LABOUR’S opposition day debate on public service delivery should give the Westminster party an opportunity to focus attention on the ways in which privatisation and profligate profit-taking have eroded the public service ethos as systematically as it has weakened service delivery.
This is difficult territory for Labour.
Its present leadership is firmly set against any measure which would breach the consensus politics it follows on political and economic questions, so the grounds on which an assault can be mounted against the government are limited.
There is barely an opposition frontbencher who dare express anything resembling a root-and-branch critique of government policy, so complete is the blanket ban on controversy.
Where the opposition does raise a small head of steam it is to make a play on ministerial hypocrisy — as if mendacity and double-dealing were not already priced into the public understanding of this government’s moral standing.
Boris Johnson was caught out when, in his first media appearance after fleeing the fallout from his close-run vote of confidence, he got his scripts tangled and spoke breathlessly of his Tory vision of a high-wage economy.
It’s difficult to square this with his ministers’ all-round opposition to pay increases.
Tory support for higher wages is a bit like Westminster Labour’s support for strikes. In favour in principle but opposed in practice.
When, today, postal workers’ leader Dave Ward pointed out that his members were balloting for strike action in a dispute about pay, he emphasised the issue was not affordability.
Royal Mail made — “on the backs of their staff” — £758 million in profits, paid out £400m to shareholders and was able to find uncounted millions more for executive pay.
Ward entered the competition for best trade union media bruiser when he three times stopped motormouth Piers Morgan in order to make his point.
Joyful though it is to see elected workers’ leaders taking on the insufferably complacent placemen and women in the bourgeois media, the deeper significance of these rhetorical fireworks is the dramatic effect they are having in stripping away the veil of mystification which normally cloaks the workings of the profit system.
In making explicit the connection between attempts by employers (aided by their government) to limit workers’ pay and the soaraway sums that shareholders garner as a consequence, these workers’ leaders allow working people to reach their own conclusions about the need for change.
Contrast this to the approach that Labour opposition figures prefer, which is to focus on the disruptive effects of any interruption in service delivery, the inconvenience to travellers or the effects on business of a postal strike, as if the business of government was not to facilitate negotiated solutions.
Trade unionists always make the point that they seek a negotiated solution to any issues that the ever-changing industrial situation throws up.
The very great extent to which technology and its impact on working practices has changed the industrial landscape exposes Tory claims that union leaders are dinosaurs.
If there is one feature of working Britain that really does belong to a long-lost era, it is the private ownership of public utilities which is the root of these pay disputes.
To this, socialists who are serious about working-class power will add the public ownership of the main branches of the productive economy.
If there is any area of human endeavour which produces profits or is essential for modern life it should be publicly owned.
A labour movement that forgets or neglects this foundational principle has no solutions to the problems this enduring capitalist crisis continues to throw up.
