Strikes - Labour Sells The Pass

The Labour Party was formed to support working people: the clue is in the name. It has consistently stood alongside workers in their struggle to gain better pay, shorter hours, paid holidays, maternity leave, equal pay for men and women, and improved working conditions. Its members, MPs and indeed leaders have shown solidarity with those taking industrial action

Oh hang on, I've just flushed my credibility down the pan

Even Shirley Williams - who was one of the founders of the breakaway SDP in the early 1980s - could be seen on the picket lines during the infamous Grunwick dispute. So when the RMT took strike action over pay recently, what would Labour MPs have been expected to do? What would a sensible party leadership have done? What would Nietzsche have done?

Sadly, the current Labour leadership, like a rabbit caught in the glare of right-wing press headlights, and paying more heed to centrist members of the Westminster media bubble than actual working people, does not concern itself with old-fashioned fuddy-duddy nonsense like anything intellectually challenging. Not while it is trying pointlessly to appeal to the tabloid press.

So it was that Keir Starmer and his team issued a diktat telling shadow ministers and the rest of the payroll vote (like PPSs) that standing on an RMT picket line was Streng Verboten. Perhaps someone advising the Labour leader thinks this will stop the Murdoch and Rothermere press shitting on them come the next General Election campaign. Wrong. It won’t.

Worse, some of that shadow payroll vote went and showed solidarity with the strikers anyway. So now they face a jolly severe talking to from the whips (allegedly). And the Murdoch and Rothermere press happily shitting all over them while they howl “LABOUR SPLIT” at their readers. Worse still, voter enthusiasm for Labour will fall as disappointment sets in.

As that went so well, or not, perhaps the Labour high command would stop and think. Not as such: when shadow foreign secretary David Lammy appeared before the inquisition of host Sophie Raworth on BBC Sunday Morning, matters went from bad to worse as he declined to show support for workers at London’s Heathrow Airport about to take strike action.

So the groans of disappointment grew louder, while none of the right-wing press will be giving Lammy, his party leader, or anyone else anywhere near Labour any credit this side of hell freezing over. Ah, the centrists will respond, but Labour has to be electable. No shit, Sherlock: if the voters won’t turn out because you shat on them, Labour still won’t be electable.

On top of that, it was not long before both Starmer and Lammy discovered that The Internet Never Forgets applies to them too: Tweets showing both men on the picket line, showing solidarity with striking workers in the Further Education sector. And just to put the lid on it, there was the Labour leader, from February 2020, telling “From the Wapping picket line to fighting the mine closures and supporting families affected by the P&O dispute, I’ve always been a proud trade unionist”. Which the press will also have seen.

Meanwhile, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has reminded us that her party supports striking rail workers, adding “Just putting this here for anyone feeling in need of a new political home following the Lammy interview on #SundayMorning”. Lammy had scored a spectacular own goal.

And for what? A chorus of approval from the Westminster media bubble? Brownie points from the Guardian and Staggers? A few columns in the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, and the Murdoch Sun? Two papers who will shit all over Labour come the next General Election, no matter how anti-strike and anti-solidarity the party becomes?

You don’t become the next Government merely by telling the country that you’re not bent like the other lot. Because they can figure that out themselves. You do become the next Government by standing for something. Like standing for decent pay and conditions for ordinary working people, rather than meekly accepting the grotesque spectacle of the poor getting poorer while the 1% trouser ever larger pay and bonus packages.

Labour won by-elections like Wakefield (and, let us not forget, retained Batley and Spen) by throwing the kitchen sink at them. That is not possible come a General Election, when all those activists who took all the doorstep abuse in 2019 will be needed to help get the message across and the vote out. Dumping on them while appeasing the right-wing press will not work.

Stop selling out working people. You’re supposed to be the Labour Party.

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