I do not come from a particularly political background. The last member of my family to have pursued a political career of any note was an advisor to Woodrow Wilson and then Franklin D Roosevelt, who sent him to Moscow as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. As William C Bullitt cut a dash through inter-war Europe, he earned a reputation as a radical – a reputation enhanced on his eventual return to the United States where he took with him all kinds of Bolshevik ideas collected from his second wife, Louise Bryant (played by Diane Keaton in the 1981 film Reds). Together they put them in a book.
Perhaps I have him to thank for the embers that sparked my own political fire in 1984. It was during the miners’ strike and there was no Pauline moment. I was simply aware that something much more important than coal was at stake. We didn’t even burn the stuff in the countryside, where I grew up. Logs tended to be cheaper and more readily available. However, while many of my school friends were happy to recite the received opinions of their parents – and I can only imagine where the parents got their opinions from – something of the miners’ plight, probably their personal tragedies rather than anything overtly political, struck a chord that reverberates to this day. I hear it whenever I see people, wherever they might be, fighting for the right to be paid a fair wage for their labour. At present, the sound is almost deafening. This is why I joined the Labour Party and why I have always paid my trade union dues. It is also why I felt more than a little uncomfortable watching Gordon Brown allowing himself to be bullied at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions by a Tory leader who knows nothing of the struggles of ordinary working people. Just for a moment, I found myself questioning 25 years of unshakeable loyalty to “my” Labour Party. Perhaps, like Louise Bryant, I’d be better off shunning mainstream politics altogether and writing for extreme left-wing magazines instead.
Of course, I also question whether a British Airways cabin crew is really a hotbed of radical socialism and if Labour activists should care that much about them or their passengers. Have those affected by the first strike by BA cabin crews for 13 years really “spent a year scrimping and saving during the recession for the only holiday they will take this year” as the Daily Mail claimed? The real scrimping and saving is being done by BA chief executive Willie Walsh. The best strike banner I have seen so far was held aloft by a striker with an orange face and immaculate hair-do who thought nothing of playing up to the popular image of cabin crew. “I love Willie – I just hate Walsh”, it proclaimed.
But whether or not you mind paying over the odds to fly with the “national carrier” (when flying long haul, I prefer to pop a pill and wake up at my destination with some foreign currency still left in my pocket) is not really the point. Those Daily Mail readers who are at a loss to explain why last weekend’s opinion polls did not reward David Cameron for his shameless union bashing would do well to take a leaf out of my book and knock themselves out for the duration of a Tory administration. Things will get a whole lot worse for all of us if Cameron gets to Number 10.
Promising immediate and swingeing cuts to public services, the Tories would head for an industrial relations disaster on the scale that has turned the “Celtic Tiger” into a flea-bitten moggy.
This week’s intervention by Ireland’s foreign minister Micháel Martin in a dispute involving workers at the Passport Office – that has seen a backlog of 40,000 applications build up, presumably from those desperate to leave the country – is the latest attempt by a senior government figure to bring stability to a nation wrecked by the kind of public service cuts being talked up as necessary by Cameron and George Osborne.
The Civil and Public Service Union has organised a blanket ban on the answering of telephone calls by the entire civil service and next week 20,000 benefit claimants are unlikely to receive their benefit cheques on time. Support staff in seven Dublin hospitals, including healthcare assistants, porters and catering staff, are due to stage a two-day walkout next month and low-level action by ambulance staff is anticipated across the country.
If Cameron can bear to look to Europe, he will see it is not just a question of the Irish behaving badly. The European Federation of Public Service Unions has seen its affiliated members call for strike action. This is not just in those countries where Tories go for their holidays (if they can find an airline to get them there) – Portugal, France and Greece, where three million workers are due to take part in a national strike next week – but also in “good” northern European Germany and the Netherlands.
The fact that some people were forced to rethink their holiday plans led Cameron to speak of a return to “the dark days of the 1970s” and there is a certain type of Tory for whom nostalgia is everything. In that case, Cameron had better hope polls showing his party with a seven-point lead over Labour are correct. But those of us who don’t miss nanny, boarding school and power cuts (oh the excitement of prep by candlelight) must ensure we do everything possible to ensure Cameron’s Tories don’t get to switch off the lights just yet.
