Solidarity

Peter Hitchens writes:

I have been a trade union member since 1973. I see no reason to stop. One thing above all keeps me in, even though I have many quarrels with the National Union of Journalists. By the way, I should say here that the naïve belief among BNP supporters, that the NUJ in some way requires its members to oppose the BNP, is a baseless fantasy. It has no power to do anything of the kind. The NUJ is, like most unions, largely run by people whose prejudices are left-wing. This is in the nature of unions, especially white-collar ones, for reasons which are obvious if you think about them I am sometimes even attacked in its official journal by other NUJ members who would be shocked to learn that I also belong to it.

But the thing that keeps me in the union is a single unforgettable experience - the day I went to Gdansk, 31 years ago, and met Lech Walesa, then the leader of the great shipyard strike against the Soviet Empire.

I was at the time an industrial correspondent for another newspaper. I had watched, the previous September, the extraordinary scenes at the Trade Union Congress in Brighton, where the leaders of the major British unions had been deeply embarrassed by the Gdansk strike. They knew they ought to support it. But the British Labour movement was in those days so rotten with Communist fellow-travellers and their dupes that it could not bring itself to give clear backing to the Polish workers.

Since then, thanks to ‘Euro-Communism’ and the influence of such things as ‘Marxism Today’, the fellow- travellers have converted themselves into a lobby for EU membership, for ‘equality of outcome’ schemes, for the social and cultural revolution and for the other causes which have in fact made the British left far more powerful and influential than it was when it was trapped by its embarrassingly close association with the worst tyranny in Europe. In these days people, including some members of the labour movement, could see the left for what it was. Now they can’t. I’ll always remember a wonderful moment at a 1970s conference of the old General and Municipal Workers’ Union, when some leftist wiseacre made a speech saying grandiloquently ‘There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union’, and a gruff old geezer then shuffled to the podium and snapped ‘There’s no unemployment in Dartmoor Prison, either’.

I had arrived in Warsaw by train two nights before, the train pulling up in deep snow at a remote suburban station, after an eight-hour journey from Berlin without a scrap of food or drink on board. The promised Polish dining car had disappeared – the country at that time was so broke that there really was very little food available, except for hard currency, and even then pretty limited. We had passed groups of Soviet Army soldiers at the Polish border with East Germany, soon before we clattered across the River Oder. The Polish passengers had anxiously interrogated them (they all spoke Russian) to see if they knew anything about rumours of an invasion. They didn’t. they were just glad not to be in Afghanistan.

Ronald Reagan had just been elected US President (and Michael Foot had just been picked as Labour Leader, though when I saw the announcement of this on Polish TV, Foot looked so gloomy, and his beaten opponent Denis Healey so jovial, that I thought for some time that Foot had lost). Washington was therefore in its lame duck period. And the challenge to Kremlin authority in Gdansk was so outrageous that many believed that Moscow would order in the troops. In the end, Poland invaded itself rather than undergo an actual occupation, setting up an authoritarian regime.

But nobody knew this was coming. Nobody knew what was coming at all, except that it was probably quite frightening. What the strikers did know was that they were up against the same force that had crushed revolts in Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. On each occasion, it had killed, imprisoned and persecuted those who got in its way, sometimes using torture as well. There was at that time no reason to believe that the Politburo had lost its nerve. But when, on that ice-cold grey morning I took the bumpy, rudimentary flight from Warsaw to the north coast, and found my way through the sad, concrete suburbs of the great ‘Free and Hanseatic City’ till I reached the seedy Hotel Morski , which was then Walesa’s headquarters, neither he nor anyone else seemed remotely afraid. The student who volunteered to interpret for me wasn’t afraid. Walesa wasn’t afraid , and obligingly gave me ten solid minutes of unequivocal denunciation of the British union leadership. The people in the shipyard weren’t afraid.

Yet the place was still quite plainly under Communist rule. The slogans extolling the party were still in place (these were never intended to convince anyone, merely to cast in the teeth of non-Communists the fact that they were subjugated). The police and the army were still under the control of the Communist Party, as were the schools and universities, the newspapers and the broadcasters.

Only two things got in the way. One was the Roman Catholic Church, which on its own had been fairly weak, but in concert with the strikers at Gdansk was extraordinarily powerful. The other was the strike weapon, obviously a vital protection against an over-mighty state.

How could I support its use in these circumstances, and not also support the continued freedom to use it (and therefore the unions themselves) in my own home country? It was one of the guarantees of liberty, and. Having seen it in use, I couldn’t doubt it. Even if it was misused, as it so often was, it was its misuse that was wrong, not the thing itself (one might say something similar about press freedom just now).

So I’ve always held on to my union card, as a deliberate repudiation of the oversimplified view of unions taken by some political conservatives.

It goes on though, specifically in relation to yesterday. But do read it.

The gap between public sector and private sector pay is entirely a product of the deunionisation of the private sector and the privatisation or contracting out of the blue collar aspects of central and local government activity. The private sector was made all white collar, with pay to match, even though the same people were still doing the blue collar work, and were still doing it at public expense, but no longer had to be paid or treated properly.

If that particular penny ever drops on the Right - that the solution is the return of all aspects of public service delivery to the public sector, together with the reunionisation of the private sector - then who knows what else might finally get through? The fact that the problems presently related to mass immigration could not have arisen if it had still been a case of "no union card, no job", and could be remedied immediately by a reversion to that state of affairs? The fact that a party financially controlled by the unions, rather than by a handful of politicised moneybags from the 1968 generation, could never have become a vehicle for the New Left, and might very well be ceasing to be such a vehicle even now as the older pattern of funding reasserts itself?

Bringing us to the point about Eurocommunism. It and the related New Left tendencies now define the limits of acceptable political opinion in this country, and have in fact done so for most of the last 20 years. New Labour was entirely an expression of those tendencies, and New Labour now defines both Coalition parties, as well as the small and embittered but very noisy Blairite rump still technically within the Labour Party because you can do pretty much anything in London and not be expelled.

But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the Left can be redefined in terms of the feminist and homosexualist movements, or the views of black people if they happen to be the wildly untypical Stuart Hall, or the views of ecowarriors, or what have you, then why not in terms of the views of trade unionists, or the views of co-operators and other mutualists, or the views of working-class patriots, or the views of orthodox Catholics, or the views of attendees at the black churches? A generation on, what was once the New Left thinks that the crisis in its approach is that of what to do with or about the Muslims. But the Muslims are the least of these people's worries.

Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna do not themselves appear to be conservative figures. But they have won the support of Blue Labour because they are prepared to listen to the patriotic and the socially conservative elements within the Labour Movement and its wider constituency. Gordon Brown was largely constrained from doing so, and Tony Blair defined himself by his refusal to do so. But Blair's day has gone. Postmodernism is not going to eat itself. Rather, it is we who have already added salt and pepper, and picked up our knives and forks. In the coming Miliband and Umunna Era, we fully intend to tuck in.