Labour – UCU Left

23 August 202423 August 2024

Organising to win under a Labour government

Although the General Election was less than two months ago, it feels much longer since the Tories were decimated and Labour won a landslide election victory, albeit on a lower turnout than in 2019.

Within that period, we have seen a fascist and far right resurgence on our streets, the continuing slaughter of Palestinians and an assassination attempt on Trump that missed but, metaphorically speaking, hit Biden.

We are beginning to see, what many of us feared – a right-wing Labour government stubbornly sticking to the neoliberal consensus. Keir Starmer’s first act was to suspend seven Labour Party MPs, including former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell for daring to vote to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Yvette Cooper’s pledge to deport 14,000 refugees in attempt to prove that she is tougher on immigrants than the Tories will give succour to the far right and fascists.

There is not a cigarette paper between Starmer’s foreign policy and the Tories. The first world leader to contact Starmer to congratulate him on his victory was Biden who outlined all the areas of agreement they had between them which included – support for Israel, the Ukraine and the AUKUS agreement. This is a continuation of preparation for an escalation of military conflict across the globe.

But it has not all been one-way traffic. Whilst Labour under Starmer accept all the guiding principles of the market and competition, there are different pressures that he has to listen to because of Labour’s organic links to the working class via the trade union bureaucracy.

The right-wing media are full of articles about how Starmer is ‘caving in’ to the ‘union barons’ over pay, employment contracts and repealing some trade union laws – all leading to the ‘bad old days’ of the 1970s. Whilst, unfortunately, this is extremely exaggerated there are moves afoot that will open up space for organised labour to exert its influence more easily.

Repealing Trade Union laws

It looks likely that within the first hundred days the Labour government will repeal the minimum service anti strike legislation and the ballot thresholds. Both, of course, are welcome.

The Minimum Service Levels was never going to work in practice, so this was an easy one to repeal. The repealing of the Trade Union thresholds, perhaps was a little more of a surprise, considering how so many TU leaders, despite their public denunciation of the 2016 Act, in private have found the thresholds useful.

Governments’ pass trade union laws not simply to make it more difficult for legal working-class resistance but also to give the trade union bureaucracy more power over the rank and file. Since the 2016 Act was passed TU leaders of all stripes have happily blamed the members for not reaching the thresholds and therefore not able to take national action because of members’ apathy.

Despite ballot after ballot showing 90% plus of members voting for action the focus was on the turnouts and not the vote for action. This became the test of appetite of members to fight. Often TU leaders went further to argue it would be dangerous to ballot members nationally because if the union did not reach the thresholds, it would expose the weakness of the union and give a green light to the employer to go on the offensive.

This would be true if members voted against action, however it is complete nonsense to argue this when members have voted by 90% to take action on a 45% turnout. Yes, action may not be able to go ahead legally but it is hardly a sign of weakness. In such circumstances, it is much more about the lack of leadership provided to motivate members to vote than any alleged apathy amongst members.

In the past few years as some unions have become successful in meeting the thresholds TU leaders have come up with a range of reasons why successful ballot results still can’t be implemented or only partially with limited action. Those excuses have ranged from ‘there was only a 51% turned out to vote’ or the turnout was ‘very uneven’ etc. etc…

Don’t be surprised to find that after the 2016 Act is repealed that some unions attempt to continue their own internal thresholds to maintain this control over when action can be taken.

But for now, there should be no argument. The legal thresholds are going. Those who have previously argued that they would love to see national action but that the union was not yet ready to beat thresholds, should now sleep easily. Sustained by the knowledge that now we will be able to get the vast majority of members to take action, beginning a meaningful campaign capable of applying pressure on Starmer’s government.

But the trade union movement needs to go further and campaign to repeal all the anti TU legislation that were brought in by Thatcher and Blair.

It is clear that the so called ‘summer of love’ between Starmer and the unions will be a short-lived thing. One Tory complained to the FT recently that there has been a lot of ‘quid’ by no ‘quo’. In the same article the author reports that Starmer is strongly in favour of ‘reforming’ public services. The use of the term ‘reform’ means more privatization and productivity deals.

In short Starmer will be telling the unions that you can’t have your cake and eat it. For modest pay increases, that fail to restore wage levels to pre austerity and inflation period and the repealing of some TU laws they will be coming for our conditions. Work harder for less.

Striking pays

The announcement that the government will agree to the STRB 5.5% recommendation for schools and health workers and agree a 22% pay award over two years for junior doctors demonstrates that striking pays. The government has made it clear that they want to avoid more industrial action and the only way to do this is to meet workers’ demands, at least to some degree.

Clearly 5.5% will not make up for the earnings lost over the past number of years where inflation reached 16% and more. We should not accept the first offer that comes along. We need to continue to apply the pressure to force the Labour government to find more money for public sector pay through taxing the rich rather than attempting to create divisions by cutting benefits or pensions to pay for public sector pay.

In FE we are not even going to be offered the 5.5%. This will mean that we will fall behind teachers’ pay by £11k.

This is clearly unacceptable and the union should be taken active steps to challenge this. Even the CEO’s/Principals at the 7 largest FE colleges recognize this to be “very unfair”, particularly as FE was reclassified into the public sector in 2022 and have written to the Secretary of State highlighting the disparity in funding.

The union has, at last, launched a campaign over binding national bargaining (well, they have sent posters out…) that has been demanded by successive FE sector conferences. It is possible that the Labour government and AOC employers’ body move towards agreeing a new national bargaining framework. But without any national action any agreement is likely to be one that favours the employers.

UCU FE has no strategy other than battling it out at a local level college by college. This is a disaster. There is a reason why the teachers have been offered an above inflation pay rise and FE lecturers haven’t – they fought at a national level and we didn’t. We need to rectify this problem now if we are going to be able shape the Autumn budget. With colleges experiencing significant recruitment problems we are in a good position to win a significant pay rise so that the sector can attract desperately needed new staff.

Seizing the opportunities that will open up

After 14 years of Tory government Post 16 education has been desperately underfunded, the curriculum narrowed and the market allowed to let rip. In HE job loses already hit many Universities at the end of the summer term and look set for even a bigger funding crisis in the new academic year.

Labour under Starmer will not budge from this model by virtue of their own ideological values – because their values have grown from the same family tree. But workers expectations and confidence has risen – they expect a different way of government from what we have experienced over the last 14 years.

Mild reforms like repealing TU laws, offering above inflation pay awards or agreeing new collective bargaining frameworks will not meet these expectations but they will open up spaces for resistance to win back what we have lost over those years and go forward to tip the balance in favour of working people.

Our task is to be alert to these new openings and fill these spaces with resistance to fight over pay and collective bargaining agreements as well as for a post 16 education system based on planning and not the rigors of the market.

86 colleges and universities took part in the Stop the War and PSC workplace days of action. We will need to continue to campaign to end the genocide in Gaza. We will need to organise in our colleges and universities anti-racist themed learning weeks to celebrate multiculturalism and push back the rising tide of the fascist and far right.

To do all this and more we need to get organised and share our experiences about what has worked and what hasn’t. This is why London Region UCU has initiated a conference and supported by over 20 colleges and universities, so far, from across the UK to come together to discuss how we are going to win under a Labour government.

Get your branch to back the conference and send a delegation. Registration here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/defending-post-16-education-under-starmer-austerity-palestine-racism-and-climate-chaos-tickets-961668044007?aff=oddtdtcreator&utm_campaign=postpublish&utm_medium=sparkpost&utm_source=email

Sean Vernell UCU NEC

13 September 20157 November 2021

Jez he did!

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election will change the face of politics in Britain. His campaign focused the angry anti-Tory, anti-austerity feelings shared by millions.

In the article below Sean Vernell assesses the significance of the victory.

Jez he did! Corbyn’s victory brings with it ‘a new kind of politics’.

Jeremy Corbyn’s successful bid to win the leadership of the Labour Party has sent shock waves through the political establishment. His victory was overwhelming and gives him a huge mandate for the anti-austerity policies he put forward during the leadership campaign.

Corbyn’s first act as Labour leader was to speak out against the Tory Trade Union Bill and to join tens of thousands on the “Refugees welcome here” protest in London.

Despite the virulence of the attacks on him, his success in the election, with almost 60% of the first preference votes, was unequivocal. The significance of this victory is enormous. For two months all the political pundits, media hacks and the three other candidates have tried to make sense of his growing mass appeal not just with party members but also with a new generation that has, in the past, been turned off from official politics.

This election campaign has revealed just how out of touch the political establishment are with the true feelings of working people.

They used terms like ‘Corbynmania’ and ‘hysterical’ to describe the tens of thousands that his campaign attracted across Britain. The establishment pundits could only rationalise his popularity by putting it down to some form of mass neurosis.

They cannot understand why working people have such a profound sense of rage and injustice towards those at the top of society who continue to get wealthier whilst they get poorer. They fail to understand the frustration and anxiety that working people feel everyday as their work/life balance firmly tilts towards work – resulting in them having no time to spend playing and watching their children grow up.

They fail to understand the young.

A generation that has been brought up in an education system where developing the capacity to think and be critical has been replaced by ‘employability’, targets and tests. They have made it more difficult for children from working class backgrounds to access further and higher education by scrapping EMA and raising tuition fees. This is a generation that has been demonised by the press and blamed for successive governments’ failure to provide them with decent secure employment.

It is this discontent and these fears that Corbyn’s campaign gave voice to.

His campaign attracted 300,000 new members to join the Labour Party. At the core of his campaign lay an army of 16,000 volunteers who built the rallies and made the calls to get the vote out.

The offensive begins.

The campaign against Corbyn will no doubt start from day one. The media and the right within the Labour Party will try to portray Corbyn and his supporters as being out of touch with the electorate and who couldn’t possibly win a general election.

There’s nothing new here. This was exactly the excuse that Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair used to ‘modernise’ the party in the 80’s and 90s. They argued that the Labour Party (ie the left) had lost touch with the centre ground of British politics and needed to reconnect with the electorate.

For them that meant moving to the right and embracing the market, privatisation and ‘humanitarian’ wars.

Behind the Blairites’ political strategy lay an acceptance that working people are instinctively right wing and had lost any notion of a collective response to society’s

problems. They had, the Blairites believed, swallowed the individualist, ‘there’s no such thing as society’ politics of the Thatcher era. They concluded from this that rather than challenge these ideas the ‘modern’ Labour Party had to mimic the Tories if they were to win office again.

But it was always mistaken to believe that working people had simply accepted these ideas. Social survey after social survey throughout the 90s showed that on key Tory policies like privatisation and taxes most people were to the left of the official Labour Party.

What the Corbyn campaign proved is that by fighting on a principled, anti-austerity, anti- privatisation, anti- war platform and by putting forward alternatives based on collectivism he could attract people into engaging with official politics again.

But, of course, this is precisely what the establishment fears. After their hacks have spent hour after hour writing column after column complaining about the apathetic working class and tut-tutting at their refusal to turn out in elections, they are now faced with the potential of all those ‘chavs’ turning out to get actively engaged in politics.

The narrative will now change to complain about how Corbyn’s ‘new kind of politics’ is ‘too simplistic’ and that his supporters are not qualified to really understand the complexities of running a modern dynamic economy like Britain’s. The Press, employers and the right within the Labour Party, who are a part of the establishment, will collude to do everything that can to destabilise and undermine the Corbyn leadership. They will be relentless.

That is why trade unionists and activists need to rally support for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti- austerity stance and his democratic right to lead the Labour Party.

Corbyn’s victory: A real boost to every campaign

Corbyn’s victory will lift the confidence of all those who wish to fight back against austerity and injustice. Every trade unionist will feel more confident to take on every bullying manager knowing that their views are not extreme – we are now the mainstream.

He has long been a friend to trade unionists in struggle and to those fighting to defend educational provision. He is on record as proposing a National Education Service (like the NHS), opposing free schools and academies, supporting lifelong learning (to be paid for by a 2 percent increase in corporation tax), scrapping tuition fees and reinstating grants, and abolishing the charitable status of private schools. Clearly these policies will be enthusiastically supported by all those who work and are taught within the education sectors.

Every anti-racist and anti-war activist will feel more confident knowing that the leader of the Labour party is for scrapping Trident, pulling out of NATO and will oppose sending the poor and unemployed of one county to go and kill and maim the poor and unemployed of another.

There will be pressure, no doubt, even from Corybn’s own supporters to seek compromise with those who are hell-bent on destroying him. We will need to resist those pressures.

The real power to defeat austerity and prevent the new moves to war in Syria, for example, lies in building a mass austerity movement in the workplaces and on the streets. This means seizing every opportunity to block the Tories’ plans in the coming weeks and months. It means building on the mass solidarity in support of refugees and migrants and against racism which has mushroomed in the last few weeks.

The main defence against all those forces that seek to undermine Corbyn’s mandate is the movements that gave birth to Corbynism in the first place. As long as we are clear about this and continue to build the movement against austerity, war and racism then the excitement and enthusiasm for a new kind of politics ushered in by the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leader of the Labour Party, could be the harbinger of real hope and change for the left in Britain.

Next stop Manchester, Sunday 4th October.

The week after, on Saturday 10th October, the UCU Left conference, which could hardly be better timed, ‘Education in the front line: how do we fight the austerity agenda?’ will take place in central London. You can register for this by visiting the UCU Left website, www.uculeft.org, where there is also a downloadable flier.

Sean Vernell, UCU Coordinating Secretary City and Islington College and FE national negotiator.