The first was to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. This initiated me into a lifetime of grief that utterly refuted the utilitarian assumption that our nature is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. They say it’s the hope that kills you, but I never got that far. Spurs offer me an unmediated Proustian route back to my nine-year-old self. Staring stupefied at the telly, Arsenal scoring, watching their fans celebrating, hearing the commentator say “that was against the run of play”, followed by a sensation of mouth-drying bereft sickness that flows from the heart, and then makes its way like mercury through my veins and culminates in a paralyzed nausea that is my intimation of eternity. Come on you Spurs!

The second object of unquestioned fealty was to the Jewish God and people. Christmas is not really the time to describe what this has been like. All I can say is that it is the very opposite of the American Constitution; the “pursuit of happiness” does not describe the experience at all.

And then there is Labour.

It is important to note that the party used to be a source of happiness to me. I was 13 in 1974, when it felt like we won the Double, winning two elections in a year. I was a supporter. “There’s only one Harold Wilson”, and “Barbara Castle, Barbara Castle, we’ll support you ever more”, was about my level. As with Spurs and Jews, I thought that we were good and the others were bad and that was all there was to it.

And then Margaret Thatcher won the election of 1979, and it felt like the end of the world. There is a Jewish fast called Tisha Bov, where we read the Book of Lamentations and remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht. They all happened on the same day — and that is what the 3 May 1979 felt like to me. And it seemed to go on forever. It was like watching Arsenal win the Double for 18 consecutive seasons. And I couldn’t avoid watching it on the telly, on repeat, all the time. All our industries were transferred to the care of the Chinese Communist Party, the French controlled our nuclear power plants, and my beloved working class were sent to work as Ronald McDonald or consigned to call centers. “Everything holy is profaned and all that is solid melts into air”. That’s the only sentence from Marx I can really get behind. And that’s how it felt to me. The Ayatollah Khomeini said, also in 1979, that “everywhere was Karbala and every day was Ashura.” Well, at least we had that in common.

And then New Labour came along to intensify the work of Thatcher. “Things can only get better.” No. There was nothing true about that statement. At any level, as we now know.

I studied history at university, and the history of the labor movement became my Mastermind area of expertise. I made it my calling to understand what had gone so badly wrong. The deeper I went into the archives, the more clear it became to me that the labor movement and party, uniquely in Europe, were not a social-democratic secular party but a genuine broad church of previously estranged Christian traditions. It is often said that Labour was more Methodist than Marxist, but it cannot be stressed enough that it was also more Catholic than Communist.

The fundamental basis of the original Labour credo was that the free market did not create the world. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is the first sentence of the Holy Scripture. Without following Aquinas too closely, we can define Creation as “human beings” and “nature”. The definition of capitalism is the commodification of both. It is the exploitation of human beings and nature in order to turn them into commodities of fluctuating price in competitive markets in order to generate quick and maximum profit. That is the definition of capitalism. Pope Leo XIII called this a system of “modern slavery” and Saint John Paul II wrote of a “structure of sin”. It desecrates the human status of the person and most particularly the worker. The highest return at the greatest speed is its objective. The status of a worker as more than a commodity blocks that return. Capitalism is like diarrhea: it liquidates solidarity.

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The second truth is that the state did not create the world either. The preservation of the sacred status of human beings and nature is the primary role of politics. Subsidiarity is the best way to temper the Pharaonic tendency of centralized state power. Sovereignty is necessary to resist the domination of capital, subsidiarity is required to resist the tyranny of the state, and all this is predicated on democratic solidarity as the fundamental ethic of society. Cain made a very big mistake. He was his brother’s keeper; we all are. This is the political position of Blue Labour in British politics, and it is based entirely on Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus.

The fundamental teaching of Catholic social thought is that tyranny is a real threat in the economy and the state, and that only a democracy founded upon solidarity, the sharing of the burdens of this hard and merciless life, can generate a virtuous politics. It does so through domesticating the demonic energy of the market and the state. Solidarity, status, subsidiarity and stewardship are the four legs of this table of wisdom.

It is far too rarely acknowledged that, alone in Europe, Labour succeeded in generating a workers’ movement that was not divided between Catholic and Protestant, or between secularists and believers. Instead, the movement itself provided the common life within which these potentially antagonistic forces could combine in pursuit of a common good. In cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, as well as London and Birmingham, this was an extraordinary feat.

“Common good” politics served the movement, and the country, very well. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Labour tradition, as opposed to social democracy in Europe, which was far more explicitly secularist in form. The non-established churches, for reasons of historical self-interest, were committed to freedom of association and expression.

The churches that nurtured the labour movement were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from state power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not defined by money or power alone. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, the rights of freeborn Englishmen through the Protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands. The currents came together in the labour movement. They also provided a national connection, that has proved durable, until now, within the labour movements in Scotland and Wales.

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The London dock strike of 1889 is a classic expression of the labour movement in action. The docks were a crucial part of the functioning of the British Empire, and they were staffed by 100,000 poorly-paid and often hungry dockers. Many of the dockers were Irish and many of them local, but an alliance was brokered by the Catholic and dissenting churches. The dockers coordinated themselves through labour representation committees, new institutions within which leaders were elected, strategy discussed and actions planned.

On 14 August that year, the strikes began. The courage of the strikers was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious, for the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub. As such, the Government threatened the strikers with not only the police, but the force of the navy and army. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, were held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation. But it was difficult for the dockers’ employers to depict the strikers, who were dignified and disciplined, as an undisciplined rabble. It helped that Cardinal Manning, accompanied by the Salvation Army band, led them on their march. The dockers, in the end, were victorious. They had built a successful political coalition on the basis of stable employment and wages: a great founding achievement of labour politics.

But chaos was still to come: the sheer ferocity of the market storm within which the Labour Party was born in 1900; the scale of the dispossession, of property, status and assets, generated by the creation of the first-ever free market in labor and land; the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands; the scrapping of apprenticeship; and the eviction and proletarianization of the peasantry. All this meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other.

In the burials given by co-operative societies, we find another example of the importance of the labour movement: dignity in death underwritten by solidarity in life. The pauper’s grave was one of the most fearful fates of dispossession. But co-operative societies provided a solution that enabled the deceased, poor though they were, to be buried respectably. The solution was subscription-paying membership, co-operation with chapels and churches, and the practices of mutuality and reciprocity. Altogether, these co-operative burials showed reverence for life as well as dignity in death. They were drawn not from a secular or modernist ethic, but from traditional assumptions and practices. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. Workers called their ideology socialism and their party Labour.

Jesus said that many are called, but few are chosen. With those words in mind, it is sometimes quipped that many are cold, but few are frozen. But such a state of affairs cannot be Labour’s ultimate goal. The desiccated utilitarian administration of gradated levels of pain was always the enemy. In contrast, the original credo was that Christ is King. Incarnated mercy and grace, kindness and truth. It is better to give than to receive. Fellowship is life. Love thy neighbor. Labour was once a biblical party, and must become one once more if it is to avoid a progressive death. I am my brother’s keeper. We all are.

In order to be truly radical, Labour must recognize its debt to Jesus Christ. In this bleak midwinter, we must give him our heart.

The 21st century narrative couldn’t be more different. To mark the National Health Service’s 70th birthday, in 2018, Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds wrote a new preface to his biography of its architect, the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan. Like most contemporary paeans to the NHS, Thomas-Symonds’ lavishes praise on its staff, both past and present. “Those who work in our National Health Service have made it what it is today,” he wrote, “and we should always thank them for their remarkable commitment to public service, often carried out in the most difficult of circumstances.”

This view of the NHS, which turns 75 this week, is even more pervasive now than it was then. During the pandemic, politicians, journalists, and patients commended the devotion of doctors with such regularity that it became cliché. Most discussions of healthcare in the UK present NHS workers as heroes, or at the very least unusually committed to their jobs. The recent news that doctors will be taking industrial action this month has been framed by the sympathetic press as a difficult decision made in the interest of patients’ safety. Supporters on social media argue that the medical profession is driven not by personal greed, but by its unwavering commitment to the British public. In February, Jeremy Corbyn repeated a familiar claim: “Doctors devote their lives to the needs of others.” Medicine is not like other professions, the story goes; working for the NHS is different from any other job. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t do it for the money, they do it because they care.

All this seems complimentary. The people praising NHS doctors are sincere, often expressing gratitude for care they’ve personally received. But the insistence that doctors are saints actually does a lot of damage. Not only does it harm medics themselves, it also does a disservice to patients.

The origin of the myth lies in the 19th century, when doctors launched something of a PR campaign to give their image a dramatic makeover. They marketed themselves as different from the quacks with whom they were competing for patients in a busy medical marketplace. Trainee physicians were reminded perpetually that the medical “calling” was very different from that of other professions. In 1890, Governor J. Proctor Knott issued the doctoral address to the graduating class at the Kentucky School of Medicine: “No other calling,” he said, “demands a more absolute self-negation than the one you have chosen. No other vocation — not even the sacred ministration of religion itself — requires a more constant exercise of the higher faculties of the human mind, or a more earnest devotion of the purer and nobler attributes of the human soul.”

By the end of the century, medical organisations had begun to describe their work using the romantic language of heroism. In 1900, surgeon Frederick Treves spoke at the annual meeting of the BMA, using military rhetoric to describe his profession: “So as one great surgeon after another drops out of the ranks his place is rapidly and imperceptibly filled, and the advancing line goes on with the still same solid and unbroken front.”

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Despite these efforts, the poor reputation of doctors survived into the 20th century. In 1937, A. J. Cronin published his novel The Citadel — an attack on self-serving healthcare professions. He particularly targeted those at the top of the medical hierarchy, the “grandees” whose driving concern was money, and who encouraged illnesses in their “wealthy, idle, hypochondriac, and mostly female patients”. The Citadel was an extraordinary success, selling over 150,000 copies in its first few months. Clearly, it struck a chord with the British public.

Just over a decade later, on 5 July 1948, the NHS was founded. It did a huge amount for the medical profession’s reputation, though not initially. The BMA was one of the most vociferous opponents of the proposed NHS, not wanting medics to be relegated to the status of “salaried” workers. “The medical profession is,” declared the BMA, “opposed to any form of service which leads directly or indirectly to the profession as a whole becoming full-time salaried servants of the State.” Nye Bevan had to “stuff their mouths with gold” to get them on board: he allowed consultants to continue taking on private patients as well as NHS ones.

The mythical status of the NHS we recognise today didn’t emerge until later, in the early Seventies — in part due to the decade’s economic and political pressures, which prompted people to campaign in defence of the welfare state in ways they hadn’t felt they needed to before. The myth was also a product of subtle but deliberate NHS propaganda, in the form of TV hospital dramas, nurse recruitment films, and medical romance fiction.

As the health service grew in popularity, the public image of medics also slowly improved. But in 1978, their freshly-minted reputation was put to the test, when NHS doctors first went on strike over pay and working conditions. Indeed, some doctors were opposed to their colleagues taking industrial action, because they thought it compromised their high-minded principles. A consultant surgeon wrote in 1976: “Doctors have to decide whether medicine is to remain a profession with ethics or to become an industry with strictly regulated hours of work.” He criticised the strikes by arguing that the withdrawal of services would “make nonsense eventually of any idea of vocation”, which was “over and above job satisfaction”. That same year, another consultant wrote to the government to argue against industrial action, which had “immediately put the doctors on a par with the trade unions and other workers”. These ideas are still around. In 2016, the Telegraph argued against industrial action by junior doctors because their “vocation in life” is “to care”. Imagine saying the same thing of the striking civil servants.

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Then again, it does make sense for healthcare professionals to think of themselves in these terms. Many medics really do feel a sense of devotion to their profession and to their patients. They do often take an oath. And if doctors couldn’t cling onto the idea of exceptionalism, would any of them stay in the job? During the height of the pandemic, doctors and nurses were working impossible hours, under extreme pressures, and the very real risk of serious illness or death loomed over them. One in ten health workers in England during the pandemic had suicidal thoughts. There is still a palpable crisis of wellbeing among NHS staff, pay has stagnated, and the number of doctors fleeing the UK in search of better jobs elsewhere has sky-rocketed. And Rishi Sunak’s plan to boost the workforce, announced on Friday, seems squeamish of acknowledging the true challenges to retention. Is it any wonder that doctors try to find meaning in a romantic ideal of their work, rather than just focusing on the day-to-day drudgery and dehumanisation that so often characterises employment in the NHS?

But politicians who characterise doctors as saints often do so to deny their right to industrial action. They don’t need better pay or working conditions, or so the argument goes, because their jobs are so meaningful. Members of the public who buy into the myth, even if they are well-meaning, obscure the bleak state of the NHS. During the pandemic, we clapped for health workers because there was little else we could offer them. You could text CLAP to 70507 to donate £5 to NHS charities, knowing that the service itself was inadequately funded. The public was unable to provide the NHS staff with the protective equipment they so desperately needed — but it could tell them they were heroes.

Doctors cannot live on saintliness alone. Poor pay and conditions means it is often hard for medics to stay professional — let alone heroic. How can you devote yourself to patients, or even show them compassion, when you can only speak to them for seven minutes at a time? In 2022, 51 million GP appointments lasted less than five minutes. 94% of NHS doctors surveyed said short appointment times put patients at risk and one in three GPs admitted they have failed to properly diagnose patients due to time constraints.

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We also need to recognise that some doctors are bad at their jobs, no matter how much time and money they’re given — just as some teachers and civil servants are also no good. But the medical profession’s glowing reputation makes it hard to confront this fact. While doctors are frequently targets of abuse, sometimes they treat their patients poorly. Not all doctors are competent, and their vaunted position in today’s society can make it a lot harder for patients to have their complaints heard, for abuses to be taken seriously, and lasting improvements to be made. In 2013, the NHS Ombudsman found that patients were often “too frightened to complain” about problems with their care.

Doctors are just people. If we just thought of them not as heroes but simply as skilled professionals doing their jobs — sometimes well, sometimes not so well, sometimes in impossible circumstances — we could level out the power dynamic between them and patients, making it easier for the latter to get their voices heard. Doctors, too, would be better equipped to advocate for themselves. And the NHS as a whole might be forced to stop falling back on the myths of medicine’s heroism, stop relying on its workforce’s goodwill, and reckon with the radical reforms needed to make the service fit for purpose in its 75th year. Some doctors might be reluctant to let go of their romantic ideals. But surely a slight drop in social status is a price worth paying for a comfortable working life?

But then my wife and I had kids in the expensive California city of Oakland, and we sent them to our local government school (“public” school, in the US). I saw that, rather than applying dubious theories from their training — “child-centred” teaching inspired by John Dewey, Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” — teachers were mainly using age-old methods to convey mandated curriculum to restless children. And I learned that many of them, especially younger teachers without spouses, or divorced teachers raising children of their own, were sharing bedrooms in group houses to cut down on living expenses, commuting huge distances from more affordable cities, or even working second jobs.

I was also seeing research showing that the skill of individual teachers was a key variable in both the subject learning and life outcomes of students. I decided to think of our local teachers’ unions as a sort of guild, securing a measure of agency and public dignity and better pay for members of a maligned profession, which might help schools attract talented people to their classrooms, and keep them there. In any case, we were part of the same community now, working together to see our kids through their school years. Some of us — the teachers — needed better pay to have decent lives. Their 2019 strike thus seemed pretty defensible. Despite the learning it interrupted and the inconvenience it caused us, no one in my world of school parents opposed it.

We parents aren’t feeling so communal about the Oakland teachers’ strike of 2023. The strike, which ran from 5 May to 15 May, wasn’t about the thing we were used to feeling invested in and guilty about — teachers’ pay. The parties (the teachers’ union and the Oakland school district) were close to agreement on a pay increase when the strike was called. What they continued to disagree on was a set of broad demands that, the union said, it was making on behalf of the “common good”.

These demands sounded like an odd fit within a contract negotiation. Our kids had been kept home from school not because teachers were being ill-paid or disrespectfully treated, but because the leaders of their union had some theories about homelessness, social welfare, climate change and, of course, racism, along with some conspicuously swollen ambitions about how much policymaking power they might wrest from elected officials.

The two most newsworthy of the union’s demands, and the most noteworthy to parents wondering how long their kids would be out of school, concerned racial reparations and environmental justice. From what we were hearing, the teachers wouldn’t return to work until our schools were remade into places where racial reparations are paid out and environmental justice is finally done.

The “reparations” demand is, at once, confusing and revealing. It’s confusing because, in its details, it doesn’t mean what Americans think of when they think of racial reparations. It’s revealing because it shows the teachers’ union going the way of other progressive organisations in recent years. Instead of protecting the material and professional interests of our beloved teachers, the activist leaders of their union have taken up a new mission — impressing each other with radical gestures.

What the term “reparations” signifies in the United States is a tough national reckoning with the moral, material, legal and political injustice of slavery, in the form of generous payouts to black Americans. As a political issue, it is profoundly unresolved. But what the teachers’ union calls racial reparations is, along with a proposal to let homeless students live in empty school buildings, the most palatable part of its common-good vision. What the union means by reparations — according to a detailed description of its common-good demands, which it published in December — is that the school district would turn schools with large black populations into “Black thriving community schools”, where food, healthcare and other social services are provided to needy families.

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Now, the idea of community schools is an old one in education circles. If it turned out that such schools were an effective way to educate poor children and deliver social services to their families, Oakland parents would probably support them, even given the racially specific framing of “Black thriving” (though we’d still object to using them as a reason to hold a teacher strike). We recognise that the overlap between black and poor populations in our city is large. And the fact that politics in Oakland — birthplace of the Black Panthers — is always also racial politics, is a shock to no one who lives here. Indeed, the vernacular rawness and bluntness of Oakland’s racial politics is one of the many things I found refreshing about the city when I moved here in 2004. Feeling all my arguments from “colour blindness” fall away was both a settling-in and a liberation. I lived in Oakland now.

In this context, casting the “Black thriving community schools” proposal as reparations is almost perversely divisive, especially for a teacher organisation ostensibly dependent on the support of parents, including non-black, politically moderate parents. In conversations about the strike I had with such parents, the word came up several times as a bemused question: “Reparations?”

To Americans, “reparations” conjures political scenarios of endless accusation and evasion, anger and resentment and guilt chasing each other in a circle, a titanic policy debate that will never end because it never really starts. This total impasse of national deliberation is not what parents want to imagine as a sticking point in the contract negotiation that’s keeping their kids home from school. And it really wasn’t. “Reparations” was just a word they chose.

But why would our embattled teachers’ union package its proposal for community schools — already ambitious, as both power-grab and policy, but not without its moral appeal — in the divisive and discouraging language of reparations? Why would it risk the support of parents by seeming to foist on them a sudden resolution of the great American racial reckoning, from the private setting of a contract negotiation, when what they were really proposing was feeding poor families and letting them see a nurse at their kids’ school?

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I wasn’t present when the union forged this document, so I can’t say for sure. But I have a theory. Activists within the teachers’ union chose the language of reparations not for its denotative accuracy, nor for the crucial support it might add to its negotiating position, both of which it subverts, but to impress each other and challenge – and, perhaps even, cow — their less fervent colleagues.

We’ve watched this pattern repeat itself, especially since the George Floyd protests of 2020: organisations dominated in their leadership by a core of activists, or highly sensitive to the sort of problematic publicity that activists can generate for them, having their historic missions erased and rewritten according to the internal dynamics of progressive cadres — pathological status contests in which no one wants to appear less extreme than the most extreme person.

In these settings, terms such as “reparations” work as memes, easily permeating a symbolic system that offers very little friction or resistance to their movement. This is surely why the union’s list of common-good demands includes other terms that are faddish in progressive circles, but entirely outside either the real classroom mission of school teachers or the proper negotiating brief of a teachers’ union, nor particularly accurate as names for what the teachers were actually seeking.

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Under the politically exciting term “environmental justice” — another red flag for parents worried their teachers were taking on messy fights that would keep their kids out of school — the union demanded that “all student learning areas […] be independently climate controlled, ventilated and weatherised using safe and green technologies”. So, what our striking teachers meant by the provocative and pragmatically fraught term “environmental justice” was… air conditioning

When we parents learnt that our teachers were in fact striking over massive and intractable societal problems, we were perhaps justified in wondering how such a strike could possibly end. The teachers weren’t willing to budge on their “equity” demands. Rumours circulated that the school year was over. Summer would be starting a month early. Few of us knew what was really at stake. We’d only heard the news stories, which dealt in generalities. We hadn’t read the online documents that said reparations for slavery meant meals and medical checkups at some schools, and environmental justice meant better insulation and stronger fans in classrooms.

Still, the teachers did stage a strike, and the strike was about a set of grievances so novel and abstract it’s hard to understand them as grievances. Now that the strike is over, the union’s ostensible grievances seem more like plans. They certainly have some big ideas about how the schools, indeed the city, ought to be run. And they seem willing to strike again if our actually elected officials don’t do as they wish, or hand them the power to do it themselves.

On their own, in their scale and reach, these novel and ambitious plans violate the implicit agreement that parents make with their unionised teachers, whose work-stoppages they support and even encourage, despite the expense and inconvenience and learning-loss they result in. We parents do this on the grounds that teachers are joined with us in an educational project that is no less urgent or dignified for being confined to the teaching of humble things like reading and maths, which requires good teachers who are paid well, and which the schools find hard enough already.

More alienating is the strong sense that these plans emerged from a hermetic and vaguely unhealthy process, an esoteric set of deliberative pressures peculiar to progressive “spaces”, as these spaces have been rewired in recent years. It will be an ominous feeling for Oakland parents, as the term for the new contract moves toward another crisis of negotiation, to know that the future design of their public schools, and their future ability to send their kids to them, could be determined by a further set of ideological gambits by progressive activists — and by the larger number of people who will go along with them, no matter how crazy they sound.

There’s also some lesser inconvenience to what the media calls the public, but it doesn’t usually last for long. A lot of cleaners and shelf-stackers have to put up with the inconvenience of being poor for years on end, whereas some stockbrokers are enraged by a mere two or three days of cancelled trains. The public is a mythical entity, apparently quite distinct from nurses, postmen, railway workers, junior barristers and the like. These people cause social disruption, and thus can’t be members of the public. Members of the public are the objects of such disruption, not the agents of it. A CEO is a member of the public but an ambulance driver is not.

Strikes are double-edged swords, which hurt those who deploy them. When a manager sacks or disciplines an employee, only the employee suffers, whereas workers who take industrial action may have to diminish their already slim resources in order to try to increment them. Strikes are also purely negative strategies, and trade unions largely defensive bodies. We’re a long way from peasants with pitchforks marching on the lord’s castle. Bosses have a number of positive ways of exercising power over their employees: firing them, slashing their pay, cutting their tea breaks, imposing longer hours, speeding up their work and so on. Unions, by contrast, have the single option of withdrawing their labour, which is hardly a revolutionary move. Like those who practise civil disobedience, all they can do is take a stand and cry “Enough!”, aware that they will then be travestied as wreckers and hooligans who are holding the country to ransom.

Their behaviour is not just unprincipled but unpatriotic. Theirs is a strike against the community itself, a case hard to maintain when a lot of the community are also brandishing banners. To walk away from your workbench is to be a bully and a blackmailer. Simply by sitting on your hands, rather than by storming the Treasury or kidnapping merchant bankers, you become an object of odium, not least to the affluent elite whose profits you are putting in peril. Charles Dickens travelled to Preston in the mid-19th century to observe an industrial strike at close quarters, and wrote admiringly of the reasonableness and decency of the working people involved in it. He then produced a novel called Hard Times, which contains one of the most lurid caricatures of trade unionism in Victorian England.

Nobody objects to the right to withhold one’s labour; it’s only when it starts to be effective that people fire off letters to the Telegraph. Moves by strikers to lend their cause more impact — linking up different struggles, for example, or striking at certain key moments — are regarded as seizing an unfair advantage, as though it’s bad form to overtake another runner in a marathon. By contrast, stockpiling coal to prepare for a miners’ strike, as Margaret Thatcher did, is simple common sense. The ideal, surely, is to have a strike which has no effect whatsoever, rather like having a baby that never bawls or a brand of chocolate that is both delicious and slimming.

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Few civil rights have been at once so respected in theory and abhorred in practice. The first question a TV journalist tends to ask isn’t “What’s the cause of the dispute?” but “How can we stop it?” There’s an entrenched assumption that strikes, like salt or smoking, are bad in themselves — an assumption not shared by those who might benefit enough from them to switch the heating back on from time to time. You can’t ban strikes because that’s what fascist societies do, but you can’t stomach them either. Fifty years ago, it was customary to decry trade unions as too powerful; but as successive governments have bound them legislatively hand and foot, they have deprived themselves in the process of this reason for harassing them. Not that it was ever a plausible argument in the first place: the muscular capacity of trade unions is nothing compared to the power of capital.

The history of the British working-class movement is not one of wreckage and vandalism. The greatest wave of social protest in the 19th century, the Chartists, worked within the law to press for a set of reasonable reforms of the parliamentary system, almost all of which are now in operation despite being haughtily rejected at the time. Some decades later, the Suffragettes, in spite of being beaten, bludgeoned and force-fed in prison, outmatched the labour movement in their militancy. The General Strike of 1926 lasted for only nine days. From the Peterloo massacre to the dockers’ strike of 1898, there was no such reticence on the part of the British state. Instead, there is a sordid history of gagging, police and military violence, imprisonment, transportation and repressive legislation, the last of which, along with occasional outbreaks of state violence, survives to this day.

Even so, the feeling lingers that trade unionism is essentially archaic: an embarrassing hangover from the industrial past, a brake on modernisation, a throwback to the bad old days of class war. (Demanding higher wages is class warfare; refusing them is nothing of the sort.) The idea is that for all the bluster of the union bosses, they are fundamentally conservative creatures. But a dose of conservatism is just what we need. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin remarked that revolution isn’t a runaway train; it is the application of the emergency brake. He meant that it was global capitalism which is bucking out of control, and which needs to be restrained before it ruins too many lives. Working-class militants in Victorian Britain were often denounced as anarchists, but the truth is just the opposite.

What they called for was more state intervention, not less, to protect children and paupers and textile workers. The real anarchist is a market-driven society in which nobody is in charge, not even those who gather at Davos each year. (It’s appropriate that Davos is also the location for Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, set in a sanatorium in which everyone is desperately sick.) When it comes to climate change, it is the Left who are the preservationists and the Masters of the Universe who are the vandals. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it can get away with it and if it is profitable for it to do so. Anyone who sees this as empty sloganising should take a look at food banks in the civil service, not to speak of the continuing devastation of the planet. We still haven’t thrown the brake on the runaway train.

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By Terry Eagleton

There is a curious belief that social disruption is a bad thing in itself. Those who run the Miss World competition took this view of the feminists who noisily interrupted it some years ago, even though their protest was the only interesting aspect of the show. The young man who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and turned himself instantly into a global icon was being politically disruptive, rather like the young women of Iran today. As a school student in Manchester, I saw Jewish men and women with yellow stars stitched on their sleeves lie down in the road to block a march by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists through a largely black area of the city. Social disruption is not only tolerable but indispensable.

It can, however, be domesticated, as it is in the figure of the Shakespearian Fool. Fools and jesters exist to tell their royal masters unacceptable truths, but wrap them up in riddle and paradox to make them more palatable. Their role is to show how everyone around them is playing a role. The difference is that the Fool knows he is playacting whereas the others don’t. But if mocking and scolding others is part of your official brief, it becomes rather more tolerable. “There’s no harm in an allow’d Fool,” remarks Olivia in Twelfth Night. You’re only doing your job, as they say. The social system is shaken but not stirred to insurrection. This institutionalised form of rebellion lives on in British politics in the form of the Parliamentary Labour Party, or more generally His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Trade unions are more than just a defence against exploitation. The labour movement has traditionally seen itself as offering an alternative form of life to what we have at present, one based on cooperation rather than competition, solidarity rather than individualism. If it is engaged in the present, it also prefigures a different kind of future. How do we stop strikes? By the kind of redistribution of resources which will make them unnecessary. Otherwise we’ll carry on with the same old antithesis of private wealth and public squalor.

Recollections of an earlier Conservative government’s failed effort to take on the unions are a bit foggier, however. Yet the failure of Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act 1971 might provide some caution to the Conservative’s anti-union bullishness. They might also set out an alternative path to Keir Starmer’s non-committal timidity towards industrial action.

On 14 June 1970, the reigning World Cup champions England squandered a 2-0 lead over West Germany to lose 3-2 in extra time. Four days later, the Labour Party saw its 98-seat majority vanish before its eyes. For both England and Labour, the glow of their 1966 victories had finally been extinguished.

The Labour prime minister Harold Wilson spent the following day packing away his personal belongings in 10 Downing Street. His wife Mary described the exit as “barbarous”. Crowds had gathered outside Downing Street shouting “Out! Out! Out!”, but Wilson could not go immediately to Buckingham Palace to resign because the Queen was enjoying a day at Ascot. To drown out the jeers, Wilson played The Seekers’ “The Carnival Is Over” again and again on his record player.

When the new Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, entered Downing Street, he had two overriding missions. One was to bring Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC); the other was to crush the trade unions. The picture of trade union strength in 1970 was quite different from today. About half of British workers were in unions, compared to under a quarter now. In 1970, nearly 11 million working days in Britain were lost to strikes, more than any time since the General Strike of 1926. In contrast, less than a quarter of a million days were lost to strikes in 2019, the final full year of data before the pandemic.

Nor were those in the past solely aimed at Conservative government; strike action plagued. The final years of Wilson’s reign. The vast majority of these strikes were “unofficial” — that is to say, they were called without a ballot of members. Instead, a show of hands at a union meeting or the branch executive committee would be used as the mandate for a walk out.

The Employment Secretary Barbara Castle had tried to curb these actions. A trade unionist herself, Castle also wanted to update trade union rights, which were still relying on legal protections passed in 1906. Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, was intended to provide a charter of rights for unions, while also imposing certain legal responsibilities. When she presented the proposals in a secret meeting to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), however, she was met with stony silence. She later compared her efforts to win support for her reforms as “like trying to win the votes of undertakers for a recipe for immortality”.

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Once in office, Edward Heath was convinced that he could achieve what Labour failed to do. He would not only propose many of the punitive provisions outlined in In Place of Strife, but he would go further. He would establish a National Industrial Relations Court, which would have the power to grant injunctions to block strikes deemed to be injurious. It also banned the closed union shop, which had been a key Labour Party conviction (later abandoned by the Labour Party to align with European law, which forbids them).

When the Industrial Relations Bill was announced to the House of Commons in December 1970, Heath sat on the frontbenches grinning like “a Cheshire cat on a hot tin roof”, as Simon Jenkins put it. Heath thought he had forced the Labour Party into a corner. Labour would be forced either to repudiate its previous reforms and look hypocritical, or to oppose the legislation and look like it was in the pocket of the unions.

Heath’s clever scheme would backfire massively. The first thing Heath had not properly anticipated was both the skill and the scale of the opposition to the bill. It took seven months for the Government to push the bill through Parliament. In that time, it was met by ferocious resistance from Labour MPs, with the normally avuncular Willie Whitelaw being denounced as a “fascist” by Labour MPs in the House of Commons. Union activists took to the streets in enormous displays of solidarity.

To the surprise of many, Harold Wilson asked Barbara Castle to lead the charge against Heath’s trade union bill. While constantly subject to the charge of hypocrisy, Castle outlined the differences between her failed proposals and the Conservatives’. To add credibility to her arguments, Harold Wilson brought Michael Foot — doyen of the party’s Left — onto the frontbenches. Ever since his election in 1945, Foot had studiously avoided frontbench work, preferring to see himself as a principled outsider. When Foot first appeared at the despatch box, one journalist wrote in amazement: “It was as if Mary Whitehouse had turned up in the cast of Oh, Calcutta!”

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The second miscalculation Heath had made was about the Labour Party’s relationship with the unions. Rather than drive a wedge, the Industrial Relations Bill helped to reunify the Labour Party and the unions, as they vowed to work together to oppose the legislation. In February 1971, the Labour Liaison Committee was formed, with six members each from the Shadow Cabinet, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), and the TUC. It would become a crucial policy arm for the Labour Party during those years in opposition.

Out of the Liaison Committee emerged the Social Contract — a “great compact”, as Wilson called it — between the Labour Party and the unions. Labour vowed that it would repeal the Industrial Relation Act in the first session of the new Parliament. It would accompany this repeal with a raft of social welfare legislation and redistribution. Unions, in turn, would work to keep down wage demands through voluntary wage restraint.

In contrast, Heath continued to promote the image that he was in a great battle against the unions. This was his third miscalculation. Once he finally passed the Industrial Relations Act in June 1971, Heath had in effect taken ownership for subsequent industrial strife. He had passed a bill which was meant to end strikes, yet strikes only increased after the bill’s passage. In 1972, there were nearly 24 million working days lost to strike action, unseen since the General Strike.

Heath’s National Industrial Relations Court began imprisoning trade unionists who had gone on strike, contrary to the court’s injunctions. These arrests, like the famous Pentonville Five case, only provoked a further storm of industrial fury and unrest. In December 1970, when the legislation was first proposed, Heath had anticipated some backlash. “It is the storm before the calm,” he warned. But, he vowed: “Your government will not bow before the storm.”

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Yet, as Heath’s government trundled on, the storm got worse. The oil price spike in 1973, combined with domestic industrial unrest in the energy sector, led to the government imposing a highly unpopular three-day week and the rationing of electricity usage. The Government was struggling to survive, and the whiff of an early election hung in the air.

In a December 1973 meeting of the Liaison Committee, it was agreed that even if the Government tried to frame an upcoming general election as a battle between Britain and the unions, Labour must stand by the unions. Labour’s January 1974 party political broadcast emphasised its productive relationship with the unions, where they would be “working together” in the “national interest”, not seeking to prolong the fight.

The Labour Party saw an opportunity to use its union connections for its own political benefit. The Social Contract, agreed by the Liaison Committee, became a clever political ploy for Wilson. He was able to promote the image that he and the unions were equals and on the kinds of terms that could forge an agreement. A vote for Labour in the February 1974 election became a vote to end the industrial strife by supporting the party that had a good working relationship with the unions. On 4 March 1974, Harold Wilson strolled through the steps of Downing Street once more.

While the strength of the trade union movement today is not what it was in the Seventies, there are important lessons for Sunak and Starmer. First, for Sunak: Heath overplayed his hand. He thought he could “take on” the unions and promised that his legislation would do just that. He was caught off-guard by the strength of the solidarity of the union movement and its ability to adapt. Rather than quell industrial strife, he only provoked more conflict.

The second lesson, for Starmer, is that Wilson refused to play into Tory hands. He knew that Labour’s relationship with the unions was a sensitive topic, particularly after In Place of Strife. Yet rather than think he could make political gains by bashing the unions and trying to “out-Heath Heath”, he opted for a co-operative relationship with the union leadership. The Liaison Committee between the party and unions proved to be a great success, helping to develop a set of policy proposals and a working relationship that would stabilise Wilson’s tenure. In the February 1974 election, Wilson could credibly argue he had the relationship with the unions that could settle the industrial dispute.

Rather than see unions as the embarrassing relative at the party, a proper working relationship of mutual respect, support, and solidarity might just be the winning formula for Labour — especially when contrasted with Tory division and disarray. There are already some signs that Labour is adopting this approach, with recent communications condemning the Conservatives for threatening to fire striking nurses.

Sunak, on the other hand, seems to be repeating Heath’s mistakes. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill will not end industrial disruption, but in claiming that it will, Sunak is setting himself up for failure. If Sunak repeats Heath’s famous question of 1974, “Who governs?”, the answer after the next general election may well not be him.

For almost a century, the question of how to deal with the working class was at the centre of British politics. This period stretched from 1884, when the Third Reform Act enfranchised a significant group of working-class men for the first time, until March 1985, when those miners who had stayed on strike for a year staged a last show of defiance by marching back to work behind their colliery bands. Of course, the working class mattered to the Labour Party (which became the dominant party on the Left after the First World War). The trade unions were the pillars of the Labour Party. Most of its voters were drawn from this class — as were, at least at first, a certain number of its MPs.

But in a more complicated way, the working class mattered to the Conservatives, partly because they needed to contain its power, but also because they needed to win at least some working-class votes if they were to form a government. And the fact that Britain was ruled by mainly Conservative governments for most of the 20th century shows how successful they were.

When did things change? The Labour Party under the leadership of Jim Callaghan from 1976 to 1980 was closer to the trade union movement than at any point before 1914. But, perhaps for this reason, it was troubled by the number of strikes — often ones that involved a breakdown of union power rather than its assertion. The Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership from 1975 still assumed that it was going to have to live with a large industrial working class; the party came to power in 1979 aiming to revive British industry, not destroy it. It also came to power with a surprisingly large working-class vote. Such voters had often voted Tory in earlier times in spite of being working-class (because they were deferential to those they imagined to be their social betters or because many voters, especially women, didn’t identify as working-class at all).

In 1979, however, some voted Tory because they were working-class. This was partly because they were voting against the various forms of pay restraint that the Labour government had practised (Thatcherite faith in monetarism meant that they were the first significant group of politicians since the Sixties who thought that government might simply absent itself from private-sector pay negotiations). The Tories also actively courted working-class voters in 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards. Watch Norman Tebbit (then Secretary of State for Employment) giving his “On yer bike” speech to the Tory Party conference in 1981. He is wearing a badge that says “CTU”: the initials stand for Conservative Trade Unionist.

Of course, the Tories wanted to reduce trade union power and, in particular, to break the National Union of Mineworkers. All Conservatives had wanted this for the whole of the 20th century. The desire was, in fact, particularly strong in the non-Thatcherite section of the party — it was, after all, Heath who had been destroyed by his confrontation with the NUM in 1974. However, the desire of the Tories to break the miners in 1979 was a bit like the desire of 16-year-old boys to sleep with Debbie Harry out of Blondie. They fantasised about it but did not think it likely to happen, or have any concrete plans to bring it about.

Indeed, the Thatcher government was nervous of the miners and backed down quickly when faced with potential strike in February 1981. But then Arthur Scargill became leader of the NUM. He took it into a strike in the worst possible circumstances, just after a Tory election victory, at the end of winter and after he had exasperated other union leaders and a significant minority of his own members. The Tories could not believe their luck. It was as though Ms Harry had stepped out of the poster on the bedroom wall and laid her head on their pillow.

The defeat of the miners changed the British working class. The miners themselves had once been its archetypical representatives — there had been over a million of them just after the First World War. Their numbers had been declining for decades but that decline became dramatic after 1985. By the early part of the next decade there were more university teachers than miners in the United Kingdom. Other unions were now wary of going on strike. Since the unions were often strongest in the public sector, privatisation (which took off after 1985) was both a cause and a consequence of weaker unions.

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All of this fitted into to longer term changes. The total number of manual workers had been declining since the Sixties. The working class was increasingly divided — by sex or race, or by the growing difference between public sector workers (who were increasingly likely to be white collar and female) and those in the private sector. The working class also became less visible in a literal sense. In the Seventies, you could catch the 63 bus from Birmingham city centre and tell, almost at a glance, which of the passengers belonged to which class — you could, in particular, have a very good guess as to who was going to get off at the stop by the university and who would stay on until they reached the giant Longbridge car factory. You could hardly do that now (not least because Longbridge closed almost 20 years ago).

The miners’ strike has lodged itself in the public and historical memory, and this fascination springs partly from the fact that it seems so archaic. It involved an entirely male and almost entirely white group of workers who earned their living by hard and dangerous manual labour and worked for a single nationalised company. It seemed to mark the end of a struggle that had begun in 1926 and rapidly became associated with the end of a whole industry. Mining now plays a strange part in the British self-image. Almost no coal has been dug for years but people still talk of “pit villages”. The NUM is still, in an odd way, one of the most important unions in Britain, fighting for the rights of former miners and curating the memory of the “great strike”.

Focus on the miners has, however, had odd effects on how we see the working class. For one thing, the emphasis on a single, long strike involving a large number of workers is as deceptive as trying to understand contemporary warfare with reference to Western Front in 1916. Even before Scargill led his followers to defeat, most union leaders understood that the working-class is, almost by definition, weak. Outright confrontation with an employer or government was dangerous. Strikes now are short and intermittent. They are conducted by people who are often ostentatiously reasonable in their aims. The post-Scargill leaders of today have learned the hard lessons of the mid Eighties as much as the pre-Scargill leaders remembered the hard lessons of the Thirties.

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An emphasis on the numerical strength or weakness of the working class can also be deceptive. In many ways, the most successful strike of the Seventies was not that of the miners which brought down the Heath government but that organised by the Ulster Workers’ Council a few months later. A relatively small number of workers (rendered more powerful by the fact that Protestants monopolised the best paid and most important jobs) were able to bring the province to a halt and force the government to abandon plans to introduce power sharing between Protestants and Catholics. The Conservatives, by now in opposition, studied the strike carefully. It taught them how much power might be exercised by small numbers of workers in key positions. They showed how well they had learned their lesson in 1984. The defeat of the miners was partly rooted in a willingness to appease other unions whose members might have helped the miners. The relatively high pay of train drivers now derives partly from the fact that they kept working during the miners’ strike.

In some ways, the previous balance of forces between workers and the middle classes has been reversed in recent years. Once, the great majority of the population were working-class but only occasionally and with difficulty could they assert their power in ways that redistributed wealth in their direction. Now a large part of the population has acquired attributes that would once have been associated with the middle class. They are likely to do white collar jobs, to own their own homes and to send their children to university — indeed access to university and to the “property ladder” are often foci for Left-wing complaint.

A small working class is not, however, necessarily a weak one. Covid illustrated the sharp distinction between those whose presence in the workplace was required and those who could work from home: “Virtuals” and “Physicals”. I am not sure that people have yet fully grasped the importance of this distinction. Anyone who can do their job from their bedroom will have shown their employer that their job can be done by someone much cheaper in Chennai or Manila. It will take a long time for employers (especially in the public sector) to act on this lesson but it will happen.

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In recent years, it can seem as though the working class is a matter of purely historical interest — in universities, it feels as though even historians who once worked on the working class belong to the past. E.P. Thompson is often talked about as a quaint relic of a bygone age. Mobilisations around gender and race have attracted far more interest. If economic divisions are discussed at all, they are presented as ones that divided “the people” from the “1%” — as though an equitable division of wealth would be arranged in a manner that caused no inconvenience to anyone who is not a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Strikes, of course, bring back a simple question. How essential is your job and who would notice if you stopped doing it? After each strike by university teachers, we get a polite note from the administration asking us to specify which days we were on strike. I am guessing that Avanti do not need to ask the driver who is responsible for taking the 8.10am out of Euston whether or not he turned up for work. I doubt if there is going to be a great resurgence of working-class power, partly because the working class was never that powerful even when it was most unionised. But some workers have begun to realise again that withdrawal of labour is a powerful weapon — and one that may reveal how much the distinction between manual and non-manual workers still matters.

Today, it seems we are here again. Britain, we are told, is on the cusp of its Second Winter of Discontent. But if the struggle for power between government and unions 44 years ago seems eerily similar to today, look closer.

For a start, we are not used to all this — whereas in 1979, the chaos was wearily familiar. It marked a return to the years when governments of both parties had tried and failed to curb union power. A “winter of discontent” had been a long time coming: the Telegraph had warned one was imminent in 1972, as had union leader Hugh Scanlon in 1974, and the new Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher in 1975.

From the mid-Seventies, Labour seemed to have settled with the unions; but when a last-ditch deal broke down in 1978, the country was plunged back into crisis. As the post-war industrial relations consensus finally froze to death, the old images flashed before the public’s eyes one last time. Huge strikes in the car industry. Union leaders trooping into No 10. Strikes stopping trains and shutting down petrol stations and unheated schools. Jumpy talk of the government sending in the troops.

Today’s wave of strikes is a novelty precisely because of the new, less union-friendly consensus that slowly took shape in the years after 1978. The unions were then at the apex of their power, and rapidly losing public sympathy. Today, they are struggling to recover from decades of weakness, and attract much more support than at the end of the Seventies. In 1977, The Sun reported a Marplan poll which suggested 80% of the public thought “union leaders have ‘a lot’ of power and influence in governing the country”. Amid the strikes last August, a poll conducted by Ipsos found only 9% of the British public thought workers had too much power.

Since the war, governments’ main way of squashing wage inflation had been “incomes policy”, by which ministers asked, or ordered, workers to accept a limit on pay increases. The Winter of Discontent was triggered when the Prime Minister James Callaghan insisted on setting this at 5%, well below inflation. Something of this is visible in the Sunak administration’s insistence on below-inflation hikes for public sector workers. But the crucial difference is that Callaghan could reasonably expect the private sector to stick to his limit. In September 1978, the Ford car company was so keen to comply that it endured weeks of strike action before folding and coughing up 17% — even though it could have afforded that at the start. Imagine that now.

Today, most companies don’t have to worry about either powerful unions demanding pay increases or government demands for pay restraint. Only a sixth of private sector workers are in a union at all; many are on insecure contracts. Of course, there are a few exceptions: last winter, strike threats by Unite supermarket workers won pay rises that Tesco had previously said “would not be sustainable”. But 1979 was another world: that January, Mrs Thatcher claimed in the Commons that a full third of factories had suffered all-out strikes in the previous two years.

So, the shock of the Winter of Discontent wasn’t private-sector workers taking industrial action, but low-paid public sector staff, often women, in workplaces that were not obviously militant, such as care homes, and hospital laundries and kitchens. The union to which many of these workers belonged, the National Union of Public Employees, had only recently become radical. Public sector pay had been cut, in the aftermath of economic crisis and high inflation, and some NUPE members were so ill-paid they had to claim in-work state benefits.

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Workers in hospitals, bin lorries and graveyards were pushed further towards striking by seeing private-sector workers win higher settlements. In Liverpool, this sense of unfairness was probably not made any better by some of those Ford employees who had just won a stonking raise. As the historian Tara Martin López notes, they took to hurling abuse at picketing gravediggers as they drove into work. This was because the idea of strikes among those charged with burying the dead was a shock, even to fellow trade unionists. Today, it is the other way around. Most of this winter’s strikes are in public services, and former public utilities NUPE’s successor, Unison, is Britain’s biggest union.

But the really glaring difference between then and now is that, across all sectors, the unions in the Seventies had far more leeway. Amid all the folk memories of bin-bag mountains and unburied coffins, we tend to forget the crucial middle phase of the Winter of Discontent: the strike by oil tanker drivers and road hauliers. This won rises of 15-17% — and hardened public opinion before the public sector strikes even started — because the drivers used secondary picketing so effectively. This involved deploying strikers not just at their own workplaces but wherever they would have the greatest impact. Unions set up “command centres”, intelligence systems and permit processes to keep strikes watertight. If you wanted to move goods in and out of Hull or Tilbury, you had to queue up and try to convince a dispensation committee that they were essential. They would very likely say no.

Crucially, the Labour government let this happen: a last-gasp version of the post-war consensus, in which the unions became more dominant than ever. They avoided massive confrontations with the police, but Callaghan’s policy chief Bernard Donoughue was not the only person who saw a government “surrendering to every pressure”. There is zero chance of any such thing happening today. Ever since the early Eighties, secondary picketing has been illegal.

And this is because the Winter of Discontent finally redrew the limits of what was politically possible: old taboos broke, new ones became vividly clear. Long-standing fears that restricting the trade unions would produce intolerable conflict were overridden. Prime Minister Callaghan, a long-term ally of the unions, despaired at their leaders’ inability to see what was coming their way if they refused to co-operate, the Labour government fell, and Margaret Thatcher took over. By 1979, the scope to restrict strikes was just beginning to open up. Fast forward to today, and in response to the current strike wave, Rishi Sunak has said he wants to take this process even further. A new bill, for instance, proposes to mandate minimum service levels for transport, while Downing Street has left open the possibility of outlawing strikes in the emergency services. The Trades Union Congress has objected to “restrictions that will further hinder industrial action”, such as requiring a new ballot for each continuous strike. After years of trade union legislation, critics say further tightening risks effectively making strikes illegal — which, under international law, could itself be illegal.

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At the same time, this winter’s strikes may be revealing another hard limit. Public sector pay has been under more pressure, for much longer, than it had been in 1979. Between January 2021 and September 2022, it fell by 7.7%. A quarter of hospital trusts have organised food banks for their staff. This is reflected in the difficulties in filling job vacancies in hospitals and schools, as working conditions drive existing staff to leave, and make it harder to recruit replacements. If public services get much worse, particularly the huge backlogs in the NHS, the situation may become today’s overriding political nightmare.

Meanwhile, the Times reports that the Prime Minister’s allies concede that the Government “is struggling to come up with a coherent message” to explain why it cannot afford to raise nurses’ pay to match inflation. Even the Spectator has suggested we may be at a tipping point: that for ministers, it’s the NHS strikes themselves that may be “politically unaffordable”.

In 1979, by contrast, Thatcher did manage to carve out a coherent message: that it was time to break the taboo on challenging the union’s legal position, because a weak government had allowed a minority of extremists — the “wreckers among us” — far too much power. That “us” is crucial: she sought to swing the rest of the population in behind her, including most trade unionists. In January 1979, she told an audience that “we’re all victims”. In April, campaigning in the general election, she declared:

“All of you have suffered under the rule of the pickets and the strikers this winter. We all saw at first hand that power and felt our own powerlessness. Well, you’re not powerless now. This is a time when the ordinary people of this country in their tens of millions hold the future of our country in their hands. And when you come to decide that future on May 3rd, remember last winter.”

For today’s Leader of the Opposition, such a manoeuvre may not be so easy. Keir Starmer is, to some extent, caught like Callaghan between the pickets and the rest of the public. Perhaps he can ape Thatcher by rising above the fray, casting the strikes as the final breakdown of the old order. But that would involve casting the Government, or indeed profitable companies refusing to raise pay, as the new “wreckers among us”. Thatcher could not have used such language convincingly if it had not chimed with the public mood. Will today’s voters choose to blame union leaders, cast by some as the heirs to Arthur Scargill? Or the allies of what Vince Cable once called the “pin-striped Scargills” in finance capital?

It may be that, like 1979, this winter is a breaking point that will come to haunt the next 40 years. Fairly or otherwise, the first Winter of Discontent became a warning that politicians must never allow a return to the bad old days of rule by picket and strike committee. Perhaps, as train strikes ruin Christmas and un-unionised workers miss much-needed shifts, that will happen again. But it may be that this winter comes to symbolise a different nightmare to which politicians must swear never to go back: that time when the country grew cold, and, even with the energy price guarantee, millions were barely paid enough to keep warm.

***

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A “tale of two crises” has unfolded in the last few days on the southern and northern shores of the English Channel. Both crises flow, in part, from the high rates of inflation caused by the Ukraine war and the retreat of the Covid pandemic.

In Britain, where inflation is just over 10%, a political crisis wrapped in a financial crisis has threatened to destroy the private pensions system on which millions depend. A chancellor was ejected after a few weeks in office; another prime minister has gone. Britain, though, has so far escaped civil unrest.

On Tuesday in France, however, (with inflation running at “only” 6%) there were around 200,000 people on the streets. A strike for higher pay by oil refinery workers has made petrol and diesel scarce and have spread to the railways, the Metro, schools and other public services.

Some have suggested this could be the start of a “new May 1968” or the “Popular Front” rebellion of the Thirties which gave French workers higher wages and paid holidays. It could mark the beginning of a generalised revolt, both in streets and in parliament, which could destroy President Emmanuel Macron’s second term. His Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, was obliged this week to resort to emergency powers to push her government’s 2023 budget through the National Assembly. Losing his parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June (two months after winning presidential re-election) is coming back to haunt him.

But there’s a fundamental difference between the crises afflicting France and Britain. What has happened in the UK in the last few days is bizarre and unprecedented. What is happening in France is more or less normal — for France — after three years in which social unrest has been largely paused. Macron’s first term was littered with such protests, first by the Gilets Jaunes and then by union marches and strikes against pension reform.

The Gilets Jaunes rebellion of 2018-9 was very unusual — at first. It started in the apolitical, lower-middle and working classes of the countryside and outer suburbs. It was eventually hijacked by the metropolitan anti-state and anti-everything far-Left. “Fake” Gilets Jaunes and their anarchist allies dressed in black were active once again on the margins of the Paris marches this week, vandalising “capitalist” banks and burning “capitalist” litter bins.

The bulk of this week’s protests came from equally predicable sources: the militant trades union federation, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail ) and, before that, in a Paris march on Sunday, the hard-Left party, La France Insoumise (LFI). The CGT leader Philippe Martinez spoke of creating that perpetual fantasy of the French Left: une convergence des luttes — a merging of disparate protests and social conflicts into a single anti-government and anti-boss rebellion. He hoped that a decision by the Macron-Borne government to break, or bend, the oil strike by requisitioning key workers would produce a powerful reaction in defence of the right to strike.

The leader of the LFI and Macron’s one-time presidential rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even predicted the beginning of a new “Popular Front” — a “conjunction” of Left-wing and environmental causes to create a “cycle” of revolt “never seen before in our country”. Both predictions fell flat on their faces. Mélenchon forecast 300,000 marchers on Sunday and claimed 140,000. An independent survey for the main French media organisations counted 29,500.

The day of strikes on Tuesday was somewhat more effective but not much. Only one in four rail workers stopped work. The great “convergence des luttes” was supported by 6% of teachers and 4% of public employees. The biggest French trades union federation (there are at least eight of them), the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), refused to join in. The CGT oil strike, already fading, has since fallen apart. Only two out of seven refineries are still blocked and filling stations are slowly returning to normal, and the CFDT and other moderates had already signed pay deals with Total and Esso.

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By John Lichfield

It’s not all over yet. There is a dangerous challenge to Macron from CGT-affiliated workers in the nuclear industry. Just under half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are already closed for emergency repairs and routine maintenance and the strike is delaying their re-opening. If it persists, there could be widespread black-outs this winter. In sum, the hard Left overplayed its hand this week but they will threaten Macron again later in the year.

Macron and his government acted earlier than any other country in the European Union to soften the impact of inflation. They spent €100 billion this year and plan to spend another €45 billion in 2023 to keep down the price of petrol, diesel, domestic gas and electricity. France has the lowest inflation rate in the EU — an annual rate of 5.6% in September, compared to 9.9% in the Eurozone as a whole. Unfortunately for Macron, the French do not shop or fill their petrol tanks “elsewhere”. They shop in France. Even a softened inflation rate has left many people on low to medium salaries struggling to get by.

Because of arcane government rules, those on the statutory minimum wage — Le Smic — have enjoyed a cumulative rise of 8% this year. This has squeezed margins with workers on slightly higher, but still low-to-medium wage levels, leaving them feeling devalued, financially and socially. Both Macron and Élisabeth Borne have been slow to grasp this problem. They were also slow to realise that the vast windfall profits of the oil industry would permit the well-paid refinery workers to become an unlikely symbol of social injustice (to some).

Macron had wanted to keep down wages to prevent an inflationary spiral which would damage France’s competitiveness. Instead, he subsidised energy prices and offered tax breaks for one-off bonuses, hoping that would blunt the demands for higher pay. In recent days, his Prime Minister and other ministers have been belatedly urging all employers to consider wage rises — on top of the bonuses and the splurge of state-spending to dampen inflation. In other words, long-term, economic policy has been jettisoned in an attempt to calm the social unrest.

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France is haunted by civil war

By Francois Valentin

By a quirk of the political calendar, Macron and Borne also collided head-on this week with the scattered, but numerically greater, opposition in the National Assembly. Opponents of the Left, Right and far-Right had been picking apart the 2023 draft budget, trying to add billions in pet spending plans. Events in Britain might have warned them of the market dangers of messing with debt and deficits, and France’s overall national debt is much higher than Britain’s — 114.6% of GDP, compared to just under 100%.

The opposition was only playing games. They knew that the government would eventually blow its playground whistle and use its emergency constitutional power to impose something close to the original budget. Borne did so on Wednesday night, using a clause of the constitution inserted by Charles de Gaulle for exactly this purpose. Every previous president of the Fifth Republic has used 49.3 at some time — even those with friendly majorities in the Assembly.

Cue, nonetheless, fake indignation on the part of Left, Right and Centre-Right, accusing Macron of “riding roughshod over democracy”. In fact, the opposition, if it cared to work together, could overturn Article 49.3, the budget and the Borne government by passing a censure motion. An absolute majority of the 577 deputies is needed or 289 actual votes in favour. Macron and Borne have 250 centrists; “the rest” have 327.

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Will Macron call another election?

By John Lichfield

Two censure motions have been tabled. The Left refuses to vote for the far-Right motion and the far-Right refuses to vote for the Left motion. The centre-Right will not vote for either, fearing wipe-out in an early election. In other words, the government has called the opposition’s bluff, as everyone knew they would. Just like the day of inaction on Tuesday, Borne’s use of 49.3 is a faux crisis. Like the day of inaction, however, it presages a proper crisis later this winter or early in the New Year.

Emmanuel Macron insists that he will push ahead by March with his plans to increase France’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2027. He warns that he will use 49.3 again, if necessary. He will call new elections, if he loses a vote of confidence (as, on this issue, he might). There are good arguments why France should work longer. Its minimum retirement age is the lowest in the EU. Politically, it is hazardous and even foolhardy to insist on it now. The government has no majority. The national mood, always fractious, has been darkened by two years of pandemic and the resurgence of inflation after years of low or no wage rises.

Macron has bound himself to the pensions mast. The deficit of 5% of GDP promised to Brussels and the markets next year depends on the enactment of pension reform by July. As Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng found out, it’s not a good idea to disappoint (or excite) the markets when you are already hugely indebted to them. On pensions, most French people, including the moderate unions, are united in fierce opposition to Macron. For now, the President remains determined to go ahead. The true “crisis”, both on the street and in parliament, did not happen this week. It is on its way.

“It has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, they would’ve cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment. So financially speaking, it’s unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate!”

Anyone who’s worked in the National Health Service for more than a few months would, depressingly, recognise this kind of equation.

Those episodes were first broadcast in 1986, when the tobacco tax generated £4 billion in revenue for the government and smoking-related diseases did indeed cost the NHS £165 million a year. Last year, the tobacco tax raised £8.7 billion for the government — but smoking-related illnesses cost the UK healthcare system £2.5 billion per annum. Nevertheless, a smoking ban has never been seriously considered. Behind the gallows humour at the heart of Yes, Prime Minister lies a bleak fact: the state is happy to kill off the weak to balance the books, or even make a profit.

This cavalier attitude to death rather defined the Government’s attitude to the pandemic, as it spread through hospitals and was encouraged into care homes, pushing the NHS to breaking point. In hospitals, we’re battling it still. When Omicron started spreading at the end of last year, we were told it wasn’t as dangerous as previous variants — but that might just have been because patients and the public were more vigilant. Now, vigilance has waned. With most Covid mitigation measures nothing but a memory, hospitalisations could spiral out of control again. And it’s now predicted that, because of a lack of exposure during lockdown, flu deaths will be very high this year. This winter, according to The Lancet the return of influenza as a major public health issue appears “inevitable”.

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Don't go to A&E

By Emma Jones

Then factor in the cost of living crisis. People are not going to be able to heat their homes. People are not going to be able to put food on their tables. People are not going to be able to put fuel in their vehicles to go to work to earn money. People are not able to afford prescriptions. People are going to have to choose whether to feed themselves or their children. Isolated, vulnerable people are going to be more isolated and more vulnerable. Abused people are going to be more abused. 

Emergency departments throughout the country are starting to seem Dickensian. I routinely see patients admitted with combinations of multiple problems: severe respiratory illness, loss of sphincteric function, terrible hygiene and general self-neglect. Paramedics are having to wear specialist kit to cope with lice, scabies and faecal matter — and incinerate patient property in keeping with protocols.

All of this will put immense pressure on the NHS — which is in a terrible position to deal with any of it. After a recent bout of Covid (yes, even doctors get it) left me utterly drained, I dragged myself into my department because — like the rest of the NHS — it is suffering from unprecedented staff shortages. A staggering 40,000 nurses have quit in the past year, many due to stress and poor pay. (Those remaining are deciding whether to strike.) Resignation rates far outstrip recruitment. Sick leave, meanwhile, is running at an all-time high, with some 60,000 healthcare and social care staff suffering from Long Covid. Working conditions for those working are verging on untenable.

The A&E department where I work is representative, in that it is falling apart. Ambulances get stuck outside for hours. There is no patient flow, and therefore no capacity; there are not enough GP appointments, so problems aren’t treated early and people show up on our doorstep far more seriously ill; and there is a dearth of community services. In the past two years — since before the second lockdown — I have seen more severe cases than in the rest of my career. Recently, I had a patient who had telephoned his GP complaining of a sore arm, which was thought to be a muscular or skeletal problem. In fact, the man had been suffering from angina, and the sore arm was referred pain. The situation soon escalated: he had a massive heart attack. We worked on him in A&E, but to no avail. Had the patient had a face-to-face consultation with his GP, things may well have been different.

This summer, we experienced “excess” non-Covid deaths in the region of 1,000 a week in England and Wales — in other words, far more deaths than would usually be expected for the period. Many of them, it seems, were related to lung, heart and circulatory diseases. Research by The Kings Fund healthcare charity revealed that the pandemic era has seen life expectancy in the UK fall by a magnitude that “has not been seen since World War II”. Second only to the US, the UK’s pre-pandemic life expectancy was lower than in many comparative countries for males, lowest for females. In the first 12 months of the pandemic, it fell by over a year for the former, and just under a year for the latter.

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Inside the Covid ward

By Jane Smith

If deaths this summer were way beyond the average, the prognosis for this winter is bleak, given this lethal cocktail of health and socio-economic issues. According to the Government’s own research, for yet another week, “statistically significant excess all-cause mortality by week of death was observed overall in England” — and autumn has only just begun. The nation is about to be plunged into a winter during which people can’t protect themselves, comfort themselves, warm themselves or feed themselves.

Our hopes rest on a new Health and Social Care Minister, Thérèse Coffey. She is, it’s said, in “listening mode”. She has already made remarks that sound great. Everyone is going to be able to see a GP within two weeks, she says, without explaining exactly how she’ll achieve this. (Currently, some people are unable to see a GP at all.) Coffey has also said that nurses won’t get a pay rise. In fact, she’s advocated working for no money at all, unabashedly calling for a “national endeavour” to support the NHS, which “includes encouraging more volunteering across the health service”.

Coffey has proposed tweaks to the NHS pension rules to “allow” retired staff (who are probably well shot of the health service) to return to work if they want to (why would they?). But why the focus on clinicians at the end of their careers? The General Medical Council (GMC) is reporting that two-thirds of junior doctors are “worn out” at the end of a working day and morale among trainee nurses is at an all-time low. Coffey’s plan should throw them a lifeline; instead, it doesn’t mention them. Our healthcare system is dreadful and dilapidated because of this government’s failure to invest — not only financially but also in terms of the time and brainpower needed to sort out the situation — and the same Government is still failing to do anything meaningful about it.

The cherry on top is the fact that Coffey seems poised to bin its plan to tackle smoking. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that she herself smokes. We live in a world in which “optics” matter — particularly in the socio-political sphere — and Coffey, like Jim Hacker’s chain-smoking, tobacco-lobbying health minister, aren’t good. She’s obese. She drinks. She’s known to be cosy with the tobacco industry. And she’s anti-abortion.

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Is Truss the worst PM in history?

By Dominic Sandbrook

Still, there are signs that somebody, somewhere in Coffey’s department, understands the most pressing challenge facing departments like mine: one of the priorities in what has been titled “Our plan for patients” is the Adult Social Care Discharge Fund, the aim of which is essentially to free up beds. In my region, we can’t seem to get any patients out the hospital and into social care — because there is no social care. If Mrs Smith on ward seven has her pneumonia treated quickly, and she turns the corner beautifully, and she’s off supplemental oxygen and on oral antibiotics, and all the paperwork has been filled out by the junior doctors for the social care assessment — all that happens is she gets into the queue for social care quicker. The queue gets ever-longer. Mrs Smith remains in hospital.

It is hard for hospital managers and clinicians to remain motivated in the face of this absurdity. Making things more efficient within the hospital doesn’t actually speed up the process of getting patients out of hospital. It just gets them onto these waiting lists quicker.

Even the best British satirists might struggle to lampoon it, so dark is our current situation. The other night, while I was on call, the sister in charge let slip that only one or two beds in the emergency department would free up that evening. This is a continual problem where I work: the number of beds available in any given 24-hour period is always far outnumbered by the number of patients requiring clinical admission. Allocation is a simple mathematical equation. On this occasion, the sister followed up her update with another: “We’re expecting a couple of deaths…”

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The tragedy of Matt Hancock

By Will Lloyd

In other words, the only way we can get new patients into our emergency department — and the only way we can get existing patients into the community — is if people die. This health “target” unsurprisingly doesn’t get openly discussed. But it’s there, nonetheless, in the back of management’s collective mind, reminiscent of Sir Humphrey declaring, “it’s unquestionably better that they continue to die!”

If this is the NHS’s new normal, and the Secretary for Health and Social Care is happy to accept it, then that’s a sad indictment of her stewardship. But her party sets the tone. We’ve been here before with this government: in April 2021, Boris Johnson said he would rather see “bodies pile high” than take the UK into a third lockdown. The UK currently has a body count of 205,000 Covid-19 deaths, and the Tories seem all too comfortable with this — which doesn’t bode well for the coming winter.

Without adequate support from the Government, the NHS will be forced to keep relying on a shameful, unofficial “beds for death” policy. Staff shortages will snowball. The new generation of clinicians is already battling with severe financial and mental health issues. And they’re not stupid: they know exactly what their employers are depending on, to free up beds. That these young people are trained, pressurised, and ultimately programmed to operate within an NHS that relies on human misery to create capacity is yet another sign of a healthcare system at breaking point. To make a dent in these systemic problems, the service urgently needs money and personnel — not a spate of excess deaths.

Independence creates responsibility, and personal jeopardy. These then give rise, over time, to the good sort of institutional pride, and so to exactly the kind of “strong culture of ethics” noisily boasted of by organisations where it is so obviously absent.

Income has fallen by about 30% in 15 years. The Government rejects the Criminal Bar Association’s request for a 25% increase, and offers what it claims is 15%, but which really amounts to less. This will only apply to new work and not to the 60,000 cases in the backlog, which will take a year or two to complete. So by the time new trials are finished and paid, inflation will have annihilated the benefit.

Among the reasons given by the Government to the Chair of the Bar as to why any increase cannot be applied immediately, in line with their own report’s recommendation, is “software challenges”.

So on the surface, yes, it’s about money. Baby juniors’ income horror stories are well-known, and £50K for 50 year-olds in London — for banker hours and teacher stress — will not attract students of the first, or even the second, rank. But it would be wrong to insist that no one, or only the incompetent or wealthy, would do the job unless the money improves.

A profit-sharing corporate model could get the Government over the hump: subsidise the juniors’ income from the seniors’. Standards would fall, as there’s not much fat left on even the higher incomes, but at least no one would drown in debt while earning £10,000 a year. The real problem, though, would be the end of independence.

Barristers who work in the traditional way — that is, as members of a set of chambers, but self-employed — do not share profits. Instead, they are paid directly for the work they do. They chip in for clerks and an office — about 20% of gross income — but they do not have to chip upwards to a boss. This is of course different from the way solicitors operate: all their fees go to the partners, who then pay a proportion in salaries.

Now, profit-sharing — or labour-exploiting, if you prefer to see it that way — does not turn lawyers bent. Partners are responsible for the actions of their junior employees, and it is in a firm’s interests to maintain an ethical culture appropriate to their corporate structure. But there is something about the way things move in and around a criminal courtroom that makes them intractable to a corporate ethical culture.

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Can the Secret Barrister tell the truth?

By Adam King

Anyone who has watched a criminal trial knows it is not all action. Longeurs almost comical to the unfamiliar are commonplace: a room full of people sitting in silence for half an hour, taking turns to glance about for something that might remind them what everyone is waiting for. But the blasts of activity, when they occur, are intense, and — importantly — unobserved.

A short private conversation with a client, opponent, witness, or police officer can suddenly shift the course of a trial. Usually these exchanges are not, and cannot be, written down. Promises must be kept, yet no one else can ever be sure what was said. So how is trust maintained? The answer is, by an ethical culture based on individual responsibility, and individual reputation.

Run into a friend at court, and you will soon be discussing each other’s opponents: in particular the extent to which they can be trusted. And despite great opportunity for short-term advantage through dishonesty — or perhaps because of it — it is rare to hear of serious ethical failure. Those who do cross the line become infamous and do not prosper.

An obvious counterexample is employed advocates: they are many, and play fair. But they are still in a minority, and so their culture, the culture in which they must try to succeed, is the culture of the independent Bar. Many of them come from its ranks,  and those who do not, but who want to build the respect required for advancing their clients’ interests, must adopt the prevailing ethical norms. “My boss said so” can never be a good answer to a judge’s question.

Of all the corollaries of independence that feed this culture of integrity, perhaps the most significant is the habit of most independent advocates to both prosecute and defend. The sometimes giddying sense of “I could have been on the other side of this” helps keep temperature low and probity high. Yes, there is increasing specialisation, but the majority keeps the right culture alive. With a mainly employed Bar, however, it would disappear, and the courts would soon thrum with the tribal attitudes of mutual distrust and moral disgust that we have found so inimical to justice on social media.

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Covid safetyism has gone mad

By Adam King

There are foreign jurisdictions, of course, where integrity in criminal courts is high, and where advocates are not fully independent. But this will be thanks to their own professional culture and their own complex network of long-standing conventions. Just because they might manage without their independence does not mean we can do without ours.

And in fact, I suspect we do have something special over here, and not just in comparison with the obvious example of America. A recent Times piece on the strikes described us as an “extraordinarily kind” lot who only do the job “to help people”. Perhaps it’s the company I keep, but I wouldn’t personally put it quite as high as that. But while I may never find it difficult to tell the difference between my esteemed colleagues and, say, the volunteers at a children’s hospice, I am certain we are far more honourable than we are perceived to be — and that this has a substantial positive effect on what ultimately matters: trial outcomes.

Even putting justice aside, there is another important public good that depends on independence: efficiency. Independent counsel at court — with personal responsibility, personal jeopardy, and a personal reputation to consider — can often sort out in 15 minutes what a more corporate litigation process might take weeks to decide. That is not to suggest that the slow business of pre-trial litigation could be sped up by handing it over to barristers – on the contrary. But rather that there comes a time when they, and their independence, are required.

So why is the Government fighting? Simple short-termism and bloody-mindedness, no doubt, and because they do not believe the warnings. But also, I suspect, from the politician’s natural reluctance to pass up an opportunity to acquire power. The Bar is a small but significant national institution, whose members sometimes humiliate ministers with impunity. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Bar were weakened somewhat, made a little more biddable? Of course, destroying the independence of the legally aided Bar would not affect most Public Law practitioners, but there are not always bright lines between the two, at least not in the minds of the Government, and petty resentments are not always rational.

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The law can't end the culture wars

By Adam King

I personally didn’t love the cries of “All Out” on the steps of the Old Bailey last week, or the cheers when the RMT turned up in solidarity. Theirs is a very different battle. Extreme strike rhetoric — with its menacing undertone of hostility towards “scabs” — is not, in my opinion, appropriate to a walk-out of the self-employed that will leave some defendants spending extra time in custody.

Yes it is the Government’s fault, and yes we are doing this to reduce this kind of outrage in the longterm. But nevertheless, a small number of Counsel, in particularly sensitive cases, are choosing to continue with their trials, despite their support for industrial action – and they must be respected. We are a “fees” profession, and if we do not want to become a “pay” profession, we should be careful not to behave like one.

The right of barristers to strike has been much discussed, and much advised on. The conclusions are vague. But what is clear is that the barristers participating in the walk-outs — unlike teachers, train drivers, or even doctors — are risking serious professional disciplinary sanction. Strength of feeling is not an infallible guide to the merits of an argument of course, but here they do coincide. And these are actions, not words — actions that have never been taken before. I cannot see the Bar backing down.

There is a well-known handful of barristers on Twitter who over the last few years must have damaged the profession’s reputation among Government even more thoroughly than among the public at large. This is not their fight. This is the fight of the inconspicuous thousands, who can give honest advice to a client, argue fearlessly with a judge, or carve a sensible deal with an opponent, without having to factor in the career-affecting demands of a line-manager or HR department. This is a fight any Minister of Justice should be happy to lose.

Yet on almost every level, the notion that we’re seeing a return to the Seventies is fantasy politics. Certainly, by paralysing Britain’s rail transportation network through the withdrawal of their members’ labour, the RMT has demonstrated the latent industrial power of Britain’s workers. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, so three days of national strikes by a single union does not signal a return to 1979, let alone a future blighted by class war. Union membership and labour militancy remain at historic lows across the Western world, including in Britain.

Yes, Britain’s summer of chaos is real enough: energy prices, NHS waiting lists, flight cancellations, and inflation are all spiralling. But none of these ills can be attributed to union power or working-class tumult.

It is not uppity labourers but supply chain shocks stemming from the pandemic and lockdown, as well as the Ukraine war, that are driving inflation, smoothed along by pre-emptive corporate price hikes. It is not union barons but airline companies, which slashed so many jobs during the lockdown, that have shredded Britons’ summer plans. And unlike in the Seventies, today’s economic sclerosis can hardly be blamed on creaking nationalised behemoths, given the fact that the Tories have sold off most of them over the last 40 years.

Under an exhausted Tory government, corporate profits are booming while wages are being eaten up by inflation. We are at the end of the process that began with Thatcher’s election in 1979. In short, however this tale unfolds, it will necessarily have a different ending; a neoliberal fairy godmother isn’t going to come to the rescue.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

Back in Seventies, governments had no choice but to negotiate with pervasive and powerful unions. Then Thatcher came along and pursued a different tack of open confrontation in her bid to break up the power of the organised working class. Today, the Conservative government’s refusal to negotiate with the RMT is no flash of Thatcherite steel, but a sign that they are unwilling to take political responsibility for Britain’s railway grid, which they have already been nationalising through a haphazard, piecemeal process driven by necessity over the last few years. The Tories’ unwillingness to fully reverse the failed disaster of rail privatisation betokens no commitment to free market nostrums, but a simple inability to see anything through at all.

This is not just a process of elite decay but also a direct result of neoliberal government inaugurated by Thatcher: the regulatory state that replaced the command-and-control state had less direct power. And with less direct power at stake in party-political competition, politics itself became less meaningful, with the banks and corporations sucking up the best and brightest that would have once formed the cadre of government and party-political elite. Neoliberalism locked in a vicious cycle in which a diminished public life drew in increasingly mediocre professional politicians, culminating in our hapless parliamentary class of today. Taking back control of Britain’s railways would require a political vision, and that is something our politicians are unable to supply.

All of this indicates that we are not returning to the Seventies, and we are far away from class war. The fact that sub-editors and journalists have no way to frame the railway dispute except by plucking out shibboleths about seasons of discontents only shows that the Right and the Tory middle classes need socialism and class war just as much as the Left needs fascism — which is to say they have no vision to offer. It is ultimately unsurprising that a generation of journalists, editors and pundits whose careers were made in the era of neoliberalism are struggling to adapt; after all, what we are going through is the end of an exhausted neoliberalism.

The exception to this fantasy politics is the RMT itself, which is seeking to defend its members’ wages and jobs. How far this will inaugurate a new confidence in labour organisation and trade unionism remains to be seen. It certainly seems that, with attempts to re-shore various industries and supply chains, and with tightening labour markets, the conditions exist for some form of organised labour to re-emerge from the abyss. Add to that the way Covid lockdowns exposed our collective dependence on a swathe of often poorly paid and menial working-class jobs, and it is hardly surprising that in the aftermath, “key workers” are now claiming more than merely symbolic tokens of our affirmation.

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In defence of class

By Justin Webb

But who will support them? The fact the broad swathes of the middle-class Left has thus far shown sympathy for a working-class strike is probably more reflective of the Left’s penchant for working from home in the wake of the pandemic than any substantive political solidarity. Were the RMT threatening the middle classes’ capacity for telecommuting, we can be certain we would already have been subjected to a torrent of op-eds and tweets about the “privileges”, racial exclusivity and backwards sexual mores of RMT members. Intersectionalism is designed to disable the formation of collective interests, majoritarian decision-making and solidarity. As long as the Left remains committed to intersectionalism, it will have nothing to offer the reformation of independent working-class politics in Britain. This is plain in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s efforts to distance himself from the industrial action — an attempt to maintain the strategy of triangulation and middle-class support.

Throughout the neoliberal era, it is the unions that were cast in the role of conservative goliaths, standing in the way of the forces of technology, modernisation and globalisation. If it were ever true, that narrative certainly no longer holds: from its insurgent beginnings in the Seventies, British neoliberalism has collapsed into widening inequalities, technocracy, lockdown, indebtedness, stagnant wages and wilting productivity. Can a new working-class politics reverse these trends? For all the media histrionics provoked by the RMT strike, one thing it has exposed is that our entire social and political order rests on labour passivity and working-class quiescence. What happens when this ends?

The aims set out in this manifesto are Socialist aims, and we are proud of the word… It is our intention to:

Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families

Eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain

Make power in industry genuinely accountable to the workers and the community at large

Achieve far greater economic equality — in income, wealth and living standards

Increase social equality by giving far greater importance to full employment, housing, education and social benefits

—

It’s time to take on vested interests holding people back.

Labour will build a fairer Britain that cares for all, where wealth and power are shared.

Labour will rewrite the rules of the economy so that it works for everyone. We will rebuild our public services, by taxing those at the top to properly fund the services we all rely on.

The first section was taken from Labour’s manifesto in February 1974; the second from its manifesto of 2019. As Corbyn and McDonnell started their careers during the Seventies heyday of widespread nationalisation, empowered trades unions and high taxation why not go back to find solutions from that era?

There are, of course, some similarities. Like today, it was a febrile time with politicians facing challenges from all sides.

There was economic upheaval, terrorism (from the IRA) and the rise of the far right countered by anti-racist movements on the streets. There was the rise of the feminist and gay movements. A debate and then referendum on Europe. There was even extreme weather: 1976 had the second hottest summer recorded and a hapless Labour minister, Denis Howell, was named in annual succession the Minister for Drought, then Floods and finally Snow.

In the past decade we also have seen economic upheaval, terrorism (from Islamic religious extremists) and the rise of the Left and Right in mainstream politics. Feminism and gender identification with the rise of the #MeToo and LGBTQ movements. We have had a debate and a referendum on Europe. Climate change is now a mainstream issue.

So perhaps it is not surprising that today’s Labour leadership has gone back to find solutions that are no longer remembered by most of the electorate. Labour wants the renationalisation of water, energy, the railways and Royal Mail. It argues that private companies are making huge profits and failing consumers with high prices and incompetent management. “Public ownership will secure democratic control over nationally strategic infrastructure and provide public stewardship for key natural resources” as the manifesto says. And who can argue with that intention? The aspiration to have public control is an appealing one, according to the polls.

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By Matthew Goodwin

Anyone aged under 50 will struggle to recall nationalised industries. Between 1945 and 1970 coal, steel (twice), electricity, gas, water, air travel, the railways, roads and waterways and the Post Office (including what became BT) had all been nationalised. In the 1970s British Leyland and Rolls-Royce joined them. The level of bureaucracy had, by 1979, become a byword for incompetence; a metaphor for state overreach. From 1979 the industries began to be privatised, and only in 2008 did this trend reverse when the banking system became partially owned by the state as part of the bailout.

Nationalised industries had another effect — they entrenched the power of trades unions so that they became almost a tier of government in determining economic policy. Their power lay in the right to strike. It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of strikes on everyday life in the Sixties and Seventies: from the three-day week and doing exam revision by candlelight in 1973 to the winter of discontent in 1979. That year, 29.5 million working days were lost to strikes.

The Left has never forgotten that a Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in 1969 first tried and failed to curtail the right to strike. It took Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to pass legislation, and when Labour eventually returned to power in 1997 Tony Blair refused to reverse it. Like Wilson he is still blamed by the Left, but the days of widespread strikes were over and 2018 saw the lowest level since the 19th century.

Today the Labour leadership has moved back to a much closer relationship with union leaders. Len McCluskey of Unite operates as an extension of the leadership. The manifesto pledges to work in partnership with “the workforce and their unions in every sector of the economy” and for unions to be handed the power to negotiate sector-wide agreements on wages and conditions that will re-empower the union movement. The first stirrings are being seen in railways where on 3 December the RMT began 27 days of strikes leading up to Christmas. Media reports of shivering commuters and shoppers can be expected any day now. For anyone from the Seventies it will be a familiar and depressing sight.

However, it was on direct taxation that the 1970s set some remarkable records, which even Labour’s current manifesto cannot get close to. The concept that high taxation stifled initiative and competitiveness was born in this era and led to much of the thinking on reducing direct taxation. Like nationalisation, high taxation was the policy of both major parties in the 1970s. In 1973, under the Conservatives, the highest rate of income tax was 75%.

When Labour came into power in 1974 Denis Healey as Chancellor faced an economic crisis that led to his creation of 10 bands of income tax. The basic rate of tax (which started at £4,500 a year) was 33%. Income above £20,000 per year was taxed at the staggering rate of 83%. That was nothing compared with the tax rate for investment income, which was set at 98%!

This had an effect on high earners. In what was regarded as a golden period of music two of the era’s greatest albums reflected the fury with tax. A few years earlier, George Harrison wrote “Taxman” on the Beatles’ album Revolver:

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
Cause I’m the taxman

Should 5% appear too small?
Be thankful I don’t take it all
Cause I’m the taxman

Not to be beaten, in 1971 the Rolling Stones, each of whom owed more than £250,000 to the Inland Revenue, made themselves tax exiles and went off to the South of France, where they recorded Exile on Main Street — one of their greatest albums.

By these standards, the current Labour manifesto is quite modest. After 10 years of austerity the idea of taxing the rich at a top rate of 50% is by historic standards not too radical. In fact, as UnHerd Britain’s polling reveals, only 30% of the public agree with the statement that “Tax rates for high earners should be minimised to keep the UK competitive”, with 42% actively disagreeing. The top rate was 60% until 1989 — 10 years after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. You can see why veterans from the Seventies are relaxed about it.

Indeed, they may be onto something: the younger generation is tired of austerity. Among the 18-30 demographic the aspiration to tax more, spend more and control more does not seem too radical. The idea that tax alone would have a negative impact on wealth creation does not make sense if you haven’t lived through the 1970s. Today’s impetus is more about fairness and repairing the creaking nature of public services. Such a policy may even work in the short term, as the public sector expands with higher tax receipts.

However, the final lesson of the Seventies is that once the political tools of nationalisation and higher taxes take hold they don’t easily go away. You cannot turn off such bold policies without the political cost of admitting you were wrong. The lesson for Labour is that sooner or later the public turns. Last time it led to Margaret Thatcher and 40 years of reversal. For Labour that would be a huge price to pay. History bites in both directions.

His bad week kicked off with Donald Trump threatening tariffs of up to 100% on a large number of those French goods that actually do sell well abroad — from yoghurt to luxury handbags, champagne, cheese, and cosmetics. This was a retort to France’s unilateral 3% “digital tax” on sales (not profits) on those internet giants, all American, as it happens, with global revenues above €750 million and above €25 million in France.

This “GAFA tax” in turn was a result of French annoyance at the OECD’s perceived inability to come up with effective guidelines for international digital giants to pay tax in the countries they operate in. Other European countries (Italy, Austria, Spain, Belgium) have similar plans, although few have taken the drastic (and very French) tack of a tax based on turnover, not profits. So Macron decided to go it alone, and to go it first.

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Trump, the man who once dreamed of having a military parade in Washington modelled on the Bastille Day one, evidently decided to make an example of France, pour encourager les autres.

Then the French President even managed to irk Merkel. It takes talent to annoy the German Chancellor. But she finally snapped  in response to that Economist interview, in which he declared Nato to be “brain-dead”. “I understand your desire for disruptive politics, but I’m tired of picking up the pieces,” she told him. “Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can then sit down and have a cup of tea together.”

Macron knows that Mrs Merkel is scheduled for departure next year; he’d probably already been briefed, ahead of speaking to the Economist that her GroKo (Great Coalition) was threatened by her SPD partner’s Left. Typically, for a top of the heap Frenchman of his particular stripe, he saw her as “a loser”, and dumped on her accordingly. It’s the sort of venomousness they all learn at ENA, the elite government school Macron attended.

Meanwhile, at home, his popularity is tanking. An Odoxa poll last week gave his negative opinions at two-thirds of the voters (with just 34% favourable); another Ifop poll gives his favourables at 33% against 65% negatives.

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The French are unhappy with him and the “Jupiterian” (his own word) persona he constructed to counter the appearance of youth and inexperience. As they see it, the country is careening from one crisis to the next, with a chest-thumping president leading a weak government of clone-like technocrats. Added to which is an even weaker parliament full of inexperienced, first-term Macronistas rubber-stamping most of his legislation, and occasionally indulging in woke amendments (the one last week calling to outlaw any advertising for Black Friday in a good example). Absolutely none of this resonates with the country’s concerns, real or imagined.

The French worry about jobs, insecurity, immigration, the economy, crime; they’re angry about the degradation of public services they used to take for granted, from vanishing country train lines to overcrowded and understaffed hospitals. They complain, bitterly and incessantly, of deep “inequalities” — even though France is in fact more redistributive than Sweden.

Macron has argued back that the French economy is doing better. It’s largely true, but his problem is that it’s not perceived as doing well, partly because some stubborn problem areas remain, with an EU record number of long-term unemployed seniors, young people, minorities. Unemployment has slipped from 10% in 2016 to 8.4%, but uncertainty on too many economic variables (taxation, regulation, social climate) means the very last investment businesses make is manpower.

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Hence the surprising amount of support for any kind of social protest in the past year. It would be a mistake to believe that because their weekly demonstrations now only gather a few thousand people, the Gilets Jaunes themselves are no longer a headache for Emmanuel Macron. “The Gilets Jaunes aren’t a movement, they’re a symptom,” says a Préfet who received many delegations of his département’s protesters. “They are a clear manifestation of a deep state of discontent, they’re not a coherent party. Among Thursday’s strikers, officially answering a call by the unions, you’ll find many of the same people who were once stopping traffic on provincial roundabouts.”

He points out that, significantly, 60% of the French support the national strike; and that the strikers’ motives and sociology will, in fact, be quite close to the GJ’s. In his view, the current porous anger (superbly theorised by the American analyst Martin Gurri  in his prescient book,  The Revolt of the Public) is expressed in many ways, from the Left to the Right, to the violent and inchoate. The Gilets Jaunes shape of this has run its course; the motivations, which are a mix of reality-based complaints and deep misperceptions, remain.

Paradoxically, Emmanuel Macron’s chief problem may be that he has essentially destroyed any form of democratic opposition. Whenever someone on the Left or on the Right seemed promising, he co-opted them into his Cabinet, and he continues to do so. As a result, voters find themselves inexorable herded toward a single, unpalatable choice. It’s not clear whether Macron has realised that the wasteland he’s leaving in parliamentary politics will drive people away from the democratic process — making them ripe for a Bolsonaro or an Orbán. The scene will be set for a populist to sweep in.

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This doesn’t yet mean Macron won’t be re-elected in 2022. In all likelihood, he will be up against his favourite opponent, Marine Le Pen, but it will be a much closer shave than before. She’ll lose. But not because she is seen as a Fascist danger. She’ll lose because of her incompetence. Her 30-year-old niece Marion Maréchal, whose turn will come five years later, may become the Matteo Salvini of France — within the far more stable Fifth Republic constitutional system.

Like her father, she’s a good public speaker, but her policies have wobbled depending on which adviser had her ear (pro- and anti-“Frexit”; pro- and anti-euro) or where she was campaigning: in her Northern constituency, most of her electorate once worked in mines or textile factories, now closed; and like to hear of more state aid; in the South-East Rassemblement National bastions, the burning issues are immigration and crime. Few believe she has effective policies to change either.

But another eventuality is currently terrifying the Elysée tacticians. These thirtysomething white men who all look and sound like Macron are said to be working on pre-emptively neutralising what they call the “clown candidate“: a possible run by a non-politician, probably a popular performer (TV presenter, actor, singer…), à la Beppe Grillo or Volodimyr Zelensky. It could be what the French public is waiting for.

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Yet on Macron proudly strides — with Europe in his sights. Even though he is struggling at home, the President, a petit-bourgeois liberal, imbued with his own undeniable but narrow intelligence, considers himself to be Europe’s natural leader. Since Germany will be preoccupied with its difficult political transition, facing signs of an early recession, and with the UK gone (the UK will be gone, won’t it?), who else is there, after all?

Some of his arrogance comes naturally, but some is theorised: why would he go against the tactics defined by de Gaulle, and followed by Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac? The assumption that nuisance value gives you more clout in international politics has always been a mainstay of French power projection. Macron is simply continuing the tradition.

But alienating friends and not influencing people is all too often coupled with a lack of effort to understand how France’s partners think. And given that many decisions have to be taken unanimously by the EU27, it’s hard to see how he’d make a success of European leadership.

Macron does have a unique way of ruffling feathers — from his Nato remarks to his recent veto against EU membership application for both Albania and North Macedonia and his rudeness to Mrs Merkel. It will trip him again and again: the President will never be a team player. So as the country literally grinds to a halt, Macron stands alone with only his ambition and acolytes for company.