Following the successful TUC rally and parliamentary lobby "Speaking Up For Public Services", Bill was asked to put pen to paper to express his thoughts for The Morning Star...
Public Services...
Our public services are - in every sense of the phrase - a "touch of class"... and so was the spirited TUC “Speaking Up For Public Services” rally and parliamentary lobby on 23rd January.
It was, as Brian Caton of the Prison Officers’ Association rightly said, long overdue. But at last and at least, it was an indicator that movement is saying “enough is enough” – as repeated by many of the General Secretaries lining up to speak – and that our unions really intend to show solidarity with each other in our specific struggles to protect our services. Of course, declaration is an important stage. But now comes the test of reality - of daily practice and of strategic direction. The standing ovation that met Mark Serwotka’s PCS declaration of strike action against job loss needs now to find expression in practical and real ways.
Our strategic direction must be hammered out. To many, the battle for public services is a battle with the New Labour leadership – and of course, immediately, that’s the case. Teachers’ leader Steve Sinnott was right to mock New Labour’s “compulsive obsessive disorder” - their obsession with the private sector - which can only be cured by major treatment by our public sector workers.
But, at the same time, we all know that this is a far more fundamental battle than one simply with the leadership clique in the Labour Party, or for that matter in the Tory Party. The evidence is laid out across Britain and across the globe for us. This is undeniably an 'unreconstructed' class battle.
The workers of the world, to coin a phrase, have fought battles long and hard to establish - even within capitalist societies - publicly owned, publicly funded and publicly delivered services – and indeed publicly owned industries too. But the capitalists of the world never accepted the principle of the public good, preferring their own principle of getting excessively rich, and then richer still. They want ‘the public sector’ back in their world of profit – and have used – and will use - a whole range of strategies and vehicles to achieve it. Thus, in the 80s, Thatcherism. Then, from 1997, New Labour’s Blatcherism. They are the symptom of the problem – not the problem itself. So, what, after Blair, will come next?
New Labour may decide to continue to spit in the face of working people. Or it might be that with enormous determination, at the eleventh hour for the Party, the workers and unions it once sought to represent within capitalism’s corridors of power will begin the process of reclaiming it. We must do all we can to ensure the right outcome – it’s an important struggle, with outcomes and lessons of its own. But whatever its outcome, it won’t stop the international and domestic assault on public services – whether that assault is headed up at any one time by a domestic political party, by the privatising World Trade Organisation’s GATs legal framework, by the re-emergence of the European Union Constitution, by the neoliberal “Lisbon Strategy”, by the malign influence of the World Bank – or even by what Blair and Brown delicately call the use internationally of “both soft and hard power” – ie economic and political blackmail dressed up as diplomacy… or war led by the USA.
There is a vile thread that runs through the experience meted out to working people – from the closure of a local hospital, through the marketisation of schools, through the axing of Civil Service jobs, to the attacks on sovereign nations and people in the name of “regime change”. That thread is the drive for profit – and so our public services are under attack.
Too simplistic? Consider my own sector of public service – state education. All over the world, in developing nations, in the USA, in new EU “Accession States”, in Britain and the rest of Europe, there is a drive to fragment, marketise and privatise education. And Tony Blair is not everywhere. Just people like him - prepared, even enthusiastic, to do the bidding of what T&G General Secretary Tony Woodley referred to as the ‘fat cats’ – too nice a term really for the capitalist class. Global spending on education exceeds one thousand billion dollars. It covers the employment of 50 million teachers, the potential education of a billion students in hundreds of thousands of educational establishments and buildings. As Education International, the worldwide organisation of education unions, says, “Some see this immense bloc as a dream market for future investment… In the wake of other major public services which have been subject to extensive privatisation and deregulation, public education is increasingly being targeted by predatory and powerful entrepreneurial interests. The latter are aiming at nothing less than its dismantling by subjecting it to international competition.” Thus PFI, “Academies”, Trust Schools, marketisation, business dominated Local Education Partnerships etc undermine our communities of primary and secondary comprehensive schools, and our local authorities. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
A very recent report shows again that class is a reality very much alive in the experience of British people. Of course the media use it to launch their tired old knockabout pieces about “the middle class”, “the upper class” and “the lower class”, and try to get us hot under the collar about whether you call the toilet a lavatory, and what knife and fork you should use at the opera.
But the drive to privatisation, and the determination to resist it and renew demands for public ownership are real examples of the real class divide – here in Britain and throughout the world. As that divide finds its expression in struggle, the New Labourites will have to be dealt with. Workers will struggle to reclaim the party that our unions founded – and will either celebrate their success or need to move on to new forms of political organisation. The outcome will of course be very significant.
But, either way, the essential class struggle will continue. You can’t simply wish or argue the destructiveness of capital away. We need to build the widest, broadest, strongest possible coalition of people and organisations, locally and nationally, around our trade union movement – a coalition to defend our hospitals and schools, to resist job losses, to stop profiteering from services, to attack the corruption of the market place, to demand not only “re-nationalisation”, but new nationalisation of our industries. We are all working class – and the capitalist class are out to rob us – again – unless we stop them.
The expressions of determination and solidarity at the TUC Public Services lobby and rally must be reflected in real day-to-day and longer term strategies and activity. All the unions need to look forward with a realistic assessment of the size of the problem, and a strategy for winning, not just protesting.
Those unions that took an active part in the rally, but returned the next day to ‘Social Partnership’ with a government that chooses to represent the other side of the class divide are kidding themselves. Those that tolerate the continuation of Blatcherism and New Labourism in the continuing vain hope that “things can only get better” need to get real. Those that see some salvation within the neoliberal capitalist club that is the European Union need to think again. By fostering such ‘partnership’ illusions they weaken our potential for success.
Only by recognising the true nature of the problem and enemy we’re up against, by relying on our members, by organising ourselves from the grass roots up, and by building strong alliances in our communities will we develop the strength to see the battle through. Every public building and service, every hospital and school must become a fortress of organisation against the attacks.
It’s a big job, particularly starting from where we are. Is the movement both up for it, and up to it? I think we are!