I lost any taste I had for the autumn political conference season in the Thatcher years, the years when the miners were defeated and with them the whole organised working class. It appears since then that our political leaders have been free to reshape the country in their own image, almost without opposition.
I thought of this when I read last week's supplement in the New Statesman about the history of trade unionism. It reminded me how successful the unions once were at broadening and deepening democracy in this country. Without them as an active force, it is obvious that democracy is being undermined. Today, only one in five workers in the private sector is a trade unionist, and two in five in the public sector.
With all this in mind, I watched some of this month's conference of the Trades Union Congress, where Gloria Mills, who has been president of the TUC for the past year, was in the chair. Not so long ago, of course, it would have been little short of a sensation that a black woman could hold such a position, but not now. I didn't know her, but once the conference was over I rang her (a surprisingly easy business) and discovered that, like me, she was Trinidadian and, like me, she had not had to wait until she reached Britain to discover trade unionism. We grew up in villages 15 minutes apart, in communities lifted out of penury (a consequence of colonial oppression) by workers who were organised into unions in the oilfields, at the oil refinery, and on the sugar plantation.
This was a powerful force for good. In Trini dad and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the trade unions funded and built mass political parties on every single island. They were the driving force in the construction of independent and demo-cratic post-colonial states. No wonder Gloria Mills eased into the British trade-union movement without fuss and with little fanfare.
When trade unionism was defeated in Britain, a process that began with Mrs T but was completed by Mr T, we lost much of that energy and democratic drive, and the consequences were so great that we have yet to grasp them fully. Communities that had a sense of themselves as a class, at work and at home, began to drift into the dark. A generation has grown up without a compass, floating hither and thither, into substance abuse and mindless violence. A working-class hero is no longer something to be; you have to be a celebrity now.
In the black communities the consequences have, if anything, been even more damaging. The local trades councils have been replaced by mosques, mandirs and versions of Christianity which allow scam artists to pass themselves off as priests. In the houses of the Pentecost the collection box is all and miracles are offered in return for cash. In some cases you may be guaranteed riches here on earth while in others you may transcend the science of gynaecology to produce children by the laying of hands on the stomach.
Religion has returned with a fury, paralysing reason and extolling hocus-pocus. The inter nationalism of Islam, and of other faiths, has become a substitute for the old internationalism of the working class. The cry is no longer "Workers of the world unite", but "Islamists of the world unite" - and fight against, for example, a bankrupt and fading papacy.
Yet I do not despair. Gloria Mills may seem to many to be irrelevant, but to me she represents a small, fragile deposit in a possible renaissance, for trade unionism is one of the few possible routes out of the collective mess in which we find ourselves. Once, bodies such as the Pakistani Workers' Union, the Indian Workers' Association and the West Indian Standing Con ference set out to cleanse Britain of the racism that infested organised labour, and they proved to be largely successful.
Now these organisations are dead in the water, and Caribbean youths and young Asian Muslims are at each others' throats. Jihadists, Hindu nationalists and Sikh religious extremists are making the running; so are some of the Christian sects. Dysfunctional families where children thrash about in despair, murderous Caribbean youths armed with guns and stumbling around looking for respect, a proliferation of sexual diseases - all pollute the landscape.
We need to rediscover trade unionism, the organising tool of the working class. We need to rediscover the working class here. And we need to do it soon.
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