The Scottish referendum is dominating debate right now, but it is wise to recall why that is the case.
The TUC's Congress starts in Liverpool today, and a issue at the top of many minds will be the threat posed by the Conservative Party's new proposals on strike ballots.
These are not just a few bureaucratic obstacles that will make life a bit more difficult for trade unions. Rather they work together to make official strikes close to impossible and will open up trade union activists to increased surveillance by the state.
The new rules should be considered either draconian or absurd. First there has to be a 50% turnout for a strike ballot when many elections to parliament don't achieve that. Second, they have to be postal ballots when the post is moving into history. Third, the admin rules are tightened to give more legal opportunity to challenge any strike. And last those on strike will be subject to considerably more monitoring as if each picket were an enemy of the state.
As Frances says:
The Conservative proposals are .... an attack on our fundamental civil liberties, but it will also act to lower living standards for the many — whether or not they are union members. With these new proposals, the Conservatives seem to found have a simple slogan for the next election — “Keeping wages down for ever”.
And you wonder why some north of the border reject the idea of wanting to be linked to a country where such abuses of freedom are not only proposed but have government backing?
I'm not.
Disclosure: I have undertaken work for the TUC since 2007
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I think Labour are set to lose 46(?) MP’s if Scotland votes yes so on one level the Tories should be in favour of it were it not for their concerns about oil revenue.
I’m inclined to favour the Scots saying ‘yes’ as we need a shake up awfully badly and it will give them a chance to re engage politics with social purpose which has all but disappeared in old Blighty.
This anti strike proposal seems to be more ground preparation for the TTIP.
You may well be right on the last point
I have suggested, more for mischief than as a serious political comment, that the electoral advantage of shifting fifty Labour MPs out of Westminster could be the gift that keeps on giving: every decade, disaffected socialists in the North will campaign to join a free and successful Scotland, and a Conservative Prime Minister with a wobbly majority will see a way of deleting another half-dozen opposition MP’s.
First Northumberland, then Cumbria, then Tyne & Weir, then Lancashire; every one a winner, shoring up the Westminster Conservative majority.
Will it take a century of salami-slicing the disaffected socialist constituencies off to Scotland to draw the border of Greater Caledonia at Solihull? Or at least, fifty years to get as far South as the Jacobite rebellion?
Or will it be done by enclaves, with haggis and chips for sale in Hackney, Haringey and Tower Hamlets, and the saltire fluttering bravely over socialist Town Halls who famously flew the Hammer and Sickle?
Best to laugh while we can: the dark side of the joke is life in Lesser Britain, a locked-down unionless surveillance state where austerity has run its course, and rents have risen past Victorian levels of exploitation, a disenfranchised and malnourished underclass fights for spaces on the work-for-dole schemes, and a shrinking middle class lives in fear.
Of course, we might just have all that with the border at Berwick-on-Tweed.
Whatever happens there is a revolution coming our way
I had thought you more of a Fabian than a revolutionary!
I would hope that we see an upheaval, rather than a revolution.
Nevertheless, this isn’t idle talk; democracy is supposed to provide safety valves to social pressure and corrections to imbalances of power. And, when democracy fails, protest escalates and violece is all but inevitable – we have been fortunate in Europe in that the recent ‘Velvet Revolutions’ against undemocratic governments passed off relatively peacefully.
It’s worth pointing out that those upheavals haven’t all succeeded in replacing corrupt institutions, removing the imbalances of power, and renewing the civic participation of the population in a democratic state.
The Scots have found another ‘safety valve’ against undemocratic government: devolution and the possibility of secession. That upheaval may fail: Scotland is itself a deeply unequal society, with indigenous imbalances of power, and an independent Scotland may become as much a neoliberal rentier state as Lesser Britain – but it might not, and I am much encouraged by the Scots’ engagement in politics. At times it seems that they are a nation of activists, incomprehensible to the political couch-potatoes of suburban England.
I fear the worst outcome will be a narrow ‘No’ vote: that means Devolution’s done and dusted for a generation and the neoliberals – in both the blue-rosetted and the red-rosetted wings of Westminster Conservatism – have free rein over Scotland. That will be a lesson in the value of a safety-valve and representative government: instructive and uncomfortably close to the ‘revolution’ of your metaphor.
How this will play out from a ‘Yes’ vote, for the denizens of Lesser Britain, will be anyone’s guess: my guess will be emigration as the ‘safety valve’.
Of course, an actual revolution – the real thing, burning cities, mob violence and troops given the order to fire – is utterly impossible in an age of pervasive surveillance. In this century, all we’ll get is a kind of ‘Dirty War’ without the shallow graves; all the more reason not to use the R-word, and *quite* the reason to be worried about the powers of surveillance and exclusion that will come to bear on workplace labour activists.
I am, I stress, talking a very peaceful revolution in that all changes
like quite a few Scots have said, if us English didn’t keep voting in the Tories they wouldn’t be that fussed about leaving. as a Yorkshire man i feel their pain. personally i’d like to see the border moved down somewhere just north of Melton Mowbray, with a big metal fence running east to west.
Norfolk has to in the North, I say
As a former trade unionist, I was never a taken in by the Labour Partys rhetoric ( the party of the Workers LOL )the creasy poll climbers, Armani Socialists,climbing on the backs of the Working Man/Woman.There is no representation of the working people its all Corperate TTIP is only the start, Corperate financies reach into the many pockets in political systems UK/EU.Scotland has long known we are not represented in the Political System of the Uk, we will take our leave in 2016 & hope that the Peoples of the rUK wakeup to the Westminster Troughfers HofC/HofL clear it out fully.