Edinburgh Anarchists

After the General Election charade finishes, the war that we aren’t allowed to name and aren’t defend ourselves in, carries on. British Airways have been awarded a 2nd injunction against their cabin crew’s union.

There’s not much to add to this article at LibCom, which echoes some of our earlier comments.

Like BA’s previous successful injunction against strike action by its employees over Christmas, the technicality it is disputing could in no way affect the mandate for strike action that has been presented by cabin crew. 81% of members voted in favour of strike action on a turnout of over 70%. Instead, a clear message has been sent to employers that no matter how large or clear the vote for strike action is, the most trivial of technical points can be used to halt strikes.

But what these rulings demonstrate is that the right to strike doesn’t really exist in the UK anymore, because they impose an onus on unions and consequences which don’t exist for other kinds of organisations. It is unimaginable, for instance, that a council could be prevented from collecting its council tax payments due to inaccuracies in its database of residents, or that the results of the general election could be annulled due to irregular voter registration (which certainly does happen – evidence of electoral fraud arises at every general election, including this one.) In this way, smaller organisations with smaller resources like trade unions are obligated to meet higher standards of record-keeping than exist elsewhere.

Important caveat:

Its worth making a point at this stage in case we are mistaken as arguing from the perspective of defending unions’ rights. Unions are of course inconvenienced by this state of affairs, but on the other hand complex anti-union laws give them more scope for frustrating the initiative of their members. Whether or not the unions ‘want’ to impose anti-union laws is irrelevant, in practice they either have to do that or have their funds sequestered, any union which openly and flagrantly defies the laws will lose its right to protection from litigation and will be destroyed through the courts.

My first reaction to this piece by Johann Hari in the Independent was: Dubai an authoritarian shithole? Who knew! but it’s well worth your time. The place is worse than the concrete, class-ridden shopping mall you might have expected, it’s positively medieval, but without a peasants’ revolt on the horizon. And don’t go thinking that it’s nasty because of some kind of Arabic cultural reasons, it’s an international of ignorant rich scum. Listen to these toerags:

I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. “Oh, the servant class!” she trilled. “You do nothing. They’ll do anything!”(…)

My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn’t the omnipresent slave class bother you[a City couple who've been coming there for 10 years]? I hope they misunderstood me, because the woman replied: “That’s what we come for! It’s great, you can’t do anything for yourself!” Her husband chimes in: “When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don’t do is take it out for you when you have a piss!” And they both fall about laughing.

Johann Hari’s done some clownish stuff before, notably supporting the Iraq war, but this detailed, enraging story is dynamite stuff.

Still the case, the miners' fight is your fight.

…that’s a headline you’ll see a lot in the next year. I don’t have any particular insight into the struggle, but I did come across this fantastic set of 4 Xmas Cards produced by a miners’ support group in South Wales. I have scanned them at the highest resolution I could and have uploaded the full set to the site (direct download link, ZIP, 2Mb).

As well as the haunting monochrome images, the cards have poems inside, written by striking miners and their families. If you find it hard to imagine just how strongly felt this dispute was, just read “Ode to a Scab”, or “Kids’ Questions”. Ever think that Margaret Thatcher deserves a bit of sympathy in her later years? Feel the despair caused by her deliberate policy to destroy the labour movement and this particular part of it.

And never forget that it wasn’t just her. She couldn’t've done it without MI5′s “counter subversion”, without the Metropolitan Police beating pickets for overtime, and without the willing lies of the media, including the saintly “impartial” BBC. (Was it them or ITN that re-edited their Orgreave footage to make it look like the miners charged first? Doesn’t matter I guess.)

(PS shout out to South Wales Anarchists who might be interested in this post.)

Poem by striking miner, inside a card

"Support the Miners" one of 4 Xmas cards produced during the Miners' Strike