Looking forward to 2010

Best moment of 2009? Not often so easy to identify , politically at least,
but it has to be Monday 22 June and the hundreds of contract workers walking off the
Stanlow site in solidarity with the workers sacked at Lindsay. See the June posting on this blog.



There have been other good moments, not least the freezing cold
morning, 18 December, on the UNITE picket line at Fujitsu with a good
number of pickets and supporters in excellent spirits, albeit a little
soft on the picket line.

Both are good omens for 2010. Add to this the victory of the Leeds
refuse workers. And the strong start to the jobs dispute at Leeds Uni.

On the down side has to be the failure to confront the judges in the
BA cabin crew dispute. Perhaps that will go right, second time around,
in the new year.

I anticipate something of a 'phoney war' from now to May and all hell
breaking loose afterwards but I could be wrong. Quite a lot will
depend on what happens at BA and perhaps at Leeds Uni.

There are bound to be comparisons with 1979 and Thatcher's victory.
The situation, though, could hardly be more different. Then Thatcher
was crusading in favour of the free market and deregulation, against
trade unions and had a good deal of popular support. Today, though
government and business still practise Thatcherism - renamed
neo-liberalism - and have no alternative to it, these ideas are in
crisis. The world has seen its biggest ever financial crash which
flowed from the ever more unrestrained practice of Thatcherism and
remains mired in economic crisis. The next government may try to
follow Thatcher's example and implement swingeing cuts - the figures
indicate they should be much tougher than they were in 79 and the
early 80s - but the reasoning 'the need to balance the budget' will
convince few.

The question will be how do those attacked respond? The ballot
results at Fujitsu and BA show that where the work is done properly,
the response is overwhelming even on a postal ballot. The lesson of
the Thatcher yars is of lions led by donkeys. In every major dispute
the leadership of our side failed. Thatcher understood that if she
picked her moment, avoiding going into battle too early I the Ridley
Plan - and, crucially, was willing to raise the stakes without limit,
then at some point the leadership of the other side would bottle it.
There was nothing novel in this. Lloyd George did this in 1919 as
described by George Smillie and Stanley Baldwin as well on the General
Strike of 1926.

The same is true today. The obvious differences are that there are 7
million trade unionists as against 12 million then and there were
fresh memories of significant victories. Today the long shadow of the
defeat of the miners has receded. The challenge in 2010 is whether a
new generation can get its act together hard enough and fast enough.
Gramsci's watchword 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'
seems to fit these times.