The Labour Party is a broad church – but the word ‘Labour’ still means ‘work’

The Labour Party is a broad church. We have room for everyone from Jeremy Corbyn to Tom Harris in the PLP; the authors of The Purple Book and Chavs both pay their subs. Our tweeting members include proud Blairites as well as Bevanites. Labour means different things to different people.

But the word ‘Labour’ still means ‘work’. We are still meant to be the party that works for working people (and people who want to work but can’t). I won’t try to convince anyone that that’s been top of the agenda for every Labour government, but it’s still meant to be the aspiration. Even Tony Blair didn’t change our name to ‘the New Party’. The Labour Party’s responsibility to support working people is not something trade union members purchase from us with donations. They should be able to expect it.

It’s possible that some members joined under the illusion that the name of our party was something to do with babies, or that it was named after LabourList, or that it was some kind of acronym (Let’s All Bash Our Union Relatives?). But otherwise – in the same way that people who join the Conservatives can be assumed to be in favour of the status quo, people who join the Green Party are fans of things leafy, and people who join the Liberal Democrats have the kind of masochistic streak that drives more famous people into the jungle to eat dingo balls on ITV…by joining a party called ‘Labour’ you sort of imply that you are signing up to the ‘workers rights’ bit. That’s a minimum. And one of those rights is the right to withhold labour, aka the right to strike.

This causes complications for the Labour leadership when a strike is called. Public sector workers need many things from Labour, and we need to be in government to even have a chance of being able to achieve them. When we’re in opposition – particular when our leader enjoyed the support of the biggest trade unions during our leadership election – then we have to be prepared for the government and the media doing their best to convince the non-striking public that the inconvenience they are experiencing is Labour’s fault. I agree with Mark that – particularly when public support for Wednesday’s day of action could be as high as 61% and includes even Tory voters – I would like Ed Miliband to support this strike. But I understand that he has to walk a media tightrope, and I wasn’t terribly surprised that he distanced himself from the strikes today.

But very few Labour members are under that particular kind of pressure. Those of us who aren’t on strike can show some support.

–          If you’re lucky or unlucky enough not to be at work on Wednesday, you could join a demonstration. False Economy have a handy map so you can find your nearest. (Tweet me if you hear any good new chants.)

–          Use the same map to find a picket line. Try to avoid crossing one. Go along, if you’re free. Even if placards make your hands sore and shouting embarrasses you, it might be a good opportunity to find out what public sector workers actually think. The weather forecast for Wednesday isn’t great, so taking a flask of tea along might be helpful.

–          If you are in work and you come across myths about trade unions, strikes and public sector pensions: challenging them, rather than perpetuating them, would be helpful. Comrade Owen ‘socialist extremist’ Jones took some time out from nationalising the turnip farms to produce this handy communiqué, but if your colleagues find things easier to believe when they’re in the press, Polly Curtis’ Reality Check in the Guardian is pretty nifty.

As members of the Labour movement we can, in short, show some solidarity.

Now, that’s an even less fashionable word. After all, the working people of Britain are hardly united behind the strikers, are they? The BBC quotes a shopowner:

“I’m very unhappy about it. These people have jobs and they are always going to have their jobs and when they retire they are going to get a great big fat pension… I’ll be having to work until I’m 111 because there’s no feasibility that I’m going to get any more than the minimum pension you get now. I think they are being very selfish.”

Meanwhile, in an article entitled ‘Strike creates childcare nightmare’, the Independent quotes Margaret Morrissey, of campaign group Parents Outloud: “There’s a sort of sympathy with the teachers to an extent, but…there are significant numbers of parents who have had their jobs taken away in the cuts and pensions destroyed…in this time of crisis, everyone’s got to take some share of the problem…I think there’s less support now than in the summer. More people seem to be affected by the cuts now and are beginning to realise what a struggle life is going to be.”

The belief that public sector workers get ‘great big fat pensions’ is one thing – a carefully constructed media myth that the government have been happy not to dispel. But the complaint that it is ‘selfish’ to strike when other people are even worse off; the insistence that ‘everyone’s got to take some share of the problem’ as long as the problem is ‘cuts’, not ‘the schools being shut for a day’; the alarming assertion that, now that the government is making everyone’s lives harder, there will be less sympathy for anyone who fights back – where has that come from? Why are people blaming each other for the pain inflicted on them by bankers and Tories?

Well, maybe because of Michael Gove trying to turn the teachers against their own unions.

Or because of Michael Gove (again) trying to turn single parents against the teachers.

Or because of Danny Alexander (and David Cameron, and more or less everyone else in the government) trying to turn everyone against public sector workers by implying that they, somehow, don’t pay tax. (Or that they aren’t the same as ‘voters’, or ‘parents’ or ‘the public’.)

You get the picture. The government and the right-wing media want us all to spend Wednesday going on about the trade unions backing Ed Miliband, and how much Dave Prentis gets paid, and how the answer to crappy private sector pensions is for public sector pensions to be at least as crappy.

In other words, the government is once again trying to use division as a diversion. The best way people like us can respond is with a show of solidarity. Or if you think that’s an outdated word…just think of it as being helpful.