My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.10.26), mourning the lost opportunities for a class fight against privatisation and Austerity in Britain. Look to the French! And Spanish! Today’s mass strike in France is the key element – workers remain key to wealth creation and when we down tools we have key collective power at the point of production. Simple, but so hard to achieve. Protest does work, to a limited extent and inside the confines of social democracy. Mass Strike works whatever the society. Student protests tend to lead to mass strike when workers see their children attacked by the State, coshed, shot at and their hands blown-off if not murdered. Today’s mass strike in France has already won concessions against pay cuts. In Spain the protests have forced a General Election. this is all what has to happen here – a socialist workers’ mass revolt, not a White Riot!
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In an Emergency, Break the Glass!
There is a case for violent riots. As Martin Luther King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are a lot of people unheard in the world. There is a general sense here, too, that we have very little say over our lives or concern for our needs.
Looking across at Europe right now, perhaps we, too, should be breaking glass to regain our voice. The protests in France and Spain are advisory. School students in France have taken to the streets to publicise the terrible state of schools and colleges. They have been soundly beaten by Police, shooting them with rubber bullets. In response some have resorted to violence.
It is a core human condition of basic justice that “self defence is no offence”. No government, no municipal authority, no educational body has taken any of the students long-standing grievances on board. At heart, the extreme weather this summer has brought issues to the boil. Classrooms were at over 35 degrees centigrade, impossible to learn in, and now as winter approaches, they’re down to 15C. No-one can learn in these conditions, and shouldn’t be expected to.
Nor can anyone teach properly in these dilapidated state schools. On United Nations’ (UN) World Teachers’ Day yesterday, teachers in France took strike action and stood with the students, demanding new funding and reparations to the crumbling education estate. Unions are staging a mass strike today. France has experienced the neoliberal onslaught more recently but much faster than Britain, with €46 Billion in cuts now in train. To date, French workers have fought back against privatisation and austerity in a way we have not, with huge protests and strike action. The French government weakens and falls back one step at a time, yesterday withdrawing plans to lower wages further but continueing to freeze pensions. The protests continue. All power to the working class!
In Spain, last weekend’s street violence, perpetrated by incredibly violent policing worthy of the fascist regime of General Franco, has been challenged by a mass outpouring of anger against the injustice of the housing markets. The protests have been so large that they have forced a General Election! Local people have been forced into poverty and squalor by speculators playing the market to raise the price of homes ridiculously above anything working class people can possibly afford. In response, landlords have raised rents to prices that defy value and overwhelm the wages of most.
When those with wealth are free from rules and regulations, devoid of legal or moral constraint, they run riot. It is the rich who are violently assaulting the working classes everywhere, copying each other internationally in pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the majority. This has long been the case in Britain, one of the first countries to adopt the neoliberal economic model as an experiment, imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1970’s.
Margaret Thatcher ensured the privatisation and eradication of our council housing stock that has led to today’s deep housing crisis. Her legacy, with plaudits from today’s annual conference of the defunct Tory Party, includes the highest number of people sleeping rough ever recorded. In England we have 135,000 households living in temporary accommodation including 176,000 children. It will take 119 Years to clear housing waiting lists. We have parasitic housing corporations charging exorbitant service charges for home maintenance never delivered.
The hikes in housing costs here are unaffordable and, in their consequences, wholly illegitimate. And yet the Tories and their ex-colleagues who have fled to Reform UK, braying in their respective conferences, are promising more deregulation and more free market competition, planning to suck the very lifeblood out of working class people.
In comparison with the French and Spanish, we have just let the deep crisis across all social services happen, unopposed. We few who do shout out are bombarded by screaming Blackshirts saying the housing crisis is all the fault of migrants, the schools dilapidation caused by Black children and Muslims. These racists are the lackeys of the landlords, whipped-up by flagrant lies to secure and protect the exploitation of the property-owning elite. Fooled.
There is another way. We can fight back. Take to the streets. Demand housing regulation, legally enforced rent caps, public investment in education and social care. Learn from workers and students in France and Spain. That’s the element of rejoining Europe worthy of chasing!
