An article I particularly liked appears on page 6, with a college worker writing on what people in her workplace have been thinking over the course of the pensions dispute and parallel concerns over restructuring and redundancies. This probably tells us more about the fate of the anti-cuts movement than only discussing what union leaders are doing, however important that may be. She writes:

“We can complain as much as we want about our unions disempowering us and selling us out, but how do we get control over strikes back in our hands? We need networks and local strike committees so we can support each other and start building up an independent culture outside the official bureaucracy, but our attempts haven’t got very far in this borough. Often the people who might be interested are already very busy, long working hours make it difficult to meet, and we are too inclined to stay in our own little corners instead of reaching out to other workplaces [...] It looks like people feel more positive about big strikes than they usually do. However we need to fight for more grassroots control, and work out how to organise meaningfully with the non-unionised majority, or we won’t win.”

Indeed, the campaign began with Sparks creating their own rank-and-file committee, not from the initiative of the Unite union. Actions such as the occupation of Network Rail’s offices in London; invading BBC offices in Glasgow to protest the lack of media coverage of the dispute; and today’s road blockade at Ratcliffe-on-Soar; attest to many workers’ willingness to take direct action to resist the savage new BESNA industry agreement. 

Unite have put much of the focus on Balfour Beatty, the only company where it called a strike ballot in October, even though the construction giant in fact employs only 1,690 of some six thousand workers involved. At today’s Blackfriars demonstration, which gathered perhaps 100 people, there was talk of another two companies (of the seven involved) being balloted for the next round of strike action.

At the protest there was somewhat of a debate between those wielding the megaphone as to whether the Sparks’ aim is to put more pressure on Unite to take the lead in developing the dispute, or else the workers simply taking the initiative themselves. This kind of argument can be a bit of a false dichotomy, since engaging with Unite’s structures does not demand obeying the union leadership if they fail to take action, while independent initiative will itself affect the union’s behaviour. Indeed, many hundreds struck on 7th December despite a court injunction forcing Unite to call off a strike for which some 81% had voted. Protests such as today’s pressed ahead despite the absence of Unite officials: the fight has continually shown how workers can take action by and for themselves.

It must also be said that this was a debate between leftists (often instead introducing themselves as reps from various unions and campaigns) and that this morning’s demo had a lot of this kind of speaker rather than electricians themselves. Many were from such unions as the civil-service PCS, and spoke of the links between the Sparks’ dispute and the 30th November public-sector day of action over pensions. Indeed, we have already seen Sparks’ desire to link up with other struggles, for example the 200 electricians who joined the student demo of 9th November (only to be kettled by the Met).

However, I would suggest that the Sparks’ fight may have more potential to give wider layers of people confidence in their ability to resist austerity than do the days of action called by public-sector unions. This despite the fact that both fights are defensive; the Sparks dispute involves thousands rather than millions of workers; and is clearly not so directly a question of government policy. The existence of substantial rank-and-file initiative and control – rather than being orchestrated by union tops – appears to suggest a higher chance that the workers will not settle without some concrete results having been achieved. The problem is not simply bureaucrats holding back the pensions fight, but an apparent lack of independent initiatives or mass pressure among the rank-and-file as a counterbalance to this, suggesting a wider lack of confidence in ultimate victory.

Moreover, the Sparks’ condition is representative of the increasing casualisation of all kinds of workplaces, particularly in that many of them are unemployed or attached to sites for only short periods of time: a situation which unions across the private sector have found difficult to organise around. The 14th December strike, involving 5,000 other construction workers covered by the Blue Book/NAECI agreement, was in fact the first national construction strike since the 1970s. Pulling off such actions is particularly inspiring in an industry blighted by blacklisting of known militants and the danger of the work itself (as an example, this Monday saw a short strike at West Burton power station after a 31 year-old died in the site’s tenth fatality).

Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, there is a total media blackout of the Sparks, helping feed the myth that the only people who would want to strike at times like this are (supposedly) well-paid public sector workers ‘defending their privileges’. It seems hard to believe that the anti-cuts campaigns will succeed through just ‘keeping on marching’ or through infrequent days of action (large numbers do not as such mean results), whereas one group of workers showing the possibility of successfully resisting austerity would be a shot in the arm for the movement as a whole.

This is a good video showing some of the actions which took place last month:

After the adverts for the merits of cinema advertising, and the adverts for the cinema itself, came a trailer for War Horse. Based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel, this is a film about a horse from a humble farm who is deployed for use in World War I, runs around a lot through battlefields as carnage rages all around him, and ultimately saves the day and warms all our hearts. This plot is more-or-less identical to about half of The Iron Lady, although seeing Maggie Thatcher rise from grocer’s daughter to Prime Minister and obstinately press ahead with austerity as rioting and mass unemployment wreak havoc on all around her… it’s just not as uplifting

Indeed, the message of The Iron Lady is rather curious. Structured as a series of flashbacks by the now seriously mentally ill Baroness Thatcher,  she repeatedly recalls people giving her saccharine nuggets of advice: ‘Be yourself’, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what to do’, ‘You can achieve anything’, and so on. Thatcher’s children Mark and Carol apparently considered the film a ‘Left-wing fantasy’; while they are wrong insofar as the film portrays its hero largely sympathetically, it is nonetheless a sort of liberal mystification of who Thatcher was: her fight against class and gender prejudice is pushed to the fore, and through her determination she manages to overcome these barriers and thus forces the establishment to accept her.

The most obvious reason why this portrayal of her idealism rings hollow is that she was not at all a fighter for people of her background or gender, most of whom did not have a similar experience of the 1980s. Her legacy of mass unemployment, the destruction of working-class communities, and austerity clearly heaped far more burden onto most working-class women: hence the protests by former miners and miners’ wives which greeted the film’s appearance. Moreover, this itself points to the sham of today’s liberal inclusiveness: the mere fact that individuals can transcend their class background and be included in the establishment does not stop class from existing. This is not to deny that Thatcher did provide opportunity for some limited number of working-class people: divide-and-rule, a tactic as old as colonialism.

But there is a further problem, more damaging to the fate of this film. It constantly venerates her sense of purpose and determination, her sureness in her principles. In a conversation with her doctor, when he asks how she feels, she complains that people always talk about their inner feelings, not about what they think, or what action is necessary. In contrast to such behaviour, she wears her politics on her sleeve. So the film makes a strange kind of tribute to Thatcher: how can you champion someone’s sureness that their principles are right and indeed necessary, regardless of any judgement on whether they are indeed correct? If a politician takes their beliefs seriously, surely they would want others to take them seriously too, rather than merely celebrate the fact that these beliefs exist?

While I am not suggesting that the film ought to have included some Ken Loach-style set-piece debate of Thatcher’s legacy, this contradiction does mean that The Iron Lady fails in its attempt to arouse admiration, or even interest, in its hero. While didactic political films often come off poorly, series such as A Very British Coup or The House of Cards do at least explore the interaction between personality and raw power. The Iron Lady lacks any sense of power, particularly due to its structure: the memories of a Baroness Thatcher now struck by dementia. So there is little tragedy, here: her hallucinations of her long-dead husband are as dull as what they are (the rather sad longing of an ill old woman), and moreover, since this fate is not self-imposed, it doesn’t really succeed in counter-balancing her hubris in her years in power.

Thus half of The Iron Lady asks us to admire Thatcher simply because of her firm beliefs (no matter what those principles were) and determination in action, and yet the other half suggests we should pity her as just another mentally-ill old lady, who we ought to feel sorry for no matter what she did and believed, simply because she has dementia… If you will excuse the unintended hyperbole of the comparison, a film about hubris like Downfall (with Hitler raving as his empire collapses around him) is far more successful because it doesn’t invite us to valorise his courage in his convictions, but rather, shows how his beliefs interact with the consequences of his actions.

Truth be told, despite my avid interest even in Westminster politics, and although Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Thatcher is certainly very believable, I actually found the film quite boring, and the scenes of the dementia-struck Thatcher pottering around are tiresome and overlong. For an inspiring tale of obstinate courage against all odds, I suggest you instead go and see War Horse. This is particularly the case if you have kids, since The Iron Lady is a 12a, and is thus unsuitable for miners (sorry.)

I believe this is important not only in telling a little-known history of brave struggle, but also doing something to challenge mainstream ideas as to the democratic character of the Allied war effort. It is just a first stepping stone in a wider project of writing a class-struggle history of World War II: indeed, it was the story in this book which first interested me in the subject. The book will be out in March, or so Amazon says. There will be a launch and so on announced in due course. See below for the advert by publisher Merlin Press.

“A train full of SS returning from Russia derailed. Terrorism, or an accident? That hardly mattered to the SS officer. He needed revenge, so put the French train drivers in charge up against the wall, sent troops to arrest all the men who could be found in the village, and had them shot.

“But he had not counted on the fact that despite five years of war the German workers haven’t lost their good sense and still have some idea of solidarity. The German train drivers helped many Frenchmen to escape, thus saving their lives. When an inquest later found that the accident was not caused by sabotage but rather the poor condition of rolling stock, revolt took hold of the French and German train drivers. They declared a one hour strike to protest against the murder of innocent workers. The trains stopped for an hour on this line, with the German train crews supporting the French workers and their protest strike. … the German train drivers showed that workers do not feel national hatred their sense of solidarity knows no national boundaries.”

This is just one of the stories in this book. It tells the history of Trotskyists from 1938 to 1945 focussing on their activities aimed at subverting the German army of occupation.

It considers the history of the French Left, the coming of war, work aimed at influencing German soldiers, the potential for solidarity across national borders and the potential for radical change at the end of the war.

The author writes: What matters to us is to understand: what were people’s aims and motivations? What analysis did this or that tendency make of the situation? What were their tactics and their strategies? What were the results?