Business as Usual

Viewpoint – from Freedom–anarchist fortnightly, 7 October 2000

As we go to press, the Labour Party conference is convening in Brighton. Gordon Brown will miss the conference’s opening because he’ll be at the IMF/World Bank jamboree in Prague. Given that conference delegates are up in arms about petrol prices and pension levels–and been overtaken by the Tories in all recent opinion polls–Brown’s choice of conferences probably says all we need to know about New Labour and its priorities; this is a government committed to the interests of capital, and the concerns of pensioners, small farmers, single parents and NHS users are irrelevant to it, and, in consequence, the voices of those who articulate such concerns are voices fit only to be ignored. At Brighton, Tony Blair has moved to ensure such voices are literally not heard by conference delegates; the party has spent £300,000 building a covered walkway between the Hilton Metropole, where King Tony will reside, and the conference centre, at the Grand Hotel, protecting delegates and their entourage from the protests of anyone still stupid enough to think this a government to be lobbied, to be persuaded, rather than fought.

Some people, though, will get a chance to touch the robe of the Great Leader. More than six hundred lobbyists, PR consultants and industrialists will hand over £350-per-plate for dinner with Blair on Tuesday night, raising £200,000 in the process for party funds (cost per table is £3,500–conveniently below the £5,000 threshold for declared donations, so you’ll never know, therefore, which particular set of commercial interests bent the ear of which MP). The real business of conference – the dinners, parties, displays, which Labour’s corporate relations manager Anne Creek describes as "an opportunity for business to engage in both formal and informal dialogue with Labour politicians"–will generate about £4 million for the party. There you have it–representative democracy in action (perhaps rather than close the Dome, New Labour could keep it open indefinitely with public funds until Blair departs this mortal coil, at which point it could become a mausoleum for the Great Man, with private companies invited to sponsor Blair’s embalming, the highest bidder getting the opportunity to have its logo on the sides of the sarcophagus, with any losses involved in the project cooked away by an Immortalisation Commission made up of Friends of Tony from his days in chambers).

Representative democracy, though, is having a bit of a rough time at present. Few of us any longer feel represented, and those who do are beginning to sweat. (Perhaps unnecessarily; Lady Jay has after all reassured farming protesters that she under-stands the problems of the countryside because she "has a little cottage she visits most weekends". Maybe we protest too much–this is, after all, the way most MPs see their constituencies anyway.) The response of the Great and Good of Hampstead to the fuel protests gives us a few clues as to what’s really at stake.

Bill Morris, leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, called for a public inquiry into why oil companies and police appeared to collude with fuel protesters, citing the failure of the police to use "their considerable public order powers to restore safety to the roads". The argument that tanker drivers failed to drive through blockades because their bosses didn’t pressure them to is a bizarre one for any trade unionist to advance. Most tanker drivers stayed put because they agreed with the protests. Some stayed put because they’d been told they’d be followed home and their addresses posted on a scabbing website if they attempted to breach the blockades. Morris’s argument amounts to a request to fuel bosses on behalf of the government to threaten to sack drivers who won’t do their jobs, with the inference that, if such drivers were disciplined or sacked, the TGWU would not intervene. Nothing more clearly illustrates the supine nature of the trade union leadership than this craven attempt to curry favour with a govern-ment that has refused to allow it its place at the table, handing over its members as sacrificial lambs. New Labour, though, knows full well that the trade union bureaucracy is a spent force, and, while politely thanking Morris, began moves to extend the 1976 Energy Act to cover fuel companies; seeking to introduce unlimited fines on fuel companies if they fail to ensure maintenance of supplies. Morris claims his hostility to the hauliers stems from lorry drivers’ scabbing during the 1984-85 miners strike, suggesting he’s stupid as well as craven. Large numbers of drivers who crossed picket lines during the miners strike did so because they were refused the support of the TGWU if they refused to cross. The miners strike was broken by a combination of co-ordinated police violence, state-supported scabbing in the Notts coalfields, and the refusal of trade union bureaucrats like Bill Morris to sanction solidarity action in support of the miners in the key industrial conflict of the post-1979 period. Morris – the man who sold out the Liverpool dockers–is now reduced to seeking to advise Gordon Brown and Jack Straw about how to get his men to work.

As to the argument that the police should have steamed in–at the Hyde Park Corner blockade it was fairly easy to see what was holding them back. Most lorry drivers on the blockade had failed to live up to their image as middle class militants, and looked, as one motorbike cop was observed to yell to another alongside him, "rough as fuck, big bastards. I really don’t fancy it, do you." Trying to stop articulated lorries driven at speed during a protest with massive public support presented, as the Association of Chief Police Officers made clear to Straw, a public order problem they really didn’t want.

The line taken by the liberal-minded opinion-formers at the Guardian was that the protests were some kind of right wing revolt, engineered by the Tory Party, an uprising of the Daily Mail reading middle classes.

According to Polly Toynbee, the coalition of hauliers, small farmers, cabbies, and anyone else who turned up on the day represented the "forces of conservatism" incarpate, a revolt of "The Sun’s white van man" which should have been opposed by "the other, greener Britain" (Guardian, 15th September 2000). Car drivers were, for Toynbee, embodied manifestations of "individual selfishness", the protesters "a popular front of Poujadists, small businessmen, farmers, cab drivers and truckers, all supported with weasel words by Mr Hague and the right wing press" (Guardian, 13th September 2000). Isabel Hilton took the argument even further, reminding us that "when the CIA wanted to destabilise Salvador Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s, they organised a truckers strike … In Northern Ireland the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974 … also targeted transport and succeeded in breaking the power sharing executive" (Guardian, 13th September). So the fuel protests were a right wing-almost neo-fascist conspiracy? The problem is, that, for the analogy with Chile to work, we have to accept Blair–whose government pioneered the Terrorism Act, the New Deal for Jobseekers, witch-hunted single parents and asylum seekers and sneeringly handed over ‘75p to the pensioners–as Allende, and as soon as we attempt the comparison the analogy is revealed as nonsense. It is significant also that opinion polls suggest that broadly the same numbers who supported the fuel protesters support a substantial increase in the basic state pension (more than 90% of those polled in each case)–suggesting that the idea that the fuel protests represented a militant selfishness was a convenient fiction resorted to by the likes of Toynbee and Hilton in the absence of any more coherent or convincing argument. Most people, it seems, don’t buy the line that a cut in fuel taxes would have to lead to a cut in public spending elsewhere, regardless of Gordon Brown’s assertion that "irresponsible tax promises" would put ‘both stability and public services at risk". New Labour’s economic strategy is increasingly transparent. We have written before of Blair’s attempts to use the minimum wage as the prop for a low wage economy. Britain has the lowest rate of corporation tax in Europe, and New Labour’s income tax strategy has been designed to aid not the low paid but those paid the most. In reaping the benefits of stealth taxes like the tax on fuel New Labour has continued its redistribution of wealth from poor to rich by covert as well as overt means. If fuel costs go up, then those hit hardest are those with the least to spend. If fuel costs go up at a time when political pressure and trade union conciliation have conspired to hold wages down then those with the least are hit harder still. If you drive for a living then your future is mortgaged to fuel prices. The Green argument for fuel taxes doesn’t hold under present circumstances, because the money raised from fuel taxes isn’t going towards improvements in public transport, but towards underpinning New Labour’s existing public spending commitments, so that the tax concessions to the rich can remain in place. New Labour has spun the myth that we’re all middle class now. If large numbers of those in work bought the lie in 1997 then rises in petrol costs, mortgage rate increases etc., have quickly disabused them of the notion. The majority of us, clearly, then, want the cost of daily living to fall, and want those worst off (pensioners in the case polled) to have more. Hardly a sign of incipient fascism.

The fact that the Green argument has been trotted out with such regularity though says something about those who employ it. Keen to denounce the fuel protesters, it’s fair to say that the columnists in question have never used such heated prose to denounce King Tony and his cronies as they’ve overseen increases in child poverty, heart disease, workplace stress, debt and suicide. As we write (25th September) Gordon Brown has invited the low pay commission to come forward with proposals for an increase in the minimum wage, and is considering an increase from £3.70 per hour to £4.00. The Council of Europe’s low pay threshold, fixed at 68% of adult full time earnings, was £5.87 per hour in 1997. Will the likes of Toynbee and Hilton condemn Brown for consigning millions to a life of poverty and ill-health, or will they continue to hand out ‘comradely’ advice to their friends in Cabinet? I think we can guess. Where were the words of barely contained fury when Chris Woodhead told the Guardian on 4th September that A Levels ought to be made more difficult and preserved for the minority of students. "Let’s preserve A Levels that really do stretch the intellectually most able, but let’s recognise that such qualifications are only for a minority … An examination which doesn’t involve failure is a very peculiar examination … for me failure isn’t a dirty word at all. An education system must involve failure. Life involves failure." Was there then any ringing condemnation of the ‘forces of conservatism'? Or just the silence which is part and parcel of any conspiracy? As Simon Charlesworth has observed, in his book A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2000), which is one of the few works in recent years to take seriously the question of–and the experience of–class from the point of view of those condemned by class rather than that of those who profit from it, "to fail to be outraged is to fail in one’s connection to the world and to fail to see the domination that the position of the scholar [or journalist: NS] is predicated upon: the dispossession of those whom the political system requires to be what Galbraith calls ‘a functional underclass’ (J.K. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, 1992), a group whose poverty is guaranteed in order to maintain the standard of living and relative prosperity of the very section of the population that are politically important to election and re-election and whose own social reproduction is invested in the academic field." In other words, the likes of Toynbee and Hilton and, as another example, Hugo Young, rush to condemn the ‘ugly masses’ for intervening in political life because their privileges depend on the containment and atomisation of that mass, the ‘swinish multitude’ of middle class nightmare. New Labour is doing okay by those who flock to it in time of crisis – the real voice of middle England, the real Poujadism, manifest in the anti-working class prejudice of Guardian columnists, think-tank hacks and Green Party movers and shakers like Darren Johnson. That they cloak their class prejudice as environmentalism ought to tell us what really motivates the environmentalism-from-above which the Greens now represent. Because the politics that suggests New Labour needs to crack down on lorry drivers that refuse to cross picket lines, that suggests cabbies and hauliers can rot on the dole so long as fuel tax stays high, and thinks that Ford and Rover workers should go down with their industry without a fight amounts to nothing more than a politics of ‘Clean Air for the Middle Classes, and Screw the Rest’–a politics of selfishness, pure and simple.

In the fuel protests, the anger over pensions, and the recent UNISON strike in Scotland, we can see the beginnings of a new politics emerging. That it takes such disparate forms, that it sometimes fails to articulate its agenda clearly, that it sometimes carries with it the allegiance of those of other classes, whose fundamental interests are really set against it, ought not to surprise us. To quote Simon Charlesworth again, "deindustrialisation has, clearly, had the effect of wrapping many in a powerful sense of entrapment, as low wages, the cheapening of the qualifica-tions they might reasonably aspire to obtain, and the shortening length of time that they hold jobs, have given them a sense of inescapable destiny, of being individuals collectively overwhelmed by historical change. Absence of security and of respect create a crisis in the reproduction of the culture that many grew up with as the educational links with the trade unions, the presence of union people in the communities, and the decline of the old spaces that used to be those of working people, like the pub and club." Building a new politics of working class solidarity will have to involve a battle for new spaces in which to organise, new ways of organisation–and the adoption of direct action by the fuel protesters is a precurser of this. It showed us also how little it might take to stop the ‘friction-free’ capital of 21st century Britain in its tracks. People who hadn’t been asked their opinion by a television reporter or newspaper journalist in fifteen years suddenly found themselves questioned at petrol stations, at blockades, on their way to work. Those of us who for years had been told we didn’t count could see again just how much we count for, how much social power we wield. In the Observer on 24th September, Richard Dawkins, that figurehead of scientific objectivity and reason (if, that is, you associate corporate cash with reason) voiced his fear that "Big Brother-watching Sun readers" might begin to determine government policy, and Mary Riddell sweated over the fact that "the oppressed are a motley bunch" and that "group power of any sort teeters uneasily between the mild and the mad". The wrong sort of people are being heard, we’re told. "Public uprisings do occasionally pitch it right, as in the outcry for more money for the health service, but in the main they specialise in the selfish, the blinkered and the vindictive ... In a modern democracy, the cult of direct action ... looks increasingly bizarre." Politics, then, is not for the great unwashed. We should listen to the voices of calm of our betters. For Riddell, the fact that many of us are not prepared to is a "signal of something more sinister". The constitutional theorist Anthony Barnett has written of the ‘sovereignty of voice’ assumed by the established political class. "‘They’ used to conduct the only conversation about the rules of the game that mattered, and they did so in exclusive tones. The upper class accent dominated British power. And until now it has been almost impossible to break into the conversation from outside" (This Time, Vintage, 1997). That sovereignty of voice is beginning to be challenged. Every-one from the London Socialist Alliance to William Hague wants to seek to divert the mood of dissent against New Labour down one electoral cul-de-sac or other. Our challenge is to ensure that the anti-capitalism of Prague and Seattle manifests itself as a challenge to the everyday sovereignty of capital in Tottenham, Moss Side and Rotherham, and that challenge be mounted through the development of working class self organisation along the lines shown by the movements in France in 1995 and briefly in the fuel protests here that brought the world we were told had ‘escaped space and time’ to a sudden, grinding halt.

Nick S.