Though Cowards Flinch

"You want me to what now?"

All through this year and last year, as strike after strike was brought down by employers’ opportunistic legal attacks – on any grounds they could possibly muster, whether those grounds had any material effect on the situation or not – I said that laws governing strike ballots were draconian and poorly constructed, failing to fulfil their stated aim of protecting the democratic rights of workers in trades unions.

Employers’ group, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, have underlined my point with a recent demand that the government tighten laws on strike ballots, and consider banning strikes altogether and introduce compulsory arbitration in “key” industries. There’s no pretence that tightening laws will respect the democratic rights of workers now, it’s simply naked aggression towards anyone who disagrees with the cuts and will act to stop them.

Naturally the CBI, the Confederation of British Industry, is not far behind. In a document with a title that would make Orwell worry, they’ve announced that the government should impose a 40% quorum for strike action on the balloted workforce. Making Britain the Place to Work also, ironically, proposes to shorten the statutory consultation period for firms making more than 100 people redundant from 90 days to 30 days.

Here, of course, there is the usual pretence at defending the interests of ordinary people – as John Cridland, CBI Deputy Director-General stated when launching the document, “Strikes cause misery. They prevent ordinary people going about their daily lives, whether it’s getting to work or getting the kids to school.” To which the obvious answer should be, guess what? Mass unemployment and encroachment into the terms and conditions of a workforce cause misery too.

The CBI document contains a lot of other worrying ideas as well. A key one is the attack on TUPE – the transfer of undertaking (protection of employment) regulations, which essentially protect workers’ terms and conditions if a company is transfered from one owner to another. The CBI want any new owner to be able to ‘harmonise’ a newly acquired business with a previous one, paying workers the same; i.e. less.

Contained in the document is also a demand for the American system of workforce voting for union recognition instead of the Central Arbitration Committee having the power to simply grant workplace recognition to a union, if that union has gained over 50% of the members of the workplace. This takes place in the context of businesses which simply refuse to negotiate with unions, even when their whole shop is unionised, provoking strikes simply to get recognition – which is not in the interest of workers, who lose pay.

Ballots introduce a plethora of questions. Would it only be held once? Could it be forced any time employers were having difficulty negotiating with a particular union? Would there be a particular threshold to trigger union recognition? In the US, these laws are used to stymie union recognition – even to the point of employers creating and promoting their own unions for workers to join, just to screw with the recognition of other unions.

The CBI document states:

“People at work should always be empowered to decide for themselves if they want to be represented by a union or take the opportunity to use other routes to communicate with their employer. The law should be amended so ballots should always be held to enable employees to demonstrate whether or not they support recognition of a trade union to speak on their behalf.”

People at work are always empowered to decide for themselves if they want to be represented by a union; they can join one or not. The problem here is not with the accurate representation of workers, it’s with the voluntary nature of union recognition. And I don’t see the CBI bemoaning the failure of businesses to accept the decision of their workers to be represented by unions.

This leads me to suspect that the CBI have other motives than empowering workers.

With the (half-) victory of a Conservative government, it would be surprising if employers’ groups weren’t gearing up to attack unions and further impose regulations on the one area of employment law where regulations seem tolerable to bosses; that area where the worker gets to give force to his opinion. We need to be aware that a victory in this field will make life all the harder later on, when unions are finally forced into action against the cuts.

We should also recognise that these are only opening salvoes from bosses’ organisations. As with Thatcher’s government, once they know they can get away with this, they will try and take away much more.

I’m not a Labour Party member, and I’m unlikely to rejoin the Labour Party, even secretly, just to vote for Diane Abbott. Yet I suspect there are few socialists who would not appreciate the re-politicisation of the Labour Party membership.

I have only my own experience and that of others of like-mind to support this contention, but the lack of debate over issues (beyond property development, traffic lights and similar things) at branch and constituency Labour Parties is key to the continuing inability of the Labour Left to engage decisively within its class or within the Party.

Why is there no initiative to change that? I know of several people who sought the position of Political Education Officer within their CLP because they felt they could bring some debate to their CLP. Perhaps it’s time to support them.

A central body like the Labour Representation Committee, backed by the research groups of various unions, the TUC and even (gasp!) Compass, could issue one resolution every week, for debate at branches, to be voted on by the end of the meeting. Information in support of the resolution could be issued much in the way that New Labour issued their talking points bulletins to the PLP (except our version would be intellectually more engaged and honest).

Such debates, in the lead up to Labour’s conference, would provide the opportunity to orient new or depoliticised members to key issues facing the Party and the working class. This will be vital in distinguishing between candidates for conference delegate. But these debates will only happen if groups like the LRC press Party members to regard the proposal of resolutions and the toeing of a socialist line as their duty at CLP and branch meetings.

It might also lead to a wider activism; it doesn’t take an intellectual giant to draw a link between a resolution supporting a national strike (of which there are liable to be a few, and this is just an example in one area) and the potential for actually doing something to support the strike at a local level. If one or two members for each geographically tight region (done by county perhaps) was willing to oversee this development, support to picket lines or protests against job cuts etc would be easier to bring out.

When people see this happening, they’ll be more likely to join, and those who join as a result will be more likely to take an activist role and stance.

Additionally, it might provide a way to establish contacts in those branches which don’t necessarily have a strong Left contingent. One member would be enough to start the debate. Even if that member didn’t feel especially confident running a section of the LRC, passing back contact details to the LRC officers would help in fleshing out that organisation.

From the point of view of a member of the Socialist Party, it may seem unimportant to strengthen Labour’s grassroots. But the reality is that a Labour Party that moves Left will form one arm of a broad coalition of the working class – wherever they stand politically – to fight the Conservative-Liberal government and their cuts.

In fact, there’s an argument to be made that an LRC, forced to the Left by a greater connection to its class, and staffed by committed community and trades union activists – particularly of the younger generation – will feel a pull towards mobilising for mass disaffiliation of CLPs from Labour, if an alternative political organisation can successfully upset the Con-Lib agenda.

Just a thought.

Counter-intuitive thought for the day: beat the Tories or this man may be your next Prime Minister

Prior to the election, I wrote a piece asking people to support TUSC – the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. In the immediate aftermath of the election, like so many others, I was buoyed by what seemed a shocking victory by Labour – yes the vote had been slashed and the parliamentary majority had been lost, with Labour dropping to second-party status but it didn’t quite feel like a defeat.

Despite my previous resignation of Labour membership, despite the constant barrage of attacks by the tabloids and despite Lib-Dem pre-game triumphalism about a drop to third place, Labour defied expectations and I was euphoric. This was supplemented by the electoral annihilation of the BNP across Barking and Dagenham and other areas, whatever our rational selves were saying about the unsustainability of such a rout.

Yet that initial euphoria has since given way, as it would have had Labour stayed in government. Thousands of us watched David Cameron’s journey to Buckingham Palace, dejectedly staring at our screens while the Prime Minister to be went inside, and was saluted by the Palace guards as he came out. We felt bitter and angry, for despite everything, led on by Left Lib-Dems, we’d hoped for a Lib-Lab pact.

However unrealistic, these were the hopes of a million people around the country. However much we knew in our hearts that the Libs and Labour would immediately set to writing their own ‘austerity’ package, something inside us rebelled at the idea of a Conservative government. And the last two months have proved that our hope was the correct one – as the swingeing cuts and millions of projected job losses testify.

The one positive aspect to the situation is a resolute hardening of attitudes against the Liberal Democrats. People who might once have considered voting or even joining them have been pushed away by the Lib-Dem decision to go into government with the Conservatives. The phrase ‘the Left’, after so many embarrassing urgings to vote Lib-Dem by various bloggers and pundits, can now refer only to a backbench rump in Labour, and the socialists.

What’s the next step? We already know that the Tories are pushing full steam ahead with many of New Labour’s least popular policies. Except they’re going further. So the part-privatisation of Royal Mail is now wholesale privatisation of Royal Mail. The public sector is going to haemorrhage jobs – against which dubious OBR predictions, of economic growth to pick up the slack, will not count for much. Communities and workers are in for a battering.

So the fightback must begin. This week Bob Crow, leader of the Railway, Maritime and Transport union called for a General Strike. The distance between where we are now and the actualisation of such a demand is incalculable. We have the institutional conservatism and bureaucracies of the unions to overcome, we’ve got some sort of mass political organisation to forge (or reforge, in deference to the Left still in Labour) and we’ve got millions to mobilise.

All very pie-in-the-sky you might say, and you’d be absolutely right. But the alternative is ensconcing ourselves in comfy armchairs to watch as Labour’s ‘leadership’ attempt the obscene tactic of outmanoeuvering the Tories from the Right.

We must realise that the only thing which will stop the government and its partners in Europe dragging our countries to the right by further destroying the unions and communities through increased casualisation of labour and decreased redistribution of wealth is the solid kick in the groin that simply standing up and refusing to go along with it delivers. So, all out, all out. Or else the next stop, after another 18 years of Thatcherism, is New Labour Mark II.

Both Ed and David Miliband have begun their rhetorical repositioning for the leadership campaign. The by-line of the Guardian article on Brother David reads, “Former foreign secretary woos the party’s left…” but the reality is probably more accurately exposed by Paul Waugh’s summary over at the Evening Standard. David Miliband has set himself up as the ‘clean hands’ candidate – nodding to the past, nodding to the thousands of activists who had to watch dumbfounded as Labour waddled from mistake to disaster and so on.

Meanwhile, brother Ed has turned to rather naive-sounding guff about New Labour not having a sense of mission, but falling into the mindset of ‘technocratic caretakers’. His pitch is that Labour needs to hook up once more with the core vote, but that New Labour ‘asked the hard questions’ – that something can be saved. Some people seem to think that Brother Ed is appealing to the working class, and he picks out ‘real world’ examples, saying that we should prefer the realities visited upon people instead of abstract economics.

The harsh reality, of course, is both were cabinet ministers (one under Blair and both under Brown). They aren’t reformers, and a latter-day conversion towards Labour members having a greater say is opportunistic in the extreme. When we see concrete proposals on this ‘having a say’ bit, I’ll be sure to return to it, but the ‘feel’ of their speech is that there may be institutional adjustments and gasping policy announcements and lots of talk about ‘renewal’ but that very little will change. This is virtually inevitable if Brothers Ed and David don’t move beyond Blair – and I don’t think they will or can even imagine how to.

Just as interesting as those who have thrown their hat into the ring is who has not.

Jon Cruddas has ruled himself out of the leadership race, which probably removes the only chance the soft Left ever had at influencing the thing, beyond gushing pronouncements in favour of Ed Miliband, who is viewed as the more Left of the two brothers. Wannabe softie, James Purnell, is pushing the same line as Cruddas at the moment; re-connect with the vote (among C2 voters), move slowly, re-energise the Party. This seems to be standard for the so-called centre Left; thus too pressure group Compass’ post-election statement. Evidently Neal Lawson and the rest of that self-admiring cohort don’t think they’ve done enough damage with their urgings to vote ‘tactically’ for the Lib-Dems, to keep out the Tories.

All of this talk about renewal and reconnecting etc, from the centre-Left, is meant to fill the bloody great hole where actually doing something fits in. Around the world, indefinite strikes have been pronounced – here at home, workers (often against the wishes of their trades unions) are gearing up to fight the incoming cuts, whether from private business or the public sector…and meanwhile the lions of centre-left socialism are doing little but mewl in the press. Which is exactly what I and others expect, so that at least is gratifying.

A centre-Left candidate may yet emerge, of course. In the meantime, those who have been casting rather silly aspersions at John McDonnell’s potential candidacy find themselves in the unenviable position of wanting ‘a clean break from the policies and practices of the New Labour era’ while opposing the only leadership candidate likely to achieve it. Former MP Bob Clay’s article on the subject departs from reality entirely, with a mention of Michael Meacher as a more likely candidate (Meacher got three endorsements and crumbled at the 2007 debate).

McDonnell ran in 2007 and though he failed to get enough endorsements, his campaign was like a fresh wind through the often sterile internal debates of the Labour Party. Even a Cruddas candidacy, though more likely to gain enough nominations, would not necessarily provoke this – Cruddas is, after all, basically a Blairite, and support for him would still place the  soft Left in contradiction to themselves – wanting a change from New Labour, a return to an older form of social democracy, while supporting a candidate who wants nothing of the sort. We’re spared making this argument because Cruddas isn’t running. His own reasoning (if such banalities deserve the title) can be read here.

This makes the attacks against John McDonnell seem all the more surreal. Without an alternative candidate of even basic Left credentials, McDonnell is the natural choice for any socialist remaining in Labour. What all the arguments against McDonnell clearly miss, of course, is the chance that a McDonnell candidacy gives the LRC – a group based around members, union branches and CLPs – to get a foothold in Labour around the country, to kick off real debate and to set up mini-groups of supporters who can deepen and broaden LRC support by campaign activities. Only this long game offers a glimmer of hope for the Left; otherwise they should get out of Labour and stay out.

Key among campaign priorities before the election demanded the full attention of every activist was the People’s Charter, which is solid Left stuff that appeals far beyond the narrow confines of the Labour Representation Committee. This is the sort of thing which could get off the ground, certainly in time for conference in the autumn. What plenty of the nay-sayers also neglect to note is that there are several McDonnell supporters running as the Left candidates for leadership of different unions. Paul Holmes, interviewed here, is a key one, over at UNISON.

This is a chance to energise and mobilise the whole Left – both its union and party elements. Meanwhile those people saying that John McDonnell is hostile to or likely to alienate the unions because of his opposition to union bureaucratisation need to catch themselves on. McDonnell is the only candidate who, as leader, would have any intention of mobilising parliamentary and extra-parliamentary elements of the movement to slam dunk the Trade Union Freedom Bill.

Whatever platitudes we get from the soft-Left, that fear of extra-parliamentary action will always keep them bottled up – that is why we need a candidate like McDonnell. The other regular rebels – like Jeremy Corbyn – will likely fall into line behind McDonnell, especially with the unanimous backing from the LRC’s National Committee put firmly on record, in the aftermath of Saturday’s conference, sponsored by the LRC, whatever remains of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and various unions.

If McDonnell doesn’t win, then Labourites face years of a Tory government whose best friends are the Labour leadership, as under Thatcher and Kinnock, when everything possible was done by the Labour heirarchy to smother mass activism and militancy, in fear that it could damage the credentials of the Party to lead ‘the nation’. Then, I guarantee you, that space outside of Labour for a Left party, which people are saying has closed or is closing, will be blasted wide open in no time at all. Tomorrow’s article concerns just that.

I have been deeply troubled by the news as of late, much more so than usual. Industrial action at BA (which Dave has discussed here) and in the Civil Service, with promises of more to come, have got the Right and the media talking about the Unions again, in that wonderfully narrow-minded and ill-informed manner we’re all used to. I have come to the conclusion that my recently held suspicions of a resurgent Thatcherite tendency in the ranks of the Conservatives is becoming more and more obvious.

Even most on the left would accept that Margaret Thatcher was a woman of overwhelming conviction, and that she had a radical vision of how to change Britain. Though many on the left would not associate right-wing positions with radicalism, which is of course deeply flawed. The ideas of people like Thatcher, Milton Friedman and others on the fundamentalist right sought to change society, as they saw it, for the better, where we lefties tend to see them as changing it for the worse.

Whatever your views on the motivations of Thatcher and the consequences of her time in power, we can all agree that she made fairly significant alterations to our social and political landscape.

Her goal was to smash the post-war Keynesian consensus, and return to a more fundamentalist, laissez-faire, model of capitalism. She saw the changes of the post war period as limiting our opportunities in economic performance, and suffocating us with bloated and inefficient big government. As I like to often point out (with a somewhat smug tone), one of the major “successes” of this, as Thatcher herself put it, was New Labour. As she famously said, “we forced our opponents to change their minds”.

Despite the mountain of rubble under which the Tories buried themselves by 1997, Lady Thatcher could rest assure that certain elements of her cause would be safe in the hands of Blair and Brown.

Crucially, they supported her liberalisation of the financial markets. Despite manifesto promises, they supported continued marketisation of Public Services and never put an end to the Privatisation of essential services and national infrastructure.

They bought little or no reform to Local Government, essentially leaving Councils exactly as Thatcher had wanted them, spending agents of the Treasury. And virtually nothing was done to rebuild the skilled base of our once great, and highly Unionised, productive industries.

Our industrial sectors that were the backbone of numerous working class communities were decimated by an economic model that accepted un-unionised global competition as an immutable fact. Thatcher and her successors favoured a predominantly service based economy, where todays youngsters are more likely to be found working in jobs with little potential for advancement and less training in transferrable skills.

I tend to run through this list in my head and wonder, how much exactly did New Labour concede to Mrs Thatcher?  Of course massive changes have been made, not least of all to the funding of our Public Services and eradication of poverty, but I am focusing on the core objectives of Thatcherism, the ones that survived her, and more so on the one that slipped the net.

Despite the tremendous damage Mrs Thatcher inflicted upon the Trade Union movement, she never truly succeeded in crushing them as she so wished. More importantly in my opinion (and in the opinion of many Tories no doubt!), she never managed to break the link between the Unions and the Labour Party, a pet cause of many on the right since Labour’s inception.

The Tories know, as Keir Hardie et. al also understood, that the major strength of the Labour Party is its nominal position as representative of the millions of men and women who are expected to bear the cost of every capitalistic cock up without protest.

That’s what made the Labour Party so special, it was rooted in the organised sections of the class it sought to represent. It was what the ruling classes of Britain had feared since the English Revolution, the previously silent majority organising effectively enough to make their voices heard, and right the terrible wrongs that this country’s majority had endured for centuries.

Although many will argue that this principle has been shunned by the current Labour leadership, which has refused to enact a whole host of policies suggested by various Trade Unions, they are just as vital to the continued existence of the Party, as they were at the beginning of the 20th century.

Most of the Party’s money come from Trade Union member’s, who donate money voluntarily to their respective Affiliate Political Funds. Also, large swathes of our activists come from the Unions, notably USDAW and Unite, who both play a massive role in Labour general election campaigns, with Unite currently running a national phone bank campaign, contacting tens of thousands of voters around the country.

The recent industrial disputes yesterday prompted Conservative Chairman Eric Pickle’s to bring this all up, he whipped himself into the usual kind of hysteria that Tories seem to get themselves into when Trade Unionists try to stand up for their members – which is, ironically, what Thatcher sought to portray as her aim, when it came to supposedly “undemocratic” union bosses and practices.

Pickles demanded that The Labour Party immediately stop taking funds from the Unite Union.

I have become bored of trying to explain the relationship between the affiliated Unions and the Labour Party to excited Tories who have very little understanding of our internal workings. I don’t want to make the whole “The Unions are a Part of the Labour Party” argument again, I outlined it here and George Eaton also wrote a cracking article in the New Statesman, that sums it up pretty well. But its pretty clear that the Tories are now trying to turn the Ashcroft scandal round on us and at the same time revive their favoured boogeyman.

George Osborne also had some words for us yesterday on the matter,

“Gordon Brown cannot have it both ways. He can’t condemn the strike whilst at the same time taking money from the strikers’ union and while at the same time allowing Charlie Whelan, the political director of that union, to have open access to 10 Downing Street.

“In the end it’s a question of leadership for Gordon Brown. He has to cut off the links with the Unite union which is a party within a party now for the Labour Party.”

It is clear from such comments that they are eager to get back to Thatcher’s unfinished business, and break the link between the Party and the Trade Unions for good.

David Cameron has been pretty open about his plans to reform the Union link, and Conservative sources have assured us that this is intended to be a first term priority if Cameron wins the election. If they succeed, they will pretty much destroy the last remnants of the Party’s links to the organised Labour movement, and certainly ensure it will no longer have any hope of serving its original purpose.

This shouldnt be of concern just to Labour Party members, but to all Trade Unionists, whatever their affiliations. This is an attack not on the Labour Party, but on the right of organised Labour to secure formalised political representation for our movement, and is an attempt to finish the work of their revered handbag brandishing leader. We should work to ensure they don’t get away with it.

When the time comes, the words “Taff Vale” will be on more lips than mine.

"I say, brother can you testify?"

No doubt Paul or I shall have something more in depth to say about Tories and their plans to allow ‘co-ops’ in every public sector industry, from schools to job centres. A few thoughts occur to me right off the bat, however.

Most obviously, the key problem is that these plans are being enacted just when both Labour and the Tories are ready to indulge in swingeing cuts, laying off and not replacing staff, cutting operating budgets etc.

Touted as a measure to drive efficiency, as workers can ‘become their own boss’ and wages can go up if services are delivered cheaply, overall it’s not going to change the fact that some services are about to be lost.

As with outsourcing and privatisation, therefore, there is the worry that this is just one more mask for cheaper, sub-standard services, compared to what even the bureaucratic monster state can deliver.

Another concern is that a lot of the powers given to the co-ops will be relatively superficial. George Osborne, speaking on Radio 4 this morning, said that co-op schools would be able to fire their headmaster, which he re-iterated in the Telegraph. Which is great, I suppose, but rather moot since central funding will be set elsewhere.

Key issues like classroom sizes, staffing levels and so on would be prefigured.

I’m not a fan of Labour’s Academies, but at least there the government stumps up quite a large chunk of money to refurbish the school and to pay for increased numbers of staff and so on. With the Tory idea, it’s unclear who pays for what and which powers lie where.

Thirdly, though I’ve yet to take a look at the off-the-shelf models for ‘co-ops’, I wonder just how many of them place industrial democracy at the heart of what’s actually being done, and how much of them rely on the motivation of management types towards a bigger salary – which is rarely good news for workers’ terms and conditions.

Lastly, the notion of ‘successful’ co-ops being able to bid for other areas of government business is profoundly worrying. raising the spectre of every single public service provision becoming subject to a contract between government and a legally independent entity – initially co-ops, perhaps, but ultimately the private sector too.

Current Tory plans admit of co-ops contracting outside management experts in to help run things (continuing the “consultancy” boondoggle incidentally) or going in to joint partnerships with ‘outside organisations’. It’s only a short hop from there to abolishing the ‘co-op’ middle man, and the not-for-profit status while they’re at it.

This has ramifications for the collective bargaining agreements of virtually every single public sector union. There’s no indication (and I can’t find a relevant policy paper) that the Tories would set a benchmark minimum wage based on the national arrangements agreed with the unions.

Transferring employment contracts to these new entities, and letting them control the terms and conditions of their own staff, piecemeal undermining the unions, would be an ideal stealth measure, and would probably achieve some of the cost-cutting the Tories want to see in place – and might draw flak away from the government, at least allowing them to appear defenders of decentralization and local democracy against big union bureaucracies.

Tories could also say that unions should invest in the co-op movement themselves, and compete on a level playing field with other suppliers of services ‘if they think they can do better’. For this type of thing, the unions better gear up now.

If I find evidence that this is more than a stunt by Georgie Boy, there’ll be more to come on this, as soon as I can get my grubby paws on whatever rhetoric-laden policy document bilge the Tories have prepared. In the meantime, there’s some links provided by Chris Dillow to consider: Demos on mutualism in public services; James Crabtree at Prospect on Cameronian Co-ops and some stuff from James Macintyre on why Labour’s Right get woodies over co-ops.