The strange case of Britain’s demise

A country that prided itself on stability has seemed to be in free-fall. Whodunnit? asks The Economist

Dec 12th 2022 | GRANTHAM

The driveway dips as you approach Belton House, the gold-hued façade rising before you as the road tilts up again. Passing through a marble-floored hall to the ornate saloon, early visitors would have admired a portrait of the original master’s daughter with a black attendant. For a while, says Fiona Hall of the National Trust, a heritage charity that these days owns the property, servants came and went from the kitchen wing through a discreet tunnel. A magnificent staircase led finally to a rooftop cupola, and views of an estate that stretched beyond the horizon.

Built in the 1680s, the idyllic mansion embodies a costume-drama view of Britain’s past that is widely cherished at home and abroad. Its location in Lincolnshire makes it emblematic in another way: in the heart of England, in a region that in 2016 voted decisively for Brexit, and on the outskirts of Grantham, a typical market town that was the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher, the country’s most important post-war prime minister. Previously the venue for a murder-mystery evening featuring suspects in period dress, this history-laden spot is an apt place to ponder a different sort of mystery. Who nobbled Britain?

Alas, the victim is in a parlous state. A country that likes to think of itself as a model of phlegmatic common sense and good-humoured stability has become an international laughing stock: three prime ministers in as many months, four chancellors of the exchequer and a carousel of resigning ministers, some of them repeat offenders. “The programme of the Conservative Party,” declared Benjamin Disraeli in 1872, “is to maintain the constitution of the country.” The latest bunch of party leaders have broken their own laws, sidelined official watchdogs, disrespected Parliament and dishonoured treaties.

Not just a party, or a government, but Britain itself can seem to be kaput. England’s union with Scotland, cemented not long after Belton House was built, is fraying. Real incomes have flatlined since the crash of 2008, with more years of stagnation to come as the economy limps behind those of most other rich countries. The reckless tax-slashing mini-budget in September threatened to deliver the coup de grâce. The pound tanked, markets applied a “moron premium” to British sovereign debt and the Bank of England stepped in to save the government from itself.

Today the economy is entering recession, inflation is rampant and pay strikes are disrupting railways, schools and even hospitals. The National Health Service (nhs), the country’s most cherished institution, is buckling. Millions of people are waiting for treatment in hospitals. Ambulances are perilously scarce.

In Grantham, a town of neat red-brick terraced houses, half-timbered pubs and 45,000 residents, the malaise shows up in a penumbra of hardship. Amid staff shortages in the nhs—and an uproar—the local emergency-care service has been cut back. Immured in stacks of nappies and cornflakes at the food bank he runs, Brian Hanbury says demand is up by 50% on last year, and is set to rocket as heating bills bite. Rachel Duffey of PayPlan, a debt-solutions firm that is one of the biggest local employers, predicts that need for help with debts is “about to explode” nationwide, as people already feeling the pinch come to the end of fixed-rate mortgage deals. As for the mini-budget: “It was a shambles,” laments Jonathan Cammack, steward of Grantham Conservative Club.

Natural causes

Whodunnit? A rich cast of suspects is implicated in the debacle. Some are obvious, others lurk in the shadows of history, seeping poison rather than dealing sudden blows. A few are outsiders, but as in many of the spookiest mysteries, most come from inside the house.

To begin with, Britons with long memories may detect a familiar condition: a government that has reached decrepit old age. A parliamentary remark in October about soon-to-quit Liz Truss—“the prime minister is not under a desk”—brought to mind immortal lines from the death-spiral of the Labour administration that lasted from 1997 to 2010. Then the chancellor referred to the prime minister’s henchmen as “the forces of hell”; “Home secretary’s husband put porn on expenses”, newspapers reported. In the mid-1990s, at the fag-end of Tory rule that began in 1979, a run of mps were caught with their pants down or their fingers in the till in another relay of shame.

Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power. Eventually routed at the polls, it then takes the guilty parties several parliamentary terms to recover. In opposition, both Labour and the Tories have determinedly learned the wrong lessons from defeat before alighting on the right ones. In a system with two big parties, for either to lose its mind is dangerous. For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.

“A family with the wrong members in control,” George Orwell wrote of the English. Yet a repeating cycle of senile governments does not, by itself, explain the national plight. Those previous administrations never plumbed the depth of disarray the current lot has reached. Something else has struck a country that has spewed out ruinous policies and a sequence of leaders resembling a reverse ascent of man: from plausible but glib David Cameron, to out-of-her-depths Theresa May, disgraceful Boris Johnson and then Ms Truss, probably the worst premier in modern history. Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University of London says that, in bygone days, Rishi Sunak would at this stage of his career have been a junior Treasury minister, rather than the latest prime minister.

Violence has been inflicted on the body politic—most brazenly, by Brexit, in the referendum, with 52%. Parties in power for over a decade are bound to scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. In this case, much of the Tory barrel was poured down the drain when support for Brexit became a prerequisite for office. The outcome has been rule by chancers and cranks. Mr Johnson’s Brexit machinations put him in Downing Street; the tribalism that the campaign fostered kept him there for much longer than he deserved. Brexit has wrecked the Tory party—and yet it is, broadly speaking, the side that won.

Brexit has also institutionalised lying in British politics, as the dishonesty of Brexiteer promises segued into the pretence that they are being fulfilled. They are not. “Nothing much has changed,” says Mr Cammack in Grantham. “Life just keeps going on.” But some things have changed for the worse. Investment is down and inflation higher than it would have been inside the European Union. Labour, skilled and otherwise, is scarce. Farmers are losing crops for want of workers. In Lincolnshire, says Johanna Musson of the National Farmers Union, tulip-growers are especially fretful. The county’s exports have fallen as, across Britain, Brexit-induced red tape leads some businesses to give up on European markets altogether.

In 1975, during an earlier strike-hit era, Britain held another referendum on its relationship with Europe. Roy Jenkins, a pro-Europe statesman, predicted that, if it left, it would wind up in “an old people’s home for faded nations”. Give or take a detour to the lunatic asylum, that judgment looks prescient. The economy is floundering and the country’s international prestige is plummeting: precisely the future Brexit was meant to avoid.

Still, as any murder-mystery aficionado knows, the obvious suspect is rarely the right one. In the curious case of Britain’s decline, Brexit is as much a weapon as the ultimate culprit.

The hand of history

Many of the factors behind the decision to leave have roughed up other countries, too. Lots of people on both sides of the Atlantic crave simple answers to complex questions, and populists have provided them. Faith in mainstream parties has waned, even as expectations of government have risen. The line between politics and entertainment has blurred, aggravating, in Britain, an old reluctance to take things too seriously, and a weakness for wits and eccentrics who cock a snook at convention. That is less damaging when there is substance behind their insouciance and discipline beneath the panache.

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes Britain’s predicament seem less an inside job than part of a wider takedown of democracy.

But other likely suspects lurk in the attic of British history. One grew up down the road from Belton House. The grocer’s shop in Grantham above which Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, was born is now a chiropractor and beautician. A statue of her put up earlier this year was quickly egged and defaced (she endured worse in real life). Her legend still looms over the country—particularly her Conservative Party.

Thatcher’s 11-year rule was an amalgam of caution, patience, luck and boldness. But among some Tories it is often misremembered as a prolonged ecstasy of tax-cutting, fight-picking, union-bashing and shouting “No, no, no” at Brussels. The rows over Europe that erupted on her watch rumbled on till the referendum of 2016. For some, she bequeathed a hunch that if economic policy doesn’t hurt, it isn’t working. Her ousting nurtured a lasting taste for party bloodletting. To court Tory members, Ms Truss even seemed to mimic Thatcher’s wardrobe. (It took just 81,326 of them to put her in Downing Street.)

Peer deeper into the past and more evidence comes to light. Recall, for instance, that painting in the saloon at Belton House, of the girl and her black attendant, possibly a slave. Her family, the Brownlows, had links to both Caribbean plantations and the East India Company, which helps explain the house’s splendid collection of Asian porcelain. The wider legacy of Britain’s former empire, runs a plausible theory, is a gnawing sense of unmet expectations and a fatal delusion of grandeur over the country’s place in the world.

For Sathnam Sanghera, author of “Empireland”, a powerful book about the largely unspoken effects of imperialism, “the original sin behind Brexit is empire.” The circumstances in which that empire was lost may have redoubled the psychic blow: in the wake of the second world war, during which, at least in the popular memory, Britain stood nobly alone against the Nazi onslaught. Afterwards it found itself diminished, broke and outdone by erstwhile foes, nurturing entwined feelings of greatness and grievance and haunted by phantom invasions. As the Irish author Fintan O’Toole has quipped, “England never got over winning the war.” In his view, Brexit was “imperial England’s last last stand”.

Perhaps not quite the last. Even now you can hear an echo of imperial hubris in the tendency of some British politicians to talk to eu negotiators, or the international bond markets, as if they were waiters in a Mediterranean bistro, liable to comply if only you repeat yourself loudly enough. It resounds in hollow boasts about having the best health care or army (or football team) in the world, in the yen to “punch above our weight”, and in the pursuit of a pure sort of sovereignty which, in an age of climate change, pandemics and imported gas, no longer exists.

“Until we face up to our history,” thinks Mr Sanghera, “we’re just going to carry on being dysfunctional.” On this analysis, the unravelling of Britain is a kind of karma.

In the 18th century, with a shrug

Maybe. Yet imperialism, greatness and all that have always been more an elite preoccupation than a popular one. In his enlightening new book, “The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain”, Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London cites a survey of Britons conducted in 1951, when the loss of empire ought to have been most raw. Half of respondents couldn’t name a single colony (one suggested Lincolnshire). Odd as it is to say of a country that for centuries ruled swathes of the world, it may not be ruptures like the end of empire or Brexit that have done in modern Britain, but, less dramatically, a kind of long-term drift; not violence, in other words, but neglect.

Think back to the era in which Belton House was built. After the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the short-lived English Commonwealth, the monarchy had been restored. Compared with other European nations, the English got their big revolution done early—but then thought better of it, afterwards nudging forwards to constitutional monarchy and democracy. This piecemeal approach has characterised the country’s political evolution ever since. Walter Bagehot, a great Victorian editor of The Economist, noted the habit of compromising on thorny constitutional issues—or ducking them. “The hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit,” he wrote of such botches, and “succeeding generations fought elsewhere.”

Booby traps were often left behind. One lies in the fuzzy and weak restraints on the British executive. As Lord Hailsham, a Tory grandee, warned in 1976, a government with a secure majority in the House of Commons has an inbuilt tendency towards “elective dictatorship”. The House of Lords, which is meant to scrutinise legislation, is the fudge par excellence. In an absurd backroom deal of 1999, the hereditary peers who once dominated it were ejected—except for 92 of them. They are still there; when one dies, another is elected to replace him. Those are the only elections to Parliament’s upper chamber.

It is hard to see many other countries tolerating such a farrago. Meanwhile, a gentlemanly understanding that leaders would regulate their personal behaviour, once known as the “good chaps” theory of government, did not survive contact with Mr Johnson. As when a mob realises the rule of law is a confidence trick, it turned out that a few good shoves could dispense with much of the flimflam of oversight.

Or consider the myopic attitudes of successive governments to devolution. When it created the Scottish Parliament, Sir Tony Blair’s Labour administration did not fully anticipate the subsequent surge in English nationalism. Nor did it foresee how, after taking office in Edinburgh, the canny, pro-independence Scottish National Party (snp) would enjoy both the dignity of power and the sheen of opposition to Westminster. Now Brexit is inflicting more casual vandalism on the union, undermining support for it in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which both voted to remain in the eu.

Whereas once Scottish independence was an in-or-out proposition, says Sir John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, it has become a choice between competing unions, British and European. As the snp vows to rejoin the eu, some Scottish Remainers who had rejected independence are embracing the idea. For some in Northern Ireland, explains Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, the mere fact of Brexit made a united Ireland more desirable; the region’s awkward post-Brexit position has led still more to think unification is likelier than it was before. Across Britain, a majority thinks the union will fall apart. It is not on the cards yet, but one day Britain may dissolve itself by accident.

Drift and neglect have undermined more than the constitution and the union. David Kynaston, the pre-eminent historian of 20th-century England, invokes Sir Siegmund Warburg, a German-born banker who helped shake up the City (on the slide as an equity market in the aftermath of Brexit). Warburg detested the British fondness for the phrase, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” As Mr Kynaston observes, Britain is not a place that is “good at grasping the nettle”.

With some glaring, uncharacteristic exceptions—Thatcher’s battle with the coal miners, the bust-up over Brexit—Britain tends to dislike confrontation, especially the ideological kind, perhaps a legacy of the civil war. It prefers irony to ideas and douses plain-speaking in good manners; its people have a quaint instinct to apologise when a stranger steps on their foot. Alongside this squeamishness, says Mr Kynaston, runs a “deep-dyed anti-intellectual empiricism”, and an inclination to tackle problems “pragmatically, as and when they arise, not looking for trouble in advance”.

This reticence has costs, not least through its complicity in the underpowered economy. Consider the glacial planning regime, or—an even more venerable problem—the skewed education system. It produces a narrow elite, dominated for too long by the alumni of a few private schools: Brexit and the mini-budget can both be traced to the playing fields of Eton, attended by Mr Johnson, Mr Cameron, who botched the referendum, and Kwasi Kwarteng, very briefly the chancellor. Less conspicuous, but at least as damaging, is the country’s long educational tail.

It has recently made some progress in international education rankings, but a stubborn quarter or so of 11-year-olds in England are unable to read at the expected level. A higher share of teenage boys are not in work, education or training than in most other rich countries. As for those who stay in the classroom: the “greater part of what is taught in schools and universities…does not seem to be the most proper preparation” for “the business which is to employ [students] during the remainder of their days.” That was Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”, published in 1776. Employers make similar complaints in 2022.

In a post-imperial, post-industrial, ever-more competitive world, all that contributes to a skills shortage and a long-term productivity gap with other advanced economies. The fat years under Sir Tony and Gordon Brown disguised these shortcomings—until the crash, when it became clear that the boom they oversaw was over-reliant on financial services and public and private debt. Using the fruits of Thatcherite economics to fund a more generous state had seemed a political elixir; it turned out to be a fair-weather formula. In the kindest of circumstances, New Labour left some of the hardest problems unsolved. Most new jobs went to foreign-born workers. The number of working-age adults receiving welfare benefits barely shifted.

The cradle of the Industrial Revolution has not yet found a secure niche in the 21st-century economy. Nor has it figured out how to pay sustainably for the sort of public services that Britons expect. If, in the matter of Britain’s meltdown, Thatcher is an accessory before the fact, so is Sir Tony.

The country-house red herring

In the upstairs-downstairs, country-house vision of Britain, the country is a museum of class, with overlords surveying their lands and minions scurrying below stairs as they once did at Belton House. Famously, Disraeli wrote of “two nations”, the rich and the poor, as distinct as “inhabitants of different planets”. England, especially, is indeed a class-ridden place, whose denizens still make snap judgments about each other’s backgrounds based on accents, shoes and haircuts. Too many at the bottom of the ladder cannot see a way up it. Some at the top still benefit from unearned deference. Politicians often share this binary outlook, thinking the business of government is to squeeze the rich and comfort the poor, or vice versa.

But Disraeli’s formulation is too crude for 21st-century Britain. After generations of muddling through, it is in large part a country of people who are not exactly poor but are by no means rich. Instead they are “just about managing”, as Mrs May, the last prime minister but two, described them.

Take Grantham, a constituency in which the average income in 2020 was £25,600 ($32,900), just below the national median. (This year, Britain’s gdp per person will be more than 25% lower than America’s, measured at purchasing-power parity.) Amid the cost-of-living squeeze, says Mr Hanbury at the food bank, not only households that rely on welfare benefits but nurses and teachers are coming unstuck: “People live so close to the edge.”

It is only a 70-minute train ride to London, but power in Westminster seems remote, reflects Father Stuart Cradduck of St Wulfram’s, a lovely medieval church behind Grantham’s low-slung high street. Lincolnshire, he says, feels like a “forgotten county”. Kelham Cooke, the leader of the local council, says young people who leave for university often don’t come back. Regional inequality is another old, hard problem that successive British governments have only desultorily tackled, watching on as London sucked in talent and capital and other places fell behind.

There is something to be said for drift; or, to put it another way, gradualism. A “highly original quality of the English”, Orwell wrote in 1947, “is their habit of not killing one another.” By slowly expanding the franchise and incorporating the labour movement into democratic politics, Britain avoided continental-style extremism in the 19th and 20th centuries. When liberalism perished elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s, observes Mr Bogdanor, it survived in Britain. Compared with places such as France or Italy, where the far right is resurgent—or with ultrapolarised America—it is healthy in Britain still. Ms Truss’s stint in Downing Street was inglorious, but, Mr Bogdanor notes, she was removed quietly and efficiently, without riots or fuss. The flawed parliamentary system worked.

So drift can be benign. But it can also take you into a cul-de-sac—or off a cliff. In Britain it has led to economic mediocrity and disgruntlement, which in turn contributed to the yelp of Brexit and the desperate magical thinking of the mini-budget. Senile governments, self-inflicted wounds, the blowback of empire, corrosive global trends, the spectres of bygone leaders: they are all accomplices. But the main cause of Britain’s woe belongs less at a crime scene than in a school report. In the end, it didn’t try hard enough. 

A Strong Labour movement Raises everyone’s Living Standards

Owen Jones in The Guardian

Respect for tradition, we are told, underpins the Conservative party. But there’s one tradition for which it has unwavering contempt – strike action: a part of our culture and heritage it has ferociously and instinctively demonised as an antisocial attack on the general public. Tories are known to extol the virtues of rugged individualism, but it seems the collective suddenly matters when industrial action is declared. Then, it seems, society – which in previous Tory eras was doubted to even exist – becomes a totem to be protected from sinister forces, from a malign and externalised striking rabble.

Strikes bring inconvenience. Of course they do. They disrupt our normal life, our plans, our expectations. But the concentrated attempt to stigmatise the very notion of the strike is something that must be resisted. The strike – and the threat of striking – should be celebrated precisely because it underpins many rights and freedoms we now take for granted. Union struggles in the 19th century played a pivotal role in shortening the working day, and in the 20th century, in creating the weekend. In the postwar heyday of union power, they drove up incomes. Strikes are a profound social good.

Yet how little this argument is heard. Anti-union sentiment is profoundly embedded in our political culture. When the Tory chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, suggested on national television that the upcoming nurses’ strike would aid Vladimir Putin by worsening inflation in the west, it was yet another crude illustration of this very British phenomenon, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s denunciation of striking miners as the “enemy within” in the 1980s. This hostility has a long pedigree and, historically at least, the Tories have been known to be candid about their real intentions.

RMT picket at Slough railway station, 8 October 2022. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Rex/Shutterstock

As the 20th century dawned, the Tories defended a legal ruling making unions financially liable for profits lost to strikes, leading the Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin to later confess: “The Conservatives can’t talk of class war. They started it.” In 1926, they introduced a raft of anti-union laws in the aftermath of the general strike, including the banning of solidarity industrial action.

But while unions were hobbled in the 1930s, a spirit of collectivism nurtured by wartime sacrifice helped their rebirth. The three-decade social democratic consensus established by Clement Attlee’s Labour government led the Trades Union Congress in 1968 to boast that it had grown from a “small debating assembly” into a body that shared “in the making of government policies, taking part in administering major social services and meeting on equal terms with the spokesmen of the nation’s employers”. This was the era in which Britain enjoyed its highest ever sustained period of economic growth, which – thanks in part to strong unions – was more equitably distributed, boosting the pay of ordinary workers.

When the oil shock of the 1970s sent prices surging, unions mobilised in an effort to match wages with the cost of living. The grand climax – the winter of discontent – was successfully spun by Thatcher to label unions as national bogeyman for a generation. Her successors took up that framing as well. When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, he promised that his government would “leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world”. And David Cameron assailed Ed Miliband as “taking his script from the trade unions”, and turned the screw further, with even more restrictive laws.

But today this anti-union approach jars with political reality. One poll has suggested that nearly six in 10 voters back the nurses’ strike, and another found that more people backed the rail strike than opposed it. After an unprecedented fall in living standards, the default position of millions whose pay packets are shrivelling in real terms has become “well, fair play to them, at least someone is taking a stand”.

While earlier generations of Tories may have used the language of class warfare openly, their modern cohort is savvier. They seek to isolate striking workers from the wider public, portraying them as somehow separate from society at large. Rishi Sunak denounces strikers as a threat to “hardworking families”, as if nurses, paramedics or transport workers are excluded from that category. But this attempt to separate striking workers from society at large collides with the reality people see every day. The withdrawal of strikers’ labour is so noticeable precisely because of how central they are to our way of life. Rather than a middle-finger salute at the general public, it is one part of society crying for help from another.

 

Despite all the talk of monstrous disruption, for most the real inconvenience is struggling to pay bills and feed their children, rather than the irritation of a postponed train journey. Real wages are projected to be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008.

Indeed, a fundamental reason for wages being so low and conditions so poor in the UK is because of the dilution of union power. According to one study, the “changes in bargaining power” suffered by unions explains half of the decline in the share of the economy going to wages over four decades in several rich countries, including Britain. Rather than union action inconveniencing everybody else, the decline of unions has dragged down the wages of non-unionised workers, too, according to a US study. A strong labour movement, in other words, brings up everyone’s living standards.

A strike, then, isn’t antisocial behaviour, on a collision course with the interests of the wider public. By neutering the threat of strike action with authoritarian laws, the Tories have succeeded only in weakening a mechanism with a proven record in raising the living standards of all workers. Despite the mythology, no one goes on strike on a whim. A worker forfeiting a day’s pay isn’t just a sacrifice for the sake of their own interests, it’s a gamble and a sacrifice. Indeed, one of the government’s fears is that a victory for nurses or railway workerswould embolden the pay claims of other workers – an anxiety that is well founded.

Union membership should be honoured not just as a democratic right, but as a cornerstone of collective prosperity. Even many union sympathisers have retreated from such an argument, instead blaming bosses and government for any regretful breakdown in industrial relations. But to strike isn’t a sin, or antisocial or an act of mendacity: it’s a key to a society less beset by injustice than our own.

Striking workers are providing the opposition that Britain desperately needs

Andy Beckett in The Guardian

In Britain, more than in most democratic countries, going on strike is a risk. Your employer, the government, most of the media, much of the public and often the opposition parties are likely to be against you – or, at best, unsupportive. Your loss of income is unlikely to be made up by strike pay. Your behaviour on the picket line will be subject to what Tony Blair described approvingly in 1997 as “the most restrictive” trade union laws “in the western world”.

In very public ways, you will be breaking the rules of the modern economy: refusing to work, inconveniencing consumers, acting collectively rather than individually, and making demands for more money openly – rather than in private, as more powerful people do. If you are on the left, you are likely to be told again and again that your strike is politically counterproductive.

Such are the written and unwritten laws that have constricted British strikes for approaching half a century, ever since the walkouts of the 1978-79 winter of discontent inadvertently did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher to power and to provoke the counter-revolution against workers that still continues today. Many voters have long got used to the idea that strikes are a minority pursuit associated with a bygone age to which the country must not return. Boris Johnson’s government, with its especially strong intolerance of dissent, aims to demonise and marginalise strikes even further.

Yet this summer, more and more Britons are striking or considering striking regardless. From railway workers to barristers, firefighters to doctors, Post Office workers to teachers, nurses to civil servants, council workers to British Telecom engineers, an unusually large potential strike wave is building. Its social breadth, the range of occupations affected and the atmosphere on some picket lines all suggest that something politically significant may be happening.

At the first barristers’ protest, outside the Old Bailey in London this week, an already excited crowd of advocates in courtroom wigs and gowns burst into prolonged applause when they were joined by a few activists in shorts and jeans from the RMT. It’s not every day that you see such camaraderie between self-employed professionals who rely heavily on trains and striking transport workers carrying a banner that calls for “the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

The cost of living crisis, and the refusal of the government and other employers to raise wages accordingly, is the immediate reason for this summer’s “wave of resistance”, as Mick Lynch of the RMT union calls it. Yet the causes go deeper: more than a decade of stagnant or falling wages; the long Conservative squeeze on the public sector; and the whole transformation of the British economy since the 1970s, which has effectively taken money from workers and given it to employers, shareholders and the wealthy.


Public dissatisfaction with this model has been growing for years. In the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 64% agree that “‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth” – up from 57% in 2019, and far greater than the support for any party. As Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn tapped into this discontent. But the end of his tenure, and Keir Starmer’s apparent lack of interest in its redistributive ideas, has created a vacuum where a movement with a radical economic agenda ought to be.

It’s possible that the strike wave could become one such movement. While support for the strikes has been stronger than expected - the pollster Savanta ComRes found that even 38% of Tory voters considered the highly disruptive rail strikes “justified”; among younger people this attitude was particularly prevalent. In the same survey, 72% of under-35s backed the strikers. Since few of them have ever been on strike themselves – less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35 – then the likely explanation is not shared experience but shared disenchantment. Young people, like many of the strikers, have been particularly badly served by the status quo.

Many young people supported Corbyn for the same reason. And there are other similarities between the two movements. Former Corbyn advisers such as James Schneider, Corbyn himself, and the parliamentary Labour left all support the strikers. Green activists, once an important part of Corbyn’s coalition, have joined RMT picket lines. Like Labour’s 2017 election manifesto, Lynch uses clear, populist language – “every worker in Britain” should get a much better pay deal, he told Question Time – and its effectiveness has taken the media by surprise. Support for the RMT strike rose after his TV appearances.

Could the strikers succeed, not just in getting fairer pay deals but in beginning to change how the economy works? It’s an immense task, which Labour under Corbyn sometimes talked about compellingly but never came close to carrying out. And as the strikes widen and lengthen, public opinion may turn against them. Walking to work because of a train strike will seem less of a novelty and more of an imposition if that dispute drags on into the autumn. One of the obvious but often forgotten lessons of the winter of discontent is that voters often hate strikes in cold weather.

Excited union talk about building new mass movements has proved over-optimistic in the past, for example during David Cameron’s government. The proportion of British employees who are union members has stabilised in recent years, after decades of decline, but by historic standards it is still low: less than one in four. And the fact that Starmer is not prepared to support the strikers removes one of the main means by which their campaigns could be amplified.

Yet for almost a decade now, British politics has not followed the expected paths. It may be that an economy built on poor wages was politically and socially sustainable only while inflation stayed low. That relatively stable and docile era may be over. Recently, the leftwing website Left Foot Forward listed some of the pay rises already won this summer by the increasingly assertive trade union Unite: “300 workers at Gatwick get 21 per cent”, “300 HGV drivers win 20 per cent”. In post-Thatcher Britain, such transfers of wealth to the workers – not just matching but far exceeding the rate of inflation – aren’t supposed to happen. But they are.

Unlike in the 1980s, when the iron lady beat Britain’s last big wave of strikes, unemployment is low and the supply of labour is short. If strikers don’t like a pay offer, sometimes they can threaten to go and work for someone who pays more. You could call it an example of something the Tories talk less about these days: market forces.

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Don’t complain about the strikers – they’re only doing what we all should in 2017

Paul Mason in The Guardian


We seem to love the working class as long as it is a) white and b) passive. The real working class is neither. It is multi-ethnic and, from Southern Rail to British Airways, it is set to strike.

Predictably, the Conservatives are calling for more legal restrictions on strike action. Theresa May accused strikers of “contempt for ordinary people”. And – as always – the neck veins of TV reporters are bulging as they express outrage on behalf of those affected.

Union leader says No 10 demonising working people in strikes row



Yet, try as they might, the politicians and journalists have failed to stir up mob hatred against the strikers, some of whom – such as the Southern Rail drivers and guards – have been taking industrial action for weeks. And the reasons for this are obvious: they are ordinary people.
While the miners and steelworkers of the 1980s worked in relatively insular steel and mining towns, everybody knows a BA cabin steward, a train guard, a baggage handler or a Post Office counter worker. What’s more, because so much of our work has become modular, low-paid and deskilled, many people know, or can guess, exactly what they are going through.

We have near full employment yet near wage stagnation. The strikes taking place over Christmas are happening among workers who have not seen a pay rise for years. BA’s onboard customer service managers, for example, have been stripped of their union negotiation rights and had their pay frozen for six years.

One of the most pitiful things about the political class, and the economists who whisper certainties in their ear, is their distance from the actual experience of work. As trade union rights have become eroded throughout the private sector, and large chunks of the public sector become privatised, a culture of coercion has taken root at work.

 A commuter protests in support of Southern Rail staff. at Victoria Station in London. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

It does not have to be as bad as the leading fast-food cafe chain where a secret shopper deducts the bonus of an entire shift if one person does not smile. But it is pervasive.

Generally, you are supposed to smile, supposed to exhibit happiness for your seven quid an hour, obey orders without question, to hit meaningless targets or scam them on the instruction of your line manager – and, increasingly, you’re supposed to pretend you are self-employed.

You can spend entire days, if you think about it, being served only by people with no actual employment status: the Uber driver, the hairdresser, the physiotherapist. Even businesses where you’re paying a limited company through your credit card now routinely require their “associates” to be self-empolyed.

The result looks like a fake-tan version of Downtown Abbey with all the same levels of deference but zero paternal responsibility. And deep down, people who work for a living understand the modern “contract” between worker and employer is barely worth the paper it is written on.

That’s why workers with union rights and relative job security use the strike weapon. It’s never pleasant. But every cabin worker at BA and Virgin knows that, without the unions, they would see their pension rights stolen and their conditions eroded to the same levels enjoyed by their counterparts at the budget airlines.

And what’s driving the attacks is always the same familiar, financial pressure. Public services, once privatised, are forced to enter a race to the bottom in terms of pay, conditions and pensions for their workers. Once financial logic overtakes the logic of providing a service as efficiently as possible, you get the stupidities of Southern Rail, which cut its services to passengers in order to provide itself with an achievable target.

Jeremy Corbyn has been condemned for failing to condemn the strikes – and for attending a Christmas party with the Aslef union. If it were up to me, Corbyn would actually throw a Christmas party, not just for the Aslef strikers but for all the workers toiling on basic pay, fictitious contracts and unachievable targets over the festive period.

Those of us in unions – and there are still millions of us – know they make a massive and positive difference. Because workers on London Underground are unionised, there is a guard at my local tube station who refuses to wear any other name badge than one with “Lenin” on it.

No 10 accuses striking workers of 'contempt for ordinary people'



Although I do not recommend this level of resistance for everybody, it is a physical symbol of the fact that unionised workers are people you do not mess around with.

The Southern strikers, the BA crews and the Post Office workers are showing a different side of what it means to express your collective identity at work. So did the junior doctors, whose determined action got them a better deal than their leaders originally thought they could achieve.

Coming on top of the strikes by Deliveroo riders and a union-led court victory for Uber drivers, these are signs that even the heavily casualised workforce of the 21st century will not suffer indignity for ever.

In economics, it has become common to hear that one of the main failings of the current system is wage stagnation; even the Bank of England would like to see more inflation. So don’t complain about the posties, train drivers, cabin crews and baggage handlers – they’re only doing what we all should in 2017.

Ask for a pay rise, defend your pension rights, insist that work conditions are respectful and safe – and demand your employer negotiates with a real trade union and pays the rate for the job.

No matter what, there should be no war

Editorial in The Dawn

Nearly one and a half billion people in two countries — India and Pakistan — appear to be held hostage to conspiracy, rumour and reckless warmongering. That needs to stop, and it needs to stop immediately.

On Thursday, 11 days after the Uri attack and seemingly an eternity in Pak-India sabre-rattling and diplomatic tensions, another layer of confusion and chaos was added to one of the world’s most complicated bilateral relationships.

With the facts of the Uri attack yet to be established or shared with the world, a new, potentially larger, set of questions has now overshadowed an already fraught situation.

What happened along the Line of Control between midnight and early morning on Thursday is a story that Indian authorities appear to be very clear about and the Indian media has reported with relish. But virtually nothing has been independently confirmed about the events along the LoC, an area that is effectively cordoned off from the media in both countries and where the local population is unlikely to know the facts or be willing to speak candidly.

What is clear is that something did happen at several points along the LoC in the early hours of Thursday morning. At the very least, Pakistani and Indian forces exchanged fire in which two Pakistani soldiers died.

That is a sad, if long-standing, reality of the region: whenever tensions between the two countries are high, parts of the LoC see live ammunition fired, the lives of local populations disrupted and several casualties among security personnel and civilians.

Indeed, two summers ago, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi newly installed in office, the LoC saw a series of skirmishes that progressively escalated until reaching crisis point around mid-October. That set of events was supposedly meant to herald the start of a new, so-called get-tough policy by India.

Eventually, better sense prevailed and by September 2015 the DG Rangers and DG Border Security Force met and agreed to renew the LoC ceasefire. The Pathankot attack earlier this year, which involved infiltration across the Working Boundary, did not materially change the situation along the LoC, but unrest in India-held Kashmir and the Uri attack appear to have done so.

At this point, it is imperative to establish the facts quickly. The wild cheering that greeted the government’s accounts of events in India may become a dangerous precedent and create a new set of expectations in a region where war in an overtly nuclear environment would be catastrophic for both countries.

Facts, however, would help nudge the situation towards de-escalation, given signalling from the Pakistani state and Indian government.

Pakistani policymakers, both civilian and military, have reacted sensibly, and appear to be resisting Indian attempts to bait Pakistan. But the media echo chamber — jingoistic, fiercely nationalistic and often removed from reality — can have unpredictable effects, especially when it comes to whipping up warlike sentiment among the populations of the two countries.

Quickly establishing two sets of facts, of events along the LoC on Thursday and the Uri attack, would switch a media narrative from punch and counter-punch and allow the two states to work on how to ratchet down tensions along the LoC.

The Modi government, despite its hawkish instincts and muscle-flexing, has indicated an awareness of the dangers of unrestrained rhetoric. Facts will help clear the miasma and introduce the necessary rationality into a debate that is increasingly unhinged.

Clearly, the problems in the region are not unilateral and one-directional. Pakistan has pursued flawed policies in the past and could do more to help end the menace of terrorism in the region. But this is not an area of straightforward cause and effect, nor are the broader issues of the Pak-India relationship of immediate relevance.
First and foremost, the priority of the leaderships of Pakistan and India should be to ensure that no matter what the circumstances and no matter what the concerns, the path to war is not taken.

India suffered a blow in Uri as it did in Pathankot. It has a right to expect justice and Pakistan has a responsibility to investigate any links to citizens of this country. But what has been unleashed in India since the seemingly exaggerated claims of so-called surgical strikes along the LoC is frightening and wildly destabilising.

If now is not a propitious time for a dialogue of peace, it is the time for some serious introspection.

Only a few days ago, the Indian prime minister talked of a joint war against poverty; he must now also resist the poverty of ideas and the temptation to take the low, dangerous road.

The lies binding Hillsborough to the battle of Orgreave

Ken Capstick in The Guardian


Police covered up their attacks on striking miners. And they used the same tactics after the football tragedy.



‘For those of us who were there when the ranks of police suddenly opened up and launched a cavalry charge, it felt like civil war.’ Photograph: Photofusion/Rex



Just eight miles separates the patch of ground on the outskirts of Sheffield where Orgreave coking plant once stood from Hillsborough stadium, where 96 people were unlawfully killed on 15 April 1989. To those of us involved in the miners’ strike in south Yorkshire in the 1980s, the so-called “battle of Orgreave” and Britain’s worst football disaster have always been linked.

It was a glorious summer’s day on 18 June 1984. With my son and other mineworkers, I set off for Orgreave to take part in a mass demonstration to try to stop coke being moved from the plant to the steelworks at Scunthorpe.

The miners were in a jovial mood, dressed in T-shirts and plimsolls. To save on petrol most of us travelled four or five to a car. We had been on strike for more than three months, had very little money and relied on the £2 picketing money from the union to pay for petrol. Our destination was to be the scene of one of the bloodiest battle grounds in Britain’s industrial history.

We went to Orgreave to fight to save our industry from what has since been revealed, following the release of cabinet papers in January 2014, as a government plan to kill off the coal mining industry, close 75 pits at a cost of approximately 75,000 jobs, and destroy the National Union of Mineworkers.

The battle of Orgreave was a one-sided contest, as miners suddenly found themselves facing not a police force, but a paramilitary force dressed in riot gear, wielding long truncheons, with strategically placed officers with dogs, and a cavalry charge reminiscent of a medieval battleground.

For those of us who were there when the ranks of police suddenly opened up and launched the charge on horseback, it felt like civil war. Miners had no defence other than to try and outrun the horses. Furthermore, we had to run uphill. Many miners were caught and battered to the ground with truncheons, then outnumbered by police on foot before being roughly handled as they were arrested. Those of us who made it to the top of the hill found refuge in a supermarket or in the nearby mining village.

‘Following the battle, 95 miners were charged with riot, an offence which can carry a life sentence.’ Photograph: Mike Forster/Associated News/Rex

No one died at Orgreave, but it was clearly the intention of the police to create what felt like a life-threatening situation. The police faced no threat from the miners at Orgreave that warranted such a violent response, but it was obvious to those present that the police knew they could act with impunity.

Following the battle, 95 miners were charged with riot, an offence which could carry a life sentence. Gareth Peirce, one of the defending solicitors in the abortive trial that followed, wrote in the Guardian in 1985: “Orgreave … revealed that in this country we now have a standing army available to be deployed against gatherings of civilians whose congregation is disliked by senior police officers. It is answerable to no one; it is trained in tactics which have been released to no one, but which include the deliberate maiming and injuring of innocent persons to disperse them, in complete violation of the law.”

Miners' strike: IPCC considers unredacted Orgreave report



I wasn’t in court when the prosecution of the Orgreave miners was thrown out because the evidence did not stack up. But the trial revealed the way police would collaborate and coordinate evidence in order to get convictions or cover up the truth. In this sense, Orgreave can be seen as a dry run for what happened after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. Had the South Yorkshire force not been allowed to get away with what they did at Orgreave, perhaps Hillsborough would never have happened.

As the Hillsborough inquest verdicts have shown, we cannot have an unaccountable police force charged with upholding the rule of law but immune to it. We need to know which politicians or officials gave such immunity to the police, if it was given.

Only a full public inquiry into Orgreave will get at the truth, an inquiry to which all documents must be revealed in unredacted form. This inquiry would not just be in the interests of the miners injured on that day, and in the interests of their families. It would be in all our interests, because we all need to understand how a police force came to believe it was a law unto itself. If we don’t, we risk creating the conditions in which another Hillsborough or Orgreave could happen.

In 1985 the miners shouted from the rooftops, but we weren’t heard. Ignored by the media, many gave up. What happened at Orgreave was not a human tragedy on the same scale as Hillsborough. But now, thanks to the tremendous campaign by the Hillsborough families who lost loved ones, and who refused to give up their fight for justice, we have the chance to discover the truth about what happened at Orgreave too.