France is grinding to a standstill as millions of workers and students erupt in the streets at the government’s prposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Across the Channel, the new Tory Chancellor has announced savage cuts in public expenditures that will slice away more than a million jobs, drive workers out of south east England and doom the country to years of austerity (unequally imposed, bien sur.) Yet the response has been muted.
A few years ago, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy told an interviewer that he knew the French better than most. Today, he confided, they were admiring the good looks of his wife; tomorrow they would cut his throat. It hasn't quite come to that just yet, but the French – students and workers, men and women, citizens all – are out on the streets again. A rise in the pension age? Impossible. The barricades are up, oil supplies running out, trains and planes on a skeleton schedule and the protests are still escalating. More than three million people a week ago. Hundreds of thousands out this week, a million yesterday, and more expected this weekend. And what a joyous sight: school students marching in defense of old people's rights. Were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.
What a contrast with the miserable, measly actions being planned by the lily-livered English trade unions. There is growing anger and bitterness here too, but it is being recuperated by a petrified bureaucracy. A ritual protest has been planned, largely to demonstrate that they are doing something. But is this something better than nothing?
Perhaps. I'm not totally sure. But even these mild attempts to rally support against the austerity measures are too much for dear leader Ed Miliband. He won't be seen at them. He has renegued on a promise – made when he was seeking union support for his leadership bid) to show up at a union rally. The rot of Blairism goes deep in the Labour party. A crushing defeat last year might have produced something a bit better than the shower that constitutes the front bench. Ed Balls, the bulldog, might have gone for the jugular but he has been neutered. Instead, the new front bench is desperate to prove that it could easily be part of the coalition and not just on Afghanistan.
There is growing bitterness and growing anger in England, too, but not much else so far. It could change. The French epidemic could spread, but nothing will happen from above. Young and old fought against Thatcher and lost. Her New Labor successors made sure that the defeats she inflicted were institutionalized.
This is a country without an official opposition. An extra-parliamentary upheaval is not simply necessary to combat the cuts, but also to enhance democracy that at the moment is designed to further corporate interests and little more. Bailouts for bankers and the rich, an obscene level of defense expenditure to fight Washington's wars, and cuts for the less well off and the poor. A topsy-turvy world produces its own priorities. They need to be contested. These islands have a radical past, after all, that is not being taught in the history modules on offer. Given the inability of the official parliament to meet real needs why not the convocation of regional and national assemblies with a social charter that can be fought for and defended just as Shelley advised just under two centuries ago, shortly after the massacre of workers at Peterloo.
Ye who suffer woes untold
Or to feel or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold.
[. . .]
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
What a contrast with the miserable, measly actions being planned by the lily-livered English trade unions. There is growing anger and bitterness here too, but it is being recuperated by a petrified bureaucracy. A ritual protest has been planned, largely to demonstrate that they are doing something. But is this something better than nothing?
Perhaps. I'm not totally sure. But even these mild attempts to rally support against the austerity measures are too much for dear leader Ed Miliband. He won't be seen at them. He has renegued on a promise – made when he was seeking union support for his leadership bid) to show up at a union rally. The rot of Blairism goes deep in the Labour party. A crushing defeat last year might have produced something a bit better than the shower that constitutes the front bench. Ed Balls, the bulldog, might have gone for the jugular but he has been neutered. Instead, the new front bench is desperate to prove that it could easily be part of the coalition and not just on Afghanistan.
There is growing bitterness and growing anger in England, too, but not much else so far. It could change. The French epidemic could spread, but nothing will happen from above. Young and old fought against Thatcher and lost. Her New Labor successors made sure that the defeats she inflicted were institutionalized.
This is a country without an official opposition. An extra-parliamentary upheaval is not simply necessary to combat the cuts, but also to enhance democracy that at the moment is designed to further corporate interests and little more. Bailouts for bankers and the rich, an obscene level of defense expenditure to fight Washington's wars, and cuts for the less well off and the poor. A topsy-turvy world produces its own priorities. They need to be contested. These islands have a radical past, after all, that is not being taught in the history modules on offer. Given the inability of the official parliament to meet real needs why not the convocation of regional and national assemblies with a social charter that can be fought for and defended just as Shelley advised just under two centuries ago, shortly after the massacre of workers at Peterloo.
Ye who suffer woes untold
Or to feel or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold.
[. . .]
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many, they are few.
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Shamed by our spirit of protest
20.10.2010 17:36
For example, Cable campaigned for election on a promise to abolish university fees, even signing a pledge to prove his commitment, and interpreted that pledge by doubling the fees. Because abolish and double are like stalagmites and stalactites, it's so easy to get them mixed up. His party must have won countless votes as a result of that pledge, but he says now he's in government he has to be realistic, in which case the entire election campaign was pointless. When they had those debates, Clegg might as well have said, "I'll agree with whoever makes me a minister, so rather than waste time on what we think, in my time I'll show you my favourite scenes from Only Fools and Horses."
It's especially unsettling that such blatant lying came from Cable because he looked like a sweet old uncle, but it turns out he combines the demeanour of Mr Kipling with the economic ideals of Norman Tebbit. So every time he makes a statement he should be introduced with a cuddly slow deep voice saying, "Mr Cable wanted to be in the Government. So he set about doing all the things he'd said would be disastrous a few weeks ago. Because Mr Cable is an exceedingly power-hungry unprincipled little snake."
And yet no matter how vicious these cuts become, all the parties insist it would be wrong to protest or strike to try and curtail them, because they're being made by an elected government. But if they're doing things they promised not to do they've been elected fraudulently. In any case this is the thinking that got us into this mess. Most people are aware the people being made to pay for the debt aren't those who caused it, but we're resigned to putting up with it. Ministers could march round hospital wards ripping out drips and catheters and kidney machines, and we'd say to the patients, "You'd better put up with it dear, they do have a mandate." They could announce chemotherapy patients have to pay for their treatment by selling their bald heads for advertising space, and the level of protest would be a letter to The Times signed by 37 doctors and a treasurer at the BMA in a personal capacity.
Whereas in France they're running up and down the street and striking and setting fire to random objects and their cuts haven't even started yet. It's as if this is their warm-up match to get in practice and decide on the best formation for the real tournament. The Spanish have had a general strike, the Greeks are in a state of permanent revolt, and even the Belgians have had strikes and mass demonstrations. How humiliating is that? We're being put to shame by the bloody Belgians. How did we become so subservient and docile? It's as if the rest of Europe is preparing for mass protest and our slogan is, "I can't make it I'm afraid, I've got a tummy ache."
The unions have called for a demonstration against the cuts next March. Next bloody March. Even then they'll probably get frightened and call it off, and replace it with a "Gasp of Action", in which we're asked to go, "Ooh" at the same time to show our displeasure at the fire service being sold off to Balfour Beatty.
It's often claimed that protest doesn't make any difference. But then why have the French retained pensions and services and a working week (without the country falling apart) that few people here could aspire to? You can understand why a population feels unable to confront unfairness, if it's up against the North Korean army or the dictatorships of China or Zimbabwe. But surely we can't allow every public service to be dismantled and the poorest 90 per cent of the population to be wrung dry with no opposition, and say: "Well what could we do? I mean, never mind Mugabe or Kim Jong-Il, we were up against Vince Cable."
Mark Steel
Homepage:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-shamed-by-our-spirit-of-protest-2111258.html
Tariq Ali supports the Lib Dems
20.10.2010 19:55
not a fib dem
Blair and the Labour Party took Britian to War on False Pretenses.
20.10.2010 19:59
They blame the entire fiasco on Joe Stalin, which is the veteran nazis resort to lies and fraud of all destriptions (Now their on our side traitors) to which they push the line that their war crimes are in fact Joe Stalin's crimes and not theirs. This resort to untruth is rift throughout the British Royals, and the aristocatic feudal, and former enslaving classes in alliance.
It indeed to going to take a renewal of the theory and practice of the workers to make the new organic revolution work. Short of the workers taking over the means of production and distribution and owning and controlling them, all the protests are going on. That really begs the question of the necessity to create a workers state and guarantee work for all and a real income for all.
Morris and Marx were genius on this and stated that electing woman equally was needed to make a harmonious society again. That way the phoney capitalist system that sources aggressive war, poverty, unemployment, gender discrimination, pollution beyond sustainablity of ecological green balance to support life anymore will be over with and exploitation of the labouring classes will be ended forever.
With that working class take over becomes the dismantling of the war machine and its manufactury, and all technology will be turned to improving working and living conditions ie re-tooling to the renewables and quitting fossil fuel dependence. Along with the restoration of the matriarchy, which causes perpetual peace on earth, a real liberation of the peoples. Viva liberation theology!! Viva socialist liberation. End pollution wars, not endless wars for more pollution. Power never concedes anything without a demand. The workers are the most able to make the wholistic changes and put the bosses in overalls.
Union Jack
Don't you believe it
20.10.2010 20:07
Kids are in an educational environment from the age of 2 in France. There's a lot of rote learning, order and learned conformity by the age of 10. This, I'm convinced, is deliberate policy. It ensures that, ultimately and in spite of fiery appearance, the general population in France will be compliant.
I'm sorry to say it, but a lot of French activists are not radical, don't get involved if they have a lecture to attend and are afraid of the police. (Some, not many that I've met, ARE active).
There's not a lot happening over here yet, it's true, but when it does, I reckon the more hap-hazard education system, shifting families and uncertain employment makes for a far more dangerous mix for governments to deal with.
Well, we'll see, might be wrong!
anon