She is, after all, speaking from her vast experience of…ummm….errr….
The legality and feasibility of a British general strike, the first since 1926, is now being discussed in meeting rooms on the pebbly seafront and in police strategy rooms up and down the country, but on the left, resounding support for mass direct action is still teetering on the tip of our collective tongues.That’s because the adults are in charge, Laurie, and they know the spectacle of public sector workers chanting and waving banners and demanding to be fed, clothed and housed at the expense of everyone else will go down like a cold cup of sick with the public.
This sort of hesitancy is unfortunate. It’s also understandable. One of the few effective weapons that defenders of neoliberal austerity projects have left is to make the possibility of effective resistance seem ridiculous and unfeasible, to insist that “there is no alternative” , usually backing that up with violence or the threat of violence against anyone who suggests one.There is no alternative. There’s no magic money tree.
The moral case for a general strike is beyond reproach. With the economic and social future of Britain in jeopardy, anybody with a voice to speak for social justice must use it to argue for an ethical duty to resist this Government’s austerity programme.Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn’t it your bedtime yet?
Nothing sends today’s Tories into a whirling, childish tantrum like a strike threat.Nothing sends Penny into a whirling childish tantrum like… well, anything, actually, but especially the prospect of a march she can breathlessly Tweet about.
This is no time to be timid about our convictions or hesitant about strategy. For the first time in well over a generation, the radical left has both objective circumstance and the momentum of history inarguably on its side.Well, there’s that old saying about history, Laurie; it’s written by the winners.
Pick this fight, the unions will lose.
I say, ‘Bring it on!’
6 comments:
I wonder how Ms Penny would react to plans for a general strike not against the government but against excessive immigration?
Bring it on?
Ooooh. Sell the franchises for brick and popcorn stalls in advance and from the bunker, JuliaM. Better to be tucked in bed over Kristallnacht.
I feel like being a more active member of the opposition to the 'defenders of neoliberal projects'.
Bunny
Laurie Penny throws a tantrum...
There's so much tantrum abuse in the world this week that toddlers are in danger of losing their franchise.
Will no one think of the chiiiildren?
What austerity programme? No-one seems to know the meaning of the word. I bet actual cash money I could spend an afternoon with the Treasury books and a couple of civil servants to look things up for me and cut £200 billion off public spending. They'd need to get a smaller table in the Cabinet Office (a dining set from IKEA would do) and the QUANGO would go the way of the quagga, but I see no overriding reason why public outlays couldn't be brought down to sub-30% of GDP levels without too much difficulty. A three year pay-and-recruitment freeze in the public sector would thin the ranks of the surviving departments quite nicely through natural wastage. As a bonus, no ridiculous ads for apparatchiks would sink Graiuniad Meejah Group, reducing the opportunity for Penny Dreadful and her idiot confreres to spout their bullshit.
"I wonder how Ms Penny would react to plans for a general strike not against the government but against excessive immigration?"
With unmitigated fury, I've no doubt...
"There's so much tantrum abuse in the world this week that toddlers are in danger of losing their franchise."
Heh!
"What austerity programme?"
Very good point!
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