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The neoliberal fairytale is over (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Headlines scream about a looming “class war“; reports warn of an inevitable “summer of discontent”. Britain’s newspapers are trying their hardest to evoke the chaos of the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the grim nadir of union power and social collapse in the UK. As with all fairy-tales, it also had a happy ending, in this case with Britain’s exhausted voters ejecting James Callaghan’s Labour government and sweeping Mrs Thatcher into office to save the country from intransigent union barons and far-Left militancy.
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.
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.
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SubscribeInteresting read, but why is it that when explanations are set out for the current inflation / cost of living crisis, what seem to be the three key factors are nearly always ignored or skated over; namely: a) Unprecedented public spending through vast QE & borrowing thoughout 20-21, b) enforced economic suppression throughtout that same period, and c) energy provisions & security made intentionally precarious by the implication of shortsighted and irresponsible environmental ideologies.
Are we to suppose that these are merely coincidental factors, or is it that placing too much emphasis on them detracts from the ability to use the crisis to blame convienient political hobbyhorses (such as Brexit, Thatcher etc)?
I suspect it’s mostly because the people who most loudly clamoured for lock down policies do not wish to admit they were wrong. Particularly the media and the various bureaucracies like health and education.
The Brexit argument always amuses me as apparently most of the Western world seemingly quit the EU at the same time.
Which they are probably very grateful for looking at the fragility of the EU at this moment. The ECB needs to find someone to fork out the 200 Bn Euro covid grant/loan to Italy, unless of course they are going to print all that money!
If QE was to have an effect it would have done so years ago. It’s actually largely tapered off now.
There’s maybe some truth to inflation being a rebound from the suppression of covid, which was deflationary, but the inflation rate is far higher now than the deflation.
It’s energy prices for sure. Shutting down nuclear and coal was a mistake, but electricity prices and energy prices are marginal. Wind power can’t affect the price at the pump and electricity supply companies pay the producers whatever is required. If gas and oil go up in price all units of electricity go up, consumers aren’t billed by the energy source. If they were though wind would be fairly cheap.
commodity prices are hugely distorted by the prey that they are to capital markets and derivatives, not least because the consumer plays the role of an infinite dumb financial counter party ,by virtue of pure necessity.
True, there’s been QE proceeding at pace since 2008 with apparently little effect on inflation, but it must be recognised the amount of ‘printed money’ pushed into the economy during 20-21 doubles the total amount printed from 2008-2019*. Taken with intentional supression of the economy and the means for consumers to spend it, I can scarcely imagine this not heavily contributing to rapid inflation when its known very well the phenomenon is caused by ‘too much money chasing too few goods’.
Again – I find it highly disturbing how this could possibly be overlooked.
[*Source: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/quantitative-easing%5D
Inflation was always going to be what ‘did’ for QE, China becoming the workshop of the world kept it at bay so the Central Bankers inflationary QE/Low interest rates was offset by China’s deflationary effect. That’s why QE didn’t blow us all up years ago, but the effects are there to see in stock prices (particularly the tech companies and other weird business plans that only survive on cheap money & which are now collapsing), asset prices and the weirdest of all, Crypto Currencies and NFT’s.
Only the MMT and MSM as usual, didn’t accept dissenting voices, even prior to Covid, that would have been widely known.
The economists pointing out that unless Central Bankers got interest rates back up to at least 5% an inflationary event would trash the global economy were a bit like anyone pointing out that if Covid was the new black-death, how come the Diamond Princess, basically a floating old person’s petri dish, hadn’t become a floating mortuary?
I think a) is rightly skated over because there has been vast QE and borrowing for most of the last fifteen years and, for almost all of that period, inflation was dormant. The old A Level Economics textbooks would have predicted inflation throughout but Milton Friedman hasn’t had a good 21st century — economies today are more flexible and open and, as we’re discovering, inflation isn’t a domestic phenomenon that governments or central banks have much control over. Opposition to QE and big spending is a valid political argument (or, if you prefer, a convenient political hobbyhorse) for those who want a smaller state for other reasons, but it isn’t a compelling economic argument in this very heavily supply-side case.
Yes. I totally agree with you
https://lfu.edu.krd/personnel/sohail-imran-khan/
There’s much in this article I don’t agree with but it absolutely hits this nail on the head with this sentence.
“Intersectionalism is designed to disable the formation of collective interests, majoritarian decision-making and solidarity.”
It neatly encapsulates the driving force behind why “woke”, went from an academic fringe movement, to becoming the chosen ideology of the upper middle classes and corporations, despite its revolutionary pretensions.
This makes me immediately think of Whole Foods (Amazon) illicitly collecting data on how diverse each shop’s employees were and then using them to stop unions forming, because they figured out that the more diverse a workforce is the less willing it is to unionise.
Do you have a source / evidence for this? I totally believe it and am keen to find out more
I agree, it wouldn’t suprise me either, but I would like some evidence so that I can use this in arguments.
I recall reading that they sent Inclusion and Diversity trainers in to speak to the staff and tell them that Unions were a form of White Privilege.
I’m not even sure how that argument is supposed to work (although I’m sure it did, somehow). Even if it is a form of white privilege, why would that mean anyone else would not wish to partake?
Being a wealthy board member of a large corporation is also supposedly white privilege (and male) but I’m pretty sure that a lot of the non-white male demographic would like that privilege, too.
“I’m not even sure how that argument is supposed to work (although I’m sure it did, somehow).”
Unfortunately I have an idea how it goes. Unions have been disproportionately representative of white male workers in the past and since all discrepancies must necessarily be caused by discrimination, (well understood phenomena like class, demographics and economics which explain such differences, should be disregarded as privileged forms of knowledge, that undermine the lived experience of oppressed minorities) unions therefore must be institutionally and structurally patriarchal and white suprematism.
Since unions are inherently prejudiced, it’s therefore strongly advised that workers who want to advance an agenda of anti-racism do not join unions and instead, join the companies own internal worker representation schemes. These will focus their goals on increasing representation, diversity and equity, rather than the narrow economic interests of the unions. Anyone who is opposed to making these the primary aims of the worker representation scheme need to check their privilege. (Of course, demographic changes means that work forces will become more diverse regardless of what the company does anyway but this way they can say they’ve achieved their goals representing their work force, without ever having to offer a pay rise.)
I’d forgotten about that.
Maybe it’s a purely generational thing, but I’m really struggling to see the unions as the bad guys here: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/neoliberalism-and-the-cathedral-are-the-same-damn-thing/
lower middle classes… addenda and errata
“the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the grim nadir of union power and social collapse in the UK”
I take it you weren’t alive then? Because it was no fairy-tale.
Or it was a very Grimm one 😉
As mentioned below, this article ignores the massive money-printing that went on for far too long during the pandemic. There was no proper discussion of the likely consequences, indeed it was shouted down as “peoples’ lives vs the economy”, as if the two were unrelated.
Well, now we have a learning opportunity.
Pay rises are inevitable, as we chase the dragon of inflation. The main challenge for union dinosaurs is to use the shortages and cost increases to regain power and present themselves as leading this charge instead of following it, which is what everyone is actually doing.
“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.”
Err, isn’t that exactly the case with the RMT – clinging to archaic and inefficient work rules and refusing to embrace technology?
So the industry wants the workers to work more efficiently and increase their output, but not pay them the extra money for their efforts?
When workers are stuck at a minimum wage and never receive raises from their employer no matter how hard they work, how is that any different in practice than working under Communism?
When every penny you earn is taken by basic living costs, rather than personal advancement we’re basically back to the days of serfdom
https://fullfact.org/economy/RMT-strike-salary/
Firstly those figures have been largely shown to be incorrect, as they’re heavily skewed by higher earning drivers who are part of a different union.
Secondly, even if they were true why are they relevant? Why should they accept a below inflation pay increase (a pay cut) or a substantial increase in their workload (which is what the redundancies will cause) without an increase to their wages?
My faith in any ‘fact checker’ went out the window when snopes produced the response shown to the question
Did a ‘Convicted Terrorist’ Sit on the Board of a BLM Funding Body?
It came up with these conclusions
What’s True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What’s Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of “terrorism,” it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of “domestic terrorism.”
A simple ‘Yes’ would have been better, but nowhere near as funny.
An equally amusing ‘fact check’ was the BBC’s radio response to why the claimed fact that Covid got out of a wuhan lab was ‘false news’ when Trump said it, but wasn’t when Biden did. But that was down more to the fact even on radio one could hear the embarrassment and imagine the squirming of the panellists when explaining why the change.
My understanding is that RMT members are payed substantially better than the minimum wage. Plus best in class pensions and benefits. Thye wouldn’t get that under Communism.
It’s irrelevant whether they earn the minimum wage or are paid rather well. Why should they accept a pay cut (in real terms after inflation) or do double the work for the same pay due for economic circumstances out of their control or the incompetence of their bosses?
The answer is simple here – because the business situation has changed and this is required if they want to keep their jobs. There is nothing whatever unusual about this – people in private industry understand that they need to learn, be flexible and adapt to survive.
In fact, this all changed decades ago. It’s just that reality hasn’t caught up with the rail industry yet.
It is simply unrealistic to expect to be “protected” from any and all change and furthermore to expect others to pick up the cost.
We all have to deal with “circumstances out of our control” every day. Why do you suggest that a small elite group of workers deserve “protection” from these whilst the rest of us do not ?
These workers are not being asked to do “double the work”. What utter nonsense. They are being asked to work in a modern, flexible way just as the rest of us do. Who knows – they might actually benefit from a more flexible approach to work and enjoy it more.
That’s before we factor in that in many cases, what is being “protected” here are archaic and restrictive working practices which mean that some of these people are actually doing less work than they could or should (workers apparently refusing to walk over the road from King’s Cross to St. Pancras, being paid to go to the toilet and all sorts of other nonsense). And who’s allowed (and not allowed) to open and close train doors.
Those who stick their heads in the sand and fight automation will perish eventually …
I do wonder just why you suppose the bosses to be “incompetent”, but imply that the workers are all somehow perfect and blameless. Being very generous, I would say that this is “statistically unlikely”.
They can increase output just by doing away with unnecessary duplication, archaic demarcation (you know, the Kings Cross maintenance crew can’t help at adjoining St Pancras cos “demarcation”), and most of all automation. Nobody works any harder, but efficiency increases. That’s how it works in normal industries.
So the workers don’t get to share the spoils of this vastly increased productivity? The money simply pools at the top, inequality increases and those full time workers at the bottom are increasingly reliant on government assistance simply to keep the wolves from the door.
You’re attitude is neoliberalism in a nutshell, and why it is being increasingly rejected by large sections of society
If they don’t increase efficiency they’re all out of jobs anyway. Happened to me three times before I woke up.
I have no more idea than you do what “neoliberalism” is, except a stick for overeducated unworldly academics to beat employers with – more than half of whom are not “corporations” but small businesses who may well be earning less than their employees.
In your dreams. Most companies are absorbing production cost increases for now and only passing a proportion onto customers.
That’s why inequality is at record levels?
Inequality is a useless measure . Poverty is what matters.
Inequality is the price of living in a free society.
Only when it is properly defined against some absolute standards and essential needs. I’m fed up hearing about “relative poverty”.
The will always be inequality, that in itself isn’t the problem. However when you have full time workers who can’t pay their bills while those at the top are keeping an ever increasing proportion of a nations wealth then the system needs adjusting.
Inequality in the UK was at its smallest levels in 1977 I believe, and has been rising substantially ever since Thatchers reforms
Ironically, pre-Thatcher & a big reason she got in was because of strike action, and a lot of it was to ‘maintain differentials’ – ie the lowest paid got a rise, so the unions for the skilled wanted one to restore the ‘inequality’
Bang on. It’s mainly about status and power. Rarely “fairness”.
Looking at the salary levels, it would be most surprising if the RMT members are those most in need to pay their bills right now. If we’re really concerned to help the strugglers, I’d suggest we start with those suffering the most.
A left-winger perhaps having the dawn of recognition that deliberately trying to stop as many people as possible getting to their work, holidays etc might not be an entirely popular policy? Keir Starmer, whatever his manifold faults, isn’t going to make that schoolboy error. Give the structure of the economy, most people simply aren’t in a position to use industrial strength like this (in my view a good thing!). Get another job, if you don’t like your current one!
“It is not union barons but airline companies, which slashed so many jobs during the lockdown, that have shredded Britons’ summer plans”
i.e. responded to a massive (largely government dictated) loss of business by reducing the workforce. Or else, perhaps go bankrupt! A conspiracy against the working class?
“… 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…” so what exactly are you objecting to – privatisation, nationalisation, both, or whatever particular settlement the awful ‘Tories’ have hit upon’ . As we know, we didn’t use to have any industrial disputes at all in the halcyon high point of industrial nationalisation in the 1970s!
The railways are heavily subsidised, above any importance of their actual role in Britain’s economy or transport system. The government is perhaps in its cack-handed way attempting to take political responsibility by attempting to reduce the grotesque subsides to this industry!
‘Neoliberalism’ – just an undefined ‘boo’ word. If only we could wish wealth into existence by government diktat as the Left seems to endlessly imagine (The Chinese seem to have become wealthier by becoming more capitalist, not more communist!), without any conflict or even hard work required.
I don’t think conditions of the factory workers in China have improved. The few have more money and the many have less, or may be the same as they had before but inflation has made it less. Effort should be recognised. I don’t care what words are used to describe any of this except it seems the rich just get richer and the rest stay under the thumb of less. That will not work out in the end. You cannot eat gold. Eventually the rich may have to do their own cleaning that’s what they are afraid of. One thing is for sure the more the people understand and break down the bullshit the more inclusive the conversation will be. Hard WORK deserves a reward, hard money making is sometimes pure lazy. I may a bit ignorant in this argument but I do believe people deserve a decent living wage, that will give them spending power which will benefit those that distribute goods. How much money do peole have to have to be satisfied? How much money does Elon Musk need, or who whoever owns Amazon now, or Bill Gates or any of the billionaires? That money does not circulate in the wide world, only in a small section of it. I don’t think we need to Robin Hood it, but rewarding fair work, encouraging innovation in the workforce with some patience and education wouldn’t go astray. I think I’ve said enough as I am sure I will now receive a barrage of criticism for being feeble minded. Sorry.
‘Neoliberalism’ – just an undefined ‘boo’ word – exactly! – hence I could not begin to take this article on board.
I don’t think it is a meaningless ‘boo word’. It has a specific historical lineage (as well described in Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists) and versions of its core doctrine (the encasement of the market, safe from the reaches of democracy) were vividly recounted in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.
What governments subsequently did with the work of Hayek, Mises, Ropke etc wasn’t always a textbook reproduction, but nevertheless their efforts to follow in that vein were hugely historically and economically significant.
Hand the railways over to the Unions to be run as a Co-op.
One thing I found when contracted to the railways under Blair, my job along with others, to build a national database of all their assets, was that Rail-workers seemed to ‘love’ railways. Though there was the slight issue that Nationalisation still, after all those years, hadn’t appeared to remove the character and loyalty of staff to the regional railways. South West for example still believed it was God’s Wonderful Railway.
Almost everywhere you looked (not sure about Management only ever reported to them) with workers they just loved railways. I was often required to visit signal boxes etc to find out from the men/women who knew what they owned and where it was, to see if it matched what the rest of us thought they owned and where we thought it was)
My favourite experience was the gentleman in Swindon who having retired, returned to run something or other, but in his spare time organised chartered trains for enthusiasts that ran on routes that normally weren’t available to passengers. He then went on holiday on those charters. He was the fount of all knowledge – in fact they probably should have sat him down keying in all he knew. He once told me not only where a particular signal I thought existed in the middle of Wales, but couldn’t find, was, but also what end of the platform it was on at a tiny station there. He then proceeded to tell me how ‘rail archeologically’ interesting it was. He also proudly showed me his computer screens and told me about the ‘Thunderbirds’ displayed on them. Which may have been what he actually looked after. They the engines sitting around waiting to go and rescue any trains that broke down!
Give it to the Unions I say.
I don’t know how profitable it would be, but boy I bet it would be wonderful experience.
Nope. You would need leaders, and by default they would almost certainly be politicians. But the working class (and some of the middle class too) have realised that they were just cannon fodder to be used and set down whenever the political game required.
Perhaps Neoliberalism has exposed the commercial hand in the velvet glove of democracy. Perhaps Tony Blair exposed how a nation could be stampeded into an unjust war. Perhaps the delay in implementing Brexit has exposed the preening of pouting politicians resisting what they personally do not want.
Politicians have to demonstrate their trustworthiness before they can be trusted by the working class or any other client group. A tough requirement for the current sets of ‘managerial’ politicians.
Let us not forget that the German union system, designed by our TUC after the war, and rejected when offered to UK by a then Labour government, saw workers representatives on management boards… and it worked beautifully. Let us also not forget how the big pension funds of the Miners, post office, merchant Navy, coal board and others used to be some of the largest shareholders in British public companies AND buyers and holders of UK Government bonds, so were actually the back bone of a large part of our capitalism.
Rose tinted spectacles suggest that post war working men used to a hirearchy of orders and duty,?suddenly went from orderly, disciplined fighting men in uniform to radical communists, without looking at the woeful management of, for example, our car industry that made badly designed product that could not compete with post war Allied re- built German and Japanese competition, from countries not burdened by a massive post war defence budget.
It doesn’t stop them striking
https://news.maritime-network.com/2022/06/10/workers-at-5-german-ports-walk-out-in-warning-strike/
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/workers-at-5-german-ports-walk-out-in-warning-strike
The article seems to set out to say there’s no class war and then goes on to invoke all the tropes of class war.
I happen to agree that the definition of working class from the 70s no longer applies (we area all middle class now!) – but the language of “corporate profits are booming ” etc attempts to re-invoke that class war.
The same two excuses – pandemic “shocks” and war in Ukraine – are trotted out over here in the US to explain away the economic pain, but this is an obvious, coordinated lie. These deprivations are being deliberately imposed upon tax payers and other productive people to exercise power, to let regular people know what can be done to us – and, short of full-blown revolutionary rejection, the power authorities will continue, untroubled by conscience. No more of these lame “here’s why” articles. They’re insulting.
I believe Jerome Powell confessed that wasn’t true last week,
“Asked whether he thought Russian President, Vladimir Putin, was responsible for the inflation currently swamping American consumers, as per President Joe Biden’s persistent claim, the Federal Reserve chief replied, matter-of-factly, “No, inflation was high before — certainly before the war in Ukraine broke out.””
Ah so the global pandemic that caused a recession coupled with a major energy producer invading a major wheat exporter has no impact on the global economy, but the Illuminati does?
“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.”
That’s actually quite amusing!
Only useful for playing Buzzword Bingo.
Unreadable nonsense. Is there any quality threshold for getting published on UnHerd ?
By which you mean “I don’t agree” – fair enough, but at least engage with the points made.
Which parts do you think are incorrect?
All of it ! And the general tone of class warfare of the language and jargon used.
Too many things I could disagree with.
So let’s pick just a few:
This idea that “the government” should negotiate with the RMT. Sorry – the government are not the employers here and not a party to the dispute.
Or the idea that unions are exclusively for “working class” people (whatever that term actually means these days. I would suggest that a majority of union members are now actually middle class – most union activity is now in the public sector or quasi-public sector (which we might consider the railways to be). A lot of these disputes seem to be primarily about protecting the rights and privileges of small groups of workers who are earning more than current market conditions justify. My favourite example here would be BALPA and the airline unions – a lot of their efforts are directed towards protecting the higher salaries and benefits of BA staff at Heathrow, whilst doing little for their less well remunerated colleagues at Gatwick – in other words actively promoting a two tier workforce !
This feels very like the 1970s/80s to me in some respects. Some of us remember the Fleet Street print unions and the way they operated – very high pay, endless strikes, controlling entry to the business for their own families. Technology finished them off. It’s come for the airlines. It will come for the RMT – it’s just a question of how soon. And we will have cheaper, safer and more reliable rail travel as a result. Remember how the airline unions always used to claim how their main concern was “safety” and this justified high airline salaries. EasyJet and RyanAir proved otherwise.
Is that better ?
I suspect I could knock something better than the original article up with one of those software programs which generates this sort of jargon-ridden writing.
So if the government shouldn’t negotiate with the union (a point a largely agree with) then why are they getting involved in the first place putting pressure on the union to end the strikes? You can’t have it both ways.
Your second point seems to complain that unions only look after their members, which is rather confusing as that’s the entire point of a union. They have no responsibility to those who don’t contribute.
My point is that the airline unions specifically campaigned for their better paid members at the expense of the less well paid members in the BA case – i.e. they actively support a two-tier workforce. Bizarre when you think about it.
I never actually said that the government should intervene to tell the unions to stop the strikes. But yes, it is what I was thinking – so I’m guilty there. But I guess as an individual it is not inconsistent to say that the government should not intervene and to view the strikes as futile and damaging (which is indeed my view).
But the unions also have contradictory priorities. On the one hand, they campaign for their own members interests (no problem here, provided it is done within the law). On the other, they bang on about political issues and campaigns in general and sponsor a political party (for whom the majority of their members appear not to vote). Once they get into politics like this they are assuming responsibility for “those who do not contribute”. This is one reason why they got into such trouble in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not clear today if those lessons were actually learned …
Why is the unions supporting Labour any different from business groups donating to the Tories?
Once any government gets into power it’s responsible for those that didn’t vote for it, which in the case of the UK can often be 2/3 of the electorate. All your arguments about the unions politically can just as easily be applied to the other side
So what ?
I’m commenting on unions and the article.
What’s all this other stuff you’re throwing in now ?
Noise.
I think thats a deliberate ploy to encourage major dissent in the workforce and in the union itself, very destructive. However, the Unions themself should work to remove that ‘non member ‘discrimination bullshit. All it does is reduce their membership and forces a rigid blinkered membership. I was in the construction indsutry for many years and worked on job sites that were heavily union controlled. It was interesting because the tower crane drivers became very very well paid compared to other workers on the same site. Over time though they certainly didn’t appear to become wealthy, guess they wasted the money on???
Rather than being angry over the opinions of others, this is a really constructive argument that should be encouraged, with the aim of understanding. Rather than a slinging match to the bottom.
Personally I’d say we are at the end of the 2007 QE/Low interest rate palliative. Because lockdown introduced inflation, something many of the non-MMT economists warned would kill economies IF Central Bank interest rates weren’t raised to around 5%. But inflation had been offset so much by China the Central Bankers thought inflation was dead (a bit like History was once) and it would be a black swan event. Ironically China let black swans loose with lockdowns, and then let tthem migrate across the globe!
Too late now to raise rates without drastic consequences, so now the Central Bankers are stuck between a recession and a depression or maybe 2 depressions!
So next is the Zombie apocalypse as all that basically free money to the monied and the Zombie companies who never had viable business plans in anything but a free money era ceases .
Though it has to be said Putin and the Greens combined really well to speed up the advent of the apocalypse, it was already on its way here last Winter when the failure of Hydro and Wind power & subsequent increase in demand for gas was accepted as the reason for the gas price hike.
The money Putin reputedly spent on funding the greens was money very well spent from his point of view. Time to bin Net Zero and go for oil and gas.
I don’t think that I have ever seen so many mentions in one short article about the “working class”. To me, it raises these questions, rather than the rather turgid philosophical points that the author makes.
Is there any such thing in today’s Britain as a “working class”.
If there is, then what sort of people does it comprise?
Do they need any more protection than our current legislation already provides? Or more protection than any other “class”?
Are Trades Unions really the correct vehicle for this purpose?
Suggested answers:
1) No
2) N/A
3) No
4) No
There are people who work and contribute (or have done, or will do). Still thankfully most of us. And some who never have and never will do (but could and should). Plus some who genuinely cannot and deserve support.
Reading some of these comments is a remarkable experience. It’s like the greatest hits of Norman Tebbit and Milton Friedman.
The economic reality is that basic infrastructure like railways should not and cannot be left to the market to provide. It’s this aversion to the state providing genuine public goods which has led to the slow but steady disfigurement of British society over the past several decades. The perverse results are things like the government’s ridiculous Covid policies (“protect the NHS”, i.e. the institution that’s supposed to protect us) and Chinese state-backed companies becoming key stakeholders in our energy and telecoms sectors.
The only thing they have going for them is that the opposition is basically the same but worse. After the incoherent experiment that was Corbynism (old-fashioned statism fused with bourgeois cosmopolitanism) the Labour Party seem to have re-embraced the same line, with the added toxin of vociferous identity politics that basically cancels the whole concept of a common good that can be pursued in the first place. They have become the useful idiots of corporate capitalism.
Must have missed the “fairy tale” @ the time…probably because the electric was only on half the week !
The article has a lot of rose-tinted views of years of the post-war consensus, coupled with reactionary rants about the present.
1) To characterize neoliberalism as technocratic ignores its implementation in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. How else was Keynesian demand management realised? How else was Wilson supposed to get his technological revolution? What was Babara Castle’s “In place of Strife” if not technocratic? This was the backdrop from which growing demands for industrial democracy came, be they New Left socialists or unservile state liberals.
2) The UK never had a command and control economy. The post-war consensus years were characterised by corporatism, where consent was generated between large sectional bodies like the TUC and CBI. It broke down as governments were unable to generate consent from these groups and trade union power shifted to shop stewards.
3) Intersectionality is a response to how collectivist politics often leaves minorities short-changed. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the winter of discontent happened; public sector service workers were short-changed by Callaghan’s social contract that benefitted workers in nationalized industries. Telling oppressed and marginalized groups to “shut up” and get with the program is no way to do politics in the democratic world post-1960s. I don’t see how the Cunliffe can have a working-class movement that stays silent on the interests of large sections of the working classes.
Inronically, articles on Unherd have no problem using intersectionality when criticizing contemporary feminism as being too middle class or current trade unions too focused on a narrow public sector labour aristocracy.