March March
One More Try Before I Get Old
I haven’t done this in a long time.
Just for once I can say exactly how long, because the date was drummed into me during the run-up, never to be forgotten: it was December 8th. Not December 8th last year, when I was suffering from a cold; not December 8th 2002, when I was hit in the face by a snowball while on an open-top bus tour of New York; nor even December 8th 1980, when John Lennon was murdered just off that same bus route: this was December 8th 1970, and we were marching through London to express our opposition to the Industrial Relations Bill.
We were a conglomeration of trade unionists, left-wing or left-leaning politicals and fellow-travellers of every description, including us students. The Bill was designed to curb the activities of unions, who were said by some in government and elsewhere — including most newspapers, and the bosses of any company in dispute with its unions — to be too powerful. We, naturally, thought that those people themselves had more than enough power. We didn’t feel like we had any power.
December 8th had been planned for weeks to be a Day Of Action. There would be unofficial strikes, of the type the Bill aimed to outlaw, by workers all over the country. For those who could reach it, there was to be a march through central London, finishing with a rally at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. There would be a strike in solidarity by students. For striking students whose college was just beyond the other end of the Park, it promised to be a grand day out.
Students on strike? Yes. Take that, capitalism! Almost unanimously, we withdrew our presence from lectures. This was not the regular failure to turn up on time, or at all, due to transportation difficulties or hangovers: we were making a political point, and a number of our educators were happy to let us make it. (A small group of Conservative students stood firm to make the opposite point, and attended their one lecture of the day regardless, only to find that their lecturer was on strike. Ha ha ha.)
Thus I found myself that December afternoon walking towards Marble Arch, in the company of thousands of arguably like-minded people under scrawled placards and proud Trade Union banners, hoping to delay or defeat some invidious legislation. And, more than forty-six years later, here I am doing it again.
This time, it’s about Brexit. We had this referendum, you see, in which the people’s attitude to a hugely complex situation was gauged by asking them a single yes/no question so badly phrased as to be meaningless, which a narrow majority answered with a snarling No. That vague growl of discontent is now interpreted by the winning side as The people have spoken. There is some evidence that having learned a little more about the background to the question, or its complexity, or the implications for their future and that of their children and grandchildren, a number of those who snarled so hard might, if given the chance, change their minds; but they will not get that chance, not even after they know what divorce terms have been negotiated. Having spoken once, having said just one word, the people are expected to shut up for another couple of generations.
And that idea of a collective change of heart may be wishful thinking. The campaigns for and against were mostly racism with gloves on. There are still plenty of people who think they don’t like foreigners: Send ’em all back where they came from! goes the cry. So there is a serious risk that many people who have come here to better themselves, and help us by being our doctors and fruit-pickers, and doing every other job that is beyond our capability or beneath our dignity, people who contribute far more to the nation in tax than they ever take out in benefits, will have to go back where they came from. This is what the pro-Brexit camp calls Taking back control: as if the control that matters was not where it always is, in the hands that have the most money.
The Brexiteers talk up the return of an age that never existed, when Britain was Top Nation and the traders of the world beat a path to our door. Certainly there was a time when England was Top Nation, but that was when Scotland was our closest enemy and Ireland a subjugated vassal. English trade in those days was not only enabled but accomplished by force of arms, and merged seamlessly with piracy. Only after the Kingdom became United under a formerly-Scottish royal house was this unashamed grabbing of others’ wealth legitimised (if we can call it that) as the British Empire. It’s no coincidence that the votes in Scotland and Northern Ireland were much more strongly in favour of Bremain that the overall vote for Brexit; and it’s entirely possible that Brexit will be the first step on the path to to the dissolution of the United Kingdom.
“A price worth paying,” crow the tax-exile newspaper-owners and the entertaining liars who write for them, the anti-elitist man-of-the-people millionaires, and the somehow undiminishing band of armchair soldiers still fighting the second World War — in which, you will remember, Britain Stood Alone. We did it before, and we can do it again!
Do you remember?
Rationing of food, fuel, clothing and other basics, introduced to help the country cope with its inability to produce at home everything it needed just to survive, ended nine years after the end of that six-year war.
Nine. Six. That way round. That’s what Standing Alone does for you.
I remember. I was there.
I’ve been lucky in my life. Born after one of the worst of the wars that have been endemic in Europe ever since man first crossed the Caucasus, I’ve lived in peace, occasional terrorists excepted. Conscription was abolished in my country before it could bother me, and the few wars we managed not to avoid all happened far away. I enjoyed free education and healthcare, both paid for out of general taxation. (We weren’t the richest country in the world; on the other hand, we only had some gun-wielding lunatic without even the excuse of a Cause invade a school or maraud the streets to murder innocents about once every ten years, rather than every other week. Swings and roundabouts.) When my dream career failed to take off in the way I would have liked, I was able to train at public expense for another to which I was suited, and made a success of it. I have, as I’ve said elsewhere, done OK.
But now, starting next Wednesday, a big chunk of what made all that possible, by keeping the peace in Europe and letting everyone get on with life instead of going round the continent picking fights, is being cast aside. The plan seems to call for it to be thoroughly trashed before it is discarded. Well, at least that part should work, since the most hilariously unsuitable people, the most rabid of the Brexiteers, have been told off to do it. There is a little lesson here on taking responsibility for one’s promises. There is likely to be a bigger lesson for children of the future on the benefits of co-operation, illustrated with this example of what happens when you try to live without it.
It took seventeen years of asking before we were let in to the European Common Market, which became the European Economic Community, which evolved into the European Union (and the Customs Union and the Single Market and a bunch of related-but-not-identical things whose names weren’t on the ballot paper). Although a referendum two years later confirmed that we wanted to stay in, we’ve had over forty years of near-constant argument about it. Now we have two years to get out.
It will take another forty years to recover, if we ever do.
You can never really go back. You might think of today as the second leg of a very long relay event. This time we’re starting near Marble Arch on Park Lane, heading for a rally with speakers at the Houses of Parliament. The event even has a name, Unite for Europe, just in case anyone got the wrong idea and imagined this was about one of the many things irrelevant to modern life that governments and pressure groups prefer to argue about, such as Grammar Schools (“let’s return to the 1950s!”) or foxhunting (“no, the 1750s!”).
The announcement that the national suicide note will be formally handed in next Wednesday has left some UfE supporters thinking our protest is pointless. There was a possibility that the terrorist incident at Parliament last Wednesday would affect today’s march. As of three days ago there were somewhere over 20,000 of us registered to join in, which isn’t a lot — it’s far fewer than the difference between the Yes and No votes — but we’re unlikely to be mistaken for a party of tourists. Presumably someone will be around to count us.
It’s about time I did something that counted.
Despite our efforts, the 1970 Bill became the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. It was repealed three years later, following the change of government at another General Election; but it reappeared in different guises, with more heads and bigger teeth, as part of what became known here as Thatcherism, elsewhere Reaganomics or neo-liberalism.
“There is no such thing as society,” the witch Thatcher famously said, “only people and their families.” It was an outrageous claim, until her policies started to make it true. Union power — an expression of society — was vanquished by the forces of selfishness, powered by money supplied by an explosion of personal borrowing. Other things — community pride, industrial training schemes, any part of any job that could be shaved off and done in a cheaper part of the world — went the same way.
The country once known as The Workshop Of The World became a big player in what is still euphemistically called Financial Services, as the meaning of that term degenerated from Banking and Insurance to Gambling and Money-Laundering. It generates a disproportionately large amount of the tax revenue we manage to collect. One of the few coherent proposals for post-Brexit Britain is that we should go the whole hog and become even more of a tax haven for super-rich criminals than we already are.
Living in a tax haven (as opposed to pretending that your money is there) is notoriously tough on protestors and other citizens. I might not be able to do this again in 2063.
But I will if I have to.
