Can the Labour Left Make a Comeback?

Along with tens of millions of others, over the weekend a tweet appeared. Translated from internet speak, it asked "what opinion do you, as a leftist, hold that would draw denunciations from other leftists?". There followed a long thread, but one of the most pointed was simple. "The British left needs to get over Corbyn." I know where the sentiment comes from. Not a day passes on my feed without criticisms of what was done to him, praise of a latest speech or intervention, or the ubiquitous photo of Corbyn smelling flowers appearing and getting shared. While the people doing this are on the left, they are not "the left". Most activists are now involved in a variety of struggles outside of the Labour Party, even those who were inspired by Corbyn's leadership challenge. They are organising, not mourning. However, there are some other people who definitely can't get over Corbyn. He's the alp that weighs on the brains of the Labour right, as Patrick Maguire demonstrates.

Looking at the field of selections, of which only two out of 100 have been won by "the left", Maguire writes of a Labour left in despair. The Socialist Campaign Group, who've always been less than the sum of its parts are "terrified", worried that they'll be deselected for being close to Stop the War. One anonymous source opines to Maguire that there won't be a single left-wing idea left on the table by the time Keir Starmer is done. But amid the gloom, the slightest glimmer of hope! Another anonymous mouthpiece loyal to the Starmer project reckoned all their work driving out the left could be undone if a major union swings to the left. I.e. Unison or GMB. Or, assuming a small majority, the left will be able to extract a series of concessions from a Starmer government. As if implementing policies that make life better is a bad thing. The not so subtle argument pushed by Maguire being that Starmer should have purged the SCG from parliamentary party when he had the chance. Now all of them are on "best behaviour", moving now would come with political costs attached. Such as galvanising the remains of the left activist base, prodding trade unions to do more than issue meek protests, or failing to capitalise on the latest Tory calamity.

The right worrying about the left now sounds absurd now, but it does represent an unease embedded in the character of Labourism itself. As a politics that emerged from the struggles of the working class two centuries ago, it replicates and, in practice, reproduces the split in capitalism between employer and state, between economics and politics. As a result, the varieties of Labourism that have issued from this have ranged from conservative to accommodating, from reform-minded to the radical. And their respective periods of dominance in the party roughly correspond with the advance and retreat of the labour movement. For instance, the 1945 Labour government was the beneficiary of an upsurge of working class confidence and radicalism during the war. 70 years later, Corbyn's victory in the leadership contest condensed the politicisation of millions which reflected their experience of life and work, and an establishment politics that didn't speak to them at all. New Labour, on the other hand, was a product of labour movement defeat. With the trade unions in serious retreat after the 1980s, combined with the decomposition/recomposition of the working class, the increasing privatisation of social life, and the end of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and Russia, the collapse of organisation and consciousness made the conditions for Blairism's centrist and authoritarian politics possible in the Labour Party.

Because of Labour's link to the labour movement, the right's victory over the left can never be total and permanent. The relationship is simultaneously a source of stability and uncertainty. In terms of a cadre of activists and ready money, friendly trade union leaders can help steady the ship and did, in the past, police the industrial activism of their members. Which is what we've historically seen from right wing trade unionists. But if the wider trade union movement is active and millions of workers are moving into industrial action, the possibility of that politics making its way into the Labour Party is a live one.

Which is where we are now. The comparison is often made between Starmerism and Blairism, and there are some similarities. The language of modernisation and authoritarianism being the most obvious. But they face different circumstances. Tony Blair presided over the aftermath of labour movement defeat, and not only had it not recovered by the time he left office New Labour policies actively stymied it. If there is a parallel for Starmer, it's the Harold Wilson/Jim Callaghan governments in the sense that they faced a rising tide of workers' struggle while trying to keep a lid on it. Obviously, what is happening now is at a lower pitch of intensity and isn't drawing in as many people, but for the right wingers who have Starmer's ear it's enough to feel the tug of its coalescing political gravity. Corbynism was an unwelcome surprise for them that no one saw coming, including the Labour left itself. But industrial unrest has prefaced and fuelled radicalism in the past, which is a fact not even selective readings of history can deny. Therefore the concern, even though the left in Labour are at a low ebb, with the possibility of a return. But this time rooted in a movement outside of the party and carrying institutional heft within it.

Despite the right wing anxieties and where it's coming from, I don't think the right wing night terrors are about to materialise. Even though there have been some stunning victories, especially with the RMT's victorious result over Network Rail. For one, Starmer has made it clear that Labour is no home for radical or socialist politics, and he's been marginal to irrelevant in the industrial disputes and struggles of the last couple of years. And when he's in government and the inevitable attacks on workers come, it's doubly unlikely they will move into the party in response. It didn't happen in the Blair/Brown years, after all. In fact, it wasn't until well after they had both departed from office that a left anti-Blairist politics coalesced around Corbyn. In other words, we're looking at the medium term. Instead, with the likelihood of the Tories taking a sharp right turn following their coming defeat, other alternatives to Labour are set to benefit. The Liberal Democrats? Possibly. They did well out of the Blair years. The Greens? Almost certainly, especially as the climate crisis really starts biting. The SNP? Provided their current difficulties don't prove fatal, they cannot be discounted given their position of strength vis a vis Scottish Labour. This is all outside of Labour, but 10 years down the line after Starmer has left office something like the Bennite or Corbynite surges cannot be ruled out. If an opportunity opens and it hasn't found expression elsewhere, then Labour could again become the key political battleground.

The Labour Movement Resurgent

Congratulations to Rishi Sunak for reaching 100 days in office. He'd have preferred to mark the occasion with a quiet toast rather than the biggest single day of strike action this country has seen for 30-odd years. But even rich boys don't always get what they want. I agree with Richard Seymour, today's actions are significant in size and scope. After what seems like years of a virtual absence from public discourse, except either as whipping boys for Tory politicians or regarded as embarrassing relatives by sundry Labour MPs, since the RMT took action in the Summer momentum has been building behind trade unions. With no one in mainstream politics sticking up for the labour movement, hundreds of thousands of work days lost speak louder than mealy mouthed shadow ministerial apologetics.

The first consequence is such a big, visible action can only embolden further such action. With ballots live for civil servants, teachers, railway workers, HE workers, nurses, and dozens of smaller scale disputes flaring up week after week in the private sector, as the cost of living bites workers have no choice but to defend what we have and demand back what's been taken. This can only spread further, seeing as Sunak is is refusing to negotiate. Inflation and affordability aren't the issue. We've seen how these don't matter when occasion affords an excuse to shower their well-heeled support with state money.. No, Sunak wants to be seen as a strong leader and needs to keep a lid on the politics of expectations. Doing the sensible thing and hammering out compromise deals with trade unions, even if their demands are nowhere near met, is fatal to a Tory project working to delegitimise and render ineffective all forms of collective action.

Yet, despite this, not only is the strike wave growing, public support is growing. This doesn't matter so much for workers in dispute per se. The object of striking is to be disruptive and make life unliveable for the employer for the duration. This, ultimately, is all that matters. Yet with some 300,000 teachers taking action and the huge inconvenience for millions of parents, polling shows their sympathies lie with them as opposed to the government and that this has increased as the strike wave has picked up speed. The reasoning isn't hard to fathom. Parents speak to teachers. They know what goes on in their kids' schools. They can see how hard pressed they are for resources, and have an inkling about the ridiculous (unpaid) workload that comes with the job. Likewise, because of the spread of the strike action, we are approaching that crucial point where every family and social circle has someone who has either been on strike during this wave, came out today, or will be looking to very soon. Whatever Tory MPs say in the Commons or the lines they push in interviews, or rubbish written by the shrinking right wing press, social proximity cuts through their lies.

Herein lies the danger for establishment politics. For decades, Tory rhetoric has relied on supposing the unions are some sort of excrescence; a barely-acceptable set of institutions who don't have any place in the modern workplace and are divorced from and separate to the workers they organise. For much of the same period, Labour's attitude has been little different. This has left an opening. The combination of the inflation crisis, and that unions are the only organisations talking about solutions is turning heads. Last time, political neglect of entirely normal aspirations resulted in Corbynism. This time, ignoring the fact working people want a wage or salary they can live on is legitimising trade unions and militant action. Sunak's short-sightedness is not keeping the labour movement in a box, he's antagonising it, setting up a dynamic where disputes can only grow and grow - especially when it's he, the Prime Minister who dodged a leadership contest of his own members, who's lacking legitimacy.

There are medium term consequences here for Labour as well. Keir Starmer has spoken favourably about trade unions pretty consistently, even though he won't be drawn on the specifics of industrial disputes or offer striking workers the smallest amount of encouragement. His silence about today's actions are typical. However, by not saying anything positive he's already teaching trade unionists, especially those new to the movement and taking their first striking steps, a valuable lesson: that Labour, and particularly its leadership cannot be trusted. While most sections of the labour movement will support Starmer without enthusiasm to get shot of the Tories, the aloof positioning, the "we're not a party of protest" posturing is placing a wedge between the enlightened legislators of which he is the personification, and the increasingly class conscious workers voting for him. That means when the time comes for conflicts between unions and his government, and they will surely happen, large numbers of workplace activists as well as union officialdom won't feel the need to pull their punches as Labour-loyal unions have done in the past.

In other words, the strike wave has every possibility of opening politics up by normalising trade unions as aggregators of workers' voices, by framing industrial action as a reasonable and legitimate response to unreasonable and unacceptable establishment politics, and crucially create a spur for workers - us - to look to our own capacities rather than waiting on a great socialist messiah to save us. Today was significant not just because it hit several statistical milestones. We could be at the beginning of something new - and exciting.

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Three Points Against Marking Boycotts

As part of the debate in the UCU about strategy and tactics for our continuing dispute with the employers, I'm adding my two penneth. TL;DR: we should not enact a marking boycott. Long version: here are some reasons.

1. When it's discussed, there appears to be a default assumption that marking is an inessential part of an academic's job. That it, like open days at weekends, are voluntary and outside of contract. Perhaps this was the case once upon a time, but now it's integral to the academic workload. It's as much part of expectations as teaching and responding to student queries. As we have seen in the past, when marking boycotts were live it gave universities carte blanche to deduct pay, in some cases 100% for the duration. If this is the case, we might as well take indefinite strike action.

2. Like all industrial action, whether strikes or action short of a strike, they're going to be disruptive. The current ban on working outside of hours, a form of working to rule, is certainly that. The employers depend on our using our own time to get tasks done. For example, it's routine for time off over Christmas be dedicated to marking, and of ensuring everything is ready for the beginning of the new semester. If marking can't be done without eating into free time, then it's showing that our workloads are too big - which is partly point of the exercise. And as most institutions have strict deadlines for student feedback and grade entry, keeping marking to working hours does throw the university timetables into chaos with knock on effects for teaching, graduation, etc. A boycott is largely surplus to requirements.

3. Our chief allies in the confrontation with the employers are the students. We're the ones who teach, encourage, support. We're the every day faces of our institutions, dispense the knowledge and care about the university experience. Can the same be said for the senior manager who sees their current situation as a stepping stone to a bigger job and fatter salary elsewhere? Crucial to our arguments about pay and workload is how worsening conditions for us degrades students' learning conditions. The advantage with working to rule, sticking to hours, and the withdrawal of labour is its obvious the target is the employer. And this allows for real alliances to be built between staff and students, considering how wasteful and misdirected a lot of HE spending is. Have library budgets, for example, gone up in line with the increase in tuition fees since their introduction, or do we find money frittered on boondoggle buildings and handsome salaries for university executives? There is a commonality of interests, and a shared opponent. Marking boycotts, however, almost appear designed to drive a wedge between academics and students. Many students would accept late marks as part of a refusal to work in free time, but to deprive them of marks altogether appears to hurt them more than any disruption it causes the institution. All of a sudden, the student appears to be the target - almost as if lecturing staff are protesting against them. Our tactics should be about securing the support of those we teach, not making management's business-as-usual seem more reasonable than our actions

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Sunak's War on Striking Workers

The nurses have spent another day out on strike. On Wednesday it's the turn of ambulance workers. This is against a backdrop of postal workers striking, rail workers striking, civil servants striking, and border staff striking. The New Year can look forward to higher education staff walking out again (hello!), as well as all these workers ramping up their action. By the time Spring comes around, it'll be more a case of which sections of the work force haven't taken action. And Rishi Sunak is loving it. Assailed from all sides, the government are trying to make saying no a virtue.

While polling on other workers walking out is mixed, there is obvious public backing for the nurses' claim. Most people have an awareness of the pressures in the job, regard it as a calling rather than a career, and that they put everything on the line during the acute phases of the pandemic. This is reflected in the coverage of the dispute. Can you remember the last time the BBC gave striking workers sympathetic coverage? Or when the Daily Express backed workers taking action? Two Tory MPs, Jake Berry and Dan Poulter, have called on the government to reach a settlement, and other establishment figures are likewise weighing in with similar sentiments. And this has led to some confusion among politics journalists.

Take, for example, The Graun's Richard Partington. Looking at the small print of the pay recommendation by the NHS Pay Review Body (the "independent" committee which is the government's convenient scapegoat for holding out), he rightly notes that they too acknowledge that raising pay is unlikely to have an effect on inflation as its drivers have nothing to do with wages. But for Richard and not a few others, it makes no sense. There has been a modest recovery in the polls for the Tories, but following rebellions on housing and onshore wind - which Sunak had no issue caving in to - it makes no sense why he'd burn through political capital facing the nurses down. And likewise, seemingly content with cratering the economy (for the second time in a year) with his intransigence over the railways. What's going on?

Sunak appears to be acting against the tenets of capitalist realism. I.e. Keep the economy growing, investments flowing, and markets healthy. But he's not. Always overlooked is the fact capitalism is an extractive, exploitative system. What's missing is an appreciation of bourgeois realism, the maintenance of the class relationships that produce surplus labour and surplus value. For this to run smoothly, the ruling class of this country long ago decided that they should keep trade unions - the collective strength of the workers - shackled, and the demands and politics corresponding to it driven out of popular discourse. No tactic is too low or scurrilous, and no lie is too absurd to achieve this aim. It's no accident that as the strike wave built up during the Autumn and into Winter the Tories and their press helpers launched another campaign against asylum seekers "illegally" coming here. Their very own game of D&D: distraction and demonisation.

Sunak's project, if it can be called that, is concerned with overseeing the depleted and depleting state. His strategy is an attempt at depoliticising politics. I.e. If state institutions break down and don't work, if you can't even get a passport on time, then fewer and fewer will look to government and state action to step in and solve our collective problems. It can't ever be entirely successful, but it doesn't need to be. It's like the Tories have looked at the well-developed and often discussed concerns about hollowed out democracy and are actively set on reproducing these conditions. Cynicism about politics and mass non-participation favours the Tories, as long as the elderly can be relied on to turn out.

Of all the available alternatives on offer this Summer, no Tory leader would have differed from Sunak's approach. Conceding ground to the rail workers, the nurses, and telling Simon Thompson to knock off refounding Deliveroo with Royal Mail branding would be a major reversal of 40 years of industrial policy. It just so happens the Prime Minister is particularly committed to doing nothing. But this inflexibility has invited multiple disputes, that can only get more bitter and bite deeper the longer Sunak holds out. It's a pivotal moment for him, the Tory party, and his class, and any concession extracted from the government from any group of workers will show what the Tory cabinet discovered in July. That collective action works. And we can't well have that.

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The Tory Railway Pay Offer Stunt

You can always rely on the BBC to shred its partial commitment to impartial coverage where trade union disputes are concerned. Reporting on the RMT's decision to extend its strike days to include Christmas Eve to 27th December, it has dredged up any old random to criticise rail workers for ruining Christmas. As someone who's been very inconvenienced by the strikes for work and trying to sort a house move, I don't have any sympathy for this pleading. Especially when public support for the rail strikes is more popular than the government presiding over them. But the framing really sticks in the craw, as are the persistent lies allowed to pass without challenge or scrutiny by the media, save the tiny handful of left wing columnists.

This ramping up of action is in reply to the train companies' derisory "offer" to end the strikes. Having been allowed by the Transport Secretary to make a proposal, it would amount to a four per cent pay increase this year with another four per cent in 2024 (please note mathematically challenged journos, this is not the same as an eight per cent offer). In return for this real terms pay cut, the RMT would have to agree to thousands of job losses, which includes the closure of all ticket offices, the removal of guards from trains, and leaving staff at the mercy of company flexi scheduling. Race to the bottom doesn't quite cover it: these are proposals for completely wrecking the rail service by making it inaccessible to millions of people. But what does the Rail Delivery Group care as long as the government subsidy keeps rolling in?

The RMT rejected it out of hand, and have rightly responded to this insult by escalating action. Good. Because this was not remotely a serious offer. With the government's connivance, it was a Rail Delivery Group media stunt. Knowing only the liberal press like The Graun would report it with any even handedness or detail, the Tories and the companies are supposing the existence of an offer makes them look reasonable and rail workers militant hold outs. In an uncharacteristic moment of honesty in the Summer, then transport secretary Grant Shapps declared his intention was to break the strike. He's now over at Business, but the aim remains the same.

The Tories are not interested in making a settlement and think toughing it out will see public patience wear thin and strikers' resolve weaken. So far, there's no sign of either. The problem they have is they're beset from multiple sides by industrial action. The post, FE and HE workers, nurses, ambulance crews, and who knows who else are going to go out in the new year, makes them exceedingly vulnerable. Margaret Thatcher was never stupid enough to take on multiple groups of workers at once. They're desperate to defeat the RMT, perhaps the most militant and best organised union in the country, as a means of deterring other unions. To the credit of Mick Lynch and the RMT's leadership, they know what the Tories' game is. If they lose, it will be a blow to rising militancy. But if the union sees off the Tory attacks, it's not just rail workers who win. We all do.

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Starmerism and Trade Unionism

Having spent a leadership campaign making promises and then reneging on them, it's understandable that some labour movement people don't always believe what Keir Starmer says. To get around this, there's a good rule to apply. With Labour enjoying huge poll leads and it's being virtually certain of winning the next general election, what Starmer says now is what he's likely to do. There's an absence of pressure and need to compromise. When he talks about getting tough with Just Stop Oil protesters and attacks the Tories' draconian anti-immigration policies for not being efficient enough, no one has a problem believing this is what he wants to do. His authoritarian politics have been telegraphed enough times.

Yet there are a couple other things Starmer and the shadow cabinet keep going on about when they don't have to. One of them is the repurposed Green New Deal, and the other is the most significant extension of trade union rights since the 1970s. This, outlined by Andy McDonald before he quit the front bench last Autumn, got re-emphasised in Starmer's statement of intent published on the eve of the 2021 conference. Since then, Starmer has repeatedly referenced workers' rights from day one, and it got the retread treatment this weekend as Angela Rayner unveiled Labour's new deal for working people. This is not the place for a deep dive into the pledges, but more the seeming incongruity between Starmer's authoritarianism and his enthusiasm for trade unionism. Surely they are at cross purposes?

It could be read as a sop to the trade unions. Compensation for the abandonment of Corbynism's pro-worker, pro-working class agenda. And some comrades could be forgiven for thinking once the trade union reddies are banked that this charter will go the way of the Warwick I and Warwick II agreements during the Blair and Brown years. New Labour conceded worker-friendly policies in return for cash to ease the party's money woes, but were never implemented. Such scepticism is understandable and has precedent, but I don't believe either are the case. Rather, this pro-trade union position is entirely compatible with Starmer's politics. It's not a quirk or hold over from leftier times, but integral to his politics.

For one, it's been noted here enough that central to Starmer's authoritarianism is Fabian technocracy, that politics is not a question of interests or ideas, but the right managers. A position shared by most of the parliamentary party. And there are many schools of managerialism and how to handle industrial relations. Because we've got so used to neoliberal politics framing workplace matters, successive governments - even in moments of class peace - have barely concealed their treatment of workers as the enemy within. An industrial dispute is not something to be resolved, but toughed out and broken. Employees are to be starved back to work with nothing conceded. Strike action is always the result of troublesome militants. No matter how awful and bullying management is, disputes are the faults of the workers.

This does not appear to be Starmer's view. There has always been a patrician or "enlightened" management view that holds workplaces are partnerships between employer and employee, and one gets the best from workers by being friendly, supportive, relatively open, and clear about what an organisation/enterprise is trying to achieve. This is industrial relations as human resources, where the carrot always precedes the stick. Therefore, when a workforce comes into dispute it's a failure of management. They're in charge, they're responsible, and they have allowed a manageable situation to become unmanageable. Therefore, trade unionism is a means of structuring employer/employee dialogue, as well as providing basic protections against unscrupulous and unfit bosses. It's something good managers should welcome.

This might be how Starmer sees trade unionism as a workplace justice issue, but it's more politically significant than that. As mentioned here many times, in as far as a "Starmerism" exists, it's a politics for fixing the depleted state. If the state can't do basic things like sorting out passports in a timely fashion or resource enough ambulances, a crisis of legitimacy is not far away. Starmer wants to restore faith in the state and its institutions - an essential prerequisite for Fabian (and bourgeois) politics. But this also means preventing state overreach in other ways. As the Tories are set on reducing state capacity further, the Starmerist approach to trade unions have to be seen in this context. I.e. Repairing state legitimacy lies in re-establishing its "neutrality" in industrial matters. It represents the public interest versus the vested, producer interests of workers and bosses and therefore should not take sides but provide frameworks for dispute resolution. Therefore, the cowardice Labour is regularly chided over for refusing to show solidarity with workers in dispute, even when their cause is popular, is not so much a "fear" of the electoral consequences of solidarity. It has much more to do with its managerialist politics, and how Starmer wants to reposition an rebuild the state. This is in contrast to the Tory approach who go out of their way to oppose every strike and are therefore politicising disputes, making the state appear less than neutral and demonstrating its class character. Not useful for any project aimed at winning and keeping the consent of the many.

This suggest two further objectives. This empowerment of workers afforded by day one collective rights and state neutrality is suggestive of Starmerism moving in the direction of tripartism. That is abandoning the confrontational approach to industrial relations and creating partnership structures between the labour movement, business, and the state. These can only get buy in if the constituent organisations, presumably the TUC and CBI, believe government is an honest broker. Rather than the laissez-faire of the last 40-odd years, this is a way of providing purpose and giving the appearance of everyone having a stake in a common endeavour. 21st century modernisation, Starmer style, has been swotting up on the 1950s. And the second issue is by giving trade unions a position around the table, it introduces new pressures on them to discipline their members and keep demands inside the parameters of partnership. The theory being corporatist management generates industrial peace, and with it higher productivity, a prosperous economy, a happier work force, and a re-legitimised state guided by far sighted, well meaning (Labourist) managers.

I could be completely wrong, of course, but given Starmer's authoritarian politics, his concern with state modernisation, but his evident enthusiasm for extending the rights of trade unions to organise workers, this is how they fit in with his project. Evidently, this would reset the terms of class struggle in this country and raise a host of opportunities and challenges, but it's certainly a way out of the mess the Tories have left that recuperates the rising tide of trade union struggle into a politics of state legitimation and a programme for stabilising British capitalism.

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Royalism and Labourism

The Labour Party officially greeted news of the Queen's demise as the constitutionalist outfit it is. Keir Starmer said nice words about the recently departed, and his Twitter feed given a sombre make over as a mark of respect. None of this is surprising. Rare have been the moments when the party has found itself troubled by republicanism. But what was a bit more of a shock for some comrades was the pulling of strike action. Commenting, General Secretary Mick Lynch said "RMT joins the whole nation in paying its respects to Queen Elizabeth. The planned railway strike action on 15 and 17 September is suspended." Similarly, the CWU called off postal strikes for this weekend. You might expect tributes to the monarchy from the Labour leadership, but demobilisation by two of the most militant unions in the land? How to explain?

The immediate reasons aren't too difficult to fathom: it's a question of PR and optics. Had strike action gone ahead, the hounds of hell would have got unleashed by the press with leading trade unionists subject to the bin emptying treatment and possibly getting set up for assaults by over enthusiastic royalists. Further, RMT action on the rail might have disrupted the transportation of the Queen's body from Balmoral to London. And there's the issue of the establishment using her death as a wedge between the strike leadership and more politically conservative workers going along with action. Then there are wider concerns. During the Summer, the RMT won the public relations war against the government. They've come to the conclusion this could be jeopardised if they are seen to be "disrespectful". The downside is it interferes with the momentum and tempo of the struggle, effectively introducing a cooling off period that might impact negatively on subsequent rounds of strikes. With republican sentiment a minority position even in the labour movement, our union leaderships had to weigh up the pros and cons and, unfortunately, I think they've made the right call in this instance. Class struggle, after all, doesn't mean putting your foot on the accelerator come what may.

As some observed on social media, the death of the Queen has found the British left more British than left. Or, at the very least, its mainstream mass institutions. And they have a point, but this is a challenge to be confronted and not a moment for Dave Spart posturing. If strike action is called off because mass fealty to the royal family might be offended, we have to understand not just how monarchism is produced and reproduced, but also how it is rarely challenged within the labour movement. I'd suggest there are two historically interrelated points to this, one of which has somewhat withered on the vine. One is the push for respectability, and the other is the labour movement's integration into mainstream society.

The contradictory and self-destructive history of Labourism is well known. The earliest trade unionism in this country was less characterised by revolutionary aspirations, and more by taking our (capitalist) society for granted but securing a recognised place and a "fair share" for workers within it. In the 19th century, as the labour movement grew it understood that this could be secured by industrial action and negotiations with political elites. The original alignment between unions and the old Liberal Party was based on the view of their being more amenable to offering concessions. The Labour Party came about when most trade union leaderships became convinced, thanks to long experience, that it was not and therefore required a party of its own. When the new party took the field and began playing the constitutional game, the dominant right wing tendency of Labourist politics shifted. From subordinating industrial struggle to not upsetting cosy relationships with Liberal MPs, it became one of making sure disputes and strikes played second fiddle to the Labour Party's political needs. And this was always defined in terms of not upsetting public opinion, which itself is an imagined assemblage of establishment/press/middle class opinion. What justifies this is the belief, seldom realised in practice, that Labour governments are the only means of achieving progressive ends and meeting the aspirations of workers available. It's not much of a leap from this to believing that industrial struggle and strikes are unnecessary and, for some, completely wrong.

This preoccupation leads to a politics of respect, which is not earned by establishing and defending the interests of a constituency, status group, or class, but through the practice of supplication and capitulation to established power. If Labourism is premised on sharing out the proceeds, it never questions how these are produced in the first place. Rather than a structural feature, exploitation is a moral outrage that can be tackled through legislation or organising "partnerships" with good employers. Likewise, the state is a capitalist state, but government and legislation shows we can abolish unfairness by the law and inequality through economic policy and public spending. If the focus on wages and conditions is the bread and butter of trade unionism, an economistically-defined welfarism and fairness is the province of Labourist politics. Issues of high politics are awkward because, unless they impinge on the province proper to Labourism, they aren't really much of a concern. Or rather, to establish the goals of Labourist politics respect demands its accommodation with the status quo. An understanding that is less resisted and more embraced as generations of Labour politicians and not a few general secretaries have availed themselves to the trappings of preferment - titles, gongs, sinecures in the Lords. Becoming respectable then sanctifies Labourism, its party, and its movement with official recognition and an acknowledged place at the table.

This is the politics of royalism in the labour movement, and one that reached its height in the post-war period. The partial integration of trade unions into governance was the highest honour British capitalism could bestow, and many a union reciprocated and became disciplinary agencies of (some might say over) the working class. But it's not just a top down affair. It afforded a sense of dignity and place in the national story. Far from having no country, Britain was a workers' country too and it was great because of their efforts. Millions of workers knew their position and value in a status hierarchy atop which sat the Queen. And, as distant as she was, Elizabeth II was their Queen, her party political neutrality a reflection of the state's class neutrality Labourism wanted to and forced itself to believe.

With the post-war period long passed, since 1979 the material wellspring of the labour movement's respectable, royalist politics has diminished. It was destroyed by Thatcher's brutal deindustrialisation (compare with Harold Wilson's). This liquidated the foundation of industrial unionism, and her authoritarian ruling class politics ejected trade unions from any role in governance. The chains of office were swapped for the chains of repressive legislation. Thereby the glue that held working class monarchism together came unstuck, renderings its foundations shaky and vulnerable to slippage. The second consequence of the Thatcher years was the multiplication of individuated governance. I.e. Neoliberalism. Through institutional design, backed by blanket messaging and socialisation the isolated but entrepreneurial individual became the de facto human condition, and the only subject institutions would respond to. If you don't engage on these terms, public agencies would either ignore you or sanction you. The atomised individual was the axis of creativity and hard work, the locus of choice and responsibility. With the neoliberal subject thrown onto its own resources, it stands to reason the highest authority is the self. I.e. You live and die by your choices, and only you - not a benevolent other - can make them. This can be experienced as insecurity, and help explain why millions cling to symbols of nationhood. Or it can count toward explaining irreverence and the crisis of legitimacy institutions of state are experiencing, including the monarchy.

Without the same relationships sustaining royalism in the labour movement, it now relies on the economics/politics split practised by the unions and the economism/high politics division in the Labour Party. Political education does not take place, so constitutional issues are left a free for all. But there still remains some incentives that support the monarchical given. Right wing trade unionism and its investment in how things are. And most of Labourism, ranging from the soft left to the right for whom republicanism is at odds with respectability and avoiding wedge issues that might get in the way of building a winning voter coalition. Plenty on the left capitulate to this, including self-described Trotskyist organisations, for whom high politics are distractions from the proper struggle against cuts and job losses. And there is a legacy of the postwar period, which casts a long shadow over trade union officialdom.

This means labour movement royalism is quite thin. And it's under pressure. Not just from neoliberal cultures emphasising hard graft and individual accomplishment, but from the experience of class itself. As recounted plenty of times, the contours of class have changed, as have the "rewards" of wage labour. With millions locked out of property acquisition, career prospects non-existence, precarity standard, and little space for freedom and dignity at work, the irreverence unwittingly stoked by Thatcher is building, and building, and building. It exploded once with the Jeremy Corbyn moment. It is sustaining the movements of our time, such as Black Lives Matter and Don't Pay UK. It's now feeding into mass mobilisation in workplaces, and it's going to carry on until the polarisation of politics ends in either a decisive victory for our people, or some new compromise that allows British capitalism to carry on, albeit with a new settlement.

Ultimately, royalism's persistence is a failure of our politics because the left as a whole does not take its politics seriously. Republicanism raises the question of how we are ruled, we absolutely have to talk about it, and the issue cannot be ducked by a workers' movement that wants to win, and win permanently.

Usdaw and Right Wing Trade Unionism

"I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome", so said Clement Attlee to Harold Laski. Choosing a different form of words, Usdaw general secretary Paddy Lillis said the same to Unite general secretary Sharon Graham Monday morning on Radio 4. Having raised Sharon's ire by equivocating on matters industrial, she has criticised Keir Starmer for failing to stick up for workers. "This isn't fair" cried Paddy into the BBC microphone because he's "demonstrated time and time again that he’s on the side of workers." He goes on, "We need to be, as a trade union and Labour movement, putting the blame squarely where it belongs, and that’s with this Tory government, who have been missing in action."

"Missing in action", another variance of the "asleep at the wheel" trope. Has Paddy forgot what a trade union is for? Labour was founded by the organised labour movement, and it's a dereliction of a general secretary's duty, especially when the union is an affiliate, to simply give the party leader a free pass when they do nothing to challenge Tory narratives about strikes and collective action. Paddy would do well to reflect that Sharon was elected on an organising agenda - which is more than can be said for his inheriting the general secretaryship in 2017 after raising the nomination threshold to prevent an election from happening.

When it comes to the trade union movement, Usdaw is one of two unions who can relied on by the Labour right to always vote their way. The other is Community. Formed from a merger of two much-reduced unions, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation and Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades, Community's supine loyalty to the Parliamentary Labour Party was enshrined on day one when it made then chancellor Gordon Brown its first official member. Embarrassing. It's small as unions go, and has been rightly characterised as a property portfolio with a side hustle in service trade unionism. Therefore, its rightism isn't too difficult to explain - a point underlined by its recent swallowing of Voice, the Derby-based education "union" that refused to take strike action as a point of principle. No wonder Margaret Thatcher was a fan and variously promoted it.

Usdaw, however, is a proper union and one that represents some of the most exploited and underpaid workers in the country, primarily in retail and warehousing. Coupled with this are some very impressive density rates, usually of 90%+ in some supermarkets where they have a recognition agreement. How can a workforce who aren't just at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis, but one dangerously exposed during the initial phases of the pandemic and have lost out thanks to Tory cuts to social security before that give rise to a right wing union? One element is how the bureaucracy reproduces itself from the shop floor rep upwards. Facilities time here is particularly corrosive, allowing reps to be separated from the workforce and variously flattered by management and the away days put on by the union itself. Furthermore, unlike the RMT, for example, which provides political education to its members, the stress here is on partnership working. Usdaw identifies job security and maintaining its mass membership with the interests of the employer, and therefore the stress is on not rocking the boat, defusing tensions, and more often than not acting as unpaid health and safety at work consultants. The results are no-strike sweetheart deals, little to no industrial action, and duff pay agreements. Like the two per cent rise it agreed with Morrison's in June.

Historically, the right have thrived in recent decades because of the character of retail work. The old pottery union, the Ceramic and Allied Trade Union, was similarly comatose because pot banks, despite concentrating thousands of employees in huge workplaces, were deliberately sub-divided by a division of labour that came with their own petty status hierarchies and different wage rates. Supermarkets are very similar, with rungs of supervisors and managers spread across different departments, the separation of shopfloor, office, and behind-the-scenes functions, and a further cadre of management overseeing the lot. Workers often have to compete among themselves for "overtime" as many are taken on on part-time contracts with few set guaranteed hours. Traditionally, supermarkets recruited heavily from women and students who were looking for supplementary income, and this remains a key component of the workforce - but it also means they don't have much of a stake and can turnover very quickly. Lastly, despite the carefully stratified workplace the social proximity of manager and worker is very close. They eat and socialise in the same canteen, they often work cheek by jowl when staff are short and managers have to get stuck in on the shop floor. And, crucially, most managers have spent time on the tills, the shelves, or the trolleys as ordinary workers themselves. In other words, something of a (face-fitting) meritocracy is in place where it is possible for a Saturday shelf stacker to ascend to store boss. These problems present difficulties for the development of an oppositional trade union consciousness, and so Usdaw sidesteps them by offering a mix of service unionism, perks for activists and lay reps, and an ethos entirely compatible with management aims. And so in normal times a relatively inchoate work force that is not counteracted by the union allows for a bureaucracy happy with its place as a privileged mediator between employer and employee, and one it would jealously defend against those who might upset it.

These, however, are not normal times. As Polly Smythe reports, there is discontent among the Usdaw rank-and-file. With strike action looking to spread across different industries as we enter the Autumn, and a campaign making the case for more action, Usdaw members might start asking why its leaders are content for them to get by with a two per cent "pay rise" when inflation is in double figures. Or, when they see other workers striking to protect workplace conditions that Usdaw has long conceded, why they were merrily frittered away for an industrial peace that has just meant a one-sided class war? For retail is labour intensive and can easily be brought to a screeching halt by determined strike action.

Usdaw is a right wing union now, but the pressures of the cost of living crisis and the changing mood among the labour movement writ large means this could change quickly. When the frustrations of the 400k plus membership boil over, no amount of partnership pleas and right wing shenanigans will keep a lid on it.

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General Strikes

Since being involved in politics, I don't think there's ever been a time when the Trades Union Congress has commanded much attention. But this was the situation for a brief time on Tuesday. Its Twitter account declared there was a big announcement coming at 10.30 that evening, and duly from several corners of the internet-travelling left we saw speculation that it was about to call a general strike. The hour of decision struck and ... it was a campaign for a £15/hour minimum wage. A lot of people were disappointed, quite understandably. But how realistic is a general strike call from the TUC, and the prospect of one taking place?

There are three things that have given this legs. Asked by a clueless reporter about whether British workers should hold a general strike, in an interview early on in the rail workers' dispute Mick Lynch said it was a matter for the TUC but the RMT would support one if they called it. In British political culture, it's the done thing for leading trade unionists to be apologetic about strikes and are expected to damp things down. For the best known general secretary in the country to gesture toward wider action breaks with the received industrial consensus, similar to how Jeremy Corbyn broke political wisdom in 2015. Second, because the RMT have had wide publicity, are commanding popular support in the polls, and other groups of workers are either striking (including wildcat action in Amazon), balloting, or threatening to take action, the horizon of the entire labour movement is lifting. Most of the strikes are defensive as bosses look to chop wages and lay staff off, but some notable successes - such as Unite winning big at British Airways, and victory in the long-running bin dispute with Coventry City Council - have had a catalysing effect. The cost of living crisis is also stiffening resolve, as is the continued ineptitude of the Tory party and its leadership candidates' refusal to be drawn on how to tackle energy bills. There's a combination of having one's back against the wall and a growing awareness that collective action can address the problem - because there's no other way.

And then we have social media. This is more than the enthusiasm for Mick Lynch/Eddie Dempsey viral content, but from many thousands of people a desire for a general strike. After two pretty awful years of ruthless attacks by and rearguard skirmishes against the Labour right, the seemingly sudden eruption of strike action has had a galvanising effect. What was previously closed off now seems immediately possible. A focus on a narrow, conventional politics has become immeasurably broadened to the point where Keir Starmer and his equivocations are irrelevant. But as with all things social media, they come with a note of caution. For as long as Twitter has become a thing, so have the warnings about its being an echo chamber. The confluence of the like minded with identarian politics creates recursive universes with their own dynamics and perceptual filters. It's not that the "outside" doesn't impinge, but what does tend to predominate is a preference - and not always a conscious one - for mistaking the intentional community for the wider community. If something has gravity on Twitter, it necessarily reflects attitudes out there. The consequence is often an underestimation of difficulties and an overestimation of opportunity. Acceleration wins over deceleration and patience.

The general strike call is of this character. Wouldn't it be wonderful to see the ruling class quake as the labour movement unleashes its collective power by going out all at once? Yes. Having the last 40 years of retreat wiped out at a stroke is heart stopping stuff. But should isn't could. Consider the extraordinary efforts that have gone into the RMT's action. Activists have had to work hard over decades to ensure militant trade union consciousness is the default setting among its members. The same is true of all the other workers balloting and entering into dispute. Even wildcat actions have years of simmering resentment and activity underpinning spontaneous walk outs. The process of building workers' confidence to win a ballot and strike takes time, and while that process doesn't have a set length and can be longer or shorter, depending on circumstances, it cannot be short circuited.

What of the practicalities of a general strike itself? Returning to the TUC, as an aggregate of the trade union movement as a whole, at best it is a condenser of the general attitude among all affiliated unions. Or, to be more accurate, of the full time apparatuses that run them. And at its worse, the TUC only goes as far as the most conservative bureaucracies allow. And this is because a general strike immediately puts into question who rules. The 1926 General Strike starkly showed how Britain is run by workers (albeit not for workers), but that the TUC general council had no interest in keeping the strike going until dual power was widespread. With the consciousness of trade union leaders structurally at odds with that of the workers, they were able to demobilise before the moment of decision was reached. Famously, the miners were left on their own until starved back to work - a defeat they did not fully recover from until the early 1970s. As recent experience in the Labour Party shows, it's difficult to win if those with significant institutional power have no interest in winning. On the continent, where general strikes are a more regular occurrence, they tend to be strictly time limited - usually only for a day - and are linked to very specific, economistic campaigns and demands. Trade union apparatuses use them as a means of cooling workers off. They are held to try and limit, not expand class consciousness.

To be sure, a one day general strike in this country given the weakness of the labour movement would be a major step forward. But what would it be for, and how to ensure it wouldn't be a damp squib? People won't go on strike against the Tories, and in 1926 the call was obeyed as the TUC called the other unions out in support of the miners. If it's small and barely observed, that only exposes the weakness of the labour movement and would embolden its enemies. It's a recipe for despair and demobilisation, and would severely limit the appetite for further action - as any student of the defeats of the 1980s would tell you. Therefore, despite what several thousand likes and retweets, and a whole day as a trending topic might suggest, the preparation for and the consequences of a general strike is never a light minded affair. It is not the industrial equivalent of calling a demonstration and having good numbers turn up with placards and banners to listen to speakers. It's the heaviest weapon our movement has, and as such takes a lot of time to move and prepare.

The moment is far from ripe for a general strike, but not for industrial action per se. The task for the left now is to push for action wherever we have influence - workers should not be paying for the inflation crisis. We should be building solidarity with striking workers, bridging work forces, and the Enough is Enough campaign offers a way of doing this. And building public support for action, especially the prospect of coordinated action. Right now, getting one's hopes up and calling for a general strike must be tempered by the necessity for the strikes we have now to succeed. If our movement wins, everyone wins. And if they lose, we all lose, and a general strike will remain a fantasy for a good while longer.

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Is Enough is Enough Enough?

I can understand why some comrades are less than enthused about the launch of Enough is Enough, the campaign coincident with Don't Pay UK. Among its first initiatives is a a letter to the government telling them to get their fingers out and treat the cost of living crisis like the emergency it is. And then we have a programme of rallies, kicking off in London this Wednesday. And apart from an active and fast-growing social media presence, that's it. For comrades who've been around the block and have had a dose of initiativeitis more than once, it's not very inspiring.

This reminds me of the launch of the People's Assembly in June 2013. There were rallies, there were demonstrations, and as well as having the usual leftist suspects on board mainstream trade unions were signed up. If memory serves, the TUC's Frances O'Grady either spoke at the launch rally or at the London demonstration. My politics at that point were quite melty, but the cynical eye cast over the project were a pretty accurate forecast. A series of set pieces and activism for activism's sake, but nothing more than that. However, I was wrong as well. The People's Assembly did not achieve take off, but what it did was build links between activists in various anti-cuts campaigns and trade unionists, and undoubtedly these networks fed into the Corbyn insurgency two years later - as Alex Nunns argued in The Candidate.

I think the similarities between the People's Assembly and Enough is Enough are superficial in character. Yes, it has been organised "from above" and presented to the left and the labour movement as a fait accompli. Though it's perhaps worth noting the "usual suspects" are conspicuous by their absence. Mick Lynch, currently the country's best known trade unionist, is effectively the figurehead. Reflecting the RMT's pre-eminence in the rail strikes, and his ubiquity on the media rounds, Eddie Dempsey is there too. Zarah Sultana speaks for left wing Labour MPs (no John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, or Jeremy Corbyn), and lastly the CWU's Dave Ward finishes the speakers' roster - undoubtedly thanks to BT Openreach workers taking action for the first time in 30 years, and with a postal strike extremely likely. The CWU is on the list of sponsors, along with Tribune, the Right to Food campaign, and the community union, Acorn.

Different people, same set up? Why might this be any different to what went before? There are several reasons, the most obvious being the political context has entirely shifted. Despite the defeat of Corbynism at the 2019 general election and Keir Starmer's mopping up operation in the Labour Party afterwards, the left as a whole is stronger, more rooted, more experienced, and has many more active participants than was the case a decade ago. Second, the People's Assembly was founded not just when the left and labour movement were weak, but when there was significant support for public sector cuts. The Tories successfully spun the 2008 crash as a crisis of state finances, and at the time Labour fell over themselves to support rather than contest this analysis. If all the official organs of state and the media are putting out the same line, an awful lot of people are going to swallow it. Today, I don't need to say much about today. The energy crisis, the NHS crisis, the economic crisis, the drought and climate crisis, the crisis of state capability, the crisis of the union, and the paralysis of official politics are doing their own work. A wave of industrial struggle not seen since the 1980s with significant public backing, growing support for strategic nationalisations, and as reported on Friday, some polling suggesting large numbers think rioting in the streets would be justified. With millions driven to breaking point, acute distress is finding expressions in sympathy and, as the strikes show, collective action.

Enough is Enough might be able to cohere the despair and convert it into an anger that can mobilise. But it has to become known, which is why the programme of localised rallies are useful. It provides an impetus for people to come together, start planning their own actions, and building a camaraderie - something Corbynism well understood. But again, the difference now is the much wider audience receptive to its message. It's populist in terms of setting up an us and them dynamic, its demands a commonsensical and punitive (where the rich are concerned) politics while steering clear of party labels, and is non-prescriptive. It's down to the local groups to determine what their priorities are, which might range from picket line solidarity, mobilisations against bailiffs (especially important if Don't Pay UK meets its million non-payer goal), through to mutual aid, targeted actions, and so on.

None of this is guaranteed, but we do know the confluence of crises aren't going to let up, nor will the resistance to them. Enough is Enough can give fighting back some coherence and, crucially, integrate layers of striking workers and the newly politicised into left and labour movement politics. Is Enough is Enough enough? No, obviously not. It's a beginning and won't ever stop being a work in progress, albeit one that could really into and catalyse the febrile mood. For this reason comrades should set aside their justifiable cynicism and get involved with their local groups.

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The Tory Attack on the Right to Strike

One thing that has surprised me about the Tory leadership contest is how neither candidate have got into a bidding war over who could be tougher on industrial action and trade unions. When asked, Liz Truss and Rish! Sunak are mostly content to say they'd carry out the manifesto promise made in 2019. I.e. That for essential public infrastructure, the impacts of strikes would be mitigated by a mandatory skeleton service. Keen to carve out a future for himself under Truss, the Sunak-backing Grant Shapps - the country's occasional transport secretary - has outlined plans of his own to keep the workers down.

Taking to the pages of the Telegraph last Tuesday, Shapps said the Tories must "complete Margaret Thatcher's unfinished business." Framed by a litany of lies that come as freely to Tory ministers these days as brown envelopes from Russian oligarchs, Shapps's proposal is to ban strikes by different unions in the same workplace within a set period. For instance, if the RMT-organised railway staff are striking Thursday, ASLEF train drivers would not be allowed to walk off the job on Friday. Pickets for "critical national infrastructure" would be limited to six people, and Shapps would send the coppers down to striking workers to make sure they don't use "intimidatory language". The ballot paper would, by law, have the industrial action proposed written on it, and he implies the six month-long time period covered by the vote could be shortened. He also suggests 60 day cooling off periods after each strike. Shapps also wants to raise the notice period from two to four weeks, and the turnout threshold from 40% to 50%. In other words, the most restrictive labour laws ever seen in a Western liberal democracy are going to get even more repressive.

You can understand why the Tories are twitchy about the RMT and the sudden prominence of Mick Lynch. His plain-speaking media performances, and that of Eddie Dempsey have successfully challenged the dominant framings the Tory and Tory-adjacent broadcasters and newspapers have foisted on the dispute. Helping matters along is certainly the cost of living crisis and inflation. Masses of people tend to break with dominant and official narratives when what is propagated contradicts their lived experiences. Even the most right wing, anti-union, dyed-in-wool Tory supporter can't but notice the galloping fuel bills and the edging upwards of supermarket prices, and acknowledge that what the train companies are offering, at the government's behest, is a pay cut. It's on occasions like these when millions of people start questioning the old and start thinking anew - something Mick has recognised and used his platform to encourage. Even more worrying for the Tories, telecoms workers have come out, and posties, teachers, HE workers, nurses, doctors are about to or have threatened ballots of their own. And all this comes after a couple of years of relatively low-level but successful disputes by the new wave of independent unions, particularly in the gig economy, and key wins by the GMB and Unite. Both unions fought and won their pay claim against British Airways by threatening industrial action, and now pilots are threatening strikes after BA cut their salaries by a fifth during the acute moment of the pandemic and have not restored them. Furthermore, Unite won against Coventry City Council in the long running and bitter bin workers' dispute. Nothing breeds success like success, and all these taken together are creating the most favourable period for industrial action since the 1980s. It feels like something is in the air, because there is.

Shapps's measures are informed by this looming threat. But, given the context, is only likely to antagonise rather than browbeat the labour movement into submission. In the 1980s, Thatcher didn't finish the unions off for the simple reason that she understood hers was only a temporary victory. Had she followed up the miners' strike immediately with more repressive legislation, it would have given the labour movement a new point of unity and a fresh cause to rally against - one that would have set aside the divisions of the mid 80s. Instead she let things drift, and when the 1988 Employment Act appeared in the Commons it was mainly concerned with the internal mechanics of trade unions. The real curbs on strike action had come before Thatcher provoked her dispute with the NUM. The lesson she took was patience. She waited until the heat from 1984-5 died down, for the unions to wallow in the miasma of defeat, and then came for their privileges and added further conditions on collective action when they were weakened and demoralised. Where Thatcher came unstuck was forgetting the strategies she applied to smashing the labour movement. Having divided her opponents with some skill, her Poll Tax was a simultaneous attack on everyone. Faced with overwhelming opposition and a non-payment campaign millions strong, the game was up. Coming after her John Major was careful not to provoke such universal active opposition, and when New Labour took office Tony Blair likewise only took on comparatively small sections of the labour movement, backed by the repressive trade union legislation he did little to nothing to rectify.

What Shapps doesn't get is class relations can't be managed by coercion alone. If he pursues his schemes, presumably under Truss, he could end up not just provoking the more active unions but the entirety of the TUC. This is because he's attacking workers' bargaining positions and, also, the mediating role played by trade union officialdom between bosses and employees. Even quiescent unions like USDAW cannot tolerate so direct an attack. Shapps then is poised to make the mistake Thatcher never made in industrial relations: he's trying to assault the labour movement as a whole. And he does so in a period of labour ascendency with inflation driving workers into the unions. It's a moment the Tories could end up ruing if they persist. They could get their own way, but the antagonist they're provoking, their own internal divisions and incompetence, counts against their chances. We are cursed to live in interesting times, but one in which the spark of hope for labour has lit up again.

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On Sam Tarry's Sacking

Riddle me this. If cabinet (or shadow cabinet) collective responsibility is so sacrosanct, why did Keir Starmer go before Labour Party conference in Autumn 2018 and, against the agreed line, call for a second refendum on Brexit? If it's not the job of a party of government to visit picket lines to offer workers support, then why in December 2019 did the Labour leader-to-be visit striking higher education workers and give them words of encouragement? And if Labour is in favour of nationalising the whole kit and kaboodle of the railways, why is Sam Tarry - sacked by Starmer for visiting a picket line and therefore breaking shadcab discipline - being accused of making policy up on the hoof?

Looking at the farce of the Tory leadership contest, how out of touch both candidates are with the country and the complete absence of a plan to address the cost of living crisis, one might suppose Labour would dispatch either at a general election without much trouble. But remember the Tories' secret weapon! Not the press, not the jerrymandering of constituencies, not even the inevitable pre-election bribes, but the blunderstorm of Keir Starmer's leadership. Like a bolt from the literal blue, Starmer has unequivocally ruled out nationalisation of the utilities, despite it being a popular policy and the most effective means of bringing energy prices - now due to top £4,000 by January - under control. No budging on this, despite the Gallic Blair tribute act across the Channel doing just that to EDF Energy. And as the Tories face a blast of industrial disputes, Starmer fetches out the wind break to help them. By sacking Sam from his shadow brief, calamity Keir has detonated a major row just at the moment of maximum Conservative pain.

Starmer's self-appointed praetorians among the press pack have repeated the lines to take. This isn't about industrial action, they say, it's about discipline. This argument will not and does not wash. While it's true Labour has a long and vexed relationship to strikes, that doesn't alter the fundamental facts that the movement the party depends on for money, activists, and votes was born out of industrial action. History teaches us where labour movements are strong, societies tend to be more equal, democratic, and pleasant to live in. Enough, you might think, for the most milquetoast Labourite to make the link between victorious strikes, stronger trade unions, and a fairer society.

What Starmer has done by sacking Sam is letting everyone know he thinks industrial action is illegitimate. If you are banning shadow ministers and bag carriers from attending picket lines, but not issuing edicts against them joining lobbies, protests, demonstrations, or occasionally taking part in stunts, you're singling out strikes as a special case. This is not about discipline per se but the enforcement of discipline against showing solidarity. It is an expressly anti-working class move.

It's not difficult to discern why Starmer has done this. Ever keen to show wealthy business types who still aren't donating to Labour in anywhere near the amounts needed, he has to show them - the people who matter in Starmer's universe - that he'll protect their interests. Labour as the sensible B team of British capitalism now the Tories are going off the deep end. He has to placate the right wing press who, in the main, have given him an easy ride - the ludicrous incidence of Beergate notwithstanding. There are the voters Starmer is trying to chase (never mind the current ones that have to be kept on board). Lastly, let's not forget the man's utter cowardice. Having ridden the second referendum wedge all the way into office, he's terrified of being seen as for something because that puts him against something. Being for nationalisation places him at odds with shareholders big and small in the utilities. Confronting transphobia on his own front bench gives the Tories a war on woke angle. And saying standing up for working people without standing with working people will, apparently, stop rightwingers from calling the Labour Party a nest of militants.

The damage is done. Leading trade unionists aren't daft enough to fall for the "disciplinary" line, and anyone not compromised morally and intellectually from throwing their lot in with Starmer will buy it. This, more than anything else, demonstrates what to expect from a government led by him. We might get the day one rights at work he's keen to talk about, but apart from that, nothing. It will be a return to the years of Blair and Brown, where unions were recognised as just one pressure group among many and no "special favours" were extended or even entertained. Perhaps the penny is dropping among those union leaders who've got Starmer's back and supported his attacks. There will be nothing for them, because fundamentally his politics are at odds with those of our movement.

What a pathetic state of affairs.

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Lamentable Labourism

During his interview with Sophie Raworth on Sunday morning, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy attacked industrial action due by British Airways workers. With all the arrogance of an ignoramus, he declared that serious parties of government do not send its leading figures to picket lines. This after Keir Starmer issued his widely ignored instruction banning shadcab members from showing solidarity with striking workers. Today, he was forced to eat humble pie. Replying to a letter from a constituent, Lammy admitted his error, saying he did not realise BA workers had temporarily given up 10% of their pay to keep the company afloat and were taking action to have it restored. Even then Lammy couldn't say he was backing the workers, but his apology restores him to the studied silence he usually observes when it comes to industrial disputes.

As we've discussed recently, despite Labour being set up by the trade unions who provided the resources, the heft, and the organisational experience from the beginning the party has always had a less-than-straightforward approach to industrial relations. Leading figures from the party, even those who came from the labour movement, have had attitudes ranging from enthusiastic embrace to pragmatic support to outright hostility. None of this began with Tony Blair and New Labour. It was Alan Johnson of all people, on a Question Time many years ago in response to a leftwinger in the audience, who summed it up best. He said Labour was set up by the trade union movement as a national party. This was certainly true of the first Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald and first Labour chancellor, Philip Snowden, but what does this even mean? It suggests Labourism harbours a fundamental political weakness.

What Johnson said out loud was an implication that Marxists have always known, that there is a fundamental antagonism between the interests of the workers and the national interest. I.e. the collective interests of the ruling class, the state, and their system. Except in the Labourist imaginary the worker interest it's supposed to articulate and prosecute is sectional, special, and particular. It concedes that it's separate from the nation and is illegitimate compared to the universal interest the nation supposedly represents. In one way, the roots of this lie in the strict separation of economics and politics the labour movement organises around. The unions have the job of organising the workers, defending terms, conditions, wages, etc, and are accustomed to incremental change via negotiations and industrial skirmish. As fundamentally pragmatic organisations of workers who deal with the situation in the workplace as they find it, accepting this as the terrain of struggle is the immediate, and therefore sole purview. Labourism as a politics represents the moment when the labour movement realised its interests could only be furthered by combining their efforts in a political party, and therefore was a crucial advance in that sense - hence why Marx and Engels were keen for the British working class to form their own party and break with the Liberals. Labourism was the moment workers saw past the coal face and fixed their eyes on the horizon.

But you could also say Labourism recoiled from what it glimpsed there. Economic struggle, as per Lenin's critique of economism, was fixated on how much the wage should be, not its abolition. Conditions and working hours were about "fairness", not contesting the employer's right to run matters as they see fit. This "common sense" approach to class relations at the point of production carried through to politics. Parliament, royalty, the constitution, these were rules of the game to be accepted in exactly the same way as the reality of the workplace. Labourism in politics replicated the subordination of Labourism at work, and therefore it meant taking the bourgeois definition of permissible politics and what constituted the nation as read. Hence the craven conservatism, the social climbing, the presentation of respectability, the support for empire were features of Labourist political strategies and habits of trends within the party. All too often in the party's history, these were not means to an end but ends in themselves. Opposition to industrial struggle from this quarter is the self-loathing inherent to Labourism, of it being a distraction from the proper vote-winning business of the party, or a fear its electoral chances will be tainted by the crudities of chanting pickets and burning oil drums.

Lammy, despite his working class background, entered parliament after a brief legal career. There was no trade unionist record or familiarity with the labour movement as per so many of the intake during the Tony Blair years. And, in his damning Raworth interview this was shown up when he observed that "We're called Labour because we want to associate ourselves with working people", as if the name was a bit of marketing that had no more a relationship to the party than a disco has to a brand of crisps. And nor should we be surprised. As a careerist who puts an equals sign between the parties to an industrial dispute, or is only interested in workers' interests when they're nullified by a consumerists framing and inconvenienced by grounded flights, this very middle class, liberal stance on stoppages fits seamlessly into a tradition historically proven to be scared of its own shadow.

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Mick Lynch Vs the Media

No brain space to write anything for the third night running (sorry!). Instead, enjoy this piece from Novara on Mick Lynch and his filleting of the UK media.

Banning Solidarity

How is not turning up on rail workers' picket lines "showing leadership"? I ask, because this is the argument Keir Starmer used in a memo circulated to shadow cabinet members banning them from public displays of solidarity with strikers. It goes on to instruct them to "speak to members of your team to remind them of this and confirm with me that you have done so", having said the party already has established "robust lines". Because decrying strikes while half-heartedly criticising the Tories for provoking the dispute is what firmness looks like.

Labour Party politics come in two kinds. It either leads public opinion, which is always heavily manipulated, or tails it. Considering the right wing press have fallen behind the Tory line and their coverage is repackaged and spun by the BBC as faux "real concerns" about kids doing their exams and patients travelling to hospital appointments, as with so many other issues Starmer's "leadership" is a capitulation to pro-Tory framing. While this might be thought in terms of grubbing extra votes from imagined Sun readers who dwell exclusively in Leader's Office heads, distancing is him telling Briton's bosses that when push comes to shove, no government of his will back groups of workers against employers. Yes, he's promised some enhanced trade union rights but the responsible thing is for industrial disputes to sort themselves out, with the state - his administration - aloof from the fray. They have nothing to fear from Labour.

Let there be no doubt. "Showing leadership" in this situation is standing up against the government, rebutting Tory lies that fixate on drivers' wages - even though they're not striking, demanding to know where the Covid subsidy that kept rail afloat during the most acute phase of the pandemic went, and associating Labour with organised labour taking action to defend their livelihoods - and the network itself.

But Starmer's cowardice has a lineage that long pre-dates him. Remember, it only became standard to expect senior Labour politicians on picket lines during the Corbyn interlude. Before then, overt support from Labour MPs outside of the left were few and far between. During the Blair years, ministers almost relished industrial disputes as a means of showing how tough they were. In its actions and rhetoric during the firefighters' dispute of 2002-3 for instance, there was little to nothing separating New Labour from their Tory forebears. And throughout the long years of Conservative rule, disavowal and distancing from strike action was the norm, not the exception.

The inglorious tradition stretches back further still, and recalls the contradictions of Labourism. Once the party broke into the mainstream and sent parliamentarians to the big house, from the get go there was always a fraction not just temperamentally suited to the constitutionalism of procedure, but much preferred it to the messy business of winning advances on the industrial front. They wre a cut above, looked down on the people who put them there, and believed themselves superior to them. From their exalted positions they could see the way forward and they knew best, not those whose horizons ended at the factory gate and were mired in sectionalism and getting a few bob on the wage. They started seeing themselves as statesman, and their proper constituency was the national community, not a section of it.

These ideas are embedded in Labourism and persist not just because politics and economics are kept formally separate in the party/trade union split, but how aspirant politicians, even at the local level, are often cut off from and pay no heed to unions - and this is rewarded by the party. The lily-livered "leadership" of Starmer is reproduced by the conditions so many careerists encounter as they work their way up the greasy pole. Starmerism and its, at best, equivocation over workers in struggle is not new. It's an unwelcome throwback to the past.

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Against P&O's Union Busting

800 P&O workers sacked, just like that. Fired by a pre-recorded Zoom recording, workers were told their jobs were terminated with immediate effect. They would be welcome to apply for their jobs again via the agency who were now contracted to provide staffing, but as far as the business were concerned they "had no choice".

It's rubbish. In the early days of the Covid crisis, P&O warned they were in dire straits and, then, "had no choice" to cut workers' pay. This was despite the company troughing on furlough payments and, awkwardly, having transferred out £270m in dividends to its UAE-based parent company, DP World. And if P&O are in trouble because Brexit or Covid or whatever, how is it rival firms operating from the same ports, such as Denmark's DFDS, are doing well? The problem isn't the workers, it's incompetent management and rapacious owners. P&O's employees are entitled to take the bosses' excuses with a pinch of salt.

In firing hundreds without notice, P&O are in complete violation of the law. But thanks to decades of governments alternating between conservative and conservative-lite these protections are barely worth the paper they're written on. In the case of collective redundancy of more than 100 employees, under statute a boss must undertake a 45-day consultation with the workforce and its representatives. This has not been done, so can the book be thrown at them? No. The workforce now have the right to take P&O to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal where the company can be forced to cough up, at a maximum, a year's salary. Additionally, because they have flouted the law on consultation employees can each be awarded up to 90 days' pay. The only part of the law P&O have stuck to is their notifying the transport secretary Grant Shapps, which they did last night. It's obvious that the company has calculated any loss they'll make from tribunal actions brought by former workers can be offset by savings from replacing them wholesale. What's a cost amounting to no more than a few tens of millions versus a lower wage bill in the long run? It's pure profit-seeking from an underhanded and cynical management, and they know the pitiful legal remedies open to workers benefits them. Labour law is capitalist law, after all.

But it appears the company might have miscalculated. Both unions representing seafaring staff, the RMT and Nautilus, advised staff to stay aboard their vessels, leading to scenes of masked security guards being used to handcuff and remove workers while bussing scab labour in. Other ships sealed themselves up to prevent P&O's hired thugs from boarding, while ports have seen protests and roadblocks in response - with more to come on Friday. Politically speaking, there's a rare moment of unanimity in favour of the workers. Speaking on Humberside local radio, Keir Starmer condemned P&O in language not customary to him. Nicola Sturgeon has done likewise. I suppose their support might have been expected, but Tories too? Wheeled out in Shapps's stead in the Commons earlier, his bag carrier Robert Courts criticised the firm's behaviour as "completely unacceptable." Natalie Elphicke for Dover, not known as a friend of workers' rights, said "I don’t accept their argument they need to do this to safeguard the future of the ferry." And just before tea time, Downing Street issued a press release saying "We do not agree with the practice of fire and rehire and would be dismayed if this is the outcome they were seeking to achieve." I mean, the Tories could show how much they disagree with it by outlawing it.

With services suspended in some places for up to 10 days, unanimous political backing, and the prospect of shortages in Northern Ireland, it's difficult to see how P&O's position can stand - especially as public sympathy for the workers is likely to be high as well. Perhaps the management thought with eyes focused east and the Tories in power, they'd be able to get away with it. But P&O have found some support - from The Telegraph. Matthew Lynn, author of the cringingly-titled Death Force series of thrillers, criticises the company for its "crassness", but reserves his ire from the workers themselves and, of course, the RMT. We should be grateful for a rare outbreak of honesty in the Telegraph's pages as he notes this is less about cost and more about breaking the union. Bringing in new workers offers the company more flexibility, he claims. Presumably, the current shift patterns of one or two weeks on board followed by one or two weeks off are unreasonable when scab labour can spend more time at sea and less time recuperating on land. Not that Lynn appears to have any knowledge about terms, conditions, or industrial relations at P&O. But his article shows he does know about the RMT and the London Underground, and those militant lefties in the Universities and Colleges Union striking too. The PCS and Unite are at it as well, and another new 1970s looms. Concluding, he suggests "quite a few commuters" will be cheering P&O on if they defeat the RMT. Witness the class spite of the typical hard right hack, happy for seafarers to lose their jobs because, in his head, it would own the hated London Underground staff.

At present, however,the centre of gravity on this issue is far from the would-be union busters in P&O HQ and their press cheerleaders, and with hundreds of workers who've been stripped of their livelihoods and made to suffer the indignity of firing by pre-recorded message. The unions are doing the right thing to have recommended occupations and protests at ports. With the Tories seemingly blindsided too, effective street and workplace action combined with public support could not only force P&O to retreat, but begin unravelling the whole edifice of anti-trade union, anti-worker legislation.

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