Savages

Clearly, a meticulous selection process stands between you and me and a job in the newsroom of any of the main channels. Clearly, the kind of people who get to read out the headlines have a unique skill set that must take years to develop. Not least of which is a special kind of amnesia – the ability to report some of what happened this week as if it could definitely not have had anything to do with what was reported last week.

The postal strike gives us a perfect example.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in this crunchy economic climate, now all of a sudden our friendly neighbourhood posties have taken it upon themselves to STEAL CHRISTMAS out of sheer bloody-mindedness. The good people at Radio 4 invited Billy Hayes from the Communication Workers’ Union on to explain why his members were sabotaging this special time of year by refusing to deliver the mail, but thought better of it and just called him “pathetic” for the benefit of the listening public.

The Daily Mail and the BBC website were able to come up with one explanation – maybe they were in it to stop blind people getting their tapes – but this dismissed as too cynical. Instead, the consensus began to emerge that the posties were unable to get it into their thick working-class skulls that the post needed to be “modernised”. If this was a strike against anything, it was a strike against texts and emails and twitter and that.

Royal Mail bosses produced figures to show that no-one ever puts anything into a letter box ever anymore. One postie wrote anonymously in the London Review of Books that “every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more? How come I can work up to five hours at a stretch without time for a sit-down or a tea break? How come my knees nearly give way with the weight I have to carry? How come something snapped in my back as I was climbing out of the shower, so that I fell to the floor and had to take a week off work?”

Then more information began to come out, proving beyond all doubt that Peter Mandelson, Adam Crozier and friends really did want to make Royal Mail as state-of-the-art cutting-edge ultra-modern as Margaret Thatcher had made the coal mines. Secret documents were leaked, revealing a plan to smash the union – a plan whose scope and attention to detail could have put some of the lesser Bond villains to shame (Octopussy, I’m looking at you) with a parallel postal service of secret scabby mail centres, some of which may or may not turn out to be built upon hollowed-out volcanoes.

Unable to blame all of this on the workers, some of the savvier news outlets decided to make it about a clash between rival gangs of boardroom Neanderthals and trade-union thugs who were too full of testosterone to work it like reasonable people. “If only capitalism could be run not by the Lehman Brothers, but the Lehman Sisters, we wouldn’t have this problem” – I swear down, someone actually said this or something similar on Question Time – and I equally swear down that that someone never spent Christmas with my Mum, my Gran and my Aunties.
In reality, if you don’t have the special, selective amnesia of a newsreader, it’s not all that complicated.

The weeks running up to the strike were dominated by the conferences of the three main parties. The Lib Dems managed to get themselves on TV just about long enough to tell us that they believed in “savage cuts” to public sector spending. The Labour party, struggling to stay awake long enough to give each other a few standing ovations and then go home, couldn’t even find an adjective of their own. They warned us just how, erm, “savage” the Tories were going to be – but then turned out to have exactly the same programme of cuts lined up.

By the time of the Tories’ own conference, it didn’t even matter what David Cameron said. He just mumbled something about his wife while the ghost of Margaret Thatcher towered above him to soak up the applause. You couldn’t move for panels of politicians comparing their austerity willies, each trying to prove that it was their own party that would cut the hardest, the deepest and the fastest. Not to be crude or anything, but someone had to pay for all the money they’d thrown at the collapsing banks and it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be them. Not if they could help it.

This is why Leeds Council’s bin workers were told they had to take a six grand wage cut (and are now on all-out strike to defend their livelihoods). It’s why the management at Tower Hamlets College in East London tried to sack around 40 staff and thereby cut up to 1000 student places (until an all-out teachers’ strike put them in their place). It’s why the and the CBI have decided that tuition fees just aren’t anything like high enough, goshdarnit, and it’s why it’s suddenly so important for Royal Mail to be “modernized”.

This strike is an opening battle in the fight to see who gets stuck with the bill for the economic crisis. If the posties are defeated, then whoever wins the general election will make short work of increasing tuition fees, slashing public services and throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. But if they win, ah, then we all win. Royal Mail are looking for thousands of students to take “temporary” scab jobs in the post and undermine the strike. At the same time, students in London are doing what they can to raise awareness, collect money and even bake cakes to keep the strike going. It’s time to ask yourself: which side are you on?

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