Stand and deliver?

At the end of this week, postal workers across the UK will probably be on strike, and I will certainly be supporting them. The reasons for the strike, as I understand them, are that postal workers have had their wages frozen for the past two years, are being pressured by Royal Mail to work harder for less and are having their job security and conditions increasingly buggered about with in the name of ‘modernisation’.

As happened during last summer’s industrial action by London Underground staff, workers who chose to strike will be pilloried by the Government and the press. We’ve already seen an absurd amount of pearl-clutching over the strike’s potential to disrupt deliveries of Christmas post when, for the sake of goodness, it is only mid-October. As Victoria Coren points out: We hate it when the shops put decorations up in October, yet, somehow, suddenly, now is exactly the right time to start thinking about posting a Nintendo DS to cousin Johnny and complaining that those selfish bastard postmen won’t jam it through the letter box in time.

Ironically enough, the complaints over postal disruption serve the same purpose as the strike itself: to highlight the importance of a well-maintained and regular postal service, not one so underfunded and undermined as Royal Mail currently is. Those most reliant on a functioning post for, say, medical and financial information tend to be those without access to or fluency in the technology which has increasingly superceded it. This demographic – the poor, the elderly – have most to lose from Royal Mail’s impending push into the jaws of privatisation where quality of service will be sacrificed to cost-cutting and standards will fall on a permanent and irrevocable basis, rather than the disruptive few days which the strike will cost.

If you’re interested in the background to the strike, please read this excellent piece by a postal worker who explains it better than I can.

I don’t like linking to the Spectator, but I’m not sure where else this story is being publicised. The oil multinational Trafigura, which has an atrocious record on human rights and the environment, has instructed its solicitors to seek an injunction banning the Guardian from reporting on questions asked in Parliament regarding Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast.

That is: the British press are being prevented from reporting Parliamentary proceedings. And given the nonappearance of this story in any major news outlet, they appear to also be prevented from reporting that they are being prevented from reporting. This is sinister Kafka-esque fuckery and an awful precedent to be set. Please read the links and keep an eye on this.

Covert racists in overt racism shocka.

Link to the News of the World going useful-idiot on the BNP.

Working poverty: beyond the breadline

As the recession continues to bite, commentators continue to scrap over which of us bears the most impressive teeth marks: part-time and temporary female workers, those stuck in Britain’s post-industrial wastelands, or the Eighties-redux ‘lost generation’? The media’s preoccupation with the recession’s impact on unemployment, rather than the wage cuts, increased workloads and greater insecurity heaped upon those still in work, has been reflected in the response of both main parties. Labour in particular have ramped up their championing of paid work as panacea, chivvying the jobless into employment in an increasingly bloody-minded fashion with no apparent concern for what awaits us there. This Stakhanovite drum-beating is at odds with the reality of both poverty and work in modern Britain.

Under Labour, the National Minimum Wage has had a positive effect on the gender pay gap and, together with Working Tax Credits, has significantly raised the incomes of millions of working households. However, the problems of working poverty persist and are only increasing under current conditions. A trawl through IPPR research shows that almost six in ten poor UK households have someone at work, more than ten percent up on a decade ago. In 2006, more than one-fifth of all UK workers were paid £6.67 an hour, equivalent to 60 per cent of full-time median earnings. Handwringing over increased unemployment obscures that section of the population who cannot sufficiently stretch their wages to cover their cost of living, and who endure conditions which can be as stressful and soul-destroying as the full-time search for a job. The modern worker is subject not merely to financial hardship but also to insecurity, long hours, low pay, exploitation and sexual and racial harassment. The TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment reports that over two million people endure “intolerably poor” working lives. As UK unions have been systematically defanged, so protection from increasingly unscrupulous employment practices has been undermined or disregarded.

In addition, any party which aims at the emancipation of labour must recognise that material security, and the space and energy it grants us, is a cornerstone of creative and intellectual fulfillment. An insidious effect of working poverty, and the relentless, low-level grinding routine which accompanies it, is its theft of mental as well as physical resources. This article, for instance, was researched and written in snatches during breaks in my 40-hour working week. I earn just enough each month to cover my rent and my bank loan repayment, and doing so leaves me exhausted, with little capacity or inclination for leisurely or creative pursuits. Those without my relative advantages – no credit cards, no childcare fees, no vehicle to run, no mortgage – are being squeezed far harder.

Concentrating on driving us into work at any cost, Labour ignores that work is not a guaranteed escape from poverty. There has been little debate on what would constitute a fair wage, or what combination of regulation and support should be available to workers and employers. In politics and media, the issues of low pay, bad conditions, and the many inadequacies of Tax Credits and other attempts to tinker with the basic injustice of wages which fail to keep pace with the cost of living, are overshadowed by issues surrounding the jobless or those in long-term receipt of benefits. While the latter group are sensationalised and demonised, the working poor are almost entirely absent from the arena of debate, and too busy or exhausted to shoulder our way into the spotlight.

This is a situation in which resentment is effortlessly bred, and in which it is easy to lose sight of what unites us. The Labour Party was founded on a desire to prioritise the needs and interests of workers, and, in today’s neo-Victorian socio-economic landscape, these ideals are once again glaringly relevant. Labour must accept that a job is currently not enough to secure a reasonable standard of living, nor is it a safeguard against exploitation, stress and insecurity. Government policies on wages, taxes, credits and benefits must acknowledge the existence of working poverty, identify the problems inherent in employment alongside those of unemployment, and devote a similar amount of resources to tackling them. When the working poor are able to live rather than existing, Labour will have succeeded not only in regaining the support of a core demographic, but also in making employment an appealing prospect in itself rather than a dead-end into which it is obliged to force us under threat of destitution.

Cunning linguists and the trouble with search terms.

My feelings upon discovering that several readers have reached this blog by searching for the terms ‘unusual cunts’, ‘hornycunts’ [sic] and ’scrape our cunts’ could not be more mixed. Those searching ‘Corus cunts’ were a marginally more pleasant surprise.

I’m sorry to disappoint you with the almost total lack of salivating vaginas here, apart from, occasionally, my own. May I also take this opportunity to remind you that anarcho-syndicalism is far more satisfying in the long term than the twenty-first century’s equivalent of looking up rude words in the dictionary? Oh, you guys.

*awaits appearance of readers in search of ’salivating vaginas’*

The Blind Commissioner: twenty-five years of police, press and popular protest

The coverage of April’s G20 protests has been marked by an unprecedented level of public acknowledgement of unprovoked police violence, not only towards the uninvolved Ian Tomlinson but also towards peaceful protestors at the Bishopsgate climate camp. Press reports and online discussion forums have been awash with buzzwords like ‘kettling’, as well as displaying outrage, shock or sheer bafflement at the death at police hands of an unarmed and unthreatening individual. An exacerbating factor in this indigation has been the initial media coverage, which painted those present as violent anarchists and repeated false police claims that their efforts to help Tomlinson had been hampered by missile-throwing protestors. For many, the death of Tomlinson has involved a shattering of faith in police ability to protect citizens and maintain order, and in the media’s readiness to report their conduct objectively.

But police brutality during public disturbances is nothing new, and neither is the tendency of mainstream media outlets to repeat uncritically police claims of provocation or antagonism by demonstrators. Tales of disproportionate and unprovoked violence against participants have circulated around every major industrial, environmentalist, economic and anti-capitalist demonstration of the past thirty years. Such claims, even when backed by eyewitness accounts and amateur recorded footage, have struggled to be heard over media and government insistence on eulogising police conduct, and it is this that is perhaps the most novel aspect of coverage of the G20 protests.

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, an event which saw an extraordinary and now largely-forgotten level of government-sanctioned violence by police against a large section of the populace. The material and emotional investment in the strike by miners and their supporters led to highly-charged confrontations with police on picket lines up and down the country. The use against strikers of riot shields, truncheons and police horses and dogs became commonplace; restrictions were placed on freedom of movement as miners travelling to solidarity pickets were stopped en route and turned back or arrested. The mass picket of Orgreave coking plant in June 1984 saw, for the first time in Britain, the use of Police Support Units carrying not the normal full length protective shield used to guard against missiles, but short shields that could be used aggressively in conjunction with batons. These units acted as ’snatch squads’, following charges of the crowd by mounted police and beating or arresting individuals – a tactic developed for use in riots by colonial police forces in Hong Kong.

Press and television coverage of such clashes was almost uniformly hostile to the strikers. When broadcasting footage of Orgreave, the BBC, incredibly, transposed the sequence of events, making it appear that police cavalry charges had been a defensive response to antagonism by stone-throwing pickets rather than an act of aggression. Only in 1991 did the BBC issue an apology for this, claiming that its action footage had been ‘inadvertently reversed’.

The tactics used in the Miners’ Strike were also in evidence during the mass protests in 1990 at the imposition of the Poll Tax. On 31 March a march and rally involving 200,000 people degenerated into some of the worst rioting seen in central London as a result of police ineptitude and overreaction. Following the rally, riot police attempted to clear Whitehall of marchers, despite both their retreat and advance being blocked by further lines of police. As scuffles broke out and members of the public became caught up with demonstrators, mounted police charged protestors and riot vans were driven into the crowd. Nearly 5,000 people, mostly civilians, were injured. Media coverage of the protest ignored the extent of police aggression and instead followed police and government leads in blaming the violence on anarchist elements – a claim disproved the following year by a police inquiry. At the trials of arrested demonstrators, police video itself was influential in acquitting many defendants, suggesting that police had fabricated or inflated charges and confirming doubts about policing styles developed during the 1980s.

As the ideology and operation of protest adapted to a changed political arena after the end of the Cold War, policing evolved towards a policy of containment and suppression. The ‘kettling’ technique used outside the Bank of England at G20 was used against participants in London anti-capitalist demonstrations as early as 1999. At May Day protests in 2001, police corralled 3,000 people, including uninvolved bystanders, in Oxford Circus for 8 hours. Those inside the cordon were denied access to food, water, medicine and toilet facilities and had their details and images recorded before being released. This tactic has since been used at several demonstrations to control, subdue and gain personal information about protesters, despite police having the extraordinarily limited power simply to stop and search in anticipation of violence.

The significance of G20, then, lies not in the policing of the demonstration itself, but in the channels available for its reporting and consequent public awareness. G20 was notable for the amount of press and amateur reporters participating in and observing the protests, as well as interested civilians armed with cameras and mobile phones. One of the latter, a New York businessman, provided the video of the police assault of Tomlinson shown on the Guardian’s website.

It is this broadened and democratised arena of reporting that has made the greatest difference to coverage of police at protests. The initial press opprobium directed at bottle-throwing anarchists altered swiftly and dramatically under the weight of contradictory evidence, producing an extraordinary consensus of opinion on the Tomlinson case from across the political spectrum. The variety and sheer number of observers, as well as their access to media outlets such as YouTube, has enabled the public presentation of an ‘insider’ view of police actions, increasing the power of protestors to expose previously unknown or disputed police practices and to challenge subsequent press denials or misrepresentation. Despite the tragedy of Tomlinson’s death, G20 may yet provide an opportunity to unite public opinion in favour of greater police accountability and media transparency.

*

Versions of this article appear at The Rhexis and in Red Pepper magazine.

Solidarity Goes Down the Tube.

Commuting in London is rarely a piece of cake, but yesterday took the biscuit. On the first full day of the RMT strike, I watched and waited as bus after bus trundled past my stop, too full to load any more of us on. Each bus was crammed gunnell to gunnell with nervy commuters, unaccustomed to travelling to work by means other than the tube and glancing fearfully out of the grimy, grafitti-smeared windows.

Half an hour went by. As a slightly less rammed bus hove into view, I chanced my arm and shouldered my way on. Standing room only, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the chaos generated by Boris’ contingency plan, which failed to forsee that doubling the number of buses on the road might also halve their speed. Mine crawled along commendably to a symphony of tutting and watch-tapping, before the announcement came that it could only complete the first third of its journey. Tutting more loudly to no avail, we were turfed out at St Paul’s.

The bus I eventually boarded from there, still crammed, had abandoned any requirement to pay for one’s journey, owing mostly to the fact that the lower deck was too packed for anyone to get near the Oystercard-scanner. I looked in vain for a scrap of our fabled Blitz spirit; from what I could see and the subsequent state of my shins, it was every briefcase and kitten heel for themself. Sandwiched for another half-hour between students and suits, like a diagram charting the evolution of Homo Dailygrindus, I made it into work a full ninety minutes late and over two hours after leaving home.

My return journey was slightly eased by anticipation of what awaited me, but only slightly. Not only was everything on the road still moving incredibly slowly, but passengers were packed in like strap-hanging sardines, foreheads and forearms pressed to the glass in Boschean disarray – giving the inside of the bus, in fact, the atmosphere and miasma of a tube carriage. Yes, us lucky corporate lackeys got all the jam-packed chin-in-armpit close-discomfort of a tube journey with none of its relative speed and efficiency, as well as all the inch-by-inch frustration of a bus journey with none of the ability to sit down and not feel quite so much like a herd of cattle headed for the abbatoir. There were, I noticed, far fewer robotic announcements of the next stop. Presumably their irritant effect would have driven us into an auto-immolating frenzy.

I reached home, again ninety minutes later than usual, sticky, sore, exhausted and in no mood to do anything other than silently fume. And you know what? Good.

Strikes aren’t supposed to be a picnic. It does a daughter of toil good to be reminded, in an age of ‘human resources’, ‘downsizing’ and ‘natural wastage’, that the City can still be brought to its knees by the flexed muscles of the proletarian vanguard. If the whole of London is visibly and audibly inconvenienced, regrettably including you and I? Job done. That’s what workforces are meant to be able to do. That’s what unions are for. Think about the petty and grand disagreements you have with your place or system of work, and imagine if you could do that.

The press have, unsurprisingly, heaped acrimony on the RMT. It’s a saddening indictment of the past two decades’ anti-worker policy and rhetoric in media and government that this line has been so readily swallowed. Letters to editors, vox pops and actually speaking to those around you gather the same impression, based on a rejection or conceptual ignorance of solidarity with fellow workers, a view of society that pits one section of the workforce against others and an assumption that inconvenience to the individual is the gravest possible injury. Some common anti-RMT straw-men, then, which all blusteringly miss the point:

‘Train drivers are on £36K already, what are they complaining about?’ Yes. And the national average wage is less than half of that. Why aren’t the rest of us on £36K? Haven’t we got unions to go to?

‘How can they ask for job security in a recession?’ Why shouldn’t they, and why shouldn’t we? Why can’t we all request protection commensurate to our service and commitment to a company, instead of bowing to the destructive whims of a system that got us into this mess in the first place?

‘Why should the RMT get special treatment?’ They shouldn’t, and they’re not arguing that they should. We should be levelling up, not down, to a point where wages and conditions are at the highest common denominator rather than the lowest.

Solidarity makes sense. It’s surely no secret by now that capitalism is run for the few at the expense of the many. Unions were formed to make some attempt at redressing the system’s glaring unfairness. Over the last century, unions were instrumental in protecting and improving the conditions of the exploited and economically weak. They have historically been intertwined with the promotion of equality and civil rights. As UK unions have been systematically defanged by successive governments, so protection from exploitation has been undermined or disregarded. Unions are there for you, not for some nebulous workshy bully-boy dreamed up by the Murdoch press, hardly a friend to the working man.

I’m sorry it has to be Bob Crow. I know he does the cause no favours, and may as well have been assembled from a Thuggish Seventies Throwback Starter Kit designed by the Daily Mail. I know he’s obstructive, obstreperous and throroughly unphotogenic. (The PCS’ Mark Serwotka, on the other hand, can work-to-rule me anytime.) Look on Bob Crow as the misshapen Leninist carapace from which a beautiful anarcho-syndicalist butterfly may eventually emerge, wings gleaming wetly in the sunlight of solidarity. The point is that trade unions are the best idea pissed-off workers ever had, and if more of them exercised on behalf of their members the power and control that the RMT are exhibiting, then scandals like low pay, gendered wage disparities, exploitation and sexual and racial harassment would be less of a stain on our working lives and we might find it slightly easier to get up in the mornings with more than an uninterrupted commute to look forward to.

Collapse of stout party.

“On D-Day, Britain sent an army to Europe to stop the Nazis getting to Britain. It is an absolute insult to the memories of those who fought that 65 years later Britain is now sending Nazis to Europe to represent us.”

The Shadow Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan welcomed “a historic result” for the Tories and a “seismic shift in Welsh politics”. “Only the Conservative Party can beat Labour in Wales and Gordon Brown has gone down in history as the first Labour Prime Minister to have lost Wales.”

Europe is in a crisis triggered by the excesses of capitalism, but it is xenophobic nationalism rather than the mainstream left which has gained ground.

Words fucking fail me.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.

Contra Marx, the history of this country steers a fine line between tragedy and farce. At the moment it feels like a series of well-worn running jokes, the only possible punchline to which is a laconically raised eyebrow and the weary response, ‘No shit, Sherlock?’ This was brought home to me by the latest Recessionwatch announcement that the brunt of this economic downturn is being borne by the same areas of the country that were hardest hit by the last one. In terms of unemployment as a percentage of the local population, and the amount of local men on disability benefit, England’s post-industrial North and Midlands and the economic wasteland of the South Welsh valleys are back at the top of the Shit Parade.

The fallacy that the All-New Slump is primarily focused on bankers, estate agents and mortgage-lenders is more a product of the self-absorption of a London-based media and the admittedly novel structural failure and job-shedding which has subjected the financial sector to ravages previously exclusive to the industrial. White-collar workers may have at long last been force-fed a dose of manual-labour medicine, but there’s no call for the type of schadenfreude which battened on the banning of foxhunting or the batonning of Countryside Alliance protestors. The job of keeping capitalism going involves a mercenary last-in-first-out-ism that is nowhere more prevalent than in the job market for the poorest sectors of the country.

The recession of the 1980s, a recurring reference point for the current crisis, came after Thatcher’s free market economics had strengthened the overall economy and created a growing middle class. This sunny overview of the decade ignores the dark impact of the Thatcher government’s bloody-minded onslaught on the British manufacturing classes, the results of which have been exhaustively documented. The fruits of hedge-funds and housing development were hardly available to Britain’s three million unemployed, concentrated in former manufacturing industries and disproportionately among the young, who were herded into degrees of diminishing return or turfed out of education into an unforgiving apprenticeship-free marketplace. Under the Major administration, a second round of pit closures and the long, sad hold-out of the Liverpool dockers planted a conclusive boot on the coffin-lid of industrial organisation and industry itself.

And then what happened? Twenty years after the Miners’ Strike ended, research from Sheffield Hallam University indicated that less than half of jobs lost in coalfield districts had been replaced. As far as national attention was concerned, the areas may as well have vanished down a disused mineshaft. In the slice of south Wales where I grew up, with my father’s generation in jobless post-traumatic crisis and my own retreating into lip-curled nihilism, the only attempts at economic regeneration I saw were the daffodils planted along the M4 corridor to improve the view for commuters. Flimsy sticking-plaster sectors – call-centres, fast-food outlets, cardboard-box factories – grew like bindweed, ‘reskilling’ a handful of former miners and steelworkers to answer a phone and use a keyboard. Little or no attention was paid to the psychological aftermath of economic trauma: the spread of mental illness, petty crime, addiction and dependency. Successive Conservative governments’ gutting of industrial communities also excised the social and cultural benefits built up by long-term guaranteed employment, effectively eradicating progress made over the past hundred years. When Huw Beynon writes: At the turn of the century in south Wales and Durham, the old mining areas stood out as having … low levels of wages, high incidences of limiting long term illness, poor housing and poor patterns of education attainment. These features combined to produce high levels of household poverty. All this was compounded in particular places by a high incidence of crime and drug abuse and by a pattern of young men and women leaving to find work elsewhere, it’s difficult to be sure which century he means.

New Labour in opposition had, since Kinnock, concentrated less on the unsexy struggles of a doomed demographic and more on the promise to deliver such communities, slumped and comatose, into the welcoming embrace of a tamed free market, a line of wishful thinking as insulting as it was unsuccessful. In government, the handwringing reports of Prescott’s coalfield task force on post-industrial Britain’s ‘unique combination’ of concentrated joblessness, physical isolation, poor infrastructure and severe physical and mental health problems prompted only a renewed emphasis on attracting employment – any employment – as short-term, panicked panacea. Under Major, Blair and Brown, the only significant prospect of employment in the coalfields was achieved not by the guiding hand of the market but by farming out public funds to overseas conglomerates in the name of inward investment. It should surprise no one that the more state aid used to attract such investment, the less likely it is to succeed, since if all the risk is removed from investment by paying the sponsors to make it, they are unlikely to be overly concerned with how robust the business plan is. In addition to state subsidies, corporations were promised a docile workforce socialised to low wages, defanged unions and deregulated working conditions, at a price lower than that demanded by workers in Korea and Eastern Europe – hardly an offer any self-respecting global capitalist could refuse.

The largest single inward investment ever made in Europe was the £220m of government aid handed in 1996 to Lucky Goldstar, one of South Korea’s biggest and most powerful industrial conglomerates, to set up a factory in Newport. LG’s developments promised the creation of over six thousand skilled jobs but created less than half of these, with one part of it, a semi-conductor plant, never employing more than a night watchman. The company closed its Newport operations in 2003. The Siemens semi-conductor plant on Tyneside, also built in 1996 with the aid of £50m in government subsidies and meant to bring 2,000 new jobs to the north-east, closed within two years of opening having employed less than half the anticipated number of workers. In 2005 Sony announced plans to close its manufacturing plant in Bridgend, causing 650 job losses. The Indian-owned steel group Corus this week began consultation on closing its Teesside plant, putting 2,000 jobs at risk in addition to the 2,500 cuts already planned across its UK operations.

The use of government money to buy in and solder on, rather than to create jobs, was never going to end well, particularly when done at the expense of poorer areas of Europe and Asia and when involving the herding of workers into an employers’ Dutch auction of low wages and shaky security. A fundamental step in maintaining employment is to develop skilled jobs, but inward investment throughout the 1990s focused on quick fixes and expediency, delivering the opposite. Companies like Lucky Goldstar, whose Newport operation was potentially the source of sophisticated research and development, offered factory-line jobs that existed only as long as the cost of their workers remained artificially and damagingly cheap. As bases elsewhere in Europe offered conditions which undercut even those in Britain, companies upped sticks again, and jobs for skilled workers never materialised. The current state of economic uncertainty sees overseas companies continue to high-tail it out of Dodge with no ties to their community, no corporate loyalty, and certainly no employee power to hold them back.

One effect of the All-New Recession has been to expose the sham of meaningful support offered to communities annihilated along with the industry that was their raison-d’etre. Job losses, redundant skills and lack of a future are no stranger to areas of the country where it’s been 1984 for years, which were left untouched by the boom years and will remain as impervious to the benefits of quantitative easing. Whatever quantitative easing is.

No justice; just us

It’s been twenty years since the death of ninety-six people at the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster. Things like this require us to remember.

I’ve been astonished at how many people, post-G20, have claimed that the death of Ian Tomlinson shattered their faith in the British police and press. Had their belief in the objectivity of an arm of the state really remained intact until two weeks last Wednesday?

There are countless reasons why a great number of us never had faith to begin with – not some faux-edgy prolier-than-thou pose, but the product of growing up under events that in retrospect seem unbelievable, dictated by a government’s belief in the inhumanity of ordinary people.

Hillsborough Justice Campaign.