We’ll be glad if we see the back of Boris Johnson. More so, we want to see the back of the Borders Bill, the Health and Care Bill, the Police Bill, and the government’s squeezing of public services (NHS, social care, schools) and public sector pay.
The Health and Care, and Borders, Bills are in Committee stage in the House of Lords; the Police Bill finished in the Lords on 17 January (with some of the worst last-minute government amendments cropped), and now comes back to the Commons.
Ousting Johnson will not stop those Bills, or the cuts in real wages and services. The Tories’ favoured replacements - Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss - may be more careful than Johnson about partying at work, or chancing it with obvious fibs, or even about sallies like Johnson’s attempt to send Parliament home in August 2019. But they are stricter, more coherent right-wingers than Johnson himself.
The temper of the Tory base to which both Johnson and his rivals are playing is shown by Johnson’s “Operation Red Meat” to regain ground. Sending the military against asylum-seekers in the Channel, and squeezing the BBC financially to limit its capacity for at least some width of critical content - such is what Tories think will “make up for” Johnson’s misdeeds.
The best thing, for us, about Johnson’s stumbles is that they have made the Tories look more vulnerable.
The turnouts on the 15 January protests across the country against the Police Bill (and sometimes the Borders Bill too) were better than expected given that in most cities publicity was only by social media a couple of days before. Some thousands in London, some hundreds in many cities.
Those protests give us a boost - but also, like an expansion of sight gained by topping a foothill, bring into sharper view how far we have yet to climb.
There were some tens of thousands on the streets in London on one of the spring 2021 protests against the Police Bill (3 April). Nine months of campaigning since then, amendments from the government to worsen the Bill - and our numbers have shrunk (though surely they are bigger now than in the last Police Bill protest in London, on 8 December).
On the Borders Bill, the biggest protest so far has been only a thousand or so in London on 17 October - tiny compared to the breadth of opposition to the Bill. On the Health and Social Care Bill there have been no big demonstrations at all.
The labour movement (the unions and the Labour Party), which despite all its weaknesses is still by far the major week-to-week organisation of the working class and left-minded people, has opposed those Bills on paper, but has not mobilised.
We would scarcely expect the Starmer leadership of the Labour Party, in current mode, to call protests. But the union leaderships, many of them left-wing, have called no protests, nor campaigned to swell the protests called by others. Neither have the groups of the Labour left, like Momentum, which have networks wide enough for the task.
Solidarity will work to change that.
The spread of smartphones and social media since about 2008 has made it easier to call protests at short notice. There had been big short-notice protests long before then, at times of ultra-ferment; but outside those highs big protests depended on spreading discussions round workplaces and neighbourhoods and campuses, conveying leaflets to people’s hands, organising union and Labour Party groups to distribute the message in their circles, and that required time, some weeks if not months.
That ability to call snap protests is a boon. It can “work” to get big turnouts at high points. It can’t develop a campaign over months such as we need on the Tory Bills, and on many other causes.
Somehow we have settled into depending too much on protest being called by ad hoc groups geared not to week-to-week campaigning and to organising in workplaces and neighbourhoods, but instead to the “last-minute social media” model. The blame lies not with the ad hoc groups, but with us, with the labour movement, for leaving it to them.
Street protests are important. Strikes are more so. And those almost always have to be built on weeks, months, or years of detailed previous organising, even if sometimes they may be triggered at short term.
We have a long way to go before strikes against the Police Bill, the Borders Bill, or the Health and Social Care Bill. The layers of Tory anti-union law make strikes difficult in many conditions, as local government workers and NHS workers facing real pay cuts have recently found in their battle with turnout thresholds.
But, as these things go under neoliberal capitalism and under the burden of anti-union laws, this is a good time for strikes. A government discredited and zig-zagging through u-turns; a government which has promised to level up but is squeezing real wages and public services; employers anxious to get output going again; less unemployment than we feared.
Solidarity works to mobilise the labour movement in support of strikes like the Sheffield couriers and the disputes on the Tube and in the universities.
For two years Keir Starmer has led by trying to reconfigure the Labour Party as flag-waving and business-friendly, and has won only contempt even from the small-c conservative-minded voters he has hoped to woo. The discredit of the Tories now has swung some voters back willy-nilly to Labour.
Unions and Labour members will to some extent (Solidarity works to make that a decisive extent) increase pressure on Labour’s leadership to consolidate the opinion-poll upticks into stable support by campaigning for policies decided at Labour conference - rather than shelving them and criticising the government only for “incompetence” and the like.
Maybe a first sign is Shadow Home Secretary Wes Streeting, among the most “Blairite” of the shadow front bench, proposing on 17 January a “ten point plan” to curb Covid.
In its calls to “fix” sick pay, continue free testing, “transform” the NHS and social care, improve ventilation in schools, and help vaccinate the world, it goes further than previous Labour statements on Covid. Those have usually called only on the government to have “a plan” (unspecified) or raised demands for the government to do things only when it has become clear the government would soon do them anyway.
Yet it is vague, weak, and poorly promoted even at the level of press releases. Streeting said nothing about moves by Next, Ikea, Morrisons, and Wessex Water to cut isolation pay for unjabbed workers. And what about Labour conference policy on decarbonising?
On workers’ rights and anti-union laws?… Make the unions fight for their own left policies! Make Labour fight the Tories!
