Strikes (Continued), Ed Miliband and Perplexing Times

We live in perplexing times.

For instance, I’m on holiday but today my union were on strike. So am I, actually, on strike?

Putting aside the niceties of this tricky theological issue that could well leave me struggling to sleep tonight, I decided not to worry for the moment and joined a rally in support of today’s strikes.

As ever, I experienced the euphoria of marching with other like-minded people. I was moved by the young people who came out in support of their teachers and to remind us of the decimation of youth clubs in Oxfordshire. 

I saw another tee-shirt which I am now desperately searching for: ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs World Tour’. Really have to have that one. 

And I also enjoyed a natter and a laugh with a couple of new friends I’ve met through the Labour Women’s Group and the March for An Alternative.

I also enjoyed learning some new chants. As the demo was predominantly made up of teachers, these were rather more complex than I think any of us were used to: “David Cameron: In Detention. Keep Your Hands Off Our Pensions.” (Still think ‘You Say Cut Back, We Say fight Back’ scans rather better, but still. A++ for creativity.)

But I am worried - and confused, if truth be told - by the line of the Labour leadership. Ed M tells us these strikes are wrong. But when you are dealing with a government that is not listening, what other action is left to working people but to withdraw their labour? And I am worried that Labour is in danger of losing its role as the voice of the Labour movement more broadly defined. If we don’t fulfil that role, who will?

I got home to a late lunch, and watched a bit of television which included an interview with Maurice Glasman, the man behind the other thing that leaves me deeply confused: Blue Labour. I found myself rather liking him, and I particularly warmed to his willingness to talk about low pay and the need for a living wage. So as someone who feels very Red Labour, I now feel even more confused than when I woke up this morning.

As I say, we live in perplexing times.

Spain, Strikes and the Good Society

Ah holidays! The opportunity to take a break from the grind. I’ve just returned from Seville where part of the pleasure of visiting that beautiful city – alongside flamenco, sangria and temperatures of 46 degrees - lay in noting the cultural differences between Spanish and British culture. 

For example: Happy Hour. In Seville – or at least in our hotel – this meant sitting in the piano bar listening to a depressed pianist play melancholic numbers which included – I kid you not – the theme from Schindler’s List. In Britain, Happy Hour – I hardly need tell you – means ‘Cheap Booze’ which you should seek to get down your neck as quickly as possible. 

More significantly, I realised how deeply British culture – or perhaps I mean English culture – has invested in the cult of the individual which lies beneath consumer capitalism. In Spain, there is a feeling of the importance of the collective – be that expressed by the woman who spent ten minutes berating an errant driver for driving through a pedestrian area, or the religious parades where people of all ages get together to celebrate their saint’s day.

Emphasising social relationships is a lesson we in the trade unions might learn from the Spanish. One baking hot afternoon - did I say it hit 46 degrees? - we came across a poster that even my non-existent Spanish could translate. ‘Imagine a society without police, cleaners, teachers, civil servants. The Indispensables. Defend Public Services.’ A brilliant, upbeat poster the TUC would do well to replicate here.    

I’m still on holiday tomorrow, but like many of my colleagues I will be joining a demo in support of the coordinated strikes by teaching unions – my own included – and the PCS. The issue may be pensions, but behind that lies a much bigger question about the kind of society we want to be. The Spanish seem to know where the Good Society lies. For them, it involves recognising we are all part of a bigger whole, and that we must recognise the importance of those who work to make that society a good and supportive one. 

Time for us British to do the same too.  

Draft Blockers and Daft Bloggers

'There is a spectre stalking Europe – the spectre of draft excluder letter boxes.'

Not exactly what Marx and Engels had in mind when drafting the Communist Manifesto I suspect, but it was the phrase that popped into my head as I stuffed labour leaflets through unwilling letterboxes last Sunday morning. Feeling rather like Russell Crowe in Master and Commander, I tried to ignore the wind whipping around my ears, and the increasing limpness of my hair as it took the full force of the rains the skies were chucking down. Ah, Flaming June; the joys of British summertime.

But I digress.

Leaflet deliveries are, I think, the least glamorous of the activist’s arts. Talking to people is invigorating; meetings bring their own subtle pleasures for us militant masochists. Leaflets are irritating, because they invariably won’t go through letterboxes. Damn those modern draft excluder products! They may be ecofriendly, but really. No thought for us propagandists at all. And if we’re talking the perils of spreading the word, dogs loom large too.

Leaflets are vital. They are the most direct way of communicating with the public and the one that Kate, Roger and myself were delivering was a cracker. It included the following stories: the campaign for licensing HMOs more effectively and thus ensuring balanced communities in areas like ours where student accommodation proliferates; a feature that turns the place into a virtual ghost town when the universities are down and can make you feel like you’re in the middle of Glastonbury when they are not. It included a call for green energy (will that mean fewer draft excluder letter boxes, I wonder? I think we should be told). There was also the campaign for a zebra crossing on a busy and dangerous road.

Not glamorous stories, but about the things that matter to people.

At the same time as we were braving the elements, Labour was in the middle of what had the appearance of turning into a classic Labour bust up between the left- and right-wings of the party. In fact, the stories about the Blair-Brown years were probably just the result of a right-wing press desperately trying to divert attention from a series of government u-turns. Even so, Labour’s ‘celebrity’ bloggers – you know who you are - were diving in with their thoughts – positive and negative – about Ed Miliband’s leadership, all building up the temperature, all totally unhelpful.

It drove me mad. The leadership election was months ago and we need to get behind the leader and support and contribute to the policy review. I could bang on and on about why Ed Balls would have been a great leader, but this is old news and now any energy we have should be directed to campaigning in order to ensure the return of a Labour government.

So here’s an appeal to the bloggers of the movement who seem more interested in getting on TV and radio than getting the party back to power. Your concerns may be genuine but if you’ve nothing better to do than fuel fake arguments about the direction of a party which is currently undertaking a listening exercise and taking time to develop the right policies, then I’ve got something you might like to do with all that spare energy. 

I’ve a box of leaflets in my backroom and they won’t deliver themselves.

Refounding Labour: Social Change and the Kingdom of Heaven

I had a church upbringing and while some might resent such an imposition, over the years I have had reason to be very thankful that I did. It nurtured my delight in debate and argument and it fostered my politics. It’s also provided a useful training for negotiating the doctrines, rituals and sub-committees of the Labour Party. I may be a lapsed Methodist – not as glamorous as being a lapsed Catholic, I’ll admit, but it’s nearly as tenacious - but an ability to sit stoically on hard seats in cold church halls runs through my DNA like ‘Charge Em For Playgrounds’ is written on the heart of ‘Sir’ Edward Lister, former chief of Tory Wandsworth Council and now Boris’ Chief of Staff.

Last night I found myself sitting in such a hall on the kind of chair that I can only assume was left over from the time of the Inquisition, discussing Labour’s ‘Refounding Labour’ initiative for revitalising the party.

I’d been excited about this meeting. A chance to discuss future policies and how to form an agenda that will have voters rushing back to the party in droves.

It didn’t quite work out like that. We talked about the difference between members and supporters, how to cultivate the membership, whether councillors should have more say in developing national policy, the relationship between the party and the unions, what conference should be like…

I’m not sure that this kind of discussion is even of the ‘angels dancing on pinheads’ variety. If anything, I suspect the said angels would have left the pinheads to find somewhere more comfortable for a short nap. For afficianados, this sort of thing may be bread and butter, but for those of us keen to challenge the coalition’s divisive and socially unjust policies, this is not going to cut it. 

As a kid I was often frustrated by the church’s tendency to get obsessed with issues of individual piety and internal structures and debates rather than translating the claim that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, rich or poor, male or female into practices that addressed the need for creating a more just and equal society. Talking amongst overselves has always been the Left’s temptation: I’ve got into Twitter in a big way in the last couple of weeks (@bevclack if you've nothing better to do), but it worries me that such a platform might become yet another way of enabling some of us in the Labour party to indulge in this navel-gazing even more.  

What Jesus meant when he talked about ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ has always been hotly debated in the church. Is this a spiritual concept relating to the individual’s inner life and peace? Is it about a better life after death for believers? Or is it a vision of the new, just society that by our actions we can create here-and-now? 

For Labour, the last question is vital. Discussing how to get in more members is all very well, but are we creating a party that is the voice of the marginalised and voiceless in society; that is creating a more just society? We need to be out there, campaigning against a government that won’t even countenance nationalising Southern Cross Care Homes (shame on you, Vince Cable), that is gaily giving money to set up nice schools for the middle classes while shutting youth services and decimating library provision. And at the same time we need the boldness of 1945 when we created the health service and the welfare state to lie at the heart of the policies we develop.

The best part of last night’s meeting related directly to this boldness. Local councillors reported that new social and sheltered housing were being built and opened; concrete signs of that new kingdom that is a result of the decisions of the local Labour council. It’s those actions that warm my heart; it’s that kind of vision that gets me to miss The Archers Omnibus to do some doorstepping on a Sunday morning. (Greater love hath no woman than that, let me assure you.)

If we want a vibrant party we could do no better than start by adopting a very simple activity that lies at the heart of successful churches: welcome people in with a smile, cultivate friendships, and place human beings and relationships at the heart of our values and our campaigning. In refounding itself, Labour must model itself as a community committed to creating a more just society for all. At our best we do this, even in the toughest of circumstances. At our worst, we prefer the security of that safe, pietistic party space. 

Class and the National Portrait Gallery

Break out the champagne! I completed my UCU Equality Training yesterday. More importantly, I also acquired yet another t-shirt, this one with the legend ‘Standing Up for Education’; which, as a friend commented, is ripe with innuendo and only needs the presence of the inimitable Frankie Howerd, saying ‘oo-er missus!’, to be perfect.

Feeling elated by this result (well, t-shirts are hard to come by) and having an hour or two to kill, I thought I’d pop  into the National Portrait Gallery. 

This, dear reader, is where my troubles started.

The NPG is where I spent many a happy hour as a postgrad. Overcome by a wave of nostalgia and the need for a cup of tea (well, actually a loo – oh, the joys of a middle aged bladder!), I was soon there and marvelling at the changes fifteen years since my last visit had brought.

The Gallery had acquired a facelift and was a light and airy space to wander about, but I soon began to feel uneasy.

Now, it may be that that sense of unease was the result of having been immersed in equality issues for the previous eight hours, for I couldn’t help thinking, as I looked at room after room of British faces, of the role class has played and continues to play in British society.

We didn’t talk much about class on the course: a fact that hardly surprised me. Of all the identity issues – sex, gender, race, disability, class – class is the one that tends to be whispered and quickly passed over. To raise the issue of socio-economic inequality and its affects is to be accused of the politics of envy, and, heavens, we don’t want to be accused of envy, do we?

As I moved through the collection with what I like to think of as the graceful movement of a swan rather than the waddle of a duck, I became aware that the collection was dominated by upper class faces whose default expression was one of entitlement and confidence. They were born to rule and had no doubts about their place in society. Post industrial revolution, there appeared more and more middle class faces, proud that they or their parents or grandparents had ‘made it’; occasionally looking smug and self-satisfied.  

Occasionally I’d come across the face of someone from the working classes. Usually these were politicians brought to prominence as representatives of the people. What I found interesting was that these portraits often shared a sadness round the eyes that wasn’t quite obliterated by the success that had brought them to the artist’s studio in the first place. Now, perhaps I’m reading too much into that look, but it seemed to me that there was an understanding in their gaze that life was precarious and that what had been achieved could be quickly stripped away.

What staggered me were how few portraits there were of people from the kind of background that I had or that my school friends had. When I came across one of these fellow travellers, I fell on them with delight: Ramsay Macdonald, Nye Bevan, Ernest Bevin, Harold Wilson, Bill Morris, Mo Mowlam.

If anything, the social mobility that brought these figures to prominence is even less likely today. I wonder if that is because the political class is dominated by people from the middle classes who do not have an intimate knowledge of the complex way in which lack of money informs choices and attitudes. (That might explain why, gulp, I often feel closer to the Conservative MP David Davis - born on a council estate - than Labour politicians brought up in traditional middle class families, whose understanding of such things is academic rather than lived.)

Feeling depressed, I decided to buy a postcard of Ruskin Spear’s brilliant portrait of Harold Wilson, swathed in pipe smoke, inscrutable.

Could I find one? Forget it. If I’d wanted a picture of any royal – even the most obscure - from the past five hundred years I’d be spoilt for choice.  

I don’t get this obsession with the royals. Given that few Brits over the centuries have been royal or even middle class it seems weird we are more interested in them than in the history of the people and the centuries of struggle to achieve some modicum of dignity and respect for those not born to rule or without the privilege that attends to wealth. 

The answer for this collective inertia is probably found in the contemporary collection. From the sixties on, the emphasis was with the celebrity: pop stars and actors, and politicians like Tony Blair who brought the stardust of celebrity to the political world.

I’m worried by this lack of political consciousness. For those of us on the left, the loss of the folk memory that it is possible for the people to change society makes it much more difficult to affect real change in our own time. The structures that shape our culture are not divinely inspired but the result of human action and will. And if we are not to be swept into a future where the failures of the financial system are forgotten and therefore repeated, we need to reconnect with that past and the heroes of that struggle pretty damn quick.