“The workers... united... will never be defeated” was the cry that went round central London on Saturday as the TUC mobilised hoards of Community Space Challenger Coordinators, Assistants to the Regional Diversity Strategists, shop-stewards, press officers and the rest of the normally invisible back end of the public sector. Suddenly they have realised that the party is over and the real world of sustainable public spending is calling. Needless to say they don’t like the hangover.
Given the crowd was generously put at at 250,000 by the police, you would have thought that workers, united, would be celebrating, yet as the dust settles from the march, their cause is damaged, their organisers humiliated and the other 99.9% of the population left confused at how they could be so naive.
You can see Ed Miliband’s logic. On Friday the left was tacitly united from the purple clad union marshals to the careerist Young Labour posse, through to the cutely radical and idealist hippies over at UK Uncut. Here was a chance, which he managed to prang by wearing a suit and giving a poorly judged hyperbolic speech, for him to be seen a figurehead of a movement of opposistion.
Yet by Sunday the opposition to the government spending cuts has been left in tatters. Welcoming the self-indulgent extremist trust-afarians from UK Uncut into the fold has blown effective opposition out of the water. Despite high praise heaped on them from the Labour Party and the Guardian it was only a matter of time before UK Uncut came unstuck and their more militant friends unleashed the destruction they they have been itching for since their youth wing trashed Millbank.
Last night a spokesman for UK Uncut repeatedly refused to condemn Saturday’s violence. While she was keen to promote the “Creative Areas” she was focusing on - protesting through art. Her dangerous and militant tendencies shone through though when she was so seemingly oblivious to the concept of property rights and the rule of law. Though given that Uncut claims to be run through a non-hierarchical consensus structure, they might want to rethink how they choose their mouthpieces.
For the TUC and Labour not to see this trouble coming and not publicly distance themselves from UK Uncut before Saturday is their own sorry fault. Labour and the Unions cannot and should not moan as they cannot have their cake and eat it. Either they are the movement that they were so keen to stress they were, or you are divided with deniabilty. They tried to have it both ways on Saturday and look what happened.
Shredding Uncut
by Harry Cole / 29 Mar 2011 13:20
Harry Cole argues that Labour have tried to have it both ways on UK Uncut, and have come unstuck
Getty Images
Comments
rich / March 29 2011 1:53pm
And yet, after the demonstration Labour's lead in the polls increased from from 3pts to 8pts. I know TP's main purpose seems to be to give platforms to the Conservative Future crowd to shape the political narrative, but even by your standards this account contains a fairly significant level of wishful thinking.
Harry Cole / March 29 2011 2:07pm
Rich, have you had a look through the list of bloggers?
Sadie - left
me - right
Francesca - right
Laurence- left
Martin - Left
and sadly my CF days are long gone having no longer been a member of the Tories for a while now.
As for the polls... if you add up the two governing parties totals there are still beating Labour in the vast majority of polls.
keep spinning!
Robert Eve / March 29 2011 2:07pm
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised by this.
The Left have always been idiots.
Sandra / March 29 2011 2:11pm
I think remote & deniable political violence is a key strategy of the Unions & their wholly owned subsidiary - The Labour Party.
These proxy groups are interwoven with the Unions & their wholly owned Labour Party franchise.
Violence is the strategy - losing an election will bring more violence from indoctrinated young people via the left wing occupied zones that are the UKs education system.
How long before we see a British Baader Meinhof-esque left wing terrorist group emerge from this orchestrated crypto socialist movement?
And really - returning public spending levels to that of 2006 is hardly comparable to Apartheid - & I say this as a long serving activist against the evil that was South Africa.
Something is going badly wrong in the UK - this is not legitimate protest against Government policy, this is a movement against democracy.
Be afraid.
Lucas / March 29 2011 2:16pm
Yet another falls into the same hole the rest of media has done, UKuncut =/= The Black Bloc and their sordid little anarchist friends.
If Labour were to cut UKuncut loose it would be nothing more than an act of masochistic division. They would be distancing themselves from the very people they should be representing, the mainstream majority, those who were supportive (or at the very least passive towards) the TUC rally, the increasing number of people who do not agree with the coalition's actions.
Did you even attend the event? Or are you one of the many armchair journalists so prominent in today's media?
Jan / March 29 2011 2:44pm
As one of the thousands of nurses on the march (along with doctors) I fail to see how you can describe our jobs as non jobs ??
Did you see any reports of the march ?? or care to see it ??
Oh and didnt a Countryside Alliance lobby end in police being injured
I should know I was inin A&E at Westminister & Chelsea hospital when they came in with head injuries
Hughes. / March 29 2011 3:12pm
UKUncut are marching for Statism. A bankrupt ideology that Blair discarded with Clause 4 (and even Fidel Castro has back-pedalled on), and which Brown returned through the backdoor by replacing state ownership of industry with nationalising the workforce. This has created a huge army of public sector turkeys who aren't going to vote for Christmas.
An ever shrinking number of people actually create trade, jobs and tax revenue, while UKUncut want a never-ending increase in jobs paid for entirely by the state. Meaning more and more people with completely legal tax affairs have to be demonised, and mugged for pocket change that would barely dent the deficit/national debt/unfunded public sector, council worker, state pensions black hole.
That the left has decided to align itself with this fiscal infantilism shows Lord Kinnock really has got his party back, a party that lost 4 elections in a row. Kudos.
Peter Davison / March 29 2011 3:16pm
So political violence is ok when it is the left wing doing it?
Mmmmmkay. Next time the fascist EDL get vilified for demo violence I am sure the mock outrage of the left will be duly noted.
I was there at this demo - this is not a natural gathering of like minded people - this is planned political violence.
Many of the young there have been wound up by older professional agitators - I have seen this all before, not so well done and orchestrated, but this uncivil political violence is planned.
By who? - that is the question. Who benefits? The Unions and Labour - thats who.
We all support nurses, firemen, doctors, police - but the rest of the non jobs in the public sector must be aware that there pay and pensions are completely unsustainable because of the financial lunacy of Gordon Brown? Even if we were a rich country the public sector is way too big to sustain.
Red Ed is no better than Brown - another millionaire socialist from a priveliged background - and in hock to the unions who own him lock, stock and barrel.
TimJB / March 29 2011 3:17pm
Edward was deluding himself if, as he claims, he expected no violence. His credibility ( if he ever had any ) was shot as soon as his little "suffragette army" attacked and occupyied a shop owned by one of the most philanthropic families in the country. That says all you need to know about the ignorance and wrong headedness of their entire approach.
They don't want to just have their cake and eat it too, they want all of yours and mine as well!
Svengali Scotsman / March 29 2011 3:24pm
I originally posted this comment over at Labour Uncut on Dan Hodge's (excellent) post regarding UK Uncut. He seems to be one of the only commentators from that region of the blogosphere who is showing humility over it.
Here it is.
"I won’t hide the fact that I didn’t vote Labour at the 2010 GE (my first time being able to vote, 21 years old). Neither will I hide the fact that my political and economic views are strongly libertarian (not right wing though – the Conservatives are not my political poster boys).
However, this is the most honest appraisal of the events of that protest that I have read from a ‘Labour’, or at least “Labour-sympathetic”, source.
Whilst it isn’t my desire to see Labour return to power, or the trade unions increase their influence, I will accept it if it is the outcome of our democratic process. We cannot simply abandon the system when we don’t like the result (that is why I will be voting against AV, but if you want to discuss that particular issue, please email me and I will gladly talk about it – stu.the.cullen@gmail.com).
Where does your side go from here? There are a few possibilities, some of which I think are in your best interests to make priority.
It’s no secret that there is a ‘hard’-left element among UK Uncut. Labelling them “anarchists” is a misnomer, because anarchists oppose all forms of government. Anarchists would be protesting for “no taxes” not against corporate tax avoidance. As an aside, I recommend everyone do some research into the history of Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion in the UK.
In regards to the hard-left make-up of UKUncut, what is notable is that they are almost uniformally people in their late teens to (at the extreme end) late twenties. There is a very strong generational dichotomy in the protests of Saturday.
This is where Labour’s opportunity lies. Younger people, very generally, tend to be more left-wing (or more accurately in the UK, anti-Tory). If you make a joke about spitting on Margaret Thatcher and waiting to dance on her grave, you’ll get very different reactions in a room of baby-boomers and a room of people around my age. Leaving personal politics aside, Labour needs to take the opportunity to capitalise on this feeling, and make a political home for this generation of young people.
There is a risk that these young people, feeling ignored and shunned by the political process (as they evidently do given their method of protest), will degenerate into a state of political apathy by the time the next general election comes around.
Surely in a democratic system, that is in no-one’s interest.
If the cost of higher voter turnout and overall involvement of the politics of this country was Labour domination in 2015, I would rather live in a more socialist, Labour-led country than a Conservative or (don’t laugh here) UKIP one.
The importance of this issue extends far beyond the scope of personal politics, and Labour is in a unique position to get, at least for a section of the population, more young people involved in politics in a meaningful, long lasting way.
Shunning and decrying them in the long-term will not appease their anxiety and anger over the institutions they have grown up with."
Scotty / March 29 2011 4:03pm
UKuncut are promoting a lie and the general public are aware of the lie - their stance is no cuts, and no party, even labour, are suggesting there will be no cuts. The political divide is about timing, and a vague suggestion labour would not be as deep - even though the deficit is still rising under the coalition albeit somewhat slower than previously.
UKuncut should be equally condemning the labour party as it was under their watch that the deficit was allowed to get out of hand. And for milliband to stand there, watched carefully by his paymasters the public sector trade unions and compare himself to mandela, the suffragettes, civll rights, the tollpuddle marchers is disgusting. In no way can he make comparisons to people who risked their lives for their beliefs. The marchers only wanted more money for themselves, the no cuts message means continue to spend more of someone elses money on me me me.
Selfish self centred bigots, in no way to be compared with courageous freedom fighters.
Michael Read / March 29 2011 5:53pm
Neither your heart nor your head is really in this piece, is it?
Lucy Annson of UK Uncut is a sweetie. She sings.
Whereas, yourself? The Labour link is tenuous. UK Uncut is harmless. The analysis is hopeless.
Jeremy Robert Poynton / March 29 2011 6:30pm
@SvengaliScotsman
All reasons why Miliband wants to drop the voting age to 16 - it guarantees another million plus votes for Labour. What did someone say? If you have a heart, you vote Socialist when you are young, if you have a head, not when you are older. Summat like that.
Carry Hole / March 29 2011 6:48pm
UKuncut are chasing down TAX DODGERS ffs!! Lying, thieving, TAX DODGERS!
Crims, felons, conmen, greedy rule-twisters!
They should be given MBEs by the Queen for their services to their country.
Jeeezzz, you lot are such a set of wussy losers. You're in thrall to big money, the way footie fans worship Ronaldo but are all too fat to play.
Yorkie / March 29 2011 7:03pm
UK Uncut are just a bunch of fascists. And hypocrites. They seem on some sort of mission for fair taxation, paying your whack, only they seem to decide what that should or should not be. Lets start by cutting all their benefits. Let them go and picket The Guardian who use many of the structures other companies use who UkUncut have 'demonstrated' at.
The Public know only too well that public expenditure is completely out of control. They know there have to be cuts and they know there are thousands of useless jobs in the public sector. So let the cuts come and let them be deep and lasting. And then they can cut our taxes.
Phil / March 29 2011 7:06pm
Was this properly edited? The whole piece is very poorly written.
Misterned / March 29 2011 7:19pm
Well the TUC marchers were fewer in number than the number of people who voted for the BNP, so even their peaceful protesters only represent a tiny number of people who are utterly detached from reality. Hardly the mainstream majority. There was less than half the number of the peaceful countryside alliance march and less than a quarter the number of those who protested peacefully against the Iraq invasion.
As for the violent anti-anarchists, the middle and upper class, left wing Trotskyist trouble makers? Well they obviously cannot accept the reality that the labour party was completely thrashed at the last election. They were comprehensively rejected by the British, as Cameron won more votes than Tony Blair got when he won a 66 seat majority in 2005. Whereas Brown won fewer votes than John Major when the tories were humiliated in massive defeat 1997.
Brown was only saved from that humiliation by grotesquely biased constituency boundaries.
Labour shafted the economy and so all their dependants who were deliberately and cynically manipulated to become wholly dependent on the state, people who are incapable, or unwilling to be self sufficient, are now behaving like two year olds having a tantrum because they have had their dummy taken off them.
Labour expanded spending much faster than the rise in the size of the economy. This was always completely unsustainable and resulted in an economic bust the size of which is comparable to a 'Black Wednesday happening every single week, for the last year of labour's catastrophic misrule with the bill for which being given to the taxpayer.
The scale of that annual deficit, given to each of us by labour, is utterly insane. Ed Ball's and Ed Miliband's every reaction to it can only be described as delusional in the extreme.
The term loony left has never ever been more appropriate than it is today,
Major Plonquer / March 30 2011 1:22am
The most hypocritical act was the group of young ladies who marched on Saturday and carried placards that read '2 DEEP 2 FAST'. I bet they don't say that at home.
My wife has been demanding exactly the opposite since we were married. Does that make her a Tory?
ROGER / March 30 2011 9:03pm
Please stop using that anagram and call them by their real name:
uUKcunt
Matt / March 31 2011 2:19am
no party, even labour, are suggesting there will be no cuts.
Ah. but Scotty, that's where the problem lies. Because that there will be no cuts is precisely what the Labour Party is suggesting. Even though they know this to be a lie.
j clark / April 04 2011 11:08am
the latest poll shows the labour party with a 10 point lead' and the idiot who wrote that the combined percentage of the 2 government partys add up to more than labour needs a brain cell ,they stand against each other at elections so it matters not a jot what they add up to its how many seats they win at elections try getting your figures to add up in the local elections .so i read that the writer of this article questions the number that attended well i would sooner take the word of the police that stated a quarter of a million than some second rate blog writer who probably only watched it on tv where the quotes ranged from 250000 to 400000 thousand, the tuc protests were backed and thanked by the police dont forget the tuc provided 6500 stewards on their PEACEFUL RALLY mind you it had to be peaceful because ther were police officers taking part