A Scottish miner was walking home one night with a bunch of pheasants he had illegally poached from the estate of a local landowner, when the landowner appeared and demanded that the miner hand over the pheasants. "Why should I hand them over to you?", asked the miner. "Because this is my land and those are my pheasants", the landowner replied.
"OK", said the miner, "where did you get the land from?" "From my father", said the landowner. "So where did your father get it?", the miner asked. The landowner replied: "From his father, who got it from his father, and so on. This land has belonged to my family for 500 years!"
"Well", the miner continued, "how did your family get it 500 years ago?" "Oh, they fought for it", answered the landowner. "OK then", the miner said, "take off your jacket and I'll fight you for it!"
This story, attributed to Andy Wightman by Scottish Socialist Party leaders Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan in their book Imagine, reveals the hypocrisy of those, like the rich landowner, who piously criticise ordinary workers for "breaking the law". It also reveals the futility of trying to defend workers' conditions and rights whilst slavishly respecting government legislation.
With the Labor right and the union bureaucrats in Australia adopting this stance on PM John Howard's imminent IR "reforms", it is instructive to think back to Britain in the late 1980s and early '90s, when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's seemingly unbeatable right-wing government was attempting to impose the barbaric "Poll Tax" on the British people.
Like Howard will after June 30, Thatcher had an absolute parliamentary majority, and like the ALP and the ACTU, the British Labour Party was doing everything in its power to dissuade ordinary people from putting up a serious fight against the relevant legislation. However, Thatcher made the mistake of giving the Poll Tax a trial run in Scotland, and ran into the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, a grassroots campaign centred around local Anti-Poll Tax Unions advocating mass non-payment of the tax.
Inspired by the Scottish campaign and by the likes of Tommy Sheridan, who spent months in prison for his part in the campaign, 13 million people nationwide refused to pay the tax and 200,000 marched against it in London in 1990. Despite opposition from the Labour Party, the result was that mass action by ordinary people brought down the Poll Tax, and ultimately Thatcher herself.
In Scotland, the Poll Tax victory sowed the seeds for the growth of a new political force — the Scottish Socialist Alliance — which eventually transformed itself successfully into the Scottish Socialist Party. Like Sheridan and the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, the Socialist Alliance in Australia refuses to accept the shallow defeatism and class collaboration of the ALP and the ACTU. Just like the Poll Tax, Howard and his IR "reforms" can be beaten by mass campaigns involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people. The Socialist Alliance says: "Make IR 'reform' Howard's Poll Tax!"
Alex Miller
[The author is a member of the GLW-SA editorial liaison board].
From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.