Leaving aside the not entirely
irrelevant fact that Rishi Sunak has trouble
with his arithmetic and a tendency to invent whichever numbers suit his
argument at the time (he is just following the well-known tradition that 89.6%
of all politicians’ statistics are, like this one, entirely made up), his claim
that it would cost every household £1000 “to meet the pay demands of the
union bosses” repeats the rhetoric which the government uses repeatedly,
which seeks to pretend that this is all about ‘union barons’ rather than union
members, aka ‘workers’. It’s a deliberate attempt to distance the working
people involved from their ‘union bosses’ (who, in reality, are actually the servants
of the workers, not their bosses – their actual bosses are the tight-fisted employers),
but it’s a trick which works, not least because the BBC and press follow the
line of talking about this as a dispute between ‘unions’ and employers rather
than between workers and employers. It also, of course, draws a line between
those ‘hard-working people’ who are disadvantaged by strikes, and those ‘evil’
trade union barons who seek only to ‘disrupt’. One of the reasons why it’s been
so effective for decades is that ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ are so pathetically
afraid of the media that they are unwilling to call out this trick for the
sleight of hand which it is, and unwilling to support working people seeking to
maintain and improve their standard of living.
Any industrial dispute is, ultimately,
about power, or rather the balance of power enjoyed by employers on the one
hand and employees on the other. And successive governments – of both parties –
have consistently tried to shift that balance away from workers whilst strengthening
the hand of employers. That is what all the anti-trade union and anti-strike
legislation has always been about, whether it comes from Thatcher or her predecessors
– never forget Barbara Castle and her ‘In Place of Strife’ Bill. The way that
UK society has become more unequal, with those at the top hoarding ever greater
amounts of wealth, whilst those at the bottom struggle, isn’t an accident, and
wasn’t inevitable. It is a direct result of that shift in the balance of
power. Austerity for the many and obscene wealth for the few has been inherent
in the Labour-Tory philosophy for decades.
There are signs that at least
some of the public are beginning to see the light, particularly in relation to
workers in the NHS. The hypocrisy of giving them a round of applause once a
week during the worst of the pandemic and grinding down their standard of
living now is difficult for Sunak to conceal; of all the battles he could have
picked, this looks like the most unwise of all, and underlines how far his
lifestyle is from that of most of those he seeks to rule. Responding to pay
claims by attempting to further restrict the power of working people by banning
strikes or trying to impose minimum service levels which must be maintained
rather than seeking a negotiated settlement is an attempt to divide and rule
which might play well with Telegraph readers, but appears to be having the reverse
effect on wider public opinion. And it doesn’t help his case that he showed –
as he regularly boasts – during the pandemic (to say nothing of the response to
the war in Ukraine) that availability of money isn’t a problem for the
government; how money is used is ultimately a political question, not a
financial one.
Despite all of that, there is
actually a good case to be made for seeking to prevent strikes in certain
essential services; but to do so in a fair and just society requires a quid pro
quo, and that quid pro quo can only be an absolute cast-iron guarantee to protect
the living standards, in absolute as well as relative terms, of those working
in those services. Telling those employees that they have no choice; they must
accept a decrease in their standard of living and they cannot act collectively
in an attempt to maintain that standard is a recipe for social division rather
than harmony. It’s also counter-productive in the short to medium term – with the
economy close to full employment, lower paid people in the public services can,
and some probably will, vote with their feet. Restricting immigration to please the racists and zenophobes amongst their supporters merely compounds the problem. But that must be as obvious to Sunak
as it is to others, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that that is the
outcome he seeks. If someone wanted to destroy public services, including the
NHS, and replace them with services run for profit, what would they do
differently to Sunak?
Despite not being in
government, the Labour Party is currently in a position of unprecedented power
for an opposition party. With the increasing certainty that they will be
forming the government in less than two years’ time, setting out clearly that
they would reverse some policies would make it much harder for those charged
with implementing them to actually do so. Perhaps the most obvious example is
the new coal mine in Cumbria. If investors, even those as far away as the Caymans
looking to avoid tax on their profits, felt a high degree of certainty that the
project was going to be cancelled in two years, would they really still invest?
Even in the public sector, why rush to make things happen now when you know
that they’ll only be reversed in a matter of months? Labour’s unwillingness to
use that power is astounding – and more than a little worrying for those of us
who want to see significant change rather then mere tinkering.
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