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.

Two Sociologists Get Me Thinking

Two sociologists have posted economics stuff which has got me thinking this morning.

Firstly, Bud the American points out that, initially at least, FDR's New Deal - and certainly the famous 'First 100 Days' - wasn't what we'd now call Keynesian for the very good reason that, actually, Keynes didn't publish his magisterial General Theory until 1936 and FDR came to power in 1933. Events usually precede their theorisation. I suspect the same thing is going to be true of various kinds of policies and turning points in the current crisis.

Secondly, AVPS bravely takes an initial stab at commenting on the unofficial strike at the Lindsey Oil Refinery. I say 'bravely' because, as the title of his post suggests, this action might clearly be woven into a racist narrative. I see the BNP (and, no, I'm not going to provide a link to their website) are already claiming, "1000 British construction workers demonstrated in support of “British jobs for British workers”. But the very brevity of this statement suggest to me that, thankfully, they do not currently have a base amongst these workers - if they did, they'd be boasting much more actively. AVPS tries, gamely, to see the positive anti-globalisation themes embedded in the strike and remind people of the principled left view on dilution of labour. But I sense his heart is not quite in it as, like everyone else, he can't know how all this is going to turn out.

Nonetheless, the action takes my mind back to a fascinating Red Pepper article from last summer on 'Underdog Politics' across Europe.

"The success of right-wing populism is not only about what its proponents do and what voters think. It is just as much about how other parties, and especially the leftist elite, have created an enormous division between themselves and ordinary people at the bottom of society. The right’s populist success is the other side of the left’s failure, whether they are self-satisfied social democrats occupying privileged positions in the state or ‘post-modern’ socialists entrenched behind trendy theories on globalisation, the ‘networking society’ and individualisation."

Yesterday, the day of the French General Strike, I posted to the effect that I doubted whether the British Labour Movement would demonstrate the same type of resistance to the economic downturn as is apparent in some other European countries. But there will be resistance - and it is that 'underdog' theme which scares me most if it becomes the trope of choice of such resistance.

But perhaps, as Bud reminds us, we'll only be able to truly understand the political and economic effects of this crisis after we have lived through it for some time.

Midday Update: the BNP's site is now carrying a front page article on the strike - and the arrival of a team of their activists....

6pm Update: ah, but now almost all the Left are behind the striking workers, having convinced themselves that the basic motive is not racist. & The TUC have put out a very helpful statement which is relatively strongly worded given that these strikes are, by definition, illegal. I hope they're all proved right. Perhaps I'm being overly-gloomy but I still fear it could take a right-populist turn...