In February and March of this year wildcat strikes spread rapidly across the construction industry, protesting against this use of migrant labour at the Lindsey Oil Refinery and demanding ‘British jobs for British workers’. How did the left respond to this outbreak of chauvinism in the labour movement? While some groups and activists took a principled stance, the Socialist Party supported the strikes, played down their nationalist goals, and was even in the leadership of the movement at Lindsey. Here, Chris Brennan, who left the Socialist Party over the issue, looks at how the organisation provided left cover for a movement whose goals were chauvinist to the core.
Over the last decade, the main establishment parties have been steadily escalating their campaign against asylum seekers and migrant workers, in a cynical attempt to avoid being outflanked by the parties of the far right, UKIP and the fascist British National Party (BNP). The Tories have attacked immigrants for everything from the lack of affordable homes to an undermining of British values, while Labour’s best known attack was made by none other than Gordon Brown with his now infamous pledge of 'British Jobs for British Workers' (BJ4BW). This nationalistic rhetoric has found resonance in sections of the trade union bureaucracy. Derek Simpson, for example, leader of the Amicus section of Britain's largest union, Unite, notably posed with page three models in the viciously racist and anti immigrant Daily Star under the banner of BJ4BW.
The reason ‘labour lieutenants of capital’ like Simpson make these arguments is that it costs nothing to blame another section of workers, like migrants, in comparison to the pressures and risks that working class struggle – addressing the needs of all workers – involves. Simpson can oversee 850 jobs destroyed by BMW at their Cowley plant without lifting a finger, as part of his strategy of securing an alliance with British bosses by way of requests for the government to defend ‘British manufacturing’ and ‘British jobs’. This strategy not only violates basic internationalist principles – that we should unite with all workers regardless of their nationality – but also turns the trade unions into a pillar of support for the manufacturing bosses they should be fighting. It is also completely failing to protect jobs (as Jeremy Dewar points out on page 8) with unemployment in manufacturing skyrocketing, while official strike figures for the last six months have collapsed to a historically low level.
Those strikes that did take place in construction have, under Simpson’s influence but not his alone, targeted the wrong people: migrant workers, not the bosses. On 28 January over 1,000 construction workers downed tools at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in North Lincolnshire, in defiance of the anti union laws, which demand ballots and cooling off periods between strikes. Keith Gibson of the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SP) was elected to the strike committee and through him the SP came to play a leading role in the strike.
The SP’s newspaper The Socialist (1 Feb) gives us Gibson’s detailed insider’s account of the dispute and what led up to it. He states that the British contractor, Shaws, had lost the part of its contract at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) for work on a de-sulphurisation plant to an Italian company, IREM. Shaws notified its workforce in December that there would be lay-offs. Unite shop stewards were concerned that the National Agreement for the Engineering and Construction Industry (NAECI or the ‘blue book’) would not cover the new workers. This collective agreement lays down basic, shift and overtime pay rates, plus proficiency payments, travel and accommodation allowances, pension contributions, sickness and accident benefits, etc. The union demanded access to Italian workers for trade union representatives, negotiations proceeded and Gibson did not indicate that there was any breakdown due to a refusal by IREM management to agree to apply equivalent pay and conditions for the Italian workers.
Labour MP for Cleethorpes, Shona McIsaac, for one, confirmed the unions had been "happy" to negotiate with IREM before the strike broke out. She said, “I had a meeting shortly after Christmas at Lindsey. We knew about IREM having the contract and at that time the unions were happily negotiating with them over terms and conditions, including the Italian workers having a tea break...The unions also knew that IREM was planning to recruit British workers as part of the contract to work alongside the Italians – they knew there was no plan to exclude British workers... But when the unions took the deal to their members it was rejected and the unofficial walkout began. After that some union leaders started making claims about British workers' conditions being undercut by these contracts.”
So, the Italian workers were paid the same as British workers and did not undermine the collective national agreements. What was the basis of the strike then? Keith Gibson of the SP explains that, “...on Wednesday 28th January 2009, Shaws' workforce were told by the Stewards that IREM had stated they would not be employing British labour. The entire LOR workforce, from all subcontracting companies, met and voted unanimously to take immediate unofficial strike action.”
The strike started as soon as the stewards reported that British labour would not be employed and for that reason alone. This was the point at which Union Jacks and ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ placards began to be a visible presence on site. Shop steward Kenny Ward summed up the strike’s aim very clearly: “There are thousands in this country that are victims to this discrimination, this victimisation of the British worker.” The demand of the strike was for at least a parity of “one for one”, i.e. one British worker for each migrant employed. It is on that basis – the attempt to dump the costs of unemployment onto Italian workers, not British, French or Italian bosses – that no Marxist organisation worthy of the name could support the strike.
The Socialist Party’s defence
The SP justified their support for the strikes for two principal reasons. The first was the undermining of the national union agreement. As The Socialist stated on 4 February ('Firm strike leadership gains results'): “… fundamentally this struggle is aimed against the 'race to the bottom', at maintaining trade union-organised conditions and wages on these huge building sites.” But, as we have shown above, this has no basis in fact. The second, more disgraceful, argument put forward by the SP is that the strike was about 'fairness' and against the exclusion of 'local labour'. Let us quote the SP leaflet put out as the nationalist demonstrations spread across the North and the Midlands: “This worker solidarity is against the ‘conscious blacking’ of British construction workers by company bosses who refuse to recruit skilled British labour in the U.K.”
This simply apes Unite leader Derek Simpson, who told the BBC: “It will occur again, and I'm sure it will occur in other countries as well unless there's a realisation that you can't just use the freedom of labour to the exclusion of indigenous labour.” To base a strategy for resisting job losses and unemployment on a nationalist appeal for preference, as this is what talk of 'local labour' means in practice, is to concede to the idea, put forward day in day out in the tabloids and by the pro-bosses political parties, that there are too many workers in the UK from abroad and that if somehow they were no longer here then jobs would be easier to come by. Yet this is another of the excuses offered by the SP to explain away their support for a thoroughly reactionary strike.
Economism
The outcome of Lindsey was a defeat for the working class. The 4 February settlement saw 104 of 195 jobs go to British workers. This followed the rejection of an offer of 25% of the jobs for British workers the previous day. Bernard McAuley, Unite’s chief negotiator, told the Guardian: “We've made sure that no Italians have been made redundant, we've got jobs for 102 British people.” While no Italian or Portuguese workers already on site were made redundant, the jobs were reallocated from those that had already gone to contracted IREM workers. Only around 100 of the projected 300 were already working at the refinery. The SP, however, maintained that the strike was “…an inspirational struggle against the 'race to the bottom'... Not since the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s was there a strike wave like it. The result of the strike was a massive victory for those who took part and it gave heart to tens of thousands of others who saw that it is possible to fight back against the growing threat of unemployment.”
This wholly exaggerated assessment of the strike wave reveals that the SP adopted a highly economistic approach to the strike. Treating it just as a trade union dispute, with a section of trade unionised workers defending their jobs and position, they failed to see the reactionary political significance of a strike against the use of foreign labour. While in the short term, this won a section of unionised workers 105 jobs, it did so only at the expense of another section of workers, and the reactionary content of the strike undermines the fighting position of the class as a whole. If we are divided along national and ethnic lines, we will never be able to fight in the interests of the whole class against the bosses, demanding jobs for all.
The position of the SP was a classic example of what Lenin called ‘economism’ or ‘tailism’. Lenin had attacked the Russian Marxists, ‘the economists’, who equated trade union consciousness with socialist consciousness. Lenin argued that the former would develop naturally owing to the conditions of capitalist society, which would create a spontaneous tendency for workers to pursue a struggle for higher wages, for better working conditions, and so on. Socialist consciousness was more than this though. Socialists saw the trade union struggle as only one part of a struggle against capitalism and for a new society based on the principle of working class power. Whereas there was a spontaneous tendency towards trade union consciousness, winning workers to socialism required a conscious struggle to raise their horizons beyond the limited confines of the economic struggle against this or that employer. To equate these two forms of consciousness would, in reality, mean limiting Marxist agitation to the struggle for the immediate improvement workers’ conditions alone – the conclusion ‘the economists’ in Russian Marxism drew. Opportunism was at the core of economism; rather than challenge the bourgeois prejudices of workers, the economists chose instead to tail their existing ideas, and adapting the socialist programme to what they would readily accept.
In the LOR strike the Socialist Party adopted this exact same method. Rather than putting forward a socialist and anticapitalist perspective, including defending the rights of migrant workers to take up their jobs, the SP capitulated to the existing, reactionary ideas of a set of workers. Ultimately, the SP failed to fight for jobs for all the workers – migrant and so-called ‘indigenous’. They simply lauded the scope and breadth of the struggle and called on it to spread further into a national protest movement. The strike had exposed a particular type of craft trade unionism, where a section of unionised workers defend their section interests, at the expense of other workers – denying, for example, jobs, social rights and entry into the workplace of migrants or less skilled labourers. The SP in classic economistic fashion mistook this craft trade union consciousness for socialist consciousness. Forgetting that socialists should not just be trade unionists, but, in accordance with our broader anticapitalist perspectives and goals, we should also be tribunes of the oppressed and marginalised, the SP were blind to the reactionary goals and implications of the strikes for ‘British jobs’, seeing them as simply trade union struggles and somehow intrinsically socialist because of this.
Opportunism
The SP went onto the offensive after being stung by criticism of the strikes from other socialists, notably Workers Power and the Socialist Workers Party. A set of demands were agreed by the strike committee in the heat of the strike at the behest of Keith Gibson and the SP on 2 February:
• No victimisation of workers taking solidarity action.
• All workers in the UK to be covered by the NAECI agreement.
• Union-controlled registering of unemployed and local skilled union members with nominating rights as work becomes available.
• Government and employer investment in proper training/apprenticeships for the new generation of construction workers. Fight for a future for young people.
• All immigrant labour to be unionised.
• Trade union assistance for immigrant workers, via interpreters, to give right of access to trade union advice – to promote active, integrated trade union members.
• Build links with construction trade unions on the continent.
These were certainly good trade union demands. The problem is that they were not the real aims of the strike and no wonder then that they did not form part of the agreement that ended the strike. Moreover, the seven demands evaded all mention of the central claim – more jobs for British workers on the contract – and neither did they contain any statement about what this would mean for IREM’s Italian workforce. This did not stop the SP going out of its way to downplay the central nationalist aims, concretised in the jobs settlement. Speaking of the nationalist manifestations at LOR the SP states “...But it seems that, since the strike, the SWP and some other groups on the left are doing their level best to undermine its achievements by focusing on the issue of 'British jobs for British workers' (BJ4BW).” Rather than answer the criticisms that union jacks and nationalism were prevalent throughout the strike, the SP have consistently claimed that LOR was, “a victory for the workers of all nations, won in spite of the EU-loaded dice and the anti-union laws,” which “set a benchmark not only for militant trade unionism but for the role of conscious socialist intervention”. Opposition to the strike was even dismissed by the SP as “….betraying a lack of imagination.” This much is true – it is indeed very imaginative to be able to contort 104 jobs stolen from Italian workers as in any way a blow against nationalism or a victory for the international working class!
Nationalist solidarity spreads
As mobs marched through Staythorpe in Nottinghamshire chanting, 'What do we want - Foreigners out; When do we want it – now!', the SP had this to say: “In the case of the Isle of Grain, and the Staythorpe site in Newark as well, the jobs were advertised in local job centres but not a single local worker applying for them ever got an interview…the jobs had already been filled by overseas contractors… It was a ruse by the bosses to get around equal opportunity employment laws, and everybody knew this. That is why there was so much anger, sometimes unfortunately and completely wrongly aimed at the overseas workers by a few.” This caveat, that the workers should not be openly nationalist, is a rather weak cover for the rest of the argument. As socialists we begin from the position that workers, regardless of nationality, have a right to work. This should and can be secured by a united struggle for jobs for all.
Peter Taaffe, General Secretary of the Socialist Party has condemned all those “on the fringes of the labour movement” who refused to support the strike wave. Perhaps he has forgotten his non-SP allies in PCS Left Unity. As Public and Commercial Services Union leader Mark Serwotka said, “British jobs for British workers is not only a reactionary slogan, it is potentially racist. I saw people on the TV saying, ‘I don’t want to work with those Eye-ties’ and hurling abuse at the ship where they were living. But I was the only trade union leader to publicly oppose the slogan.”
This reformist union leader displays a greater awareness of the dangers of nationalism than the alleged Marxists of the Socialist Party.
The Olympics Site: too many foreign workers?
On 8 May over 400 construction workers gathered outside the Olympics construction site in Stratford, East London. Lindsey workers led the demonstrations with Keith Gibson at the helm. Most were members of the GMB and Unite unions demanding a share of jobs for local workers. But there were also concerns about whether non-unionised labour was used on the site, and whether the national union agreement was bring observed. Many on the demonstrations also went to great lengths to deny media reports they were objecting to the use of migrant labour. But Keith Gibson said that "The protest is about the EU legislation with regards to social dumping of European workers throughout Europe in different parts of the country.” Neither GMB nor Unite support or ratify with evidence his further claim that, “They (the bosses) are not obeying the pay and conditions that the agreements will work under."
The bosses certainly denied non-union labour was being used. The Olympic Delivery manager told the BBC the issue on the Olympic site is not the union rates for skilled workers: “There are high levels of direct employment on the Olympic Park and we have a positive agreement with the unions representing construction workers on site which includes national wage rates.” Of course, bosses should never be believed. But the problem was that the unions organising the protests did not also represent workers on the site, and there was no attempt made to involve them in the protests. This could have quickly clarified the true picture: how much were they being paid and was this in accordance with existing national agreements? Again, the nationalist goal of the defence of ‘British jobs’ and against immigration appeared to be the chief concern of many protesters. Phil Willis of Unite stated, "The more skilled labour they bring in [to Britain] it's going to deny our apprentices because they won't need them." Again, here as elsewhere, the SP have not clarified the goals and aims of the strike but at best only exacerbated the confusion and failed to challenge chauvinistic prejudices behind the demand for ‘British jobs for British workers’.
South Hook strike – nationalism gets you 40 jobs
The apogee of this nationalist approach by sections of the working class was the 'victory' in Wales. Following unofficial strike action by workers and complaints from the GMB and Unite unions, the Dutch-based employer Hertel agreed to withdraw 40 Poles and replace them with UK staff at the terminal owned by ExxonMobil and Total at South Hook in South Wales. GMB stewards and officials did not challenge the bosses’ claim that Polish workers were on the union rates. This agreement followed threats by Paul Kenny, the demagogue leading the GMB union, that he would call other workers out on strike unless local workers were employed first.
Once again the SP echoed the demand for British workers to come first: “Workers at South Hook are not opposed to laggers from Poland getting work on the site as long as local laggers are given the opportunity of the work first under the union agreement and then foreign workers can be employed on the same pay and conditions.” (SP statement on 20 May)
What this strike wave has exemplified is the failure of the SP’s politics. No attempt was made to undermine Simpson by linking his nationalism to his inaction at Cowley and elsewhere. When the strike started, socialists had a duty to fight for a radically different perspective. In addition to the demands of the LOR strike committee, there should have been a condemnation of the slogan ‘British jobs, for British workers’ and a defence of the Italian workers’ right to take up their jobs at the plant. This could have given the strike an internationalist character, and sparked a militant movement for jobs for all. Socialists may well have lost the argument, but by taking a principled stand, and taking the internationalists arguments on to picket lines as the strike developed, we would have been in far stronger position for the future: for it would have the laid the basis for a stronger, more united, movement of all workers fighting mass unemployment. Not a movement divided along national lines, fighting amongst ourselves for a dwindling number of jobs.
Left Nationalism – No2EU
With the bosses’ system sinking into a deep recession and governments everywhere facing a crisis of legitimacy, the 4 June European Union elections offered an open door to a serious working class alternative. But the No2EU slate was not and could not have been that alternative. The decision by Bob Crow, General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), to establish a new electoral alliance to contest the European elections is a direct continuation of the nationalist strike and demonstration movement in a political form. At a time of global economic crisis, when bosses across the world are attacking the working class, the No2EU platform chose to focus exclusively on the bosses in Europe, letting the British off the hook. Whilst some of its criticisms of the EU were correct – for example, the reactionary, anti-union judgements of the ECJ and its attacks on the neoliberal Lisbon Treaty – it not only ignored the fact that Britain has been, since Thatcher, in the ‘vanguard’ of neoliberal states, but also included calls to defend ‘British’ industry. This could be nothing less, given British industry is nearly wholly privately owned by capitalists, than a call for manufacturing workers to strike alliances with the very bosses who are sacking them.
When it comes to immigration, No 2 EU states that “To ferry workers across Europe to carry out jobs that local workers can be trained to perform is an environmental, economic and social nonsense.” As Natalie Sedley has highlighted, however, the “fact that workers from one European country can move to any other, can bring their dependent relatives with them, and, at least in theory, cannot be discriminated against in relation to “native” workers, is undoubtedly something progressive and beneficial that socialists and trade unionists ought to support.” (See ‘Viking, Laval and all that – are the arguments of No2EU justified?’ on www.fifthinternational.org).
The Socialist Party was quick to support No2EU and clearly hoped it could lay the basis for a new workers’ party. Clive Heemskerk of the SP wrote, “The Socialist Party supports and is part of the No2EU -Yes to Democracy coalition. We recognise that many problems, from the economic crisis to planet-threatening global warming, can only be solved at an international level. If society remains organised as it is today, on a capitalist basis, divided into competing nations, the prospects for humanity will be bleak indeed. Fundamental change is necessary, based on democratic public ownership of the major companies that dominate the globe. We need a socialist Europe, not a bosses' EU. Backing the trade union-initiated No2EU - Yes to Democracy campaign in June's election is the first step towards building a force that can unite with workers in Europe and across the world to fight for a better future.”(The Socialist, 15 April 2009)
This approach, describing in entirely normative terms (how something should be) what we would expect a fighting socialist party to look like, without acknowledging that the No2EU campaign makes no such internationalist or socialist arguments, shows both an enormous leap of political faith and a willingness to take a reactionary detour along the road to a mass workers’ party. The No2EU platform makes no mention of either socialism or the working class. Socialism is something not even implied by its very limited policies. This perhaps wouldn’t be a problem, if the Socialist Party was determined to fight for internationalist and socialist politics in the No2EU alliance, but, again, it was more concerned to provide left cover for nationalism than to actively challenge it.
At the same time, it has to be said, that the SP share, in their own politics, some of the wrong positions of No2EU – in particular, the confusion over the free movement of labour that is at the heart of the campaign. As Dave Nellist put it in a recent interview in the Weekly Worker, 21 May: “I’ve always believed that part of socialism is the right to live, work, love wherever you want to be. However, if you put a practical example in front of me, which is the IREM multinational at Lindsey, then I come down on the side of the strikers who want to enforce common trade union levels of pay and conditions on whoever works there – as opposed to the right of IREM to use the free movement of capital and labour to make the biggest possible profit.” So, rather than argue for the unionisation of workers entering the UK and for a trans-EU minimum wage and union agreements to be enforced by all European unions – the communist approach – Nellist ends up counter-posing the free movement of labour to the defence of trade union agreements.
The New Party
We must not make the error of seeing the Socialist Party, or its sister sections in the Committee for a Workers International, as one big morass of capitulators to nationalism. There has been opposition to the degeneration of the SP from within the SP itself. In South Wales, Socialist Party comrades have refused to hand out No2EU leaflets and have instead insisted that only SP leaflets are used in the campaign. This is a conscious effort on the part of a minority of SP members to limit the damage of nationalism by handing out the much better and less overtly nationalist SP leaflets. The question now at hand for those SP members who are rightly concerned with the capitulation to nationalism by their leadership is whether the new turn is simply an aberration or flows quite naturally from the politics and method of the SP.
If the No2 EU - Yes to Democracy alliance becomes a new party formation after the Euro elections then the SP have already abandoned any notion of fighting for it to abandon its nationalism and adopt a revolutionary socialist programme. Indeed, as was shown over recent years in their approach to their Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, they have always seen political accommodation to the reformist politics of sections of the trade union bureaucracy to create a new reformist party in the here and now as a precondition for any future development of a revolutionary party. Such schematism is, as Trotsky once said, “the lifeblood of opportunism”, for it results in the fight for revolutionary politics being put off to some unspecified point in the future where it will suddenly become ‘operable’. Of course, Marxists should unite with reformists to build a new party – and place no conditions or obstacles in the way of this unity – but we must also be clear from the outset that our aim is the speediest possible formation of a revolutionary communist party to lead both electoral campaigns and the class struggle in the streets and workplaces. This mans fighting for the new party to adopt a revolutionary programme from the outset, as this is the only way to ensure that the party will consistently represent the working class.
This is, indeed, a fundamental problem with the political tradition (often known as the ‘Militant’ or ‘Grant’ tradition, after its founder Ted Grant) from which the SP emerged in the 1990s. Grant founded the Militant Tendency as ‘entryists of a special type’ – the tactic of building up organisational influence without fighting openly for a revolutionary policy – in the Labour Party. This strategy was based upon Grant’s conviction that any great upsurge would result in an influx of the masses into their traditional political parties, where they would find the leadership of Militant who had been slowly preparing over many years, even decades. Even when Labour purged Militant in the 80s and 90s Grant still clung to this perspective, believing they had to remain in the party that workers would inevitably return to on mass at some point in the future.
The SP has broken with this tradition only superficially. While they don’t see the Labour Party as playing the role Grant envisaged for it, they now apportion essentially the same role for the new reformist workers’ party they hope to form with the trade union bureaucracy (a Labour Party mark II, in all but name). Grant once said “due to the process of struggle itself, the broad consciousness of the masses moves in the direction of socialism.” (Ted Grant, Militant’s British Perspective, 1979). This was always a one-sided generalisation that encapsulated the problem with his method. Grant failed to see that the class struggle only creates the potential for the development of socialist consciousness: it is active revolutionary intervention that realises the potential.
The LOR dispute provides negative confirmation of just this point. It reminds us that the trade union struggle creates both progressive and reactionary outbursts. If socialists are unable to provide internationalist leadership and are not willing, where necessary, to stand against the stream, then they will never be consistent and principled fighters for revolutionary politics. As the jobs massacre rips through the economy, as Labour lurches into its deepest political crisis in a generation, Marxists need a revolutionary strategy for the crisis. The opportunist and economistic method of the SP is incapable of developing this. It is these fundamental problems of method we urge all SP members, alarmed by the turn of the last period, to critically reassess.
