There is Power in a Union

Why the Strikers are Fighting for All of Us

Even in the deranged scorched earth wasteland of contemporary UK politics, there are still some things you can rely on, as surely as night follows day. Whenever there are strikes, even the most demoralised Tories will rouse themselves into a state of righteous indignation and reach for the yellowed Thatcherite manual that once helped them drive neoliberalism like a coach and horses through the crumbling legacy of 1945.

Like treasure hunters stumbling on buried gold, their voices have been heard up and down the country these last few weeks triumphantly braying the dreaded words ‘union barons’ in an attempt to terrify wavering voters with dark visions of a Labour Party in hoc to shadowy interests which mean to do the country ill.

Not everyone will be crass and downright moronic enough to call striking teachers ‘Commies and Bolsheviks’ intent on ‘making sure that kids suffer’, as the soon-to-be jobseeking Jonathan Gullis did last month when looking up from his coffee-stained resumé. But all of them will make that kind of case even if they use different words. Thus we hear that Oliver Dowden was ‘saddened’ by the teachers strikes yesterday. And the Daily Mail’s Mark Lehain berated teachers for ‘sacrificing the wellbeing of so many children on the altar of their political beliefs’.

Also in the Mail, and no one will at be at all surprised by this, Sarah Vine could be found earning her £200,000 a year salary with a plangent lament to a nation divided between ‘silent strivers and noisy strikers’, where ‘ordinary people’ who don’t have ‘nice gold-plated pensions’ are regularly shafted by ‘sharp-elbowed union reps’.

It’s been like this since the dawn of Tory time, and no one can say it hasn’t been effective. But this time at least the gross insults, the phoney divisions, the hypocrisy, and the faux-concern for the common man don’t seem to be working.

For once the monsters in the Tory shop of horrors don’t seem to be scaring people, because these are different times, of post-pandemic and infinite corruption, when energy companies make millions in profits while millions slip deeper into poverty through higher energy bills, when you would need a microscope with a revolutionary new lens to spot a Tory minister with a smidgeon of integrity.

In these new times the old horror flics of ‘the Seventies’ seem as dated as Carry On Films and muddy football pitches. In a dystopian hellscape of corruption when the likes of Baron Lebedev, Baron Moylan, Baron Moore, Baroness Mone and so many others have gained their titles through services to the Tory Party or to Boris Johnson, taunts about ‘union barons’ have all the rhetorical thrust of a fart in a thunderstorm.

Two days ago a poll from Sky News - no friend of striking workers - found to its amazement that public support for the strikes appears to have increased from 35 percent last November to 37 percent. Other polls last month showed that support was much higher when broken down amongst specific sectors such as nurses, ambulance drivers, and primary school teachers.

Something is clearly happening, and the likes of Gullis, Dowden and Vine don’t know what it is - or perhaps they do. Perhaps they know why the public overwhelmingly supports the tens of thousands of nurses, who have come out on strike demanding fair pay and improved patient safety. Perhaps Gullis - a former teacher God help us - knows why 20,000 teachers switched unions last week in order to be able to strike.

Perhaps these gilded commentators and low-grade attack dogs can sense the transformation that I witnessed in Sheffield yesterday, when some 6,000 strikers marched to City Hall. Because this wasn’t a gathering of the usual suspects calling for revolution now.

Teachers and teaching staff , civil servants and a delegation of fifty firefighters proudly marched together with the 500,000 workers who came out on strike across the country yesterday.

They joined the border guards, driving test examiners, barristers, university lecturers, Amazon workers, train drivers and Network rail workers, civil servants, bus drivers, firefighters, postal workers, paramedics and ambulance drivers, nurses, junior doctors, teaching assistants, and Eurostar security staff - all of whom have come out on strike in the last three months.

Don’t Say ‘Out of Touch’

To see that a convergence like this is unusual in British politics would be understating it considerably. There’s been nothing like it in years, and perhaps the most surprising thing about this current concatenation of strikes is that it’s taken so long to reach such a critical mass, given the gratuitous damage inflicted on British society by successive Tory governments during these twelve dire years of austerity, incompetence and malfeasance.

I tend to resist the cliché ‘out of touch’ to criticise governments like this. It’s not just because this is an expression that has long since had whatever life it possessed beaten out of it by endless repetition. To say that someone is out of touch suggests that they once had the ability to be ‘in touch’ and somehow lost it.

But a party that has run down the NHS to the point when nurses and doctors are leaving the profession in droves, partly because they no longer feel able to guarantee patient safety, is not ‘out of touch.’

If Tory ministers aren’t bothered about this now, it’s because they never were particularly bothered. Perhaps the single exception was that brief period when the government’s political survival was dependent on photo ops of ministers clapping for the NHS workers who kept people alive even at the risk of their own lives, even as the government was handed out no-bid contracts of dodgy PPE to favoured insiders.

But that was then, and now ambulance-drivers are ‘shitbags’, as Kelvin McKenzie disgracefully called them, and nurses, according to the equally detestable Isabel Oakeshott, spend too much time hanging round the wards drinking tea.

People like this are not ‘out of touch’ when they denigrate ‘lazy’ teachers who complain that excessive workload is burning them out, when polls indicate that nearly half of state school teachers plan to leave the profession within the next few years; when headteachers warned last October that nine in ten schools might run out of money within months; when footballers had to campaign for free school meals.

None of this may matter to the likes of Sunak, Johnson, Truss, and their tabloid armies, but it clearly matters to the people who are on strike, and it should matter to those of us who aren’t. Because if the concept of the common good means anything at all, it must surely mean that a country - particularly a rich country with means and resources - should be able to care for its sick, the elderly and disabled. Such a country should be able to ensure that its young people are educated by the best people it can find, and taught in the best conditions possible for both staff and pupils.

It should be able to ensure that those teachers are paid well and respected for what they do, and that their voices count for something when they complain of the burnout, overwork and demoralisation that is driving so many of them to leave the profession.

It should be able to ensure that you can see a doctor when you need to; that you don’t have to wait for hours in the street waiting for an ambulance; that your trains are safe, affordable, and work well; that pay rises at least keep up with inflation, instead of slipping backwards.

If a country can’t - or won’t ensure these things, then we have to ask ourselves what exactly is the purpose of it? What connections to its citizens have to each other and what is the point of belonging to it? What are the basic nuts and bolts that hold us together and prevent us from slipping into a kind of everyday barbarism?

What are we supposed to do together - sing God Save the King and Sweet Caroline? Shrug our shoulders and say ‘Ukraine’ or ‘there isn’t enough money?’ Do we simply allow some of the finest institutional examples of solidarity and public service to wither and die until some corporation comes along looking to make a profit out of them?

Is that it? Is that all we can do together?

Margaret Thatcher once said there is no such thing as society. She was wrong, and not only about that. Society exists, and public service is at the heart of whatever ‘ubuntu’ - humanity to others - the Tory vandals have not destroyed or undermined.

For too long we have allowed ourselves to forget this. We have allowed the worst people in our society to squeeze public sector workers to the last drop and convince us that somehow all this is for our own good and it will all work out in the end. We were taught to dismiss them as ‘lefties’ or ‘communists’ or ‘union barons’ when they raised concerns about their own working conditions and their ability to provide essential services.

And now our schools are crumbling, and nurses and doctors no longer feel able to live up to the duty of care, and people who would never normally go on strike are doing it for the first time.

We can and should blame the wanton social vandalism of the Tory Party for these lamentable social outcomes. But the fact that one of the richest countries in the world cannot provide these essential services is not the work of a single political party. It’s a collective moral failure, that has brought our society low and may bring it lower still.

For all the ‘union puppet’ accusations levelled at the Labour Party, there is little sign that the Labour leadership recognises the gravity of these multiple crises, as it tiptoes gingerly towards the next election like a child playing Grandmother’s Footsteps.

But yesterday’s strikes, and the support they are receiving, suggest that Starmer, like Sunak and his hapless team, may not be reading the room and that the tide may be changing. And in a country where ‘Money speaks for money/The Devil for his own’ we should be glad that there are more and more people willing to ‘speak for the skin and the bone’, who are discovering that there is power in a union.

So when the next Tory tries to stake out some fatuous binary between ordinary people and ‘strivers’ versus ‘skivers’’ and ‘unions’, we would do well to remember that these strikers are ordinary people just like us, that they also ‘strive’, not to make themselves rich, but to make society better.

And whatever the likes of Vine, Oakeshott, Gullis et al may say, we should keep in mind that these strikers are striking not just for themselves but for all of us, and they have already given us so much more than their accusers ever will.