British Jobs For British Workers: Dividing The Working Class

international | worker & community struggles and protests | opinion/analysis Thursday February 05, 2009 17:04 by Gerry Downing

The strike is now coming to a conclusion. The British labour movement will emerge from it a great deal worse that when it began. The negotiations are centred around which nationality gets which jobs, with even more reactionary demands emerging from the SP that jobs should be 'local'. The strike began about BJ4BW, some gave whole hearted support and pretended the posters, union jacks and pickets comments were just 'media lies' (Galloway et al), others came to the schizophrenic conclusion that the strike might be on reactionary demands, but ‘really’, dialectically, in a contradictory way it was about a fight to advance the rights of all workers and since it might become that it was ok – a sort of ‘if your aunt had balls’ argument.

Now the moment of truth is upon us, turn your head away and pretend not to see but the Eyties’ are to be turfed out, our British, or better still our ‘local’ lads will get first call on 101 out of 198 jobs, is it? And presumably these locals will have to pass some test of ‘localism’ or ‘Britishness’ set by the local union committee. And now we can move on to ensuring ‘fairness’ in every other site and in council house allocations as the Sun and News of the World have advocated for so long.

I worked in the buildings for 20 years, I have know many English Tory brick layers, I know what reactionary craft unionism is and this is what you are seeing here. The founding of the Labour party was a result of the great blows struck by the New Unionism inspired by the Match girls and the London Dockers against the elitist, privileged empire loyalism in these unions. They would troop across Westminster Bridge in bowler hats to go to work in the building sites, the same reactionary aristocracy of labour represented by the Ulster unionists, which many of us believed was its last redoubt.

The marginalisation (but not elimination) of this reactionary tradition allowed the Labour party to be founded as a bourgeois workers party (in Lenin’s famous characterisation) and this was a great world-historic advance for workers everywhere. The re-emergence of the ascendance of craft unionism will destroy the Labour party as a workers organisation of any kind unless it is fought, and its influence halted and reversed. The defeat has not yet been inflicted on the working class but unless we fight these reactionary labour lieutenants of capital in our ranks now the future will be bleak. And that would be a world-historic defeat and a reversion to the 1870s, but in far worse circumstances.

Barber applauded Brown’s British jobs for British workers speech, did anyone notice which other TU leaders did so too? We can hope that some trade unions will refuse support to these strikes, but their silence to date speaks volumes. In any case Unite and the GMB have adopted this line, they have allied with reactionary labour aristocratic unionist consciousness against the ‘lower orders’. And that is not just targeting Johnny Foreigner, it will target the unskilled and the unemployed and, ultimately it will rebound on its ‘socialist’ supporters too – apparently the German Social Democratic leaders were pleading with Hitler to be allowed to serve his cause as they were being led to the concentration camps. The BNP are correct to see fertile recruiting ground opening up for them.

So yes, many of you did get it profoundly wrong and when the moment of truth arrives, when the deal based on the nationality or the locality of the workers is accepted, you will have to turn your heads away and pretend not to see.