Some local resistance, we need more

It’s still true - and has been for quite a long time - that “There is far too little strike action in Britain.” The big question is “When will this change?”

Brendan Barber was right when on ‘Any Questions’ last night he described the situation at the moment as “a phoney war”. The battles are going to come, mainly but not exclusively, after Osborne’s ‘Comprehensive Spending Review’ on 20 October. The problem is that the TUC isn’t getting ready for the battle that Barber is telling us will come. We must give them credit for getting the propaganda out. Today’s Guardian leads with the TUC report that that the proposed Tory cuts will hit the poorest ten times harder than the richest:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/10/coalition-cuts-poor-tuc

But this isn’t enough. There is a danger that the attacks will find many on our side like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights. So there is a need to be there where the action is. This week’s Socialist Worker features two excellent examples, both local, the angry 400 strong lobby against local authority cuts at Bolton Town Hall and the protest in Buile Hill Park, Salford, against the closure of Hope Maternity Unit. We need lots more of these and I’m sure we will get them but I’m not sure they will be organised on the scale and at the speed necessary. We need to get the message across that there is organised resistance so no one feels isolated and abandoned.

This is why the demo outside the Tory party conference is so important. It’s true that some are much easier to organise than others but we have to get it across that our enemies aren’t as confident as they like to portray themselves. Compared to Thatcher, they aren’t starting off against the background of the biggest global economic crisis since the 1930s, they aren’t able to portray the unions as the enemy and people no longer see privatisation as preferable to nationalisation. Rather, as in any battle, the enemy will look for weakness. It’s clear from the battles in the 1970s that those who resisted often succeeded. Those who didn’t went to the wall.

We mustn’t forget how vicious this government is. Lib Dem MP Bob Russell, the MP for Colchester, make the point, if in absurdly polite way when he tells the Today programme: "Yes, let's deal with the welfare cheats. But the notion that they are responsible for all the ills of the nation is in fact a smokescreen and it's not very ethical."

Tomorrow, Sunday’s, lobby of the TUC, calling on it to organise a national demonstration now, focuses on how the TUC is so far failing to give a lead. A brief glance at our history shows how this is no surprise. The nine months notice given by the Conservative government in summer 1925 was used by government and employers to build up coal stocks and a scabbing organisation, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. The TUC did precisely nothing. And that was a TUC with much bigger left than today’s TUC. They didn’t invite Stanley Baldwin to address them as the current general council Cameron to address the congress.

The lobby of the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool in a week’s time is a step in the right direction but when union leaderships leave it to branches to organise transport, the limitations of organising from the top down become clear.

Reflections from February: "far too little strike action in Britain at the moment"

There is far too little strike action in Britain at the moment given the pay freezes, the job losses and, above all, the anger and in the last year we have seen the return of both the all out strike - Superdrug and the Leeds bin strike - and occupations. So in taking action and doing it in such a lively and determined way, the UNITE Fujitsu workers are a beacon and they certainly shone at the Right to Work conference a week ago.

This week I've been in the WCML reading about the Automat dispute 1976/1977, and the row about the Engineers Charter pamphlet which was temporarily withdrawn at the request of the strikers because they didn't feel confident enough to support an open challenge to Mather the local right wing official. The Automat workers weren't strong enough to occupy - they tried, though not in sufficient numbers - but they had amazing tenacity, the strike lasted a year and as the mass pickets were established, the employer finally crumbled. I suspect because of pressure from other employers, unhappy that the mass pickets, in mobilising the rank and file, were creating a strength that they, the extremely class conscious EEF, could see as a real threat. Looking back on it, it looks like a Pyrrhic victory: we won but at a cost which weakened the confidence of our side and boosted that of the employers. It will be worth looking at the actions of Winston Churchill Junior, MP for Stretford, and involved in the dispute, not least because he wanted to “get JT”, as revealed in a leaked letter, JT being John Tocher. 1976 is the year that Thatcher gets elected a Tory leader and the hard right in the Tory Party, inspired by the free market idea of the Institute of Economic Affairs, is busy planning their revenge for the defeats under Heath.

I’ve also gone back to the chapter on the Manchester occupations in ‘Glorious Summer’. There is a marked contrast here with the chapters on the miners and the building workers and the dockers where the strikers won a clear victory. The attitude of the strike leaders to the rank and file is the key here. In fact, the contradictions of John Tocher’s politics seem to sum it up.

Here was a man who mobilised the rank and file to win a decisive victory at Roberts Arundel in the late 1960s. This happened under the control of his leadership in a purely industrial dispute. It did not create any tensions with the CP and its relations with left officials, the heart of their industrial strategy.

By 1972, under a Heath government with the AUEW the key union in the resistance to the IR Act, Scanlon’s leadership was seen as tactically skilful. In fact, the right remained a very powerful force in the union and the overall CP strategy of an alliance with left Labour MPs, a parliamentary road to socialism, meant that the emphasis was on the election of left officials, getting the vote out at geographical branch meetings, not on the organisation of the rank and file. Thus the election campaign of AUEW president involved having transport ready to get people to go from work to the branch to vote. In the event, Scanlon’s majority in the Manchester area was greater than his majority nationally.

It is also worth noting the mobilisation of the Birmingham engineers, under right wing leadership to Saltley in March 1972 and their absence during the fight against the EEF that followed soon after. Only Manchester and to a much smaller extent Sheffield fought.


I’ve heard that Tocher many years afterwards, said it had been our International Socialist bulletins – the Greater Manchester Engineer – that had worried him during the dispute. The chapter in Glorious Summer certainly keeps referring to them for the argument on how the dispute was progressing.

It is a complicated story at one level. Large numbers of workers on one side, ranged against a large number of employers. In the context of 1972 it was perhaps the biggest battle

The title refers to Richard III – the original quote was ‘the winter of discontent’. There is a curious reversal however in the timing. Glorious summer in the original succeeds winter. Here it precedes it. It leaves open the question ‘Why?’

Colin Barker argued with me the question was easy to answer and Adam Rose put it simply in a recent meeting -. It was he said ‘A lack of politics’. More of this anon.

Coming back to the RtW conference, and how the discussion in the pub the day before with UNITE strikers: they've certainly developed a clear understanding of the position of their officials but that isn't the same as an overall view of the relation between rank and file and bureaucracy

All history is the history of class struggle. Easy to say, harder to spell out. The struggle is ‘sometimes open, sometimes hidden’. Rather more hidden at the moment.