The Reality of Trade Unions and Political Rhetoric: Insights from Burston Strike School 2024

On Sunday 1st September of this year, I visited the Burston Strike School, an annual festival which takes place in the village of Burston, near Diss in Norfolk. Every year, the great and not so great of the trade union movement in the area and beyond come to this little place and do what many trade unionists of a similar ilk like to do at these sort of gatherings, which is to set up stalls to give out free bits and bobs and dodge questions on why their trade union is so utterly useless. 

Burston 2024 was no different. Unions including RMT, PCS, CWU, ASLEF, NASUWT and USDAW sat their stalls on the little green in the shadow of the Strike School, now a museum, alongside tables set up by such luminaries of the modern left as the Socialist Party, Green Party, Socialist Workers Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party (which is neither revolutionary or communist). 

Even the Labour Party had the barefaced cheek and effrontery to defile the festival with its presence, setting up a stall (presumably to explain to people how cutting winter fuel payments to pensioners is somehow progressive) and having the temerity to participate in the march, which takes place over a mile and a half circuit from the local pub and back again. The banner proclaimed that the local Labour Party was for socialism amongst other things, though the irony of Labour supporters walking with a banner bearing the word ‘socialism’ was plainly lost on the people carrying the damned thing. 

I’ve been to Burston before and I enjoyed my day there, though coming back again some five years later has made me realise how my view of the trade union movement has changed from one of strong advocacy to mild scepticism. Just looking around at the array of stands on the green reminded me not only of how many of these unions blindly support Labour, but despite the evidence of their own eyes urged their members to vote for them in July. And here we were, barely two months in, and this Labour government had become arguably Britain’s most hated government in decades. 

But the failure of the trade union movement was not the low point for me at Burston this year. That crowning glory belongs to a Mr John McDonnell, Member of Parliament for Hayes and Harlington, who was guest speaker at Burston and certainly didn’t disappoint the assembled throng. 

On the way up to Burston in the car, I joked with my comrades that McDonnell was going to be the highlight of the afternoon, knowing as I did that my comrades had as low an opinion of the man as I did. As it was, I was absolutely correct, as he gave a speech so vacuous, so lacking in substance, which called for so much and yet contained so little in terms of how any of those demands could be met that McDonnell’s speech, above everyone else that took to the stage, caused the most discussion, criticism and debate amongst my comrades and others that witnessed it. 

McDonnell began where someone like McDonnell might be expected to begin, which was the ongoing and unrelenting genocide in Gaza. As one might have expected, our John called for ceasefire but he didn’t call for very much else. The man clearly has little to no understanding of the strategic purpose of Israel to US and British imperialism and that this settler-colonialist project, which goes back over 100 years, has been built on the relentless disenfranchisement, immiseration and murder of generations of Palestinians. Either that or he is wilfully ignorant of the place that Israel occupies in the world game plan of western imperialism. 

With the dust from the recent riots across the country still settling, McDonnell could not spurn the opportunity to lambast the hordes of fascists who took to the streets having been worked up into an absolute frenzy by the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (going under his stage name of Tommy Robinson) and MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage. To frame the riots as the act of a few lumpen fascists whipped up by outside agitators is certainly neat, but fails to take into account the forces that were at play (and are still at play now) when the anger of people in towns and cities across the country exploded so forcefully a few weeks ago. Years of neglect of poor working class communities, both at governmental and local levels, was the dry tinder ignited by the smallest of sparks and the flames fanned by far-right extremists.

Demonising the likes of Robinson and Farage is easy, and in some respects justified, but it totally fails to answer the serious question of why these riots burst into life in the first place. Working class people have seen their communities go into terminal decline for years – they know first-hand how difficult it is to find a school place for their children, or to get a doctor’s appointment, or to find a decent affordable home. They also see the deeply cynical fashion with which the ruling class places migrants – most often in the very communities in terminal decline that can barely sustain themselves for the people already there.

Anyone who was really serious about challenging the opportunism of the far-right would actually speak to the people living in these working class communities and explain that there is no tangible link between the decline of their areas and immigration. The state has sponsored and actively participated in the run-down of local services and has starved local authorities of money for years, yet will have people believe that it is migration which has caused this run-down and is happy to see working class people take the bait. After all, our rulers couldn’t care less if these people burn their communities to the ground – they themselves don’t live there and have absolutely no reason to ever go there, either.

McDonnell went on to call for the mass building of council houses. Whilst a laudable call in and of itself, he seemed to overlook the fact that his party, for which he has served as an MP since 1997, serves the interests of British capitalism and is both unwilling and unable to undertake any mass house building programme. Indeed, the mass building of social housing would effectively drop a proverbial atom bomb on the housing market, one of the only asset bubbles to have been successfully reinflated after the financial crisis of 2008 and the depression which followed it. 

Labour, who is every bit as receptive and accommodating to the demands of British finance capital as the Tories, will conspire with the big banks and owners of private housing to continuously throttle the supply of homes and in so doing place relentless upward pressure on house prices, which yields handsome returns to the state in the form of stamp duty. It is arguably this upwards pressure on housing which helped to pay for Tony Blair’s wars in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq during his tenure as Prime Minister.

McDonnell offered no plan to those present in Burston as to how this mass building programme would actually happen. He simply called for it and left it there, perhaps knowing that it would never happen and so no plan would be necessary. But more importantly he played to his preferred gallery – the Labour aristocracy and trade union bureaucracy which frequent events such as Burston.

For McDonnell, saying what his audience wanted to hear was more than enough for an afternoon’s work. As always, he spoke about many things, but actually said nothing at all. My comrade, listening with me as McDonnell prattled on, said that he believed that trade unions were an essential good, but some of the things that he saw at Burston that day had left him feeling a little demoralised, and I can certainly empathise with that view. Demoralisation is completely understandable when one looks at the capitulations of the trade unions over the last year or so and sees the clapping seals of the labour aristocracy cheering on an MP like John McDonnell as he talks and says nothing.

But the conditions which may give rise to a revolution are coming ever closer, and when it does the system of exploitation, poverty, war and the likes of John McDonnell will be thankfully swept away for good.