My Saturday afternoon treat is to take an hour off to read the Guardian Review. It’s nice to take a break from politics in favour of something a bit more cultural. But of course the two frequently overlap. This week, I was particularly interested in an interview with David Pountney, director and librettist of a new opera, with music by Peter Maxwell Davies, called Kommilitonen! It means ‘Comrades in arms!’ apparently (the explanation mark’s part of the title), and it consists of three docu-dramas describing different real-life student protests.
Pountney explains the opera was written before last December’s student demonstrations here in the UK; indeed when it was conceived two or three years ago, it was partly with the sense that student activism had become a thing of the past. Pountney himself comments with some surprise on the way in which life has caught up with art. And that for me chimed with another experience I had this week, when, with other members of the Work and Pensions select committee, I found myself in Wisconsin as background for an inquiry into welfare reform. There, as Progress readers will know, there have been mass public protests in recent weeks against the Republican governor’s plans to cut pay and conditions for public sector workers and remove collective bargaining rights.
In fact, as we saw, the demonstration in Wisconsin has been something quite remarkable. It had already been going for over two weeks when we got there, and was showing no sign of abating. Protesters surrounded the state Capitol, some even sleeping out all night (and, believe me, it’s pretty cold in Wisconsin at this time of year). Inside too, peaceful protesters colonised the building, sleeping bags everywhere on the floors of the lobbies and balconies, campaign posters tacked to the walls, tables set up to offer drinks and sandwiches – while all around the Republican administration struggled to get on with its work.
The preceding Saturday had seen a demonstration attended by over 100,000 people, and we met some of the protesters on our visit last week. They weren’t your diehard militants – we met teachers, librarians, public servants, young and retired, all anxious to tell us that ‘nothing like this has ever happened in Wisconsin before’.
So people are getting angry, and the spirit of protest’s returning – most starkly we’ve seen this recently in north Africa and the Middle East. Of course the struggles there against corruption and oppression are of a different order to the protests against cuts and economic injustice that we’re seeing here and in the US. But there’s certainly no doubt of a growing movement of protest and solidarity against injustice right across the world. Indeed, in Wisconsin people specifically told us that the UK student protests had in part inspired the action there.
Two messages jump out for me from all this, one encouraging, one challenging for us now. It’s certainly encouraging, indeed inspiring, to see the action people are prepared to take in their anger and dismay. But Labour’s challenge here at home isn’t just to benefit from or even sustain the spirit of protest, but to turn it into results. So while I’m confident the TUC organised demonstration on 26 March will provide further and substantial proof of the scale of anger at the ConDem government, we need to be planning for what comes next.
Getting out on the doorstep to maximise Labour gains in the local elections in May, and for the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, will be the vital next step, and I’m sure Labour can do well. But we can’t rely only on short-term anger, for the real prize is for the longer term: winning the next general election is crucial if we are to prevent a whole generation of social progress from being lost. Our strategic response to the public protests must therefore be carefully and collaboratively to build a credible progressive alternative which sustains the public anger, and turns it into the support we need to win. That’s the challenge for Ed and for Labour, and the circumstances are propitious – now we need a whole game plan.
Read other pieces from Kate’s weekly column
All true and well put. Did you happen upon Labour doesn’t yet belong in the anti-cuts campaign | Andrew Bowman | Comment is free | guardian.co. http://www.guardian.co.uk during your Guardian session on Saturday? If so, what did you think? The question still remains HOW we bridge the gap between people’s justified anger and our electoral objectives. People are more politically engaged at the moment than for some time, which is to be welcomed, and we will certainly benefit from that in the short-term. But the the challenge is to answer the cry of what people DON’T want, with a vision of what they do, which inspires and we can share, and take forward. Currently, that seems to be lacking; whilst that remains the case, the initial fervour provoked by the butchery of the public and voluntary sectors may ossify into cynicism that a political class are administering damaging policies regardless of their Party hue without a commitment to an alternative.