Strike, By Gove!

Education Secretary Michael Gove has today launched into a scathing attack on the beleaguered public sector workers who are due to go on strike on Wednesday across the UK. The strikes are to highlight plans to cut the pensions benefits and increase pension contributions of workers in schools, local authorities, and other public sector services. While the media and the Deputy Prime Minister have played up to myths about supposed "gold-plated" pensions in the public sector, the fact remains that the average pension paid out is around a paltry £5,600 p.a. - this is actually over £200 p.a. lower than the average private sector pension. The accrual rate is slightly better than the private sector, but it has long been a feature that lower pay in the public sector is compensated for by a slightly better set of pension arrangements than most private employers offer.

There is plenty of evidence the public sector pension pot is perfectly viable in the long run and stands to decline as a proportion of public spending. The Government however is determined to cut it and while claiming to still be negotiating, has essentially adopted a "take it or leave it" approach for some weeks now.

And so on Wednesday there will be a one day strike. It is likely to cause significant disruption around the country, although the nation will not be paralysed - but aside from anything else, the inconvenience caused might highlight to people just how much of the work carried out by public sector workers is not noticed - until it isn't there, when its vital role becomes very apparent.

Mr Gove however has lambasted strike leaders: "I am deeply opposed to this action, and the damage it generates," he has said, claiming the leaders of Unite and other unions are simply spoiling for a fight and keen for confrontation.


Mr Gove hasn't always felt like this. Like many Tories, it always a different matter when its his own wallet he is worried about.


Here he is on strike, trying to shut down his employer when he was a journalist back in 1989.


Sauce for the goose...

A kick up the 80s: Striking Gove - kneeling, on the left! (1989)

Miliband: Content Not Working (but not striking either)

Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers did not go to work today - instead they took to the picket lines and the streets to voice their fears about Government plans to cut pensions. It is just the first shots in what is likely to be a long struggle for the future of the public services much of the British population takes for granted to the extent that some won't miss them until they are gone.

I joined a rally in Huddersfield. My own union, Unison, was not striking and as someone working in the  voluntary sector, the dispute does not affect my employment or conditions, but it does affect the community I live in and the services I and others use. So showing support felt important, and it was good to know that not only Green Left and Green trade unionists were out around the country supporting the protests, but our party leader, Caroline Lucas, MP, joined picket lines in her Brighton constituency. "Fair pensions are worth fighting for," she declared yesterday.

A striking contrast indeed to Ed Miliband, the Great White Hope of the tattered remnants of Labour Party progressives. After a leadership campaign last summer in which he portrayed himself as a slightly-more-sort-of-left-of-centre-type-of-guy, Ed has flounced and floundered and finally flunked at the prospect of today's strikes. Ignoring the dreadful lies emanating from the Government about the alleged unsustainability of public sector pensions (the Hutton Report shows that their cost will decline in real terms), Ed declared "These strikes are wrong." He tried of course to slag the Government off as well, saying it has repeatedly acted provocatively and recklessly (Ed's words). Yet he still expects the unions to engage in what is clearly a farcical process of meaningless talks with a Government which has already decided on the outcome.

The Green Party leader was in somewhat less of a tangle. Rather than looking like a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights of the Tory Media, she simply declared her support and took part in the J30 events. While Ed flustered about how Clegg and Cameron would cope with having the kids at home for the day, Caroline Lucas acknowledged the inconvenience, but said:

"This isn’t something I do lightly. I regret the disruption caused by industrial action and think it must only be used in special circumstances – and would urge trade unions to work hard to ensure support from the wider public. Yet when teachers are being expected to pay 50% more in pension contributions, work longer and get less pension when they retire – and when negotiations are failing – targeted and considered action is clearly necessary."

Other prominent Greens also took part - with London Assembly members Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones (who is also London Mayoral candidate) joining the London march and hundreds of other party activists taking time to take part across the country.

Now is the moment for trade union movement (which was fundamental to Ed Miliband's election as Labour leader) to seriously ask itself if it really wants to persist with the shell that is Labour. It is a tired out husk, a brand rather than a belief. The thinning ranks of those with genuine socialist beliefs remain completely sidelined, as we saw when John McDonnell was barred from standing for the leadership last year via a nomination process that would have Putin salivating. Miliband offers a "choice" (for want of a better word) of a different set of managers to the Con Dems, not a different set of values.

The Green Party is a developing but in some respects still nascent force: it is better organised than ever before and has a wider range of values and policies than any of the other parties. What it still lacks in strategy, size and ideology it more than compensates for in its unity of purpose around social justice and environmental sustainability. And in leadership centred on conviction and values rather than soundbites, as we saw in the sharp contrast between the Labour and Green leaders during the last twenty four hours.

In the coming months, while Labour struggles to find a narrative that makes any sense, Greens, already gradually rising in the national opinion polls and at the local elections in May, have an opportunity to make their voices clear in favour not only of protest action, but in setting out the values of equality, justice and sustainability that are at the heart of both the Green Party and trade union movement. They are also values held by most ordinary people in our country. With new action planned for October, Ed's moment may have passed; but perhaps the Green one is finally coming.

In the Land of the Muppets

The Lib Dems technically "lost" the constituency of York at the last election - boundary changes made it notionally one of their seats, but when it came to it the Tories won by a significant margin. But that hasn't stopped them from aping the eponymous Duke of the same city in the famous children's song where he "marched them up to the top of the hill, then marched them down again."

Again and again in recent months we have seen just how appallingly bad the Coalition Government is for lack of foresight and planning. Of note - the supposedly cost-cutting student fees increases which were meant to deliver savings, except that by bringing them in at the same time as allowing universities to charge up to £9,000 a year, the cost of upfront loans is now prohibitively expensive to the Government to the tune of no less than £1,000 million per year more than anticipated.

Which the Muppet, and which the puppet?

Linked to this was their pandering to rightwing myths about non-existent social security benefits by slashing the numbers of overseas students, a move which will mean several billions lost in both education fees and money coming into the UK from abroad. Not only does this ignore the benefits to Britain of potentially influential people from other countries being educated here at their own cost, but it will possibly bankrupt some universities and deny even costly educational opportunities to British students. Now this is being reversed in a desparate attempt to shore up the gap in funding from student loans.

Then came the NHS debacle, which the Coalition's "partners" are fighting with each other over trying to claim which of them has "won" after their faux "listening exercise". And meanwhile the revised plans quietly remove the obligation on the state to provide universal healthcare to its citizens.

And now this - in the middle of negotiations on public sector pensions with the trade unions, Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Danny Alexander, jumped the gun and boldly announced to a thinktank's conference that employees' contributions would rise by 3.2% of income and members would have to work an extra year. Again, the Con Dems have echoed and pandered to myths about "gold plated" public sector pensions, when in fact the average pension paid to a public sector pensioner was just £6,500 p.a. in 2009/10  They also ignored the fact that by increasing pension contributions, it would deter many from saving in the first place, leaving the state to pay more when they did finally retire but would be entirely dependent on state pensions and benefits.

So, after an understandable outcry and threats of sustained strike action from the trade unions, what has happened now? Ooops! Danny has changed his mind and decided to go back to the table with the unions. On one level, good as it may mean some chance to stop some of this nonsense, and all power to the unions for being instrumental in achieving this.

But this is not a listening Government, as it cravenly claims each time it backtracks on some insensitivity or botch up. Rather, it is a disorganised, thoughtless and ideologically fundamentalist regime intent on rapidly "changing everything by 2015 " so deeply that it would take decades to reverse the increasingly market-orientated "reforms" introduced across the public sector at great cost to citizens' wellbeing and the public purse. Even if the public comprehensively rejects the ill-thought up "Big Society", the Coalition's rush is about ensuring that we will be stuck with it for decades to come, regardless of our wishes or the irreversible damage done to so many long established public services in the meantime.

Danny's nick name is Beaker, owing to his striking resemblance to the carrot-topped Muppet of the same name. Clearly, in the comedy of errors that passes for the Coalition, the resemblance is increasingly more than physical. Poor chap, he must be exhausted by the constant U-turning, totally out of his depth as he spins for his ungrateful Puppet Masters, Cameron and Clegg.

Appropriate indeed, then, is this performance of Coldplay's "Yellow ", a paean to anxious confusion and hesitant hurry, sung by none other than Beaker the Muppet himself. And of course, yellow is the jaundiced colour of the Lib Dems, in more than one sense.

Yep, go Danny boy...How he must miss those days thinking up press releases on red squirrel conservation for the Cairngorms national park.

Twisted Cable

The surreal freak show that is the Con Dem Coalition continues apace.

Talking to the GMB trade union, Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable, warned the unions that any significant increase in strikes in opposition to Government public spending cuts could be met with legislation to restrict further the right to strike. Condescendingly, he suggested that the current level of disputes are ok and so he won't legislate - unless people start to use their right to strike. It is a twisted, deceitful logic that is being employed - you can have a right, as long as you don't use it. All the more insincerely patronising are his "this will hurt me more than it will hurt you" protestations, like some old headmaster admonishing the naughty boys. Who does this incompetent sell-out of a man think he is?

The right to collective strike action has been a mainstay of workplace rights ever since the Liberal Party Government reversed the Taff Vale Judgement back in 1901. The judgement used common law to hold trade unions liable for any costs incurred or profits lost by employers as a result of a strike - effectively crushing any legitimate right to strike. Following massive campaigning by unions and by Labour and Liberal politicians, the Liberal Government elected by a landslide in 1906 reversed the decision through the Trades Disputes Act, which removed trade union liability. This concept, of a right to strike without liability, has underpinned even the Thatcherite legislation of the 1980s. Its latest manifestation is in the Trade Union & Labour Relations Act passed by the Conservatives in 1992.

British employment law is at its heart still governed by common law nostrums on the law of contract and, within that, the enacted laws of Master and Servant which were introduced in the 18th century and which require "obedience and loyalty" of employees towards their contracted employer. Later statute laws on employment conditions have modified but not replaced this inherently inegalitarian concept, which is also at the centre of the capitalist economic system. Given that employers, particularly now in the form of large, financially powerful and impersonal corporations, hold the whip hand in this relationship, being effectively in control of the livelihoods and career prospects of their staff, the right to collective action by employees via their trade unions is utterly essential to provide any sort of counterbalance.

As the Liberal Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, argued when he told the Commons back in 1906, the protection for unions was essential because:

The great object ...was, and still is, to place the two rival powers of capital and labour on an equality so that the fight between them, so far as fight is necessary, should be at least a fair one.

Yet here we have a leading light among Campbell-Bannerman's successors a century on set to turn the clock back - not because unions might break the law, but because they might use their legal rights. Of course council and other public workers might strike against plans to cut services and make jobs redundant - these are perfectly legal as long as a strike ballot is held. And why on earth wouldn't they? What other weapon do they have to protest or try to save their jobs?

New Lib Dem employment rights policy announced

The unions are central to the defence of needlessly beleaguered public services - and popular in doing so. Polls repeatedly show that the public have much greater faith in the trade unions now than for decades and infinitely higher trust in them than in our political leaders and the corrupt business class whose interests our government so keenly serves. Strikes will come as the cuts bite, as services are withdrawn and people suffer - and if Cable's response is to try to remove the right to strike in order to suppress opposition, he and his ilk will be inviting strife probably unknown in this country for nearly two centuries.

Dangerfield wrote of the passage of the Trades Disputes Act as a seminal moment in The Strange Death of Liberal England, his analysis of the collapse of the once dominant British Liberal Party. A century on, by in effect seeking to repeal the principles it established, Cable looks firmly resolved to kill his party all over again.

And no one will miss it.


And now for something TRULY awful: Lib Dem sycophancy at it's very worst.

"Everything is fine today - that is our illusion." - Voltaire

It is a widely promulagted fiction that Britain's political system is the fruition of centuries of linear development towards a liberal democracy: we arrogantly grant our Houses of Commons and Lords the title "The Mother of Parliaments". No gory French Revolution for us; no Latin American military juntas or Nazi dictatorship. The British people have over centuries of graceful partnership, moderation and, well, plain jolly good sense worked out the wonderful paragon of freedom and democratic practice we are today.

The truth is very different - both today and in history.

Today, we are ruled by a Government that, thanks to our voting system, holds 60% of the seats in Parliament with just 35% of the votes cast - would Mugabe have got away with this? A Government which rules as "King-in-parliament". This means that the constitutional legitimacy of the Government stems from its appointment by the monarch, the Queen, rather than by the choice of the people. We all are, in any case, subjects of the monarch. In most European countries, the Constitution establishes the rights of the citizen; in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, our rights and freedoms are granted by the Monarch, and able to be removed at any time. Unlike most Europeans, the USA and many, many others, we have no written constitution - only rules and precedents established over time, open to wide interpretation and fairly arbitrary change.( http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/british_constitution1.htm )

Surely it doesn't matter that much? It is just theory - in practice, we are free. But consider this: in the last 8 years, buoyed along by the USA after 9/11 and showing no sign of stopping, the British Government has established hundreds of new criminal offences and state powers to spy on you and arrest you for nothing more than the suspicions of some petty official.

A protest exclusion zone around Parliament has led to the arrest and prosecution of peace activists for nothing more threatening than reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq at the national Cenotaph; terrorist law has been used to confiscate green activists' toothbrushes as dangerous weapons and arrest a teenage girl for riding her horse in a suspicious manner; and notoriously, Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang survived Nazi persecution arriving in the UK in 1937 as a Jewish refugee only to end up being arrested and held by police for several hours for booing the Home Secretary during his speech at the 2005 Labour party conference. You may even now be arrested for handing out leaflets in town centres without a proper licence - in some, you cannot do it at all as many of our public spaces have been sold off to prviate landowners and, as such, are private property.

In themselves, these instances may seem obstructive and nonsensically counterproductive - the laws have even been used to spy on the incorrect use of dustbins - but the return of Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo earlier this year to the UK reminds us of the more sinister side of this. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/23/binyam-mohamed-guantanamo-plane-lands ) This man was held for seven years, tortured by proxy by Pakistan and Moroccan security services using questions provided by the UK. The most damning evidence against him? That he had read a joke article by a leftwing magazine about how to make your own nuclear bomb from the contents of your kitchen cupboard - ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/21/barbara-ehrenreich-guantanamo ). Detained without charge or trial, he is home now, a broken man. And in the UK, horrendously, a raft of people - mainly wanted by the security services in such free countries as Jordan and Algeria - are held in indefinite home arrest.

And coming soon...a national database of every email, telephone call and text message you send, preserved by the State and its tens of thousands of officials to inspect, interpret and act upon as they decide; a database of the details of every child in the UK (let's put the vulnerable at as much risk as possible!); and then the greatest of all - the National Identity Card - not compulsory, but required if you want medical treatment, social security and just about any service requiring proof of identity. The Government has already admitted the ID scheme will not work against terrorism, but is throwing up to £18 billion into it - a little know fact is that one of the the private companies bidding to be involved has on its Board the former Home Secretary who introduced the scheme - David Blunkett. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_national_identity_card )

The current Government claims of course that all this is simply to protect us from the allegedly innumerable threats against our peace and security; our way of life, it is said, is at threat. Yet what are we left defending when we surrender the freedoms we have fought for centuries in a matter of months?

And fought we did. Not just in the war against Hitler, which is usually meant when people say that. The fact is, we had to fight tooth and nail for our freedoms against an instransigent, often violent and oppressive state which sought to demonise, exclude and destroy any and every threat to the Establishment that runs our society. For centuries, Church and State combined to keep the Order of things intact through a mix of faith and fear. And when with the passage of time that became harder, they did not change their method, but rather refined it - controlling "freedom" of speech and arresting those too radical to be accommodated within the system.
The Magna Carta is often touted as the start of constitutional government in England; yet this was little more than a Baron's Charter. It retained the feudal order intact, while the Parliaments of de Montfort incorporated the new merchant classes into the Established way of things. These were instruments which maybe rearranged the existing order a little, allowed some "New Men" in, but ultimately left the system untouched. Even Cromwell suppressed the first socialist stirrings of the Levellers and Covenanters during our short-lived Republic and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 simply enshrined bigotry and hierarchy in spite of the titles given to laws such as the "Bill of Rights".

In the late 18th century, Thomas Spence emerged as a radical thinker who advocated land redistribution, freedom of the press, voting rights for men and women, and social security for those unable to work. Under slogans such as "The Land is the People's Garden", he and his supporters advocated social reform which quickly gained popularity, so much so that the Government quickly took to arresting many and closing down the pamphleteers who spread their ideas - this, a foretaste of today, was done for the sake of national security and public order, with France rather than Islam as its bogeyman. Spence himself was imprisoned several times.

After his death in 1814, Spencean societies were formed as part of a widespread, decentralised movement, with public houses as their meeting places and social and economic equality their watchwords. Government spies inflitrated them and in 1816 the authorities violently suppressed a rally and charged several leaders of the movement with high treason, with death as the penalty. Fortunately, the jury system meant they were acquitted. (The jury system is one of the few mechanisms that seems rooted in British thinking, though in recent years even this has come under threat from the current Government).

In 1819, at Peterloo in Manchester, a rally by people demanding the right to vote for Parliament (a right at that time granted to a tiny handful of the richest members of society) was charged by cavalry, killing 15 and injuring as many as 700 people. The Government followed this up by a strikingly familiar raft of new laws called the "Six Acts". These made it possible to arrest someone suspected of undertaking irregular military training; allowed homes to be searched arbitrarily for weapons; reduced the opportunities for bail; required public meetings to be registered if more than 50 people attended; imposed stiffer penalties for publishing material held to be seditious; and taxed newspapers which published opinions as well as facts. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts )

Unsuprisingly, this did nothing to reconcile the Spenceans to the Government, and during the succession crisis following the death of the King in 1820, twelve of the most radical attempted an ill-conceived plot to muder the entire Cabinet at dinner - later known to history as the Cato Street Conspiracy after the site of their shortlived base of operations. This ended in a sword and gunfight and the execution or exile of the leaders.( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRcato.htm )( http://thomas-spence-society.co.uk/ )

Over the rest of the century, trade unions, socialist societies and many religious reformers struggled hard for change - and slowly won changes, however grudgingly surrendered by the Establishment. As late as 1884 many men did not have the vote and a further 45 years (and several deaths of suffragettes) were to elapse before all women were to enjoy that right too. And every step of the way, the Establishment resisted - even when overt violence declined and political debate did become more established, the incumbent Order continued to resist any changes or challenges to how things are - even now, with the collapse of the banking system and the economy of the world in disarray, it kicks back and resists any suggestions of real, deep seated change.

So Britain remains prey to those who would limit and remove the rights we have won over centuries of struggle. And our lack of a written constiution and the fact of our Monarchy combine to make us ever more vulnerable to those who would hold our freedom in their hands, to dispense with as they please. If this is not quite entirely the intention of the current Government, what guarantee might we have of the motives of a future one, perhaps of different hue? How much easier has this Government made the path to Britain's future concentration camps?

We need a written constitution and a republic if we are to have any chance of establshing a truly fair and free society and changing the rotten core of inequality, greed, excess and waste that is at the heart of capitalism. Violence, actual and implied, has been at the heart of the struggle for rights for all for centuries - most of it instigated by the Government of the day, the agent of the status quo. Our political masters, in the Name of the King, are all-powerful, their police state mentality cleverly concealed in a cloak of liberalism. If we allow, it could soon just as easily be a shroud, a winding-sheet for democracy and freedom.
http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/