29.10.2009

London support

Paul Demarty reports a postal workers solidarity meeting

Around 100 people met at the Friends Meeting House, Euston on October 26, with the aim of setting up a London-wide support group for the striking CWU workers.

The meeting was very obviously SWP-dominated - Charlie Kimber spoke from the platform, and numerous SWP comrades spoke from the floor. Of course, as is their wont, nobody admitted to being a member - comrade Kimber was there on behalf of Right to Work, and speakers from the floor introduced themselves by union and branch. I make no claim to know exactly who was genuinely an ‘ordinary trade unionist’ and who was an SWP comrade. Mark Serwotka was billed as the headline act, but was unable to attend, apparently facing a particularly frustrating snarl of London traffic.

Comrade Kimber spoke first. There were two quotations that summed up the struggle thus far, he said. The first was Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier’s blunt instruction to postal workers that they ought to “shut up” - wasn’t this exactly the subtext of the endless niggling attacks on working conditions, and in particular of decades of speed-up? The other was Peter Mandelson’s admission that he was “beyond rage” at CWU workers for going on strike against ‘modernisation’. Comrade Kimber was certainly beyond rage at Mandelson. He suggested three actions that could be immediately undertaken in support of the strike (which were also distributed in a leaflet at the door) - redoubled efforts at money collections, a protest at the scab operation Royal Mail has set up in Dartford in Kent, and a protest outside Peter Mandelson’s office.

The second speaker, Alison Lord, gave an outline of the recent Tower Hamlets college lecturers strike: if they could win, why could not the posties? (London University and College Union had co-sponsored the rally.) The third was from the CWU itself, in the form of London area divisional rep Martin Walsh. Providing gorier details on the persistent attempts by management to undermine the postal workers, he also got the biggest cheer of the night for his region’s landmark ballot over funding the Labour Party - 98% against on a good turnout.

He did not stoop to suggest an alternative destination for the money, needless to say (with members of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, SWP and Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain all present and taking notes). In fact, the closest anyone came to saying anything on the matter - with several floor contributions from SWP members and one from Workers Power’s Jeremy Dewar - was a speaker from the RMT, who used his time to plug that union’s forthcoming conference on working class representation.

Many speakers pointed out the connections between the CWU struggle and other disputes ongoing or currently brewing. Yet nobody - not even comrade Kimber in his closing remarks, which used the beating doled out to Labour from the floor to get in some sharper jabs of his own - seemed willing to confront the challenge of building a political alternative to the mainstream bourgeois parties. A militant strike will apparently suffice.

From that angle, the SWP at least is certainly putting some energy into this one.