Why I Can't See Myself Voting Labour Ever Again: It's Tribal

I suppose I could, like a good little politico, go on about how much I dislike the policies. & Lord, isn’t that fertile ground? I mean there’s the War that 2 million marched against, obviously; there PFI; there’s Academies; there’s the brutal acceptance of inequality; there’s the weird Soviet/Californian managerial hybrid of target driven marketisation which has so disfigured our public services; there’s stray ‘smallish’ polices like ASBOs and Respect which really get my goat. I could write a lot about all that and then sit back and feel what a clever, principled and unsullied Lefty I was.

But, let’s be honest, it’s not really about the policies as such for me. It’s tribal – it’s about the culture and the sociology. Labour no longer feels like my tribe. In fact it feels like the tribe that despises mine.

Let me explain. The old Labour Party was always a sociological alliance between, in the main, manual workers and middle class state-orientated Fabian social reformers. Both elements contained their 'Left' and 'Right', so Old Labour produced Bessie Braddock and Dennis Skinner, as well as Anthony Crosland and Tony Benn. So I could come from an apolitical but Labour voting unskilled manual household, get an education and a job in the welfare professions and still feel I was part of a particular tribe.

Thatcherism’s attitude to this tribe was more sophisticated than many allow. Sure, it smashed its characteristic modes of industrial and political representation in a fairly cold-blooded, direct way. But, sociologically, at least as important was the way it more or less self consciously split the tribe. ‘White Van Man’ it bribed with council house sales and utility privatisations; ‘public service person’ it demonised as someone determined to pursue provider capture, that is to run public services in the interests of the staff not the users. & New Labour inherited these broad sociological attitudes, unexamined. It didn't challenge them, it didn't try to put the tribe together again - it just continued the Thatcherite programme of stamping on its face, over and over again.

Which is why I'm always bemused by accusations leveled at the Blair/Brown government about excessive public spending. It very largely went on PFI scams as far as I can see. Or dodgy wars. Or kowtowing to the so called aspirational classes. Whatever else it did, it didn't rebuild my tribe.

But it's nice when someone else remembers the tribe. Which is why I'm more than prepared to give a big thumbs up to Hilary Wainwright's latest offering, “Public Service Reform…But Not As We Know It!”, an account of a genuine partnership with the Trades Unions in Newcastle Council intended to head off privatisation and improve services. Read the shortened article here, and buy the book here.

It's not the revolution, but its a good thing for the tribe.

Polanyi Again

The Great Transformation again. This time on the differential effects of pre-existing class structures on the 'birth marks' left on the working class movements in Britain and on Continental Europe:

".....there was no comparison between the moral and cultural catastrophe of the English cottager or copyholder of direct ancestry, who found himself helplessly sinking into the social and physical slums of some Northwestern factory neighbourhood....and the Slovakian or...Pomerian agricultural labour changing overnight from a stable dwelling peon into a industrial worker in a modern metropolis. ...the English yeoman's son or the evicted cottager certainly did not feel his status raised...the recently emancipated farm labourer of the continent [had] a fair chance of rising into the lower middle class...[and] even the bourgeoisie, which socially towered above him, was politically in the same boat, being almost as removed from ranks of the actual ruling class as he was himself...In England the middle classes...were strong enough to vindicate their rights alone, and not even in their near revolutionary effort in 1832 did they look to the labourers for support...while on the Continent the still semi feudal aristocracy did not intermarry with....the bourgeoisie and the absence of..primogeniture hermetically insulated them from the other classes. Every successful step towards equal rights and liberties thus benefited Continental middle and working classes alike...it was part of the Continental tradition that the working class would help fight the battles of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, if only...to be cheated by the middle class of the fruits of victory. But whether the working class won or lost...its experience was enhanced, and its aims raised to a political level...While the British worker developed an incomparable experience in the personal and social problems of unionism and left national politics to 'his betters', the Central European worker became a political socialist, expected to deal with the matters of statecraft, though primarily with those that concerned his own interests....The Continental worker needed protection..against the normal action of factory and labour market conditions. He achieved it mainly by the help of legislation, while his British comrades relied more on voluntary association – trade unions – and their power to monopolise labour. While economically the difference be over rated...politically its consequences were great. On the Continent trade unions were the creation of the political parties of the working class; in England the political party was the creation of the trade unions."

This, I think, is closer to Anderson and Nairn than Thomson's Peculiarities of the English, but I don't want to re-open that debate. I merely quote at such length to ask whether a leftwing party need be based on the trade unions. I don't think it does, I don't even think it is desirable because it muddies certain waters in terms of roles - which is why I fear people like Phil and Stroppy are radically mis-reading the potential and significance of NO2EU, which looks to me like a train-crash about to happen.

Jack Jones R.I.P

He was the spirit of that age. A deeply honourable man, infused with all the strengths and weaknesses of the Labour Movement of that time. An International Brigader, he was a TU full timer who even the most purblind of ultra-leftist would have difficulty pinning the charge of personal or political corruption on. Integrity was his hallmark. He was hewn from the same rock as thousands of now departed working class leaders, in TUs and the Labour and Communist Parties, whose like I fear we will not see again. Despite the historians' argument I think this rock was neither specifically Methodist nor Marxist - but a uniquely working class culture and morality, shaped by the demands of British politics and industrial relations of the day.

Of course there were things I disagreed with him about. But on the big political question of his time as TGWU General Secretary let me just say this: the teenage Charlie thought the Social Contract Jones entered into was a sell-out. The teenage Charlie was both callow and wrong. Jack Jones was right - he just didn't have a movement behind him with the political maturity to make it a socialist Social Contract. So wage driven, economistic struggles predominated. There is a sadness here - he was, after all, an early supporter of the Institute of Workers Control.

Mod pays his tribute here, and there is some immediate TUC reaction here. Andy has a different view of the Social Contract, but not of Jack Jones the man over here on Socialist Unity.

On Resistance in an Information Age

In my working lifetime, the workforce has been delayered, deskilled, automated, de-industrialised and atomized. Management has asserted it's 'right to manage' beyond even the memory of such a 'right' being questioned. But where is our new Braverman to theorise all this from the left?

More mundanely, where are the tactics appropriate to this new situation? So let me welcome a new idea - well new to me anyway. It's a response to the recent NUT vote for a potential pay strike, but I think it could have a wider application. Resistance by refusing to fill in the forms necessary to manage an information society.

"What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labour which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without....it's time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up the crisis - their crisis, our opportunity.... to begin to rid public services of business ontology. (When even businesses can't be run as businesses, why should public services?)"

From here, via GTR and the Fatman.

Hey, it may not be as dramatic as a factory occupation, but it may just be more relevant to quite a large section of the workforce...

But They Got Dole, Not Coal

Christ, can it really be 25 years ago?

Here in Lambeth you couldn't move for miners: every time I left my front door there seemed to be another lot of them at this or that meeting, or just collecting at one of our many tube stations. About £1000 a week ( probably about £2.5K in today's terms) in donated coppers was being taken at Brixton tube alone. I also remember the big demos, mainly with fondness - I never saw any trouble. Like the rest of the country, I watched the big 'set-pieces' like Orgreave on the television. I was a supporter, not a participant.

But there are some funny memories that remain with me as well: one young South Welsh lad bitterly complaining he had been billeted with me and my mate in the hard to let council flat we lived in then, rather than in the posh Clapham house his mates were in; stories of miners refusing to go home from their comfy university billets (and, ahem, university girlfriends, comfy or otherwise...) after the strike had ended.

It was perfectly possible to support the strike and still think, on balance, the odds on winning would have been better with a ballot. That was my position at the time. It might have made it more difficult for the press to present the Nottinghamshire miners as heroic resistors of mob pressure, and made it a bit easier to lobby for solidarity action from other unions. But all this stuff about Scargill losing the strike through not holding a ballot is baloney.

Even back then I didn't think the ballot question was decisive in the battle. I was always amazed that Kinnock even gave it half -hearted support and I don't think having a ballot would have increased his support one iota. The key was always the Ridley plan - the Tories had meticulously prepared for the fight for a long time.

I also remember thinking the strike was lost after about six months. It was almost impossible to openly discuss this view on the Left back then - we were all so strongly committed to the struggle which was undoubtedly the biggest and most intense moment of class conflict I ever experienced, albeit at second hand as it were. Even quietly suggesting it was perhaps time to think about limiting the losses would have been seen as an act of gross betrayal. So I kept quiet (not that anyone would have bothered about the opinions of some 25 yr old South London voluntary sector worker from a non-mining family anyway).

But I do now wonder if the defeat would have been quite so total if the strike hadn't gone on for quite so long....if there is a potential criticism to be made of the NUM leadership this is the one I'd focus on, not the tired old issue of the ballot. Did they keep the miners out for so long out of pride, or because they genuinely thought it was still winnable in the winter of 1984/5?

After Lindsey: First Thoughts

So now the Lindsey Strike is over what are the immediate consequences?

Well, first and foremost, the workers do appear to have won. It has been a long, long time since anyone could say that of any strike of national prominence without any caveats or qualifications. & the strikers have won on entirely principled and defensible demands.

Secondly, though, I still can't quite agree with Mick that we should never have doubted the bona fides of the strikers. Sure: there's an offensive default message which comes from the mainstream media - it just goes 'drip-drip-drip ' on all of us to the effect that white manual workers are obviously racist. Mick's absolutely right in saying they are not. But whilst the media certainly has distorted things it didn't invent the initial chauvinistic 'mood music' which surrounded this dispute. A strong popular feeling of resentment was channeled into what I consider to be a positive direction. This wasn't inevitable. Those who played a part in ensuring this happened deserve congratulations, irrespective of any opinion of their wider politics. Nonetheless, I think Jim and Andy have a point when they distinguishes between the immediate impact of this particular strike and the way the wider political culture may misinterpret and absorb its memory. The Lindsey strike may have been won - but its meaning still remains to be fought over.

Thirdly, this is not the return of the 1970s. The Trades Union movement remains incomparably weaker than it was in my youth. In those days, Unions had real political muscle. Now they don't - one successful strike doesn't change that. They still need help to get this sort of thing delivered in the UK. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that any government containing Peter Mandelson is going to help them on this front - they're more likely to slander such legal remedies for all workers as 'protectionist'. So a further gap may well open up between 'the two wings of the Labour Movement' (we used to be able to use that phrase in the 1970s with a straight face...). This won't, in the short term, strengthen the Unions: it might even weaken them if government minsters stop returning their calls. But it will probably weaken New Labour. It could put a squeeze on the level of Union donations in the run to an election next year - and it will certainly affect the willingness of many Trades Unionists to work for them on the ground.

Lastly, this has not just been a domestic dispute. Various forces - especially in Italy for obvious reasons - have been watching and deciding how to make best use of the events as they unfurl. It's not just the domestic anti-EU types, or the BNP, who have tried to make hay from this dispute - it is also unpleasant folk like the Northern League. The battle for a positive, Europe wide response to the economic downturn still very much remains to be won.

The Power Strikes

So: the oil refinery strike spreads to Sellafield whilst England lies under a blanket of unexpected snow. (Someone, somewhere, on an Emergency Planning Committee is cracking some numbers about energy supplies, I’ll be bound....).

Meanwhile, it appears that the Socialist Party (SP - nee Militant) have established a foothold on the strike committee and played quite a significant role in heading off the possibility of the strikers’ further rhetoric developing along crudely chauvinistic lines.”British Jobs for British Workers” - BJ4BW seems the universally accepted abbreviation - remains a prominent slogan on the News footage, but not in the language of the strike committee. I think this is an Unqualified Good Thing: the BNP seem marginalised.

& the more I think about it the more I think that the idea of opening up jobs – or at least the chance to apply for jobs - on big construction projects to local people is a sound and not particularly revolutionary one. Almost every large scale regeneration bid I’ve ever seen will include some honeyed words promising to recruit local labour in depressed areas. So what’s with this weird interpretation of EU rules which says this doesn’t have to happen in the private sector? If a ‘social Europe’ is to have any meaning at all there is case law that now needs to be overturned by new European legislation. This is certainly within the bounds of the politically possible.

But there are still two aspects to all this which make me feel uneasy.

Firstly, I still think it’s a tiger the SP-influenced strike committee are riding. They may have formulated the strike demands in impeccably defensible language but I don’t doubt for one moment that some of the strikers, particularly those coming out in sympathy on secondary disputes, are not quite so enlightened. There remains a submerged ‘right-populist’ feeling – which is being given expression in many mainstream accounts of the disputes. It could yet rear up again. The underlying sullenness and resentment at the social, economic and cultural marginalisation of the manual working class really hasn’t gone away. Whether it can be diverted into Leftist channels remains to be seen.

Secondly, the actual demands of the strike committee include,

“Union controlled registering of unemployed and locally skilled union members, with nominating rights as work becomes available.” I read this as the Unions asking for the right to control recruitment – although, to be fair, it may merely mean the right to nominate for consideration, not to insist on particular people being given work. But in either event - or certainly in respect of the former, stronger possible interpretation - I think this is a bold demand. I don’t disagree with it – but I do think it runs 180 degree counter to the whole 30 year mantra of ‘allowing management the right to manage’ which we’ve all lived with for so long. Conceding this demand would fatally undermine the basic logic of New Labour and its endless calls for employment ‘flexibility’. It may be intended as a Transitional demand. It will certainly be resisted, bitterly, not just by the employer but also by the government.

As I understand it, a Transitional demand is something which sounds reasonable but which capitalism simply cannot concede in a structural sense. In other words demand the impossible wrapped up as the possible. I never believed that was a good way of getting people to agree with you - they pretty soon worked out you were using them, not working with them in their own immediate interests. I wonder, therefore, whether this is a winnable demand.

I have no contact with the strikers. I hope I’m wrong on both these points. Because putting them together leads to a vision of something pretty unpleasant and pretty combustible.