There are no two groups more different than climate protesters and striking workers. The former are mostly plummy layabouts, posh road-blockers whose chief aim seems to be to inconvenience working people. The latter are working people. Their concern is not with the fantasy eco-apocalypse that so bothers the pretty heads of Extinction Rebellion agitators but rather with how to ensure that wages are good and working conditions are top-notch.
The climate change alarmists live in a land of make-believe, in which an Armageddon of man’s own making is just around the corner and the only way to hold it at bay is by stopping oil, stopping coal, stopping everything basically. Striking workers, by contrast, live in a world of real things: living standards, money, stuff. Indeed, these two groups have utterly opposing class interests. If the End of Days eco-warriors get their way and all fossil-fuel production is ceased, hundreds of thousands of working people would lose their jobs and millions would be out of pocket as the price of energy soared. It all brings to mind one of the slogans of the gilets jaunes in France: ‘You’re concerned with the end of the world, we’re concerned with the end of the month.’
This is a grave assault on one of the most hard-fought-for liberties of the industrial era – the liberty to withdraw one’s labour
However, there’s now one thing that these two clashing social sets have in common: both are being gunned for by the government. The Home Secretary Suella Braverman is set to grant police new powers that will allow them to take a more ‘proactive’ approach to irritant outfits like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. The government is also exploring legal moves to bring in minimum service levels during strike action, meaning that industries and sections of the public sector that go on strike would be forced by law to continue providing at least some service to the public. That is, to carry on working, in part.
Both of these things are a mistake. How notable that this government was so libertarian on the economy – if for a stunningly brief period of time – and yet it seems to ditch the spirit of liberty entirely when it comes to the right to protest and the right to strike. I agree with Ms Braverman that the climate agitators currently clogging up our roads, spray-painting car showrooms and throwing soup on beautiful works of art are mad, regressive philistines. But we must resist responding to the temper tantrums of the depressed middle classes by further restricting the right to agitate in public.
One proposal is to boost the power of ministers to issue injunctions against protesters. Yet there is a distinct danger that this power will be overused. That it won’t only be deployed against green loons who are preventing people from getting to work and possibly even holding up ambulances and fire engines but against anyone who takes to the streets for a political cause. As it happens, most political protesters are not as annoying as the Just Stop Oil lot, because usually their aim is to win over the public, not piss them off (which seems to be the sole point of those gatherings of XR misanthropes). But one can easily foresee a situation where protesters for women-only spaces, say, or for the right to freedom of speech will be judged a menace to public order and slapped with one of the new swift injunctions.
The police already have powers to deal with people who are blocking major roads. They should use those powers where climate activists are genuinely interfering with people’s right to travel and work. There’s been too much kid-glove treatment from the cops, that’s the problem. This is why citizens have been taking their own direct action, brilliantly dragging the eco-bores off roads and unceremoniously dispensing with their apocalyptic banners. Cops or citizens are more than capable of sorting this problem out – we don’t need another layer of authoritarian law.
As for limiting strike action, in this case by forcing industries to carry on providing a service, this is a grave assault on one of the most hard-fought-for liberties of the industrial era – the liberty to withdraw one’s labour. I don’t expect Conservative ministers to be enamoured of this freedom, or to understand why it is so important to working people. But they could at least leave it alone. For many people, the right to strike is the only meaningful clout they have in public life – well, that and the right to vote. The right to take industrial action and the right to an equal say in who should be the government of the country emerged in tandem over the past hundred years because they are the means through which ordinary people, too often shut out of political discussion, can sway work life and political life so that they better represent the interests of their communities.
Do the Tories really have no interest at all in holding on to their Red Wall voters? Events of the past couple of weeks suggest as much. First, they dabble in free-market Trussonomics, which is not what most Brexit voters want, and now they talk about restricting the ability of workers to take action for a better standard of living. Such class antagonism suggests that this government might have more in common with the ‘hideously selfish’ greens who are making life miserable for working people than it would like to admit.
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