Making sense of the elections by Brian Bamford

IN THIS weekend's editorial in the Financial Times the editor writes:

'An old rule of politics is that British governments tend to lose midterm by-elections. That makes the resounding defeat of Labour in the centre-left stronghold of Hartlepool by the Conservative party in power for 11 years all the more extraordidary... Extrapolating too much from a town that is the 10th most economically deprived and one of the most pro-Brexit in England is unwise. Yet coupled with the early signs that Labour lost ground to the Tories in council votes too, Thursday's elections in England have provided a boost to the government - and left the oppostion searching questions.'

One thing that is odd in this context is that while in the North Boris Johnson is so popular in places like Hartlepool in the North East and yet he is almost persona non-grata north of the border in Scotland. I know an anarcho-syndicalist retired miner from the North East who voted Tory at the last General Election because of his support for Brexit. Yet in Scotland there are reports that some Tories voted tactically for Labour to try to keep the SNP out.

The 'i' newspaper had an article by its political editor, Nigel Morris, titled 'Labour in turmoil: "shattering" results plunge party into crisis' arguing 'The poor showing reopened wounds within Labour ranks as the party as the left blamed Sir Keir's lack of policy direction for its slump in support, while leadership loyalists said the party was still suffering an overhang from Jeremy Corbyn's time in charge.'

The Labour Party last 'Super Thursday' seemed to lack a serious strategy depending on sneers about sleeze and the claims about a 'chumochracy'; this led John McDonnell to write a post-election column in the 'i' entitled 'No wonder we lost: there was a vacuum instead of a vision'.

The FT editorial I referred to earlier suggests:

'Confounding Labour's urgings that it is time for a change after a decade of Toryism, many voters perceive this as a new government. Johnson has not just disassociated himself from the Cameron and May admisitrations but the Thatcherite past ....[and] has shifted Tory politics away from its former devotion to the free market.'

The conclusion is that there has been demographic shifts in politics and not just in England, Scotland, and elsewhere in the UK. Currently the expections of the centre-left in Germany now depend on the Greens more than the Social Democrats. Some like Boris Johnson are managing to combine right-wing popularism with the offer of more public spending. In this way the Johnson government appears to offer a breach with the past. We'll just have to wait and see how this plays out in the long term.

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The ‘Tyranny’ Of Social Obligation

By Les May

‘There is no such thing as society must be one of the best known comments by Margaret Thatcher . For her critics it became shorthand for a crassly individualistic world view that prized selfishness and the trashing of social obligations. For her acolytes this crude shorthand became an excuse for the policies which have come to be known, and despised by people like me, as ‘Thatcherism’. Now it appears that this crude version is alive and prospering in the minds of those protesting against the ‘tyranny’ of being told they should wear a mask in public places and practice physical distancing.

In fact Thatcher was saying something a little more nuanced than is immediately apparent in the well known version of the quote. Her point was that the state cannot solve all our problems, we have to accept some level of personal responsibility. As a democratic socialist I believe that only the state can ensure that we all have access to decent housing, lifelong healthcare and education irrespective of our income, because the so called ‘free market’amplifies and exploits inequality.

Even people who do not share my political stance readily slip into the belief that when they are ill it is the job of the NHS to restore them to health and I doubt that the protesters are any exception. If they shake off the tyranny of having to physically distance themselves and by chance meet someone who, like them, refuses to wear a mask in public and so become infected with Covid19, which of course some of their compatriots think does not exist anyhow, and go on to require hospitalisation, it is NHS staff who will risk their lives nursing them.

Wearing a mask in public places and maintaining physical distance isn’t about what the law requires it is about each of us accepting that we have a responsibility to avoid infecting others. Perhaps these demonstrators who prize selfishness above all else and reject the notion of social obligations have never known anyone who has been infected with the virus. I know three, two of them in my family and one a nearby neighbour. None of them reported it as ‘a little flu’.

Dispiriting election redraws political map of UK

'This is an awful result', said Dave Smith 

of the Blacklist Support Group

by Brian Bamford

 
LAST SATURDAY the Financial Times leader writer began an editorial thus:
'A dispiriting election has produced a seismic outcome.  Britain's political landscape has been redrawn as it was by Tony Blair's New Labour victory in 1997, or Margaret Thatcher's win in 1979.  The Conservative landslide is a vindication of Boris Johnson's strategy of going all-out for a new Brexit deal and building his campaign around delivering it....  Yet the result, combined with the Scottish National party's surge in Scotland and nationalist gains in Northern Ireland, will strain the integrity of the UK.'

At the same time in an e-mail written immediately following the election Dave Smith secretary of the Blacklist Support Group, which has been consistently loyal to the Labour Party wrote:
'This is an awful result for the entire labour movement.

'Whatever people's thoughts on Corbyn or Brexit; the Labour manifesto commitments on workers rights, NHS & public services, renationalisation of rail & utilities, house building and the climate were supported by the majority of the population.  All these things are now at risk from a right wing Johnson government.'

Yet prior to the election in another e-mail he had wisely warned us:  'working people should never place dewy eyed trust in politicians, lawyers or union leaders to solve our problems for us; continuing to build a movement remains essential.' 

But what really happened under the Attlee Labour Government of 1945?

MILITARY BLACKLEGS & the 1945 LABOUR GOVERNMENT 

Dave Smith does well to remind us that we should not 'place dewey eyed trust in politicians' etc.   for within six days of the Labour Government taking office in 1945, it sent conscript troops into the Surrey Docks, London, to break a ten-week-old strike against a wage-cut....

Yet in a Labour amendment to the Military Training Bill, in Hansard on May 12th, 1939, this same Labour Party had declared:
'No conscript should be required to take duty in aid of the civil power in connection with a trade dispute, or to perform, in consequence of a trade dispute, any civil or industrial duty customarily performed by a civilian.'

Surely there is some inconsistency here?

THE GREAT ILLUSION 

In 1959, on the Aldermaston CND march, some trade union critics, who described themselves as 'syndicalists', not unlike Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group today, claimed at that time:  'we believe many sincere but starry-eyed Labour supporters have already half-forgotten the events during those six years in which every Socialist principle was betrayed by the politicians... [and that] It is no service to the working class for the truth to be hidden, however embarrassing and unpalatable it may be for some people.'  (How Labour Governed 1945-1951 - DIRECT ACTION PAMPHLET:  Publications Committee, SWF).

 THE LABOUR PROGRAM in 1945

Like Len McCluskey said last week about the panicky policy incontinence of the current Labour Party, the 1945 Labour Government, with a vast majority, had an economic programme based on two principles - 'a give-away programme and state control of economic functions'.

Dave Smith in his generally depressing Tweet continues to argue in this gloomy vain:

'For blacklisted construction workers, our hope for a public inquiry into the Consulting Association scandal now appears to be off the agenda for the next few years at the very least.' 

Bro. Smith was here pinning his faith on Page 48 of the Labour Manifesto:

'We will establish public inquiries into historical injustices including blacklisting and Orgreave, and ensure the second phase of the Grenfell Inquiry has the confidence of all those affected, especially the bereaved families and survivors.'*

When I last spoke personally to Dave Smith in 2015, at a Blacklist Support Group conference on  'Bullying, blacklisting and whistleblowing' at a two-day event at the University of Greenwich, I expressed my concerns and doubts about his hopes about getting a future Labour Government to solve the problem of blacklisting etc. by creating a distinguished public inquires.  Since 1979, when the alternative newspaper RAP had first exposed Cyril Smith, I long had the experience of seeking public inquires owing to the work I had put in to get something done about child abuse in Rochdale and beyond.  Sadly, by the time the inquiry will finally get to publish its report many of the alleged victims will be beyond help.

The Blacklist & the Consulting Association

Tameside Trade Union Council in Greater Manchester, has been involved with what later became known as the 'BOYS ON THE BLACKLIST' during the Daf dispute in Manchester's Piccadilly in 2003.  That was well before it had been finally confirmed that the blacklist actually existed in 2009** by subsequent events in which the Information Commissioner raided an office of the Consulting Association in Droitwitch, Cheshire.

As the Financial Times leader above indicates the political landscape of the UK  has changed substantially.  But it is not the end of history which some may claim.  The nationalist issues both in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as the FT editor suggests, may still come back to haunt the Tory Government.

Dave Smith is right in his blunt response to be 'gutted' by the outcome!  It is a slap in the face for what passes for the British left.  But we at Northern Voices have always been clear that we have historically even less faith in politicians than Dave Smith has ever had.  George Orwell told the poet Stephen Spender that he always avoided going to cocktail parties to mix with literary folk for fear it may interfere with his own critical judgement of their literary work.  

Could it be that being based and rooted in London that Dave Smith and some of the Blacklist Support Group, may well have become too close to the some of the Labour politicians down there and that it could have clouded their judgement?

In the years since the late naughties that I have known them; Dave Smith and the Blacklist Support Group, have always struck me as one of the most decent phenomena on the British left in this country bar none, aside perhaps from my own personal friends among the Boys on the Blacklist in the North of England, and I don't think that those associated with my own political persuasion among the English anarchists are a patch on them.  Other parts of the British left, especially including the British anarchists, who have presented us with the politics of a shabby little shocker.  Although I believe that Dave Smith and the Blacklist Support Group are wholly committed to fairness and common decency they will be well aware that the Labour party, when in Government, has failed to make serious in-roads towards the abolition of British blacklisting. 

Despite what Dave Smith declares about us placing our faith 'dewey eyed trust in politicians'; I fear that these honourable activists may suffer from being too trusting of people inside the Westminster bubble.      

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*  Page 48 of the Labour Manifesto:

"We will establish public inquiries into historical injustices including blacklisting and Orgreave, and ensure the second phase of the Grenfell Inquiry has the confidence of all those affected, especially the bereaved families and survivors. We will also consider a public inquiry in the case of Zane Gbangbola.

We will require judicial warrants for undercover operations and retain the Mitting Inquiry into undercover policing.

We will release all papers on the Shrewsbury 24 trials and 37 Cammell Laird shipyard workers and introduce a Public Accountability Bill".

The Blacklist Support Group are proud to have stood shoulder to shoulder on shared platforms for more than 10 years with campaigners fighting for justice for Orgreave, Grenfell, Zane Gbangbola, victims of undercover political policing, the Shrewsbury Pickets and Cammell Laird ship workers. We have demanded and fought for a public inquiry for over a decade - its is our campaigning that has led to this manifesto commitment.  We therefore whole heartedly support this pledge towards getting the truth we, and other working class miscarriages of justice, deserve.  But working people should never place dewy eyed trust in politicians, lawyers or union leaders to solve our problems for us; continuing to build a movement remains essential.  

Full manifesto available to view here: https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/

**  'During 2008/09 the Iinformation Commisioner's Office carried out an investigation into employment blacklisting in the construction industry.  As part of that investigation, the ICO seized information from a company called The Consulting Association.  Some of the information we seized amounted to a 'blacklist' of individuals who were considered to pose a risk to their employers if employed within the construction industry.'

***  
Following the blacklisting scandal the Labour Government came forward with regulations. These regulations are so weak that they will not deter blacklisting. The only recourse for someone who has been blacklisted still remains taking a case to an employment tribunal and financial loss has to be proved. UCATT has constantly argued for the regulations to be strengthened. They necessary changes are:

• Make blacklisting a criminal offence
• When a blacklist is discovered all those on it are automatically told.
• An automatic right to compensation for everyone blacklisted.
• For the regulations to be widened from the narrow confines of “trade union activities” to the wider “activities associated with trade unions”. Ensuring trade unionists can’t be blacklisted for taking unofficial industrial action, such as a ban on voluntary overtime.

Vain Expectations on British Road to Socialism?

Blackballed MP, Chris Williamson, addresses Rochdale folk 

  by Brian Bamford

IN 1951,  I had a newspaper round and I use to deliver the odd copy of the Daily Worker to one customer up Long Hill in Rochdale.  The Daily Worker attracted my curiosity as it, the Renolds News and Sunday Citizen.^[5] and a Polish paper a refugee family took were unusual compared to the News Chronicle which my Dad read mainly for its coverage of horse racing and sport.  One day on my paper round I would read of a conference in which the slogan was 'FOR the MILLIONS & AGAINST the MILLIONAIRES', and the next I would see some story about a communist program about 'The British Road to Socialism'.

Last night, I listened to Chris Williamson, the Labour MP, who has fallen foul of some senior people in the Labour Party for making light of the claims of anti-semitism within the party, and for daring to suggest that there had been too much apologising for this 'sin'.  One can sympathise with him for the treatment he has received over this and for the vicious attempts to 'no-platform' him at events like the recent Manchester Peterloo commemoration: see (North West TUC Snubs Peterloo Rally over Chris Williamson MP!)

Yet there was something very quaint about Mr. Williamson's approach last night:  In 1951, Harry Pollitt, who had been elected as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1929 wrote a Forword to the Programme titled 'The British Road to Socilism', which was adopted by the then Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).  In the Foreword Pollitt wrote:  

'This is the message of this programme. It is a call above all to the whole Labour Movement to recall its glorious traditions of struggle for the immediate interests of the working people, and to safeguard their future interests in a Socialist Britain.  But it is no less a call to the great majority of the British people to join with the Communist Party and the whole Labour Movement in the struggle to win a new future for Britain in the socialist world which history is now shaping.'

Those were the utterances of Harry Pollitt in 1951, when the country was then, as now we suspect, facing a General Election and I was about to start delivering the Daily Worker.   Allowing for the time lapse, the utterances of Chris Williamson last night were only slightly different in tone from those of Harry Pollitt almost almost 60 years ago.  His rhetoric was all too easy, suggesting we can do it; a sovereign Labour Government after Brexit could print the money and build a better Britain afresh, no trouble there he claimed.

Working people could take over failing companies to save them from the asset strippers, and establish cooperatives to manage business.  Denis Healey, when he was Chancellor, was wrong in the past to go to the IMF for money and fall into the hands of the Wall Street bankers.  'He should have listened to Tony Benn', who knew what was what!*

This is all post-facto 'What if?' stuff, if you like:  But, what if the James Callaghan government had accepted Tony Benn's 'Alternative plan B' in the 1970s would it have resulted in avoiding Thatcher, Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom revisted', Milton Freedman economics, and the consequent problems of what came to be called neo-liberalism as Chris Williamson claimed in his theatrical performance last night?  **

Tony Benn admitted his own plan would result in a 'siege economy', but he claimed the difference is that in the monetarist course 'you will have the bankers with you and the British people, the trade unions, outside the citadel storming you; with mine it will be the other way round'.^[3] ***

All this was referred to in the speech of Chris Williamson last night at Woolworth's Social Club in Castleton, Rochdale, but it was not easy to discern among the gabbling annunciations from the megaphone beneath his mouth.  Les May has criticised this presentation in the post below entitled 'Our Answer to "No Platforming".'

Despite our concerns about his performance and some the things he has to say, we are anxious to continue to hear him speak.  Unlike some senior people in the Labour Party!

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* Healey became Chancellor of the Exchequer in March 1974 after Labour returned to power as a minority government. His tenure is sometimes divided into Healey Mark I and Healey Mark II.^[21] The divide is marked by his decision, taken with Prime Minister James Callaghan, to seek an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and submit the British economy to IMF supervision. The loan was negotiated and agreed in November and December 1976, and announced in Parliament on 15 December 1976.^[22][23] Within some parts of the Labour Party the transition from Healey Mark I (which had seen a proposal for a wealth tax) to Healey Mark II (associated with government-specified wage control) was regarded as a betrayal. Healey's policy of increasing benefits for the poor meant those earning over £4,000 per year would be taxed more heavily. His first budget saw increases in food subsidies, pensions and other benefits.^[24]

 **  The Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) is the name of an economic programme proposed by Tony Benn, a dissident member of the British Labour Party, during the 1970s and 1980s.
The Secretary of State for Industry in the Labour government, Tony Benn, wrote a paper for his Department in January 1975, which he described in his diary: "It described Strategy A which is the Government of national unity, the Tory strategy of a pay policy, higher taxes all round and deflation, with Britain staying in the Common Market. Then Strategy B which is the real Labour policy of saving jobs, a vigorous micro-investment programme, import control, control of the banks and insurance companies, control of export, of capital, higher taxation of the rich, and Britain leaving the Common Market".^[1]
 
***  With Britain in economic crisis in October 1976, Benn put forward the AES in Cabinet with the partial support of Peter Shore.^[2] He claimed the two courses open to the government were the monetarist, deflationary course recommended by the Treasury and "the protectionist course which is the one I have consistently recommended for two and a half years...protectionism is a perfectly respectable course of action. It is compatible with our strategy. You withdraw behind walls and reconstruct and re-emerge".^[3] Benn further said that both courses were a "siege economy" but the difference is that in the monetarist course "you will have the bankers with you and the British people, the trade unions, outside the citadel storming you; with mine it will be the other way round".^[3] However the Cabinet rejected the AES (along with two other proposals) on 1/2 December and accepted the terms for a loan from the International Monetary Fund on 12 December.^[4]

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From Outsourcing to Insourcing!

THE GUARDIAN today quotes a report by the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) published today, shows that Stoke is far from unusual, with 77% of UK councils planning to bring services back in-house this year. And the report calculates that between 2016 and 2018, at least 220 local government contracts have been brought back into council control.

Labour ‘will ban’ outsourcing of public services to private firms

Outsourcing began under Margaret Thatcher with compulsory competitive tendering back in the 1980s and was embraced wholeheartely by New Labour. Now attitudes seem to be hardening against contracting out. “What we are seeing is a 40-year experiment in public service delivery being put under the microscope,” says Tom Sasse, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government.
The Labour party has pledged that under a Labour government all frontline services would be provided by the public sector, from railways to social care. Even the Conservative government has been forced to look again at outsourcing, renationalising probation services after outsourcing them disastrously failed. And in the NHS, the cervical cancer screening programme for England will be brought back into the health service later this year, after Capita failed to send more than 40,000 women screening invitations and reminder letters to have a smear test.

“A catalogue of failure has shown that private providers have struggled to generate profit and deliver services of the standards that the community expects,” says Paul Evans, director of NHS Support Federation.

“The rise in insourcing shows that commissioners are being forced to recognise this. Not all contracts display problems, but experience now shows that the risk is high.'
For many public sector bodies, bringing services back in-house is increasingly a pragmatic way to cut costs and improve quality. “On its own, it is not an absolute panacea, but there are significant advantages to bringing services back in-house,” says John Tizard, a former Capita executive and now a strategic adviser on public services.

According to today’s report, 78% of local authorities believe insourcing gives them more flexibility, two-thirds say it also saves money, and more than half say it has improved the quality of the service while simplifying how it is managed.

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Culture, Coffee and Socialism

by Les May

I HAVE voted Labour all my life.  The reason is simple. Growing up in the 1940s and 50s I benefited directly from two things the 1945 Labour Government put in place; the NHS and the 1949 National Assistance Act which kept our family out of poverty when my father was hospitalised more or less permanently. It was policies like these and not headline grabbing policies like Public Ownership which had the biggest impact on peoples lives. What a Labour government had to do in 1945 was obvious and it did it.

But in my lifetime the Tories have re-invented themselves at least three times. The rejection of Churchill in the 1945 election was so complete that they had to accept and work with the changes Labour had made. The result was Butskellism, perhaps more properly called ‘The Post War Consensus’ (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus ).

Then we had hard nosed Thatcherism which amongst other things saw unemployment as a useful policy lever and was a mix of economic and social conservatism. Remember her enthusiasm for Clause 28

(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 .

The result was that the Tories became ‘The Nasty Party’. By sleight of hand David Cameron tried to shake off this tag with a mix of social liberalism, same sex marriage, and economic conservatism in the form of austerity and attacks on the poorest groups in society.

Labour’s attempt at re-invention gave us the Blair years. Now the search is on for how to re-invent Labour yet again. But things are more complicated now. There are those of us who see the Labour project as one of promoting economic and social justice, and there are those, I’m not one of them, who see being ‘of the Left’ as fighting, usual vicarious, battles against racism, sexism, homophobia, (add in your favourite -isms or -phobias here). If, like many newspaper columnists, you are of the latter persuasion remember how Cameron managed to hide the vicious policies of George Osborn behind a veneer of social liberalism.

I’ve told you where I stand but if you want to feel part of shaping Labour’s ‘soul’ and live in the area, you might like to visit ‘Seriously Red’, at Bury’s Socialist Cafe ‘Ground Up’. It’s hosted by Bury Momentum with Bury South Socialists, 7-9pm every third Tuesday of the month and promises debates, campaigns, culture and coffee.

You’ll find Ground Up at 8 Market Street, Bury, just opposite the Peel Monument.

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Protesting the Chop & Sheffield's Trees

Labour Council outsources tree felling to Amey / Ferrovial*

The outsource companies currently contracted to Sheffield City Council include:

• Amey manage the city's 'Streets Ahead' project including management of highways.
• Kier Sheffield maintains and repairs the social housing stock.**
• Veolia manages household waste disposal.
• Capita provides HR, payroll and IT services for council employees. ***

*       Amey, is a subsidiary of the massive Spanish company grupo Ferrovial
**     Kier is one of the seven companies that in 2015 admitted to blacklisting building workers.
***  Capita has been compared to Carillion, and its share price has plunged from around £11 to £2 in just two years and it dropped out of the FTSE 100 last March.

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OVER 5,000 trees have been cut down in Sheffield since 2012, as part the city council's £2bn Streets Ahead project with the excuse of improving roads and footpaths in the city.

The council, which is planting sapling trees after removing existing mature ones, insists the trees earmarked for felling are either 'dangerous, dead, diseased, dying, damaging or discriminatory'.

Yet it seems many of the trees condemned by the council as 'damaging' or 'discriminatory' are healthy specimens which campaigners say should be saved.  They say that alterations should be made to surrounding pavements and roads instead.

Today an event 'Get Off Our Tree!' is being held at Sheffield City Hall.  Also playing are local artists The Everly Pregnant Brothers, lead singer of Reverend and the Makers, Jon McClure, and former Pulp drummer Nick Banks and the Compare is Jason Cocker , who was interviewed on Radio Four's 'Today' program.

These are just some of Sheffield’s tree protesters, members of local groups coordinated by the Sheffield Tree Action Groups (Stag), which are claiming that this is another example of local government gone wrong.  Stag have made it their mission to protect the trees from council-backed felling crews in what is often hailed, with more than a pinch of Yorkshire hyperbole, as Europe’s greenest city.

Labour Council's PFI Contract

The fellings are part of a 25-year, £2.2bn Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract.  Signed in 2012 between the Labour-led council and a private company, Amey, the Streets Ahead programme is intended to upgrade 'the condition of our city’s roads, pavements, streetlights, bridges …'  –  no small feat in a place that was known as 'pothole city'.

The contract has serious implications for the city’s 36,000 roadside trees, which have in effect been privatised until the late 2030s. Amey, a subsidiary of the massive Spanish company Ferrovial, has so far removed around 5,350, including oaks, elms and limes. Alison Teal, a local Green party councillor, believes she knows why many were chosen:  'I can only assume that because it’s a 25-year contract, they’re felling mature trees because they are more expensive. They cause pavement and road disruption and a hell of a lot of leaves fall off them.'

Loose and wonky kerbstones and cracked pavements owing to tree roots are among the reasons given for the fellings.  But there is a belief among the Sheffield protesters that the 14 alternatives priced into Amey’s contract – from flexible paving to root pruning and pollarding – are being underused.

The council says it only resorts to removing trees if they are 'dangerous, dying, diseased, dead, damaging or discriminatory' (meaning that they damage pavements and potentially obstruct disabled residents).  Of the eight mature limes destroyed on Rustlings Road, however, the council’s own independent tree panel found that seven were in good condition with a good life expectancy.

The heavy redaction of the contract between Amey and Sheffield council doesn’t help clarify things.  With many details kept from the public in the name of 'commercial confidentiality', there is no way of verifying, for instance, the council’s warnings of “catastrophic financial consequences” if the fellings are delayed.  The gaps leave room for conjecture about why the PFI deal isn’t being called off, or its terms renegotiated.  Protesters think they have found legal reasons that would allow the council to annul the contract – a recent petition focuses on Amey’s alleged failure to disclose a 2011 health and safety conviction following the death of an employee.  A council spokesperson said it was aware of the death before the contract was awarded, but it failed to provide written evidence of that knowledge in response to Freedom of Information requests made by campaigners.

 Thatcherite Law Used by Labour Council

Many cite “the battle for Rustlings Road” as a turning point – following a pre-dawn raid and scenes that the former local MP Nick Clegg described as “something you’d expect in Putin’s Russia”, pensioners were arrested for peacefully protesting. Eight trees were chopped down.
It has been a long and gnarly road to today’s situation, with frustrations running high.  In 2016, arrests of peaceful protesters started under the 1992 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, which criminalises anyone who persistently stops someone from carrying out lawful work – in this case, tree surgeons contracted by Amey.

'We have the harsh irony of Thatcherite anti-union law being used by a Labour council against its own citizens,' says Ian Rotherham, professor of environmental geography at Sheffield Hallam university.  'Only about 30 years on from Orgreave, our local councillors seem to not see the bitter twist in all this.'

We have the harsh irony of Thatcherite anti-union law being used by a Labour council against its own citizens.

None of those arrested have ever been prosecuted, however, with the Crown Prosecution Service saying there was insufficient evidence.  Then, last summer, the council brought an injunction against nine named protesters – including the Greens Alison Teal, and Brook, as well as 'persons unknown'.   It prohibits protesters from entering safety zones around condemned trees, or encouraging others to do so, either on social media or in person.

Labour's 'One Party State' !

In Ms. Teal’s opinion of local democracy is low – and no wonder, after a year in which the council on which she sits took her to court for breaking the injunction, only for the case to be thrown out.  'This is a one-party state,' she says. 'Sheffield has 84 councillors; 56 are Labour.  They can’t be outvoted.'  She mentions Nasima Akther, a Labour councillor who defied the whip to abstain on a vote about the fellings.  'For her courage she was suspended from the party.  It’s bullying and she subsequently resigned.'

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CARILLION Mess-up

by Martin Gilbert

A partial answer to avoid repeating the Carillion mess-up is a return to Direct Works – where services like school meals, hospital maintenance and road mending were controlled directly by Local Authorities.  There was local trades union input ensuring service conditions and some over-sight of quality control. Contracting out to local business occurred where the reputations of such firms elicited trust.  Large capital investments for big projects were done in conjunction with neighbouring Authorities.  Thatcherism killed Direct Works.

There was no big conspiracy, just some complimentary events benefiting thre Tories. 1984’s failed miners’ strike gave them further opportunities for union-bashing. It was accompanied by decreasing the power of Local Authorities. Rate support grants had been under attack - the money given back to Town Halls by central government from centralised taxations.

Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s critics accuse him of trying to bring back Nationalisation (as if it was a revolutionary panacea).  Major industries were Nationalised post-1945.  They were directed by retired senior army officers, skilled at “man-management”.  Women were expected to give up the range of jobs they had done in the war while their men were at the front. Nationalisation was a long way from any kind of community decision making and workers control.

2018 sees us capable of widespread, quick decision-making, we can have selective use of the internet.  Re-introducing Direct Works would help to reverse the gross over-centralisation of successive Governments. It would contribute to preventing another Carillion-type mess-up, whatever form it takes.

martin gilbert, 22.1. ‘18

martin gilbert, 22.1. ‘18

Report warns of 'Wages Theft' in Tory Britain!

During the eleven years that Margaret Thatcher served as the British Prime Minister of a Conservative government (1979-1990), many people bought into the idea that trade unions were an irrelevance and an anachronism in a modern society. Thatcher told voters that if they bought their council house and a few shares in ‘British Gas’, they could become middle-class and a capitalist overnight. She called it “popular capitalism.”

Since Thatcher’s ‘conservative revolution’, we have seen trade union membership fall from 13m in the late 1970s to around 6m today. Part-time and temporary work, self-employment (up by a quarter), and zero hours contracts, have flourished, and today account for 43% of the UK workforce. Pay in these areas also lags behind the pay of those in full-time occupations. Changes in employment law have also made it more difficult for workers to take industrial action and have eroded the bargaining power of labour. Despite the fact that the unemployment rate is said to be at its lowest since 1975, real incomes are falling and inequality is growing.   

 Although the Bank of England estimates that the wage premium associated with trade union membership, adds between 10 to 15% to pay, most people in Britain today, are likely to be paid by the task or the hour and will not be members of a trade union.  

The decline of trade unions in the UK over the last 30 years has coincided with a giant leap in inequality. A recent United Nations report revealed that the UK has some of the highest levels of hunger and deprivation among the world’s richest nations. UNICEF have stated that one in three children in this country, suffer ‘multi-dimensional poverty’ in housing, social activities, and food. It shouldn’t require a doctorate in economics, to realise that if workers don’t or can’t exercise their industrial clout to squeeze employers, then there is little incentive for employers to improve pay and conditions. It is generally recognised even by the IMF that union members tend to be better paid and that collective bargaining yields better results for workers.

A recent report ‘Unpaid Britain’, published by Middlesex University Business School, spells out our prevalent ‘wages theft’ has become within many sectors of the British economy, which tend to be non-unionised. The research based on data from ‘employment tribunals’, the ‘insolvency service’, the ‘Labour Force Survey’, ‘ACAS’ and the ‘CAB’,  was  used to estimate the scale of deliberately unpaid work in Britain today. The report found that UK workers were cheated out of at least £1.5bn a year in holiday pay, (there is no penalty on an employer for failing to pay) in spite of being entitled to 28 days holiday a year under the ‘European Working Time Directive’ (which they’re often unaware of) for full-time workers, or the equivalent of 12.o7% of average pay, for those who work variable hours. One-in-12 doesn’t get a pay slip as required by law and £1.2bn in wages is unpaid annually.

The Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), say they have experienced a doubling of cases of wages theft between 2014 and 2017, with about 9,000 workers asking for help to recover unpaid wages and 75,000, having problems with pay and entitlements in the last year. The report says that many employers simply pockets workers wages because they can do so with impunity, due to a lack of enforcement by the authorities, or because workers who undertake variable hours, often do not get a pay slip or find it difficult, to keep track of the hours worked to prove what they are owed. Researchers found that other employers known as ‘phoenix businesses’, are going into administration owing debts and then reappearing shortly after, using a different name.

The report says that the cost incurred by workers to go to an Employment Tribunal, often prevents workers from seeking to recover unpaid wages. Since Employment Tribunal fees were introduced by Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat minister in the Cameron coalition government in 2013, individual workers taking employers to a tribunal has fallen by 67%.  Clearly, having rights and being able to exercise them are two completely different things in Britain.

The neo-liberal capitalist model of business, as espoused by Thatcher and Regan in the late 1970s, sought to smash the trade unions and the collective bargaining power of labour, so as to turn British workers into doormats for billionaires, and to introduce ‘flexible working’ like zero hour contracts and the ‘gig’ economy. Likewise, Thatcher’s anti-union laws were also used to place legal hurdles in the way of workers in order to make it more difficult for them to take industrial action, in order to get better pay and conditions from their employers.

In his book ‘POSTCAPITALISM’, the author and journalist, Paul Mason, says that many people fail to grasp the true meaning behind ‘austerity’, believing it to be seven years of spending cuts or what occurred in Greece. He asserts that the real austerity project is about driving down wages and living standards in the west for decades, until they meet those of the middle-classes in China and India on the way up. To make his point, Mason, refers to a speech given by Tidjan Thiam, the CEO of Prudential, at the Davos Forum in 2012, who said that unions were the “enemy of young people” and that the minimum wage, was “a machine to destroy jobs”, along with workers’ rights and decent wages, which stood in the way of capitalism’s revival and had to go.
 
The recent General Election which resulted in a hung parliament and a Conservative minority government showed that many British voters are getting sick of Tory one-sided austerity and they desire a change. Rather than spend another five years in the dungeons, they want to see investment in Britain’s infrastructure, services, education, housing and decent jobs. Labour’s left-wing socialist manifesto was popular and offered many voters hope and the prospects of something better for themselves and their children. According to pollsters, nearly 13 million people voted Labour including 52% of middle-class professionals under 35 and 70% of younger people in the “DE” social category, classed as “most working class.” This is encouraging, but it seems highly unlikely, that Jeremy Corbyn, will be in Downing Street by Christmas even after securing 40 percent of the popular vote. This week, Labour lost an amendment which called on MPs to lift the cap on public sector pay of 1% which has been in place since 2010. While austerity is imposed on public sectors workers, to cap their pay, it isn’t when it comes to the pay of MPs. Two years ago (2015), MPs were given a 10% rise followed by a 1.4% deal in 2016. When you hear the phrase ‘national interest’, always ask whose interest we are talking about.