Len McClusky isn’t prepared to accept the will of the electorate.
Unite, one of Britain’s biggest unions, has said that it is prepared to carry out illegal strikes if the Conservatives win the General Election.
Len McCluskey, the Unite General Secretary, said that he is so concerned that a majority Tory government will bring in anti-strike legislation that the union is prepared to remove the words “so far as may be lawful” from its rule book.
This democracy thing, he really doesn’t get it, does he? if the Tories win, then that is the will of the electorate. Well, the majority of those who vote. If the unions don’t like it, then that’s too bad. We aren’t voting for the unions to run the country and God help us if they did. We have been there and the seventies walk-outs and disruption resulted in the Thatcher government rightly taking them in hand. It looks as if more is needed. Frankly, gaol time for the likes of McClusky is what’s needed.
They are not in charge and they need to get used to the idea. Sometimes civil disobedience is necessary. An election result you don’t like is not one of them. The role of the unions is to represent their members in the workplace. it is not to bully the rest of us.
If the Tories win, its the will of the electorate? No, about half the people don’t vote and about 3/4 who do, vote for not the “winner.”
It’s a scam, LR, I respectfully suggest that you don’t participate.
Different issue. Len McClusky has no mandate-not even a shaky one. And he is effectively threatening the country if the outcome is not to his liking. I don’t recall seeing McClusky’s name on a ballot paper, and I fail to see why the country should be governed by him and his bunch of leftist thugs.
Fine, then, a strike is illegal without 40% of the vote. Will the Tories respect that 40% support principle when it comes to forming a government? Didn’t think so.
The rules on industrial action are already strict. What is the reason for a pre-emptive attack by the Tories to restrict unions further?
NB The country is already governed by leftist thugs.
I’m glad to see you used the correct English word ‘gaol’, instead of the monstrosity, ‘Jail’. Good man. Anyway, I must remember to take my medication.
Yes, I was pleased to see that too.
Me too! Good on yer, Longy.
“…No, about half the people don’t vote..”
So stuff ’em. If you can’t be arsed to vote, you deserve to get whatever you’re given.
We get that anyway. Voting changes nothing.
If voting did change anything, they’d ban it.
Indeed. If you DO vote you deserve what you’re given. Whatever political mess is made subsequently, you’re the enabler. You’re the wife going back to the brutal husband for the umumpteenth time because he’s promised to change and this time it’ll be different.
Somebody must explain to him gently at first, that the Berlin wall came down over 20 years ago, Leonid Brezniev is no longer in power and he can expect no funding from the comrades the world has moved on!
I think you’ll find that it was the Soviet Union that prohibited strikes. Only the most ignorant Tory would think that union leaders are commiies – historically only a small number have been. Lenin despised trades union leaders, seeing them as bourgeois and inimical to revolution. Traditionally unions have been a bulwark against revolution, which is why they were so readily coopted into moderate social democracy. But the modern right is so ideologically extreme that it can no longer tell the difference between social democracy and genuinely revolutionary movements.
Strikes were prohibited in the soviet union along with almost everything else, but unions were a vehicle in the west for subversion and destabilisation, the communist union scum destroyed millions of jobs in Britain from the mines , car industry , chemical industry, docks , shipbuilding, steel ,everywhere you look ,all done by the unions dancing to the tune of their soviet masters, they are treacherous filth .
Quite.
I can only presume that McClusky’s cocksure bravado will disappear once he’s spent a few nights in jail. They do that for people who incite public disorder, I believe.
At the peak of their power, the total union membership was about 12 million. Now the total membership is about 6 million, an even smaller minority of the population. The MSM (especially the BBC) should treat the Trade Unions as a minority pressure group. I would love to hear someone tell McClusky that his organisation was so small, that his opinions do not really matter.
Democracy? Really?
“The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch”. – Lord Woodhouselee 1813
Sounds about right. De Tocqueville clarifies…
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
Democracy is simply the least worst system of governance. I’m not a fan. I am even less of a fan of arseholes like McClusky forcing his will on the rest of us. Elected governments at least have a veneer of legitimacy.
And a vote of 90% in favour of a strike on 45% turnout has as much if not more legitimacy as this government. But this proposed law would invalidate the vote. Perhaps the Tories should apply the same criterion to their own election result?
I would be more than happy to see an elected government held to the same standards.
Yeah, but they not. Until they are then neither should unions.
I thought that a union would bring out the reactionary dyspeptic Tory that lurks close to the surface in every “libertarian”. Of course, this proposed law is simply intended to gerrymander strike votes, by subjecting them to a far more rigorous test than any other democratic vote. If the majority of those who votes is good enough to choose the government of the day then it good enough for unions.
I find also the defence of democracy right or wrong to be pretty hypocritical. I campaigned hard to get the ID Cards act repealed and I would have refuse to comply had it been so necessary to do so. I would have despised your defence of the law right or wrong, as I think you would have as well back then. But the perpetrator of ID Cards was those evil “socialists” New Labour, not union bashing Tories. Is that the reason for the change in attitude?
There is no change in attitude at all. There is a time for civil disobedience as I stated above. The unions are not elected and I object to an unelected body dictating which party is to govern – for this is what McClusky is trying to achieve. If the electorate choose the Tories, then that’s too bad, the unions will have to suck it up or campaign against the policy. What I object to, is the union effectively telling us what we should vote “or else”. Well fuck them, frankly. McClusky doesn’t get to tell me what to vote.
I was at one point not only a member of the RMT but was an elected official within the union locally. They have a valuable role to play and I am a vigorous defender of the right to belong to a union as it is a basic civil liberty -the right to free association. Dictating to the electorate is not, however, one of their roles and nor should it be.
If you think that I am defending democracy right or wrong, may I suggest you have a problem with your English comprehension…
I also find your assertion that I am a Tory somewhat bizarre. I am not nor ever have been. I dislike them, just as I dislike Labour. They are of the same cloth, frankly.
Unions are elected. He is clearly referring to the proposed law that would make majority strike votes invalid if a majority of those entitled to vote had not voted for strike action. If applied to general elections then it would mean that greater than 5o percent of the electorate must have voted for the government. That hasn’t happened for decades. It is an unjust law and should be resisted. It completely disingenuous to imply that opposing that law is the same as the union setting itself up as a rival government
I have no problem with them resisting or campaigning. What I am clearly objecting to is a blatant attempt to bully the electorate with “If you vote in the Tories, this will happen.” That is way out of order. And as for them being elected – it is by the small minority of their membership. The rest of us get no say for we are not a part of their electorate. So, no, they are not elected. They are a small minority interest group. It is not for them to determine the outcome of an election with threats.
Stephen:
I can see your point, but Longrider is simply pointing out that two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because the UK’s electoral system is flawed, that’s not an excuse for a union leader to pull out a cudgel, tap it meaningfully into his hand, and say: “Nice country you’ve got here. Be a shame if something were to… happen… to it.”
As has been pointed out, the *total* number of union members—i.e. not just Unite—is around 6 million. That’s only a little over half the population of Greater London.
The UK’s low voter turnouts at general elections is a *free choice*. We don’t force people to vote at gunpoint, and the political landscape has, for most of the last 30-odd years, been a particularly barren one: it was the red logo, or the blue logo, and not much else. So apathy has been rising as a result. People realised that it made little difference who was elected as the government always gets in.
*
A short rant follows:
The Lib Dems blundered in thinking the media and the population in general would understand that a manifesto can only be achieved if the party wins *outright*. The electorate failed to uphold their end of the bargain, but generations of majority governments means the Lib Dems are being pilloried for—basically—not making demands exactly like McLusky is trying to do here.
It’s the Lib Dems who have been rejecting some of the Tories’ more ignorant anti-liberty policies, such as the “snooping charter” laws that Theresa May seems to be obsessed about. This is arguably a far more important battle to fight—and win—than student fees. You can always change fees later, and even offer to cut student debts, but prying private personal data out of the government’s grasping hands is much more difficult.
Once a culture of privacy invasion, institutional paranoia, and guilty-by-default becomes the norm, changing it back would require mass sackings across the entire civil service, including the police. You’d need a full-on revolution to do that, and the British are notoriously bad at those.
Precisely.
On the Lib Dems, people seem to forget that they were junior partners in a coalition, therefore compromise was inevitable. And, yes, they were the only ones of the major parties to voice concerns about the increasing tendency for Theresa May to pick up where the monstrous Labour home secretaries left off. It seems that her department has thoroughly corrupted her as it did them.