Margaret Thatcher: how we defeated the ‘iron lady’

Quite an interesting article on the Poll Tax Movement....

Twenty years ago Margaret Thatcher was driven from office by the anti poll tax protests. But she could have been beaten much sooner. Yuri Prasad looks at the lessons for today

The anti poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square (Pic: Steve McTaggart)

‘It’s like we’ve gone back to the 1980s. We had the cuts, and now we’ve got the riot.” That was the response of one student protester interviewed outside the broken windows of Tory HQ last week.

Newspaper headlines that scream of rioting in central London and targeting of the Tories remind many of how Margaret Thatcher fell from office 20 years ago this month.

There are important lessons from that era for the fight against Cameron now—both the potential for resistance and the dangers we face.

Thatcher, the supposedly “invincible” Iron Lady, was brought low by the movement against her hated poll tax which made the poorest pay the same level of local taxes as the richest.

The campaign culminated in rioting in Trafalgar Square and outside town halls the length and breadth of Britain during the spring of 1990.

The press responded by hysterically denouncing “mob rule”. The Labour Party’s deputy leader, Roy
Hattersley, blamed anarchists and the Socialist Workers Party for the violence and called for the mass arrests of “ringleaders”, demanding “exemplary sentences” for those convicted.

Some on the left even joined in the condemnations of the riots.

Refusing

But as it became clear that millions of people were refusing to pay the tax, Tory MPs feared that unless they ditched Thatcher they would lose their seats—and that the anger on the streets could spill over into other issues. They began hatching plots to remove her.

By 22 November, the pressure had become too much, and the Tory leader announced her resignation after more than 11 years in office.

Thatcher left a trail of destruction. Hers was nakedly a government for the rich. Yuppies celebrated as they made a fortune from privatisation and rising property prices.

Meanwhile, working class communities were destroyed as the Tories pushed up unemployment to a record three million.

But there was no reason why workers should have endured such a beating for so many years.

We could have defeated Thatcher years before the poll tax. She was vulnerable from the day she took office in 1979—and she knew it.

Thatcher’s right hand man, Nicholas Ridley, formulated a plan for dealing with the strikes he predicted would greet their plans for slashing spending and laying waste to manufacturing.

The miners had twice humiliated Heath’s Tory government, in 1972 and 1974. The Tories wanted revenge.

Ridley identified key industries that were central to the economy where concessions to workers should be made—including water, electricity, gas and the NHS.

The plan also listed the docks, railways and mines as areas where extreme caution should be used.

In all of these industries, he said care had to be taken not to provoke confrontation until a time that suited the ruling class. And even then, the plan could only work if strikes could be limited to those directly affected, and there was no prospect of solidarity action.

There were lengthy and well-planned confrontations with steel workers, civil servants, rail workers and car workers at British Leyland during Thatcher’s first term.

The Tories deliberately strung out some of these confrontations to punish workers. But when, in 1981, miners threatened to strike, the Tories were quick to settle.

In the same year inner cities exploded in riots against racism, poverty and unemployment, and again the government decided that it was better to offer concessions, rather than risk the anger spreading.

Courage

In each battle, people displayed great militancy and courage—their battles quickly capturing the imagination of a public ravaged by recession and cuts.

Some 10 million people were members of trade unions. But transforming the situation would take solidarity strikes, not just sympathy.

The Labour government of 1974-79 had successfully blunted the immense wave of industrial militancy of the early 1970s. It did so through a “social contract” with the trade union leaders, who agreed to curtail strikes.

Workers had been wrong-footed by attacks from “their government” and this undermined their confidence to fight back. And a string of sell outs by union leaders led to a pattern of defeat, out of which began to grow the myth of “Thatcher the invincible”.

After rabid right wing newspaper boss Eddie Shah successfully used riot police to break the powerful print unions to launch his new Warrington plant, the government decided the time was right to launch a new offensive.

Early in 1984, they banned workers from the GCHQ spy centre from joining a union—a move that so outraged the union leaders they felt compelled to act. They called a national protest strike with just four days notice.

The response to their call was huge—hundreds of thousands struck. Glasgow and Liverpool appeared to be at a total standstill.

The Tories were suddenly vulnerable. But union leaders backed away from further confrontation, hoping that by appearing reasonable they could persuade public opinion and thereby shift the government. They could not, and the mood was wasted.

Thatcher sensed their weakness and decided the time was right to launch her biggest attack yet—on the miners.

Miners in Yorkshire began their strike in March after management announced the closure of two pits. Within days the action had spread and become national.

Thatcher and her allies hoped a strike could be defeated within weeks and unleashed the full might of the state.

The police harassed pickets and invaded mining villages, attacking and arresting people.

The media launched a full-scale attack on the strikers, denouncing their picket line “violence”.

But the miners stood firm and working people in Britain and across the world rallied to the miners’ cause, raising money and solidarity.

Yet the TUC and Labour Party leaders did not match this spirit. The TUC promised to mobilise solidarity action, which worried the government.

It failed to materialise. At crucial moments, steel, docks and the pit deputies’ unions had the opportunity to strike, but their union leaders backed down.

Despite huge pressure from his own supporters, Labour leader Neil Kinnock ensured that Labour nationally did nothing to support the strike. And, at the crucial moments, it was Labour leaders who put the boot into the miners.

After many months of extreme poverty, police violence and vilification, increasing numbers began to drift back to work. A miners’ union conference narrowly voted to go back on 3 March 1985, over a year after the strike had begun.

Myth

The leaders of other unions used the defeat as an excuse to repeat the myth that the miners had fought a hopeless battle.

But at several points the government feared that it had lost. Thatcher herself admitted nine years afterwards that the strike “could indeed have brought down the government”.

With the strongest battalion of the working class movement defeated, the Tories now started to believe they could never be conquered, and that they had changed Britain forever.

Class is a dead concept, they said. Thatcher even went so far as to argue, “There is no such thing as society—only individuals and their families.” In the dark years that followed the miners’ defeat even many on the left began to believe her.

But the Tories’ overconfidence was to be the beginning of their leader’s undoing.

The Ridley plan said that groups of workers should be taken on one at a time. The poll tax did the opposite—it took on millions of workers at the same time.

Notions of class and struggle re-emerged with startling speed. Small meetings grew into big meetings. And, in a succession of towns and cities, rallies became riots.

Defiance and hatred of the rich became the hallmarks of the campaign. More than a decade of pent up anger arose seemingly from nowhere and tore into Tory councillors and MPs.

As once-invincible Thatcher was forced from Downing Street in tears, for millions of working class people there was at last something to smile about.

Bringing down the Iron Lady didn’t liberate us from the Tories. It would take another seven years for that to happen.

But it smashed the notion that defeat was inevitable. It reminded us that even the most formidable of enemies could be defeated—something Cameron and today’s other pale shadows of Thatcher would do well to consider.

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© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=23039

Esher College student suspended over part in London tuition fees protest

An Esher College student who joined tuition fee protestors on the roof of Tory HQ in London has been suspended by the school.

Olivia Wedderburn, 18, of Kingston Hill, was taking part in the demonstration on Wednesday, November 10, when she followed a splinter group who had broken the windows of Milbank Tower and occupied the building.

Miss Wedderburn said she had been in the courtyard when she saw a window to the building getting smashed and people entering.

She said she then joined after being encouraged by others and followed the crowd upstairs.

It is believed the trouble at the otherwise peaceful demonstration, attended by about 50,000 students, was started by a anarchist groups who hijacked the event.

Miss Wedderburn's father, Peter Wedderburn, 59, said his daughter had only entered the building because a crowd behind her had pushed her inside.

He said she left after a friend of hers started to have a panic attack.

Dan Dean, principal of Esher College, confirmed Miss Wedderburn had been suspended because she had taken the day off without permission.

He said the college "does not condone any behaviour which breaks the law". The demonstration was organised because tuition fees are set to rise from 2012, with a lower cap of £6,000 and the opportunity for universities to charge up to £9,000 – triple the current cap.

Back the PCS's fight for a national demo in 2010

From the Socialist Party http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/

The PCS NEC has published it's response to the Comprehensive Spending Review. In it they express their determination that a national demo against cuts be called before Christmas, saying:

PCS prominent on the recent anti-cuts demonstrations, photo Paul Mattsson

"The TUC has now confirmed 26 March 2011 as the date for a national demonstration against the Coalition Government's agenda of cuts and privatisation.

"PCS had argued strongly for an earlier national demonstration to coincide with the CSR. Despite that not being agreed, PCS members played an active role in the success of local demonstrations on 23 October across the UK, including in Edinburgh, London, Cardiff, Wrexham, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, York, Cambridge, Norwich and elsewhere.
"At its special meeting on 26 October, the NEC agreed, given the speed with which the Government's cuts will impact and the success of the 23 October marches and protests, that a national demonstration should be held this year in late November or early December, in addition to the demo next March.
"We will be discussing this with other unions and will propose at the TUC Public Sector Liaison Group meeting on 8 November that the TUC call such a demonstration.

"A further branch briefing will follow, once the date is agreed for this earlier demonstration."
The Socialist Party welcomes the PCS's decision and is confident that such a demonstration will receive widespread support from across the trade union movement.

The National Shop Stewards Network - which lobbied the TUC Congress supporting the PCS's call for a national demo and then helped initiate the London demonstration and others on 23 October - will have an important role to play in building support for a demonstration.

Nothing will be finalised before the TUC Public Services Liaison Group on 8 November. However, the Socialist Party is confident that the PCS is determined that a national demonstration against cuts and youth unemployment will take place this year. At this stage the calendar means that the most likely date seems to be Saturday 11 December. The Socialist Party appeals to all trade union branches to pass the motion below appealing to their trade union executives and the TUC general council to support the PCS's call for a demonstration.

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MODEL MOTION FOR A NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION IN 2010
(Amend as necessary for your organisation)

This (name of TU body, student union, workplace, campaign) is opposed to every cut in the £81 billion austerity package demanded by this millionaire Con-Dem government.

We will not accept

• a million job cuts
• doubling of student fees
• drastic cuts to welfare benefits
• increasing the pension age to 66 and beyond.
• mass privatisation of services

We believe that these cuts will only be defeated by powerful united action led by the trade unions, and backed up together with campaigns of service users, welfare claimants, students, pensioners and others.
The TUC general council met on the day Osborne announced the slaughter of public services and agreed to call a national demo in March 2011.

This doesn't show the urgency necessary given the scale and depth of the attacks.

We therefore call on our National Executive Committee (or appropriate national body) to call an emergency meeting immediately, to contact the PCS and other trade unions to coordinate the calling of a national demonstration before Xmas and to discuss a suitable date for joint action.

Johann Hari: Protest works. Just look at the proof

Yes, you can choose to do nothing. But you will be choosing to let yourself and your family and your country be ripped off

Johann Hari

There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.

This mood is wrong. It doesn’t have to be this way – if enough of us act to stop it. To explain how, I want to start with a small scandal, a small response – and a big lesson from history.

In my column last week, I mentioned in passing something remarkable and almost unnoticed. For years now, Vodafone has been refusing to pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British people that are outstanding. The company – which has doubled its profits during this recession – engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, but it was eventually ruled this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules. They looked set to pay a sum Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn.

Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.” A few days after the decision, Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Tories think it should be done.

By contrast, the Indian government chose to pursue Vodafone through the courts for the billions in tax they have failed to pay there. Yes, the British state is less functional than the Indian state when it comes to collecting revenues from the wealthy. This is not an isolated incident. Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, calculates that UK corporations fail to pay a further £12bn a year in taxes they legally owe, while the rich avoid or evade up to £120bn.

Many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesn’t pay theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter – and this Wednesday seventy enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street in protest. “Vodafone won’t pay as they go,” said one banner. “Make Vodafone pay, not the poor,” said another.

The reaction from members of the public – who were handed leaflets explaining the situation – was startling. Again and again, people said “I’m so glad somebody is doing this” and “there needs to be much more of this.” Lots of them stopped to talk about how frightened they were about the cuts and for their own homes and jobs. The protest became the third most discussed topic in the country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what Vodafone and the government have done. The protesters believe this is just the start of a movement to make the rich pay a much fairer share of taxation, and they urge people to join them: go to ukuncut.wordpress.com to find out what you can do this Saturday.

You might ask – so what? What has been changed? To understand how and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and proven examples from the past. Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.

Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.

If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic pressure, anything can. But let’s look at a group of protesters who thought they had failed. The protests within the United States against the Vietnam War couldn’t prevent it killing three million Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was “failing”, it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson – a thug prone to threatening to “crush” entire elected governments – with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They “proved”, using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would “save lives.”

It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: “I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?” He knew that there would be a cost – in protest and democratic revolt – that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon – and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn’t do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed – but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do – but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.

Protest raises the political price for governments making bad decisions. It stopped LBJ and Nixon making the most catastrophic decision of all. The same principle can apply to the Conservative desire to kneecap the welfare state while handing out massive baubles to their rich friends. The next time George Osborne has to decide whether to cancel the tax bill of a super-rich corporation and make us all pick up the tab, he will know there is a price. People will find out, and they will be angry. The more protests there are, the higher the price. If enough of us demand it, we can make the rich pay their share for the running of our country, rather than the poor and the middle – to name just one urgent cause that deserves protest.

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

You don’t know what the amazing ripple-effect of your protest will be – but wouldn’t Britain be a better place if it replaced the ripple of impotent anger so many of us are feeling? Yes, you can sit back and let yourself be ripped off by the bankers and the corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But it’s an indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in your own self-defence. As Margaret Mead, the great democratic campaigner, said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

For updates on this issue and others, you can follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 or you can email him at j.hari@independent.co.uk

To watch Johann on US TV discussing Britain's austerity cuts, click here.

Firefighters in London set to strike on bonfire night

From the Guardian Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/25/london-firefighers-strike-bonfire-night

Thousand of union members may refuse to work during one of fire service's busiest periods as contracts row escalates



Euston Road fire station in London: the Fire Brigades Union claims its
members face the sack if they do not accept new shift patterns.
Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Firefighters in London are planning to strike on bonfire night in an escalating row over contracts, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said tonight.

Thousands of members would refuse to work shifts from 10am on 5 November to 9am on 7 November, covering one of the fire service's busiest periods.

The threat was greeted by claims from the London Fire Brigade commissioner Ron Dobson that emergency fire crews had faced "harassment, intimidation and violence" from "a small minority" of staff determined to sabotage their efforts during the first stoppage on Saturday.

Another eight-hour strike is due to take place next Monday, with the union claiming firefighters face the sack if they do not accept new shift patterns.

Matt Wrack, the FBU's general secretary, said: "We do not want to take this action but we have no choice. The alternative is to allow London's firefighters to become doormats for their employers to walk on. "The long-term safety of Londoners depends on a well-trained, self-confident firefighting force. The chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, Brian Coleman, issues calculated insults and says he's relaxed and sacking all of them.

"He and the Commissioner, Ron Dobson, want to run the London Fire Brigade as though it were a Victorian mill. They want a frightened and obedient firefighting force. We simply cannot accept that." Wrack said the London Fire Brigade "should show a little respect" and hammer out a compromise rather than "bullying" staff.
Last Saturday, contract staff crewed 27 fire engines across the capital instead of the usual 150. They responded to 49 incidents during the strike including several fires in homes, according to the brigade.

The brigade alleged there were a number of incidents in which working firefighters were threatened or intimidated, including three motorbikes surrounding one fire engine.

Tim Montgomerie, of the influential Conservativehome website, urged the coalition government to rush through new legislation curbing unions' rights to organise strikes. He said there should be compulsory arbitration in essential public services. "Certain key public sector workers should give up their right to strike and in return the government would accept the arbitration of an independent body - something like Acas - on issues of pay and conditions."

Montgomerie also backed London mayor Boris Johnson's recent call for a ballot threshold of 50% participation in a vote before strike action could be called. The FBU's ballot would have passed this hurdle.

Paul O’Grady calls for popular revolt to stop Tory cuts

Paul O'Grady sounds off at George Osbourne and the rest of the ConDems for the cuts made to public spending on his live television show.