MAY DAY RALLY ADDRESS BY GRAHAM STEVENSON

NATIONAL ORGANISER – TRANSPORT
UNITE – THE UNION

EXHIBITION PARK, NEWCASTLE MAY 3RD 2008

The biggest complaint amongst those who won’t vote, or who won’t vote the way they always did, is that politics means complacency, cynicism, false naivety or sheer nastiness. Being let down. Especially when the truth means anything that can’t be disproved and we should only ever believe a rumour when it is officially denied. No wonder we all become cynical. Lessons to learn, indeed.

If you read the red tops you’ll think that half a million public sector workers went on strike, as a Tory shadow minister said, "at the drop of a hat" – I dare say he’d know, top hat and all.  The Tories think more anti-union legislation is deserved.  What’s next? Barmy Boris Johnson wants to ban public sector workers from striking, apparently. They want to take care; banning London tube workers from strike action doesn’t stop there. They’ll have to stop 30,000 London bus workers as well and Unite won’t take that lying down, I’ll tell you. London bus workers are right now quietly balloting on a demand for a single pay rate across the capital, to get back where we were 20 years ago. And we expect the Mayor to deal with us on that.  I’m told by m’learned friends that’s illegal even now. Well, watch this space!

So far as I’m concerned, the National Union of Teachers should be applauded for the best lesson they could give their pupils. And UCU and the PCS. I’m almost sure I read somewhere when I was at school - “Annual inflation nearly 4%, annual pay rise around 4% - result happiness. Annual inflation nearly 4% per cent, annual pay rise around 2 1/2 % - result … misery."  But, you don’t need Charles Dickens to tell you that the real lesson to learn is that a bit of honesty wouldn‘t come amiss. Especially since public sector pay cuts are more to do with tax-and-spend policies than they are to do with controlling inflation.

Gordon Brown lauded the dockers of Durban for refusing to unload a freighter carrying arms for Zimbabwe; I didn’t hear him complain that such an act would be illegal in this country. Nor did I hear him applaud the leadership of the Chinese Seafarers Union that prevailed upon their employers to turn the ship back. But let’s be consistent when we applaud worker solidarity.

More than one red-top newspaper has called the Ineos oil refinery workers at Grangemouth "greedy".  Greedy? To take strike action to defend the pensions of future employees of the company? Unreasonable? To defend the non-contributory scheme because they are paid less than other refinery workers, who have to pay for their pension schemes. Yes, lots of workers have had their final salary pension scheme savaged. So, what should the Grangemouth workers have done - take a hit downwards in solidarity with everyone else? Or show how it’s done?

I, for one, unreservedly applaud the power of the Grangemouth oil refinery workers. It looks very likely that they will get a decent settlement and so they should, it’s not as if oil companies can’t afford it. It’s an odd feeling, though, hearing of government ministers running around, albeit very quietly, trying to find a means of pressing an employer into behaving reasonably.  But those who are so proud of the low-waged, ill-trained economy we now host have a damned cheek to attack workers for using their muscle, when they have it, to help not just themselves but others too.  I’m just as proud of the aviation workers who lined the picket lines at Gate Gourmet. I don’t call it secondary action, secondary picketing … I call it basic human solidarity.

Yet the thrice-misnamed European Court of Justice piles on the rulings that the right to business comes way ahead of the right to free association and, especially, the right to strike that makes such a freedom effective. The poor human rights that workers such as those at Grangemouth enjoy are in fact tottering on the edge of abolition. My own great-grandfather was a born around the time unions were legalised in Britain; it isn’t so long ago. How firm are our rights? As firm as the competitive free-market system will permit, it seems.   

There’s a lot of hypocrisy about; here we are in one of the most developed economies of the world, in the midst of wealth, and we hear of rickets and TB making a general return in poorer communities. Yet ministers seriously come up with the idea of tagging as a means to keep track of people with dementia, instead of decent care facilities. Homes for jobs, says the Housing Minister, as if anyone lucky enough to be given social housing probably needs it.  "Best when we are Labour", indeed. They want to get out a bit more!

Who can make sense of the election that never was and the Northern Wreck, as I think you call it up here. Lame ducks! You remember them? I dunno. Who am I to judge? Alan Sugar can break the law by asking job applicants their child-care plans on TV and he’s a hero; although he did tell us we don’t have a Labour Government; according to him it’s an “old fashioned Tory” one.  What do I know? Pundits now tell us that Blair, like Bush, always had misplaced self-confidence and was restless in his inattention to detail.  Sounds like a psychiatric illness to me!  

I’m reminded of the, maybe apocryphal, now long gone shipyard union official who made a habit of attending meetings deliberately leaving his fly buttons open. Some wag would draw attention to it and he would turn the affair into a long-drawn out farrago, reminiscent of a music hall turn. Beware of distractions, for the magician will pull more than an egg out of your ear.  

My zip’s firmly done up, comrades! Remember that old Robert Redford film, "All the President’s Men"? The young, enthusiastic reporter can’t make head nor tail of the shenanigans of high office. Deep Throat, his insider, tells him “Forget the myths! Follow the money!” Follow the money. Appalling though terrorism is, it’s a fact that global deaths from, say, malaria are more than 7000% greater every year. Solving the problem of one is highly profitable, the other highly costly. Consider this - as many people can be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan every single day – and have been every day for five years now - as were in the whole of the sad but thankfully short period of riots in Tibet.

Amidst all this confusion, where are we now as a movement? Reduced to consoling ourselves with the idea that if New Labour is crap then the Tories are just bloody diarrhoea. Some good things are done, yes. But why is it that any good that is done must be buried under a bushel but policies that appeal to greed are lauded? Rob from the poor to give to the rich? Robin Hood, my arse!

This at a time when new mortgages issued have dropped by half in a year and home energy costs have doubled in five years. There are four times as many homes empty as there are homeless temporary local authority places.  In London alone, there are 40,000 people living in squats, B & Bs, or on the streets, with perhaps an equal number sleeping on a friend’s sofa, or floor. There’s a million adults with a reading age of the typical 7 year old; there’s over 5 million - one in six of us – of that of an 11 year old. 12% of children aged 11-15 suffer mental health problems.

Set against this we have an apparent consensus amongst parliamentarians on policies that are both heartless and mindless. Obey the great god of the market! All of the contradictions you can spot are firmly linked to the strange form of economics we have, which relies on the price of private homes built decades ago not to tumble; or heaves around the price of crude oil, or the massive capital flows that Russian spivs employ to shuffle their bundles away to our Channel Islands tax havens.

It seems to many as if the western world teeters on the edge of recession and gloom. Despondency appears to be the main beneficiary of our prized electoral systems; look at Italy, which has just elected its first Duce for six decades. Here, we have simply lost three million Labour voters to the don’t know party and a couple of million to the others. What did they think people voted wanted in 1997 – to dump Michael Portillo for Boris Johnson? To start voting for the BNP?

And, yet, huge numbers of the population simply don’t accept this Market God any more and there are important lessons for us elsewhere. On the one hand we can be mesmerised by the notion that only the far right can trade in radical politics, or we can take heed of the massive swing to the Left across the whole of South America, where country after country is following the lead of Venezuela, or the brightest star of all – Cuba.

We can take heart in the massive peoples’ community campaign that saved Norway’s welfare state, or the possibility that neo-liberalism will be beaten in Ireland’s coming referendum, or the smashing of the Thatcherite government in Australia’s recent general election. That government was poised to effectively legislate against collective bargaining, making it virtually illegal.  The trade union movement rebuilt itself, engaged in community politics, ignored the media circus and concentrated on mobilising people. Unions won Australia for the Australian Labour Party on bread and butter issues not the obsessions of rich men. Lessons aplenty, I think. Learnt by ordinary people. It can be done.

You know why? I think most people now think that it’s gone just too far and want to sing to a different drum. The only consensus that exists over neo-liberal, free market, deregulatory, flexible labour market policies is in the White House, parliament, the banks, and the fine restaurants of Brussels. I think that most ordinary folk in Britain think that the human race is not a competition; if it was, most of the runners would be knackered, barefoot and thirsty before they started. There’s them that would get a head start though and a few would have the umpires on their side. No wonder many give up and watch the rat race with a beer, burger and chips for company.

Don’t deep down, we all want to help one another? I believe that human beings would prefer to be like that; to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. Our way of life can be free and beautiful but we have lost our way.  Technology that could give us abundance has left us permanently in want and our society become cynical, hard and unkind.  I remember being told by media pundits in the 1970s that we’d all work a 25 hour week by the 21st century. Yeah, 25 hours in one job and 25 in the second job to hold your head above water!

The world has become a smaller place but the effects of this cry out for humanity, kindness and gentleness. Even now, this May Day, our voice, the voice of the international working class movement unites millions of men, women and little children throughout the world. The disordered society that is now upon us is but reflective of the bitterness of those who fear human progress. The hate of unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts; but humans are not computers, or calculators.

We need to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance to win a world of reason, where science and progress will lead to the happiness of all and not the death and misery of people in far-off lands.

Ultimately, it is the mass of the people who have the power. The power to serve others and create happiness; we each have the power to make life free and beautiful. Let’s use that power to unite and fight for a new world, a decent world that will give people a chance to work to fulfil themselves; that will give future and security to all.