GOING POSTAL

As the previous blog post shows, history is on my mind; looking back to the last time we were contemplating the real prospect of the Tory vultures returning to power – 1978/9, and part of the simplistic analysis of that era is that the intransigence of the trade unions and striking workers ushered in a Tory government. However, I would point out again the fundamental contradiction in the New Labour analysis – they manage to suggest the 1979 election result was both a push (anti- old labour vote) and a pull (pro Tory free market vote), and given that the Tory medicine has been prescribed by New Labour from Day One of Year Zero (and before, as Brown announced before the 1997 election that he’d stick to Tory spending limits), they obviously favour the “pull” argument. It would be heresy of the most heinous kind in their minds to suggest that the confrontational industrial policy imposed by the IMF on the Labour governments of the 70’s ushered in the Tories.

So I would suggest that the parallels with the post dispute are not the miners strike (as at least one backbench Labour MP has observed and his whips interview must be pending), but those of the Labour government taking on public sector workers in late seventies.

Surely the lesson is not that workers shouldn’t defend their rights but that Labour governments should support them more or lose power – discuss?

Hopefully the talks on-going will resolve the bitterness that is festering on both sides.

The most despicable aspect of this episode is the disgraceful behaviour by Royal Mail, and influenced by the hand of the Dark Lord Mandelson to attack Union rights of the Communication Workers Union, as a result of this dispute.  Documents leaked to the media showed a strategy that dates back to the Victorian days.

The facts are that Royal Mail have ripped up agreements on pay, terms and conditions, and pensions,  signed with the CWU, without consultation,, who have no other option than to withdraw their labour.

The arguments against the dispute are the same old tired ones, with an obsession in indulging in a race to the bottom. 

Back the Posties!  

THE GREAT MYTH

“I have since wondered whether those thirty-four Labour members would have voted as they did if they had been able to foresee that their vote on that evening would precipitate a General Election, at the least favourable time for the government “and I’m quoting the words of Jim Callaghan himself in his auto biography “Time and Chance”, and look who he’s pointing the finger at, Labour members in 1977 not the SNP in 1979.

Who better to analyse the circumstances of the Labour government’s demise?  He was referring to the infamous Cunningham amendment which set the 40 % Yes threshold for devolution, a democratic travesty dreamt up by the arch unionists of the day. In Callaghan’s analysis of the events of 1979 “it was the adverse result of the two Devolution referenda in Scotland and Wales that finally ended the Government’s life “. What is remarkable is his non partisan analysis of the devolution vote, and he even goes so far as to state “the merits of the case had become entangled with a vote on the Government’s popularity, which was not high even in Scotland, because of the recent industrial disputes”.

So it would appear that Labour MP’s who were anti-devolution and profoundly hostile to Scotland having additional powers scuppered the Callaghan government and ushered in Thatcher’s Tories – according to the Labour leader of the day.

There’s also a great big elephant in the room when it comes to analysing the Tory victory in 1979 – the entire foundations of New Labour are built on the premise that Old Labour was fundamentally unattractive to the voters (in the oft repeated clichés of Winter of Discontent, too much power in the hands of the trade unions etc) and therefore they must believe that a Tory victory in 1979 was inevitable…no matter when the election was held or under what circumstances the government fell?

In the minds of the shiny suits clutching filofaxes in the 80’s and fixing red roses in the buttonholes then singing along to “Things can only get better”, in 1997 that they believe Thatcher, and the superiority of private sector delivery and market values was a historical inevitability,  in other words......

..Vote New Labour, get Tory!

As true today as it was then…………….