There’s been some uproar on twitter in the last few days about a blog post by Lisa Ansell. The general tone of this has taken is that she is pro scab. I don’t think that she is, I think that she raises some important issues that whether we agree with them wholeheartedly or not they need to be considered.
The best way to outline those issues is to write a little about where I’m coming from. I’m 36, I remember the miners strike. I grew up in a place called Chasetown, a place that only exists because of mining. By the time of the 1984 strike mining was important but not the major source of employment, my own dad was a welder at a drive shaft manufacturer in Aldridge, the BRD. I remember lots of my friends dads worked there as well, in fact my girlfriends dad, two uncles and granddad worked there. I’m not from a mining family. We lived next door to a man called Jim, he was a miner and a scab. I used to spend time with them when I was young, this ended when the strike began and Jim kept going to work. He lost a lot of friends over that decision, miners and non miners alike. Scabs are bad, I’ve known it since I was 9 even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
I understand it now, and I feel more animosity to Jim and his ilk than I was capable of as a child. He’s a broken old man these days, paralysed down one side by a stroke and clinging to independence with a mobility scooter but I can’t get past the part he played in the destruction of the industry of the West Midlands and the country as a whole. The defeat that was the miners strike had implications way beyond the mines. The de-industrialisation of Britain would have gone down very differently if the miners had won. Put simply, the miners lost and the whole working class lost with them.
So as a class we’ve got what we’ve got now. Precarious employment for most, no employment at all for a significant minority, especially the young and little prospect of that changing for the better any time soon. In fact things look likely to get a whole lot worse. The security that public sector workers once enjoyed has evaporated, the pensions they get are under attack. The mainstream media portrays them as lazy and overpaid and screams furiously that public sector pensions are better than those private sector workers get. It’s seldom mentioned that they get paid less and contribute more and never mentioned that if the aim was justice the call would be for better private sector pension provision, not the dragging down of every worker to the bare minimum level for survival. If they’re lucky.
The response to these attacks? Strike action from public sector workers. Action that should be supported by every worker, whether they’re in the public sector or not. The inescapable fact now, just as in 1984 is that the fate of every single member of the working class is tied to the fate of every other member of the working class. Solidarity. Not a word, a weapon as the saying goes. It’s more than that though – All we have is each other.
That’s the constant, true in 1984, true now. Lots of other things have changed though. The patterns of our lives are very different. Few of us turn up to work through a gate with 2000 other people each shift change, some of us don’t even go to the same place each day to work. How many children are at school with friends whose parents work with their parents? The community workplace connection is gone. It went with the industry.
It’s in the context of 2011 and November 30th that I read Lisa Ansell’s blog post. I recognise a lot of sense in it. The support networks that existed in 1984 have largely gone, families spread over around the country as a consequence of battles long since lost. Shouting “scab” now is not what it was. The issue of personal debt means that the sad fact is there isn’t a union in this country that could strike off for the best part of a year. Some people genuinely couldn’t afford to lose a single days pay without incurring serious hardship. And yes, I’m well aware that they’ll lose more if the action is lost. Solidarity. We need to build it and it won’t be built by shouting at those that aren’t playing the game the we way we think it should be played or by abandoning the weak and vulnerable. It’ll be built by reconnecting with each other. By understanding each other and framing the fight in a way that we can win it. That’s not to say that I don’t think anyone should ever be called a scab, they exist but Lisa Ansell isn’t one, and she doesn’t seem to me to be their friend.
I think she’s wrong about the relevance of the left. I think we belong to a tradition that comes with an insight and value set that can be central to maintaining and improving the lives of ordinary people. Our lives. How we apply that insight and those values is what’s important. We aren’t apart from the working class with a magic blue print that would save the world if only people would listen. We need to recognise the limitations we and others have, overcome them where we can and work around them where we can’t.
Scab isn’t a desperately useful word for achieving that in 2011 and the fight that’s been started with Lisa Ansell by some to my mind is an example of how not to do it.
No State Funeral for Thatcher T-shirt 
Zombie Thatcher T-shirt 
Cameron Has Blood On His Hands T-Shirt 
Boris For Prime Minister T-Shirt 
After I wrote that post I was subjected to 5 days of constant, viceral, violently graphic and intimidating abuse. From people often not even part of the strike. I have fought all year for the public sector workers who have been ignored by the left/the right., and everyone else, and when our departments were decimated. Not a murmur. I write a reasonable post which explores the differences between then and now, and I have now had to contact the police after one local guy, took it upon himself to teach me about class solidarity by intimidating me. His comments on the last few blog posts. I have also been told I deserved to be murdered, that I am a sub human scab, because what?
On Friday when I wrote that blog post, I was concerned that the same people who have borne the cost of what many have ignored this year, would be bullied in the way I saw in the 80s. The disgusting torrent of abuse I have had to fend of in the past 5 days, mainly from people who aren’t even involved in the strike as union members, has convinced me this is not on. I remember not playing with the kids of the scabs, their mothers being attacked and ostracised, and I dont want the twats who abused me this weekend shouting at the lowest paid workers in the country.
I haven’t been in a union that has encouraged scab bullying, and we are all aware this is the first in what may be a long line of actions where we need rebuild solidarity. Bullying and intimidation do not do that. I’ve been a union member since I was 16 or 17, first thing in any job has been to join a union. The only strike I ever missed, was because of a childs final hearing(was a social worker), and my union rep would NEVER have assumed I would miss that hearing-was used to people having to donate to strike fund because the responsibility to children comes first. To those shouting scab with no thought, I ask this question ‘whose side are you on?’,. A question I last saw asked by a post graduate scientist with Green Party membership enjoying his fist paid employment. I am sickened by what I have seen in the last few days, absolutely sickened. And frightened.
I have pseudo anarchist fuckwits locally taking delight in organising to intimidate me, because I am a scab. And I am done with the macho authoritarian streak those whose cause it isn’t., insist we all share. I am not fighting for the right to shout at nurses and social workers, or teachers. They aren’t my enemy. The people who have targeted me are not people I stand alongside.
Take a little look at my blog. Pay attention to the comments. http://www.lisaansell.posterous.com
I now have a spoof twtter account about me, have seen many blog posts attacking me. Because my consideration is solidarity with a lifetime of colleagues not pseudo revolutionary fuckwits want to hijjack this and hang their dogma and long lost battles on. I NEED action to succeed. There is no choice but to keep fighting because unless I do I have nothing, and the people who want to teach me about class solidarity by abusing intimidating and threatening me, can go and fuck themselves.
Thanks for writing this post. I get we disagree on a lot of things, and I appreciate the tone of my response is odd. I now have to go the police station with about 50 sheets of paper filled with insults and threats. Not from one person, but from hundreds.
Jst for the record. I am a single parent. I have a 5 year old. The tories took my career. They took the thing that means taht when I work I can still pay my bills. I have had to stop livin on my own, and start sharing a house, cos otherwise I will be constantly slipping into more debt with no way out. I have no political representation, I have no pension, I have no access to the legal system at all. I fight hard because I have to and I will continue to do so because I have a 5 year old daughter, I cant have her in a world where she ends up like this at 33. The cunts who intimidated me in the last few days are bullies. THey dont give a fuck about the fight against the tories, they dont give a fuck about effective action. They want to bully and shout cos its their turn to punish the weakest, and Im not ghoing to stand for that any more than I am going to stand for the tories bullying the weakest. And they can pretend their ideologies are whatever they like. The ability to stick ‘anarchy’ in front of your user name does not give you the riht to bully and abuse. And you aint hijacking my cause to do it.(Sorry Sabcat- just that I know a few of the cunts will be reading and I want them to know they can go screw)
And this time next year, unless I do a proportion of my income comes from writing I lose my union membership. Not because I gave it up. UNions are the ONLY means I have left of accessing democracy, adn I am not not having them hijacked by the utter psychos I have been dealing with for days.
It is important to remember that there were two very different miner’s strikes.
The better known one was led by the heroic Arthur Scargill, a strategic genius, who would have led the country into a new golden age where crime and cancer would have been abolished by a flick of his golden locks, but this did not happen because all Nottinghamshire miners were scabs, all the police were militarised, and the evil Maggie was a witch.
The lesser known strike was led by a vainglorious slaphead with a naff comb-over who thought that calling a strike when every power station in the country had vast coal stocks was a good idea, many Nottinghamshire miners were on strike, at least two chief constables firmly refused to send a single PC, but Maggie was still a witch. For some reason or another a lot of the support, mainly money and food, for the Nottinghamshire strikers was around north-west London and Hertfordshire and many of the Notts strikers came down to have a drink and collect what was collected for them and their families. I met them on many occasions, but I never once heard the word ‘scab’ spoken, in fact there was no hate in them at all, they were striking not just for their jobs but their, and their families, dignity.
I read Lisa Ansell’s blog and follow her on twitter observing over recent days the extraordinary vitriol that she has been subjected to. It is reminiscent, not of the actual miners’ strike, but of the War Veterans Association in Zimbabwe about a decade ago. The same blend of arrogant narcissistic young men who have heard romanticized versions of the struggle, but who are too young to remember it, and who substitute hatred for those they perceive as the enemy (anybody who doubts the myth) for any realistic or meaningful notion of solidarity.
I too wrote a blog – http://post.ly/3y0Mm – following the outrage expressed at Lisa Ansell’s blog.
Like you, I suggested that calling anyone “scab” is totally misdirecting one’s ire, that if people are ignoring the call to strike, it’s because the reasons for it haven’t been made persuasively enough to cut through either fear or media-induced ignorance or both. Changing someone’s worldview takes a lot; if we’ve managed a few, that’s already a small victory.
I believe many parts of the Left have been inneffectual in the years since the miner’s strike, the arguments have been lost, the Labour Party has lost its way. Now we have UkUncut and Occupy, and they, too, have been slagged off by just such mindless thugs as Lisa suffered from, because they were doing it a different way.
No-one has the right to believe their way is THE way; quite evidently it isn’t, as they aren’t in power (thankfully). Their bullying and authoritarianism is frankly the main cause for the Left being so weak. Socialism is a system which asks all individuals to come together and make decisions together, not where one or two at the top tell the rest what to do.
So my call is for all people on the left to move together with humility, listening and enabling, not creating ever more enemies. Strength lies in forgiveness, because it creates unity (Before you ask, I’m an atheist). Our only enemy is the system; for the duration of the battle, those upholding the system are our enemies, but once we’ve won, these, too, should be forgiven. Vindictiveness never created anything worthwhile.
I’m a bit late to the party with this, but this hilarious (and somewhat depressing) episode has kept me amused on a rainy sunday morning.
I went and read the original article and comments, as suggested by Lisa Ansell.
I have to say Lisa, no matter the merit of your original point, you seem somewhat unbalanced. In the comments you initiate the aggression. You start the name calling and then cry “they are calling me names”.
And I disagree with your original point. You do seem to be attacking the right to withdraw labour. Now, now, I said that nicely so don’t get all frightened and report me to the police.