The following three articles present assessments of the mass marches against austerity in Britain on October 20, 2012. They are published, respectively, in Socialist Worker, Scottish Socialist Voice, and Counterfire.
We’ve marched together… now strike together!
by Charlie Kimber, Socialist Worker, October 27, 2012
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=29858
The 200,000 people who marched in London last Saturday, and the thousands who demonstrated on the same day in Glasgow, are proof of the potential to defeat the Tories. We face a divided, ramshackle government. We can win if we use all our strength. The question is what we do next.
First, 200,000 in London is a big march. It was as big as the demonstration in the capital in 1990 which played a decisive role in the defeat of the poll tax. And there was a very strong sense of class anger. This came out in the placards and the chants about “plebs”.
They were directed at former chief whip Andrew Mitchell, but also at the sense that the Tories are arrogant public schoolboys with a sneer on their lips. They’re not from our world, and we hate them. And this sense of class anger also came out in the bitterness towards the tax avoider Starbucks—who received special police protection paid from our taxes because they have paid no tax.
This was a demonstration heavily centred on the organised working class. There were nearly as many union banners on the London march as on the bigger demonstration of 26 March 2011. But it also drew in students, pensioners, unemployed people, disabled people, those who want action on climate change and many others.
People who are angry at the Tories want to see action. When PCS union leader Mark Serwotka, Unite leader Len McCluskey and RMT leader Bob Crow all called for some variant of a general strike, they received heavy applause.
Resounding
When McCluskey asked the crowd to vote on a general strike, the result was a resounding yes. The idea of a general strike has become part of mainstream discussion in the trade unions. That does not mean it will happen—it will require immense pressure from below.
The argument for action needs to be raised in every workplace, every union branch, every campaign meeting. The union leaders and the TUC have to feel the pressure from below.
We know from the pensions dispute last year that even if there is a big strike, many union leaders will try to stifle struggle. The magnificent strike of 30 November was followed by the shameful retreat of 19 December when several big unions signed up to the outline of a rotten deal.
So as we fight for a general strike, we also need to develop networks of activists. And the talk of coordinated action and a general strike cannot be a substitute for action in the here and now.
Some union leaders—including those who head Unison, Unite and the GMB—are suggesting that there might be big strikes next April. But it is far from guaranteed. And April is too late for too many services, too many jobs, too many people’s living standards. We cannot delay the fight for our living standards, our NHS, our children’s futures and our rights. It has to start now. So we need solidarity with every struggle, even if it is a small strike or protest.
Europe
On 14 November, millions of workers will strike across Europe as part of a continent-wide day of action. At the very least, union leaders should call protests here. The PCS national executive is due to meet soon to discuss potential plans for action in parts of the civil service before Christmas. Other groups with a live strike ballot should back any action that is called.
On 5 December, chancellor George Osborne delivers his autumn statement. We need protests and more. And on 21 Novembe,r students will march. We need a big and militant demonstration.
The Unite the Resistance conference on 17 November fits this situation perfectly. If we are to turn the talk of action into reality then we need much more pressure on the officials and much more independent initiative. The conference will be a forum for discussion, a place to spread solidarity and a chance to learn from struggle across the globe.
But crucially it will be where the fighters come together, organise and prepare to make a difference in the arguments taking place across the working class. Sign up yourself today and bring as many others along as well.
In the course of every fight we need to develop a political alternative to capitalism and to Labour. Ed Miliband was roundly booed in London on Saturday by a big section of the rally when he said Labour would ram through cuts if it were in office. We need a stronger socialist spine to the resistance and a stronger Socialist Workers Party. We ask you to join us.
With fighters in every workplace and community, it is possible to win the argument that there is an alternative and a fight to be won.
Now strike together and demand socialist independence
By Richie Venton, Scottish Socialist Party national workplace organiser, Scottish Socialist Voice, Oct 19, 2012
http://scottishsocialistvoice.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/voice405.pdf
The tens of thousands marching in Glasgow on 20 October, alongside the hundreds of thousands demonstrating in Belfast and London, are a powerful force with the potential to stop all cuts – and even topple the Twin Tories who are out to ruin the future for working class people.
But it will take more than a rally to halt the worst assault on people’s livelihoods since the 1930s. Workers, communities, claimants, pensioners, young people and students are marching together for a better future. As a next step we need to strike together. The recent TUC congress hotly debated and then agreed a coordinated one-day general strike against the Westminster assault on pay, jobs, benefits, services and workers’ rights. Fine words need to be rapidly converted into decisive deeds.
Showdown
The STUC leadership should play their part in implementing this united action, by naming the day for a showdown with the government of millionaires, where the irreplaceable role of working people in providing goods and services through their hard work would be highlighted by a combined refusal to work for that day.
Combined with rallies, such a strike day would massively boost the fighting morale of workers and communities who are at their wits end, and all too often feel isolated and fearful. And as well as confronting the Westminster Cuts Coalition with a clear message that they have no mandate to rule and ruin Scotland, with a demand for their removal, a one-day general strike would simultaneously mount pressure on the SNP government to stop passing on the Westminster cuts.
Instead of passing eye-watering Westminster cuts onto FE colleges, councils, the NHS and in yet another year of below-inflation pay settlements for Scottish public sector workers, they should be defying Westminster, leading a people’s rebellion that demands the funding to save every job, service and pay packet – alongside fighting for an independent Scotland free of cuts, unemployment and poverty.
The alternatives to fighting back in such a coordinated fashion are unthinkable. The brutality of the cuts are beginning to sink home, even though 88 per cent of them have yet to come!
The naked class war from the Tory and Lib Dem friends of the bankers and billionaires, and from the profit-driven employers themselves, has recently escalated. Ninety nine per cent of pay settlements this year were below inflation – whilst profits boom.
In his nauseating empty rhetoric about an “aspiration nation”, Cameron denounced “nonsense about health and safety” in workplaces where staff shortages, overwork, stress, illness and even deaths are rising, as employers squeeze more profits out of fewer workers – who face the fear of mass unemployment.
The Tories are slashing workplace rights, delaying legal protection until two years into the job, and then plan charges of up to £2000 for pursuing Employment Tribunal cases. They are targeting and demonising civil servants – in part because these workers have had the audacity to fight back, and even win some concessions – threatening rights ranging from eye tests to longer hours to the right to be properly represented by a union.
Osborne offered to buy off what little remains of workplace rights – including redundancy pay, time off for training and protection from unfair dismissal – by company shares; a crude, absurd attempt to make workers even more vulnerable and pliable as unprotected producers of profit for the privileged few.
People made increasingly sick by assaults on workplace rights and conditions are demonised in the drive to steal billions of pounds off benefits for the sick and disabled, with profiteers like ATOS abusing them. Millionaires in mansions are declaring that people in modest houses have too many rooms, punishing them with the Bedroom Tax, whilst utterly failing to build affordable houses for need.
Working class students are being denied courses by Old Etonians slashing education. Families face a cold cruel winter as privatised energy companies making hundreds of millions in profit jack up household bills by another 9 per cent.
Privatised train companies hammer travellers with fare increases whilst raking in £2.7billion subsidies off taxpayers last year.
Over a million young people, including 100,000 in Scotland, face the indignity, despair and abject poverty of being unemployed, whilst there is a crying need for employment in building decent affordable homes, expanding green energy, educating children, minding the sick and elderly.
These are some of the sure and certain prospects not only under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, but also if Labour was returned to office.
The trade unions, with 650,000 members in Scotland alone, have the potential to carve out an entirely different future – but only if some of their leaders wake up to the realities. Marching and striking against the Twin Tories is essential, critical to the survival of a semicivilised existence for the majority population. The unions should openly build a crusade to topple the Tories, to drive them out.
But if the only alternative the union leaders advocate is to wait for a Labour government, they may as well call marches, rallies and strikes in favour of Cameron, Osborne and Clegg’s continued rule.
Labour leaders like Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have declared they will be “ruthless” in carrying on the public sector cuts. They support the devastating pay cuts – more an Ice Age than a pay freeze.
They denounce workers driven into strike action in self defence. They kept the Tory anti-union laws for 13 years of Labour government, and privatised more public assets than even the previous Tory governments dared touch.
And Johann Lament’s outburst about Scotland being “a something for nothing society” not only shows how impervious she is to the real hardship of real people in Scotland, but is also a harsh warning of the assault on benefits, services, the social wage, and the entire notion of social provision to expect from a future Labour government – whether at Westminster or Holyrood.
A far cry from the aims of labour movement pioneers, or even today’s trade unions.
Workers need look no further than Glasgow Labour council to glimpse what Labour rule means. Instead of standing up for funds off Edinburgh and London to boost the city’s services and workers’ jobs, the Labour council is hacking away at hundreds more jobs on top of the thousands they already slashed – and had to be fiercely fought to even permit the STUC march the right to assemble in the historic George Square!
Continued trade union funding of Labour whilst waiting for a Labour government is like voluntarily paying a standing order to an incurable arsonist whilst handing over the keys to your house.
Tax the rich
Workers and young people need an entirely different Scotland to that on offer from the Tories, Lib Dems, Labour – or even the SNP.
- A Scotland liberated from the Westminster dictatorship of the rich – whatever party sticker the Prime Minister might wear. A Scotland that taxes the obscenely rich minority and big business to fund wellpaid jobs for all the unemployed and all school leavers.
- A Scotland with a £9 national minimum wage; equal pay for women; an immediate £50 rise for pensions and benefits; a living grant for all students at 16; investment in housing, health, education, public transport and local services.
- A Scotland where the government has the powers and the political will to take the banks, big industry, energy, landed estates, construction, transport and all services into democratic public ownership. In a phrase – an independent socialist Scotland.
Those marching on 20 October – and the mass organisations that are members of – should join the SSP in fighting for the construction of a mass socialist alternative to all the parties and governments of cuts, poverty, unemployment and exploitation.
Driving out the hated Tories is imperative. But seeking to swap them with a capitalist Labour government is a different route to the same destination. Continued Westminster dictatorship for and by the rich, regardless of which major party holds office, is a guarantee of decades of assaults on the working class.
The quickest, by far most realistic route out of this misery for millions is self-rule, independence, the powers to radically change the system and therefore our futures. But swapping flags and emblems on its own will do nothing to create ‘a future that works’ for the working class. Those marching on the 20th need to carve out a socialist future for a independent Scotland, free not just of the Union Jack and Westminster’s dictatorship of the rich, but also free of profiteering rule by Scottish and multinational capitalism. In a phrase – an independent socialist Scotland. Join the SSP as a modest step in that direction.
Why was the TUC demonstration a failure?
By Andreas Bieler, published on Counterfire, October 30, 2012
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/october-20-failure/
The TUC demonstration on October 20 illustrated the strength of public opposition to austerity and sent a strong message to politicians. Or did it? Andreas Bieler, Professor of Political Economy, argues that the demonstration was largely a failure, rooted in the trade unions’ timid approach to the destruction of Britain’s welfare state. “The union leadership has let its members, working people and the wider public down.”
According to the Trades Union Congress, more than 150,000 people participated in the march against austerity and ‘For a Future that Works’ in London on Saturday, 20 October. Affiliated unions up and down the country had mobilised. Members from Unison, the national teachers union NASUWT, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU), the University and College Union (UCU) and others were clearly visible.
The march was colourful, the mood buoyant, the chanting intensive. Protesters were furious about the cuts to education, the privatisation of the NHS, and large-scale restructuring in the public sector. They signalled their willingness to resist. There was a feeling of empowerment, of a possibility to go beyond the current ConDem government. And yet – looking at developments over the last 18 months – is such an optimistic assessment warranted?
This was not the first time that the TUC had called for a march against austerity. Already on 26 March 2011, people had gathered in London to register their opposition to welfare cuts. At that time, there were around 250,000 people – clearly more than last Saturday – and there was a genuine sense of a demonstration by society at large. Families with their children, members of the public not necessarily closely involved with the labour movement, considered it important to be present.
This time around, the core of the demonstrators was made up of trade union activists. Yes, unions were successful at mobilising. But they mainly reached their own activists – people who would anyway support their agenda and come out if called upon. The wider population was hardly involved.
This assessment is even more damning when compared with the public sector strike on 30 November 2011, when 30 trade unions successfully co-ordinated strike action across the country, and many demonstrations took place across the country. Compared to these developments last year, the assessment of the demonstration on 20 October has to be much more pessimistic. The smaller numbers on the march, which are not substantially improved by the 5,000 people marching in Glasgow and the 1,000 people on the streets in Belfast, clearly indicate that the impetus of 30 November 2011 has evaporated. Why has this happened?
The public sector strike and the related demonstration on 30 November were a clear success. But trade unions failed to see it as a starting point for a more sustained strategy against austerity. Instead of setting a further date for co-ordinated strike action, and instead of planning further marches against austerity linked to 30 November, several of the health, civil service and teaching unions reached an agreement with government in December 2011. Others – such as the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) – walked out of negotiations and continued to threaten strike action. The trade union front was split. Some still talked about joint strike action, but this came to nothing. A clear opportunity had been wasted by a short-sighted focus on minor gains in the immediate future. Unsurprisingly, what followed was demobilisation of union members and wider society up and down the country.
My own trade union, the University of College Union (UCU), provides an excellent example of how this demobilisation was carried out. As a result of the improved government offer on pensions to public sector unions, the University pension fund also had to demonstrate its willingness to improve the pension scheme for Higher Education (HE). At a special HE sector conference in London in January 2012, a majority of delegates supported the motion proposed by UCU leadership to suspend action and instead enter discussions.
The agreement to suspend action followed a proposal from employers: yet only few concessions had been made, and employers had not even talked about negotiations. Nonetheless, the UCU leadership – having always been reluctant to coordinate strike action – felt that suspending action was the way forward. The University pension fund would not be a public sector pension scheme and therefore joint strike action would put no pressure on employers in HE, it was argued. Rather than seeing the struggle against pension cuts as a more general struggle for proper pensions for all, as a more general struggle against austerity, the dominant view was always to evaluate pension cuts in a narrow, HE-specific way.
The decision to suspend industrial action was confirmed at another HE sector conference in September 2012. The national leadership had circulated a motion to members, which argued that – if industrial action was chosen – only all-out strike could be a successful. Instead of thinking in imaginative ways about how action could focus on negative publicity for employers – potentially highly effective at a moment when Universities feel under particular public scrutiny due to the first cohort of students paying £9,000 tuition fees arriving on campuses – a strategy going back to the 1970s was put forward.
It is doubtful that the national leadership ever wanted that motion to succeed; more likely it wanted to scare off members. And in that it succeeded: a majority of delegates endorsed suspension. But while successful on the day, what the strategy also implied was a complete demobilisation of members more generally.
Shortly after the decision to suspend action over pensions, UCU held a ballot on industrial action over pay. While a majority of members endorsed action short of strike, a majority also rejected any further strike action. The ballot was lost. Overall, at the moment of the most severe attack on Higher and Further Education, the union is at its weakest. The signal to employers is clear: you can impose whatever cuts to pensions and pay you want, UCU will not mobilise for action.
It is this kind of strategy – an unwillingness to see the wider picture of restructuring and act accordingly together with other trade unions – which has put the labour movement on the back foot and is ultimately responsible for the disappointing turnout on 20 October. At the TUC congress in September 2012, there were yet again calls for a general strike. Interviewed on 20 October, however, the former general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, indicated that this had been yet again empty talk, saying ‘he did not think a general strike by unions was likely, [and] adding: “Some of my colleagues may talk about that. I don’t hear too many people calling for a general strike”.’
The union leadership has let its members, working people and the wider public down. All that is on offer now is the hope for a return to power by New Labour at the next elections. Considering how many of the current ConDem restructuring measures had actually been initiated by New Labour in the first place, this is not a very encouraging prospect.
In sum, the trade union centred approach on resisting austerity has failed. October 20 has demonstrated this. As one of the participants pointed out, the march was mainly a trade union ritual, an effort to be seen to be doing something. It was not part of a wider strategy of resistance against austerity.
What potential ways forward can be identified? In my view, mobilisation has to start again from below with trade union activists attempting to forge broader alliances through concrete campaigns with other social movements. One example in this area is the current local campaign in Broxtowe, an area in Nottingham, to save the NHS. Another example is the European-wide campaign for the right to water and against the privatisation of water provision, in which the European Federation of Public Service Unions co-operates closely with other social movements across Europe.
These broader campaigns, which have a focus on issues beyond the workplace, may provide the impetus for a new way forward. The alternative would be an exclusive emphasis by trade unions on how best to service the interests of their individual members. That would entail renouncing a role for trade unions in wider societal debates, and yet further irrelevance of organised labour.
Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Nottingham. His most recent book, Global Restructuring, Labour and the Challenges for Transnational Solidarity, was published by Routledge. His website is http://andreasbieler.net.
