The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been fibbing again. No, not that one. The new one; you know, the self-proclaimed ‘reasonable’ one, fond of taking the difficult decisions, and all that. You’ve probably seen him pretending to fill someone else’s car with petrol or demonstrating his unfamiliarity with paying for things. He wants you to think that decent pay for workers is unaffordable, that the only way to fund public sector pay increases is by putting a further squeeze on the poor. He knows these things are not true. But he would like you to think they are. But don’t worry, it’s all in a good cause: an increasingly unequal, inequitable and authoritarian Britain in which industrial action and public protest are all but illegal. This way to the polling booths, ladies and gentlemen!
The faces may have changed but the modus operandi hasn’t. They are playing different parts but, make no mistake, this is another play from the same dismal repertory company. Lately, it’s felt like the same production over and over again (so many first nights!). Their repertoire is woefully limited and, let’s be honest, we’ve seen most of it before. I mean, the lines don’t even change (who knew ‘The mess we inherited’ would still be popular 12 years in!). I stopped watching them a while ago. I thought that if enough of us ignored them they would just go away, shuffling back to their luxury yachts and heated stables, their pockets stuffed with public cash. Unfortunately, enough journalists and members of the public turn out for each new production to keep them in business. And, like a lot of things that have been around too long, staying in business is what this not especially venerable institution is all about.
Of course, Mr Sunak wants to pit ‘union bosses’ against ‘ordinary families’, as though the strikes were part of a Marxist plot and the people on the picket lines were not themselves ‘ordinary’ people trying to heat their homes and put food on the table. It is typical of the UK’s ruling party to invoke fairness when attempting to defend the chronic and systemic unfairness they wish to perpetuate. We must inflict austerity on the poor so future generations don’t pay the price of our thriftlessness! We must protect private schools because removing their charitable status would make them unaffordable to some ‘hard-working and aspirational’ families and put an intolerable strain on the state system! This is just the latest iteration of a tried and tested formula. You can’t have decent pay because it would mean taxing poor people more. But, of course, in this case, as in the others, the government is not interested in fairness. They like austerity because it is an opportunity to reduce the size of the state and redistribute wealth to the private sector. They like private schools because they perpetuate the educational inequality from which they and their kids benefit. And they are resisting the pay claims of workers because the suppression of wages in the UK benefits the people they work for: the powerful elites that control most of Britain’s wealth, people for whom enough is never enough.
In fact, the government rather likes industrial disputes precisely because they are divisive. They want you to think the strikers are greedy, selfish militants who are all out for themselves and don’t care in the least for the national good. This is what Mr Sunak would prefer you to worry about, not the appalling unfairness, impoverishment and inequality that is driving workers to strike. He wants you to think they are being unreasonable. He is the reasonable one. Don’t they realise the pot is finite? We can’t give everyone everything they want. His job is to minimize the impact of their ill-judged actions on the poorest and most vulnerable. He would prefer not to intervene but, when it comes to protecting lives, well, what would you do? It all seems so, well, reasonable. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? But it isn’t reasonable, and neither is Mr Sunak. In fact, he is something of an extremist.
What the Prime Minister would rather you don’t think about is how the current unfair and unequal distribution of wealth in the UK is the result of political choices. There is nothing inevitable about it. The poverty in which many millions of workers and their children now live is the result of deliberate, measured political choices to which Mr Sunak has been party. They have no intention of changing this. ‘Levelling up’ was never more than a slogan (and a misleading one at that). All the false choices set out by ministers are a distraction, intended to convince you that the government really has no choice: public spending had to be cut, wage bills have to be suppressed, the health service has to be privatised (sorry, getting ahead of myself!). Rather than legislating to make things better for working families, the government’s focus is on how to deal with the fall-out of the ideological austerity it has imposed over the past decade or so and that it has no interest in reversing or ameliorating.
The strikes are an opportunity for Mr Sunak to step up plans to extend anti-strike legislation that would prevent or heavily restrict industrial action by emergency service (such as nurses) and infrastructure (such as railway) workers. These plans are part of a worrying descent into authoritarianism in UK politics. The government’s new public order bill includes anti-protest proposals such as banning orders which could result in electronic tagging and monitoring of people who have committed no offence, while Mr Sunak has further promised to give police more powers to tackle ‘disruptive’ (i.e., effective) protests. The government is also considering plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British ‘bill of rights’. Mr Sunak’s own comment on this subject makes it absolutely clear why we need to retain it. ‘We clearly have a problem with human rights law in this country and it is making it difficult for us to achieve our objectives’, he commented during his leadership campaign.
The current wave of strikes, and their outcome, could not be more important. They are not, as the PM disingenuously suggested, a conflict between union bosses and ‘ordinary people’. In fact, they are the expression of frustration and anger – a ‘scream of rage’, as Brian Reade put it – at a society that has run down its public services and artificially suppressed wages for over a decade, while facilitating the enrichment of a small number of super-wealthy, highly privileged people. The dreadful unfairness of this unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the public purse to a few private individuals has gone largely unremarked by the British media, unsurprisingly, I guess, as it is, by and large, owned by members of this relatively small but all-powerful, offshore, tax-avoiding oligarchy. No surprise either that while modest requests by workers for decent pay are met with stark warnings of a wage-price inflationary spiral, the escalating billions paid out in executive salaries and shareholder dividends scarcely draw comment.
But ‘ordinary’ people aren’t stupid, irrespective of what Mr Sunak and his colleagues believe. People recognize injustice and they understand that things are getting worse. Some people are making fortunes while others struggle to meet their basic needs. They see the corruption and how the corrupt emerge scot-free. Whereas, once, disgraced politicians disappeared from public life, or dedicated themselves to public service, as John Profumo reportedly did, now they are free to launder their reputations on reality TV. People can see that power is consolidated in the wrong places, and they know that they have few cards to play – and none that can be played without pain. No-one takes industrial action lightly. It is the last resort. We need to listen to them. They deserve to be taken seriously.
For most of the twentieth century, the gap between rich and poor narrowed. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in particular, people demanded new freedoms, new rights. They expected more and saw the value in what they contributed. There was hope in some quarters that the pandemic might act as a catalyst in a similar way. Our dependence as a society on teachers, postal workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance workers, public transport workers, and so on, was laid bare. Maybe this would prompt us to reshape our society, to value differently and make fairness and equality our goals? The circumstances, however, were very different, and it already feels as though these hopes were in vain and perhaps a little naïve. Covid-19 struck in the midst of a counter-revolution, during which most of the post-war gains achieved by the working class had been successfully rolled back. In the UK, the chief agents of reaction were the Conservative Party, from Thatcher on, though New Labour, of course, also played a significant, though less purposeful, part. They have overseen the mass transfer of public assets and galloping inequality, as the rich become ever richer and the poor watched their communities stagnate, decline and die. But it wasn’t enough simply to give the rich the opportunity to enhance their fortunes. It was important too to reduce the status of everyone else, economically and socially. For decades, the UK has embraced policies that actively disadvantaged the worse off. The rewards for those prepared to dance to the oligarchs’ tune are great, and our politicians have danced merrily while working people’s lives have become progressively worse and hope of positive change has ebbed away.
This is why the current disputes matter so much. Are we content to be poor? Do we accept the hand we are dealt? Are we happy to be lied to and gaslighted, while our basic freedoms – and, in some ways the most important and basic democratic freedom, to protest – are eroded? Do we think it fair that our children’s life prospects are largely determined by the circumstances of their birth? If your answer, to any or all of these questions, is ‘no’, then you already know what is at stake. Defeat for the unions will mean a worsening of conditions, the further impoverishment of workers and our continuing descent into a kind of economic serfdom – the miserable prospect for which recent decades have prepared us. The future looks grim indeed if we cannot summon the courage to stand up and force a change of course.
