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Striking workers are telling the truth about
Britain. No wonder politicians want to silence them
Nesrine
Malik
The Tories and Labour alike believe strikes are
unpopular. But picket by picket, the divisive principles underlying British
politics are being dismantled
Mon 16 Jan
2023 06.00 GMT
More
strikes are coming, with 100,000 civil servants due to strike on 1 February.
For 18 days across February and March, 150 UK universities will be shut down by
University and College Union action. Last week, 45,000 junior doctors began
voting on strike action. They will join transport workers, nurses, ambulance
workers and a number of other public and private professionals – an objection
of strikers, to suggest a collective noun.
Their
caricatures have already been vividly painted – the “fat cat” trade union
leaders, the entitled workers, the uncaring healthcare professionals who are
taking advantage of bad times to snatch a higher paycheck; all at the expense
of small businesses and poorly patients. These are compelling portrayals. Life
is already hard, and those making it immediately and practically harder are
easier to blame than those making it abstractly so. A paramedic who refuses to
get in their ambulance is a more visible villain than a blur of ministers who
have passed policies over the years that have compelled that worker to strike.
But through
the fog of disruption and crisis made worse by industrial action, something is
emerging that is posing a potent counterargument to the anti-strike sentiment
so deeply embedded both in British political culture and legislation. Strikes
have come at a time when the old regime is dying, but another has not yet taken
its place – now is the time of monsters, as the quote goes. But it could also
be a time of breakthrough.
When it
comes to offering solutions to the growing deadlock with the nation’s workers,
we have a vacuum. The government is a mardy mess, veering between long periods
of absence and sudden bursts of pugnaciousness. Labour, on the other hand,
takes the moral high ground, but is absent on the actual ground. Starmer
rightly points out that the nurses’ strike is a “badge of shame” for the
government, but then bans frontbench Labour MPs from showing active support for
the strikes.
Both the
government’s proposed anti-strike legislation and Labour’s caution in throwing
its weight behind industrial action are based on the same belief: that strikes
are unpopular. And maybe in normal times they are. But these are not normal
times. Strikes can be made popular if politicians lack the charisma or mandate
to effectively vilify strikers, and when an economic crisis runs so deep that a
class consciousness develops. Public support for the ability to strike in most
professions has grown since June last year. Between Tory menace and Labour
caution, a large space has emerged that is up for grabs.
That space
has resulted in a strange displacement within British politics. Striking
workers and their representatives are describing, with the detail and passion
that is missing from our politicians’ addresses, the dire reality facing the
country and what a hopeful future would look like. Last week, a statement
written by the co-chair of the BMA East of England regional junior doctor
committee referred rousingly to his fellow workers in the NHS and elsewhere as
“the backbone of this country. We drive your ambulances, we sweep your roads,
we stock your shelves, we nurse you back to good health. We’re the source of
any prosperity, any trade, any security.”
And it’s
not all flourishes of rhetoric. Striking workers are also correctly identifying
the guilty parties in a way that sometimes feels almost like a hallucination,
so unaccustomed are we to hearing these arguments made in the political sphere.
As the government robotically blames the pandemic and the war in Ukraine for
almost everything, and Labour in turn blames the government, striking workers
are talking about all the contextual unmentionables – extractive private
bosses, an ideological legacy of deregulation and defunding, and a rightwing
media that essentially functions as a political propaganda arm.
Giving
evidence to the transport select committee last week, the RMT general
secretary, Mick Lynch, hit many of these notes, pointing out that even before
the railway strikes service was dire, that the deadlock is because of the
government, that the media has waged a campaign against strikers, and that, in
the face-off with workers, the Conservatives should no longer assume they are
the more popular protagonist by default.
These notes
are made even more resonant by the extent of the economic crisis. All but a
small minority are feeling the pinch, and know someone who has it harder. There
are simply too many people working in these industries or connected with
someone who does for the government line to stick. Accounts of professional
lives transformed into a kind of daily torture are all around us. In my own
extended family, one NHS worker reports such horrors that we are becoming
concerned for their mental health, and we would not only support but encourage
some strike action to protect their mind and body.
But even
with a political vacuum and more popular empathy than expected for industrial
action, the kind of solidarity that will result in a breakthrough that would
properly address pay and conditions still seems fractured. The profile of work
in this country – itself a legacy of successful union busting – is a mix of
private, public, non-unionised and zero hours, meaning there can be no central
coordination or messaging to the public.
The media
is broadly unsympathetic, placing constant pressure on popular support, and
there is little to connect broad grassroots campaigns (such as Enough is
Enough) with union leadership in the ways that could bring about a general
strike. The risk is then that the strikers’ goals become more fragmented and
inconsistent over time, and the image the government wants to portray – that of
a crisis-ridden country betrayed by its workers – grows more persuasive.
Whether
that changes depends on the momentum and connections striking workers manage to
whip up over the next few weeks, and how sustained the cost of living crisis
turns out to be. They have a shot. The irony is that both left and right are
betting heavily on patriotism and a national sense of belonging to supplement
their policy shortcomings, but have serviced them poorly with empty
sloganeering, silly symbolism and culture wars.
When there
are no real solutions on offer, that unfulfilled sense of common cause can
become welded in a furnace of frustration, and then used as a tool to hammer
politicians. For too long, British politics has successfully operated on the
principle that there is more distance between the blessed and the unfortunate
than there is proximity; that we don’t all share the same goals as immigrants,
striking workers and people who need benefits and housing, because they are
somehow responsible for their misfortune. It’s a powerful illusion. But when
there are more losers than winners, it could be an illusion that is ripe for
piercing.
Nesrine
Malik is a Guardian columnist
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