A Perfect Storm

Letter from the UK

Huge swathes of the British working class are either on strike or will strike in the coming days and weeks. Scottish refuse collectors all over the country are striking. The Port of Felixstowe container terminal – handling half of the UK’s container traffic – has been essentially shut because of striking workers. There have been regular walkouts of engineering contractors, especially at refineries across the UK Postal workers, bus drivers, train drivers and other railway workers, London Underground workers, even nurses and other NHS workers, and telecoms workers are all striking or are about to. Even the criminal barristers are on indefinite strike. And there have been strikes at Amazon too. There has been nothing like this in the UK for decades. It doesn’t take much analysis to see why this is happening.

The UK is the seventh richest country in the world and yet tens of millions of people are facing penury. The demands for wage increases are near-universal. The simple fact is that the major capitalist – the state – is gouging out the wages of the working class at an almost unprecedented rate. Yet, the government economic policy – unlike that in the decade following the 2008 recession – is not officially austerity. You could say it doesn’t have to be. So, in addition to the previous decade of austerity, we have had the Covid pandemic (over 200,000 deaths),economic hardships for many, a health service in crisis with several million people waiting years for treatments, while climate change brings floods and drought. All this against the backdrop of Brexit through which the right wing of the Conservative Party has inflicted its economic insanity on the entire population. And then the coup de grace: the Russo-Ukrainian war and the energy crisis. Inflation in the UK is now over 10% and is forecast to reach 18% in less than a year’s time. Make no mistake: the root cause of this crisis is capitalist social relations.

The energy crisis is the main driver of the current inflation in the UK. Yet, the UK produces 50% of the gas it uses; it gets 30% from Norway and the rest from LNG (from the Middle East and the US) Only 3% of UK gas comes from Russia, but all gas is priced at international market prices which are substantially driven by Russian policies. Although the UK generates 40% of its electricity from gas and 60% from cheaper renewable sources, prices are set by the most expensive unit – which is gas. This is one of the effects of having global markets and global prices. It is well-known how in less developed countries farmers were forced over decades by the IMF to grow cash crops in place of the variety of locally-consumed crops and exposed them to the vagaries of the world market. What we see now in the UK is a ‘first world’ equivalent imposed by the British state. UK gas storage has been discarded and decommissioned leaving the country materially and financially more reliant on spot markets. So, even although the Continental European countries are more dependent than the UK on Russian gas the British population is penalised more.

The standard of living of the British working class is plummeting. Food banks have been mushrooming across the country for years. These are used not just by the unemployed and the traditional poor, but by paid workers. In some hospitals, food banks have been set up – for the staff. And, as gas and electricity charges soar, we even have the food banks refusing donations of potatoes – because users can’t afford to pay for the energy to cook them.

Little wonder then, given the widespread and simultaneous immiseration we see, that the outcry of all sectors of the working class has also been simultaneous. All of these demands for wage rises come from the common experience felt by tens of millions of people. The unions are coming back to the fore again. However, they do not have the flexibility that they had, say, at the time of the last miners’ strike in the mid-1980s. Since then, successive governments have passed the most restrictive laws to tie the process of coming out on official strike into the most complex knots. The unions are under strong pressure from the workers to sound more militant and yet the laws make it far harder for unions to derail worker militancy with anything but talk.

Will traditional strikes and picket lines, each in isolated sectors, stop the momentum of this crisis? How long until the workers see that the answer is no?

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the start of the energy crisis, the UK political class has been in some disarray. The Conservative government is in a mess, between leaders and simply doesn’t know what its policies are; the Labour party is recovering from its Corbyn era but hasn’t got any coherence yet. The Union is stressed in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The economy as a whole suffers from chronic low productivity due to underinvestment for decades. The financial and legal systems are corrupt. The political system is utterly corrupt. It has been decades since the workers in Britain have struggled as a mass. Current union demands for wage increases don’t go near the rate of inflation so even if their demands were all met workers would still be losing out. At the same time, the bosses have been given the green light (as witness the P&O action in March) to fire and replace workers at lower wages;

this is illegal but the slap on the wrist the bosses receive from the government is no deterrent. There is little direct experience among the workers of dealing with the unions whose aim is always to settle matters in the interests of the nation – read the state. Will the fall into poverty for themselves and their families and the current disgusting political circus be powerful enough to open the workers’ eyes to the need to go beyond union limitations?

The unions always focus on the picket lines. But the workers’ needs have gone way beyond that. It is not enough to go on strike. It is imperative that workers see beyond the picket lines, and that a union-led strike is not going to make enough of a change. Workers must congregate, organise and discuss the whole situation they are in. We are in the early days of a perfect storm and it will be ruthless and relentless. Only workers organised into their own assemblies can reach out to other workers in all sectors and shut down the country until some positive change is made for working people. To confront the coming storm, the working class needs its own organisations and aims that strike at the heart of this vicious system to bring any hope of relief.

Marlowe

30 August 2022