This is not another call for ‘left unity’

Strik­ing work­ers at Har­land & Wolff Ship­yard 2019

Har­land and Wolff ship­yard in East Belfast may not seem to be the most obvi­ous exam­ple of ‘left uni­ty’ you can think of. Yet, cur­rent­ly, the work­ers in that famous yard have tak­en a stand in effec­tive­ly blockad­ing the work-site to pre­vent their jobs from being ripped out from under them, and their com­mu­ni­ty. As I write there are hopes that this action may yet have cre­at­ed the space for a buy­er to come in and res­cue the plant that the bum­bling British Gov­ern­ment refuse to nation­alise, even as the Stor­mont admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues its dis­ap­pear­ing act fail­ing the peo­ple and work­ers of North­ern Ire­land.

Notably, as often hap­pens, it is from cri­sis that uni­ty has emerged. Work­ers with no wages have been sup­port­ed by their fel­low union mem­bers, and oth­ers, with finan­cial and oth­er sup­port to keep the plant, and hope, alive. This sup­port has been pro­vid­ed across bor­ders of cul­ture and mind. This is ‘left uni­ty’ in action. Work­ers com­ing togeth­er to sup­port the pro­tec­tion of each other’s jobs.

This com­ing Novem­ber Unite will spon­sor a new event, the ‘Unite The Union Cham­pi­ons Cup’. On 8 Novem­ber in Belfast Lin­field Foot­ball Club will host either Dun­dalk or Sham­rock Rovers and three days lat­er a return fix­ture will take place in the South. A Trade Union will, for the first time ever, spon­sor a foot­ball con­test between two clubs deeply root­ed in work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties with very dif­fer­ent his­to­ries. It may well come just days after Brex­it when, if the sociopaths lead­ing the British Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty have their way, a bor­der with nec­es­sary checks will be re-imposed on this island.

Unite are tak­ing this ini­tia­tive because we believe our equal­i­ty agen­da is key to deliv­er­ing a bet­ter Ire­land for us all. We will pro­mote anti-sec­tar­i­an work by chal­leng­ing sec­tar­i­an­ism, not hid­ing from it. We want to pro­mote our anti-racist ethos by address­ing it, high­light­ing it and work­ing in com­mu­ni­ties to tack­le the grow­ing scourge of racism head on. The rights and needs of the LBGTQ com­mu­ni­ty needs dis­cus­sion too and it, and the vital issue of women’s rights, will also fea­ture in the pro­mo­tion of this new event.

Will it work?

Who knows? But we are try­ing to build work­ing class uni­ty, ‘left uni­ty’, in new and excit­ing ways.

Doing.  

We hear many calls for ‘left uni­ty’, and as much bemoan­ing its appar­ent absence from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. Even the estab­lish­ment right con­stant­ly point to the fail­ure of ‘the left’ to pro­vide an oppo­si­tion that they would try to kill at birth (and have done in the past) should it ever show signs of emerg­ing.

Recent­ly one of the small­er polit­i­cal par­ties called for it again. To the media. This wor­thy and wel­come call came timed for press cov­er­age and late Sum­mer ‘Think-Ins’ and spoke of a let­ter nobody has seen. The detail of the call was inter­est­ing. It spoke of both a fail­ure to build a hous­ing cam­paign on the scale of Right2Water and the need to exclude Fian­na Fáil and Fine Gael from dis­cus­sion, some­thing I whole­heart­ed­ly agree with.

Yes­ter­day (Mon­day) I was dri­ving to work lis­ten­ing to Morn­ing Ire­land on RTE Radio 1. The Irish Labour Par­ty, with a mere 7 Dail seats, were hav­ing their ‘think in’ and RTE gave their leader Bren­dan Howl­in a prime time slot to dis­cuss. What they dis­cussed was the poten­tial for Labour to win 7–10 seats in the next Elec­tion (they won 37 in 2011 and spec­tac­u­lar­ly blew it) and whether they would again prop up a right wing Gov­ern­ment if they did so. We were told that Sen­a­tor Ivana Bacik again opposed such a sce­nario, and Bren­dan Howl­in again sup­port­ed it. There would have to be a spe­cial post-elec­tion con­ven­tion (that’s them decid­ing what to do with your votes AFTER you have cast them) and it would be ‘dif­fi­cult’ for the par­ty, but it’s like­ly that they would enter Gov­ern­ment again.

D’ya think?

You may be expect­ing me now to remind you of how this is just a replay of the 2011 ‘debate’ Labour had when they decid­ed that ‘Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way’ would in fact be Frankfurt’s way and spent the next 5 years skew­ing the work­ing class with such rel­ish that they became despised. It seemed they fell over them­selves to get the Min­istries (hous­ing, water, pub­lic expen­di­ture) where they could do the max­i­mum harm to the most vul­ner­a­ble. Well no, I’m not going to talk about that. Go back fur­ther. Labour have served the sec­ond high­est total num­ber of years (19) in coali­tion Gov­ern­ment in the state, sec­ond only to Fian­na Fail. On every sin­gle occa­sion the Par­ty has asked itself whether it should prop up a right wing Gov­ern­ment it has answered ‘yes, we’ll take those Min­is­ters jobs alright’, and on every sin­gle occa­sion it has weak­ened itself and dam­aged the work­ing class. Not only have the posi­tions not changed in decades, but even the names are the same. As long ago as 1989 Ivana Bacik and Bren­dan Howl­in were hav­ing the same ‘debate’, with the same inevitable out­come.

If we are ever to see Ireland’s first pro­gres­sive Gov­ern­ment this pan­tomime must be called out, not facil­i­tat­ed on ‘the left’. What do I mean by this?

The recent extolling of the water charges move­ment in the left call for uni­ty seems to me to miss an obvi­ous point. The water charges move­ment didn’t begin with politi­cians. Or Trade Unions. The most unit­ed cam­paign we ever had began when a woman in Cork said ‘thou shall not pass’ to a water meter installer and her neigh­bours fol­lowed her lead. She led! Soon the Com­mu­ni­ty in Eden­more did the same. Cit­i­zens led. Unions sup­port­ed with mon­ey and logis­tics, the politi­cians got behind the cam­paign, but the water charges move­ment won (for now) because it was bot­tom up, not top down.

His­to­ry will recall that when it came straight after to the hous­ing emer­gency the cam­paign that was formed could not have been like Right2Water because it was delib­er­ate­ly struc­tured to be the com­plete oppo­site to Right2Water. It was struc­tured to be head­ed and con­trolled by politi­cians with some lim­it­ed union sup­port. It even brought the Labour Par­ty itself in from the cold, opened the door to the par­ty that had by 2016 presided over the sharpest ris­es in home­less­ness in Ire­land since the famine. It was not about ground up com­mu­ni­ty build­ing where par­ties and unions respond to com­mu­ni­ty build­ing. And so, unfor­tu­nate­ly, it didn’t work and the cri­sis turned into an emer­gency.

Right2Water cam­paign­ers 2015

So where to now?

A num­ber of things strike me. Imag­ine if all those call­ing for ‘left uni­ty’ from with­in their own divid­ed par­ties actu­al­ly just left and start­ed to work togeth­er for a big­ger, greater good instead of fight­ing for 1 or 2 per­cent­age points in polls and elec­tions.

Then imag­ine if we just all accept­ed that Labour are sim­ply part of a 2.5 par­ty ‘state estab­lish­ment’ that needs to be coun­ter­act­ed and that they are as left, right and oppor­tunis­tic as Fian­na Fail and Fine Gael have ever been, and we just aren’t falling for their the­atre any­more.

And then imag­ine if we stopped just call­ing for ‘left uni­ty’ and got on with build­ing cam­paigns togeth­er, work­ing togeth­er, sol­dier­ing togeth­er and being hum­ble enough to show respect to each oth­er while we did so. Right2Water worked (so far) because it stuck to sim­ple core prin­ci­ples and was com­mu­ni­ty dri­ven, ground up.

Next Sat­ur­day (11 am in Abbey Street) the ‘Tom Stokes Unite Com­mu­ni­ty Branch’ will begin the work of build­ing a Deaf Com­mu­ni­ty Branch, and we are also on the verge of build­ing a ‘Hos­pi­tal­i­ty Branch’ for work­ers – many of whom are migrant work­ers – being abused in the sec­tor by out­fits such as the dis­graced ‘The Ivy’ in Dublin. There is work afoot, and work to be done. And yes, let’s talk about not repeat­ing the mis­takes of the past for once.

I’m  fin­ish­ing by ask­ing the ques­tion again, of every­one. Maybe it is time peo­ple start­ed to come up with hon­est answers:

‘Do you want to be a small part of some­thing real­ly big, or are you con­tent to be a big part of some­thing small?’ ENDS