Counter-revolutionary action

The British press ramps up the lies and distortions in response to the teachers' strike.

Previously: The word of the day is “strike”

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The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.

‘The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850’, Karl Marx (1850)

The Daily Mail front page today had an “exclusive” — also known as a targeted anonymous briefing from the government — that screamed:

Rishi ready to step in to ban unions from leaving parents in limbo

NEW LAW TO STOP SCHOOL STRIKE MAYHEM

The story begins:

Teachers could be forced to tell schools they are planning to strike to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s nationwide disruption. 

Ministers are urgently examining whether to tighten the law to close a loophole that prevents headteachers from knowing which staff are taking part in industrial action. 

Unions are legally required to provide employers with a detailed notice when they ballot for strike action; if the union then secures a majority in favour of a strike — on at least a 50% turnout of eligible members — it must then send a further detailed notice 14 days¹ before the industrial action is planned (7 days before if previously agreed with the employer).

That detailed notice is required to be really detailed; it must have a list of categories of employees involved and indicate the total number of staff affected, according to “information in the union’s possession” (i.e. its membership records). The lack of a legal requirement for individual union members to indicate if they intend to strike is not a “loophole”, it’s simply a fact of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992.

Forcing individual teachers to confirm their intention to strike with management ahead of time would subject them to individual pressure and undermine the collective action of a strike. A government that will not have meaningful negotiations with the National Education Union is dangling the red meat of more punitive laws — the UK already has some of the toughest anti-union regulations — because it knows media dogs like the Mail will salivate.

The Mail continues:

In a general strike in all but name — dubbed ‘Walkout Wednesday’ — [teachers] joined 100,000 civil servants, 70,000 university staff and thousands of train drivers and Border Force officers in staging industrial action. 

As I wrote yesterday, it was “dubbed ‘Walkout Wednesday’” three weeks ago by… The Daily Mail. Always look carefully when a newspaper confidently declares that something has a nickname, it’s very often one that publication or one very similar to it has dreamed up itself.

As I’m picking at the threads of language here, look also at “staging industrial action”, the theatrical cousin of “walkouts”: this insinuates action is frivolous in the same way that ‘Walkout Wednesday’ is more appealing to the Mail than outright calling the event a general strike.

The article goes on:

The strikes caused misery for parents, many of whom were left in limbo after the union encouraged teachers to refuse to tell heads in advance whether they would turn up for work. 

That’s another sentence that’s almost impressive in how many distortions it manages to contain in so few words. “The strikes caused misery for parents” isn’t news reporting;
it’s narrative shaping opinion. It likely did cause a great deal of inconvenience to a lot of parents and may even have caused “misery” for some number of them but others — I’m one of them — supported the strike or were striking themselves.

The next part of the sentence — “the union encouraged teachers to refuse to tell…” — is equally deceptive. Another way of expressing that idea is: The union reminded members of the law and their obligations (or otherwise) under it.

The common elision of fact and opinion continues in the next paragraph:

It meant some schools were forced to close unnecessarily, disrupting their pupils’ education and forcing parents to take unpaid leave or pay for extra childcare. 

If the strike didn’t cause people to have to change plans or routines, it wouldn’t be a strike; it would be a Change.org petition. Daily Mail news stories are like the worst sort of ultra-processed food: They have the shape of reporting but none of the nutritional elements like facts, balance or proportion. If you can’t say how many schools “[closed] unnecessarily” then it’s an opinion-flavoured anecdote.

The Mail continues:

Rishi Sunak is said to have been ‘incredulous’ that militant unions are able to disrupt contingency plans by refusing to provide basic information on which teachers are going on strike. 

Said by whom? This is the product of the same briefing that formed the basis for the entire story but the reader is just given this claim without even a reference to a “senior government source” (they’re always terribly senior). The impression the Mail reporters want to give here is of having a Sauron’s Eye-like overview of Westminster. There are no unions that are not “militant” in the Mail style guide; even the once Torier than orange trousers and dressed-for-dinner racism British Medical Association is now a nest of “Marxist extremists” in the Daily Mail’s view.

The Rothermere empire has a deep and abiding hatred for unions; in 1989, the Mail ripped up its collective agreement with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), decreeing that hacks who insisted on sticking to their previous terms of employment would be denied pay increases. The NUJ had to go to the High Court, Appeal Court, and the European Court of Human Rights to stop the paper from discriminating against trade union members.

The Mail frames statements by the NEU about the strike as demands, threats and warnings; quotes are stripped of their actual context and given a new spooooky one:

The NEU told members to ‘ignore’ requests from head teachers in the run-up to the strike. On its website, the union warned heads: ‘Individual NEU members do not have to tell their employer which union they are a member of, or whether or not they personally intend to take part in strike action. You can’t ask staff to tell you or sign a form.’

It’s not a “warning”; the quoted text is part of an FAQ which merely provides the facts about the strike, with reference to the legal requirements.

The next segment of the Mail story sees the arrival of an anonymous government source with some factually dubious claims:

A government source pointed out that French law requires striking teachers to give schools 48 hours’ notice if they intend to walk out, to enable heads to make contingency plans. 

As I’ve covered already; the current UK law on strikes requires at least 7 but usually 14 days’ notice before strike action. Heads had more than two weeks to prepare for yesterday’s action and will have known how many staff were likely to be absent due to the legally-required strike notice. The NEU’s advice to school leaders says:

… it will be (in reality) very hard for heads and principals to anticipate which staff might be available for work and the NEU suggest that you make suitable arrangements based on the largest number of declared NEU members able to take industrial action in your school or college.

The Mail’s story continues:

The source added: ‘It is ridiculous that unions are able to add to the disruption by refusing to provide the basic information needed to make contingency plans. If this is something that is going to become a regular tactic then we will have to act on it.’

Again, if the Mail were involved in actual reporting — I’ll pause here to laugh a hollow mirthless laugh — it would note that this source is pretending that unions don’t have to provide the names of strikers but do have to provide accurate numbers. That is the very definition of “the basic information needed to make contingency plans”.

The angle pushed by the government and amplified by the Mail is about convincing readers of the necessity for the Minimum Service Levels Bill. The story claims:

Ministers had hoped to reach a voluntary agreement with teaching unions, but the PM’s spokesman said the issue was being kept ‘under review’ in the light of yesterday’s tactics. 

Someone involved in news reporting would ask how many meetings ministers have had with the union and what they wanted from the proposed “agreement” but the authors of the Daily Mail story are not involved in news reporting. What they’re actually doing is conveying the government’s threats to the public.

The paper’s leader column — the collective ‘voice’ of the Mail which is published without a name on the byline — invoked one of its elder gods, the Conservative Party version of Cthulhu, Margaret Thatcher:

Channel Thatcher in your union fight, PM

It had been dubbed 'Walkout Wednesday' and, for an increasingly exasperated public, yesterday lived up to the depressing name.

On the worst day of industrial unrest for many years, the hard-Left trade unions brought the country to a near-standstill.

Up to half a million state sector workers went on strike, including teachers and train drivers. Even civil servants put down their paper clips — if anyone actually noticed.

There’s that passive invocation of the ‘Walkout Wednesday’ jibe again — strange that the Daily Mail wouldn’t take credit for it — combined with the usual pile of clichés (“industrial unrest”, “hard-left Trade unions”, “civil servants put down their paper clips”) dressed in their finest 70s corduroy.

The editorial continues:

Sir Keir Starmer could, of course, have used such widespread disruption and misery as a stick with which to beat the Government. But when he got a golden opportunity at Prime Minister's Questions, he refused.

It doesn't take a genius to work out why. Labour is, and always has been, in thrall to the unions – ideologically and financially.

With his party reliant on union funds, Sir Keir will always side with the militants, irrespective of the mayhem they wreak.

Mick Lynch and Co may tell us that the unions are the authentic voice of the working class. But if there was ever a grain of truth in this, there's none whatsoever now.

Indeed, this once honourable movement has become increasingly the mouthpiece of a self-serving faction of troublemakers in the feather-bedded public sector.

If only Starmer did back the unions. Just last week, he told London Labour’s annual conference that “never again will Labour be a party of protest, not public service,” — after repeatedly declining to support the strikes — and a newspaper reported that he had “[picked] a fight with the UK’s biggest teachers’ union”.

That newspaper was The Mail on Sunday, in a story written by Dan Hodges and Brendan Carlin on January 29.

Today’s leader column concluded:

If ministers caved in, the bill would have to be paid via punishing tax rises, eye-watering borrowing or cuts to services.

On top of that, ruinous pay rises would embolden union extremism and risk embedding a 1970s-style inflationary spiral. So the Government must hold firm. To capitulate, even with public services facing unprecedented disruption, would be an unmitigated disaster for the economy.

Mr Sunak is right to push legislation through Parliament which will guarantee a minimum level in crucial public services and make it easier to keep schools open. That would show the public he is on their side. In the face of union intransigence, he must take inspiration from Margaret Thatcher – and bring them the smack of firm government.

“The public” includes doctors, nurses, teachers, civil servants, and university staff. The argument that pay rises would lead to “a 1970s-style inflationary spiral” is gibberish and the invocation of “tax rises” is a horror story that scares the Mail’s ‘tax-efficient’ non-dom proprietor Viscount Rothermere most of all.

Politicians screaming about “a wage-price spiral” are pretending that the recent period of inflation has not followed a long period of wage stagnation and that rising energy costs and a demand spike after the pandemic are key factors to blame. Pay rises would most likely end up being spent on food and energy, but if they did lead to more spending money in the economy and add to demand, the limited inflationary impact could be offset by dampening demand elsewhere, through tax rises for more wealthy people. Oh no! I’ve made Viscount Rothermere hide in the wardrobe again.

The Daily Mail is far from the only paper that played ignorant about the details of trade union laws today. The Daily Telegraph published a story headlined Thousands of schools closed, but teachers pass on picket duties which deliberately ignored two key points:

1) The Code of Practice on picketing says, “usually there should be no more than 6 people outside an entrance to a workplace” and reminds readers that they can be arrested if they don’t stop picketing when told to do so by the police

2) Where schools were closed, there was no point in picketing them; where schools were open for a limited number of pupils, newspapers like The Telegraph would have accused staff who picketed of scaring children or being bad role models

The Telegraph story does reference, however, the marches attended by thousands of teachers, which took place yesterday.

UnityNewsUK ⚠️ Working Class Affiliated Media @UnityNewsIndie

@brokenbottleboy They picketed and marched .. but there was not one mainstream media camera there ...

The paper’s front page was a showcase for even more shocking ignorance, this time with the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, slapping on the clown paint:

Under the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992, the National Education Union (NEU) must notify schools of how many teachers at each institution are members of the union. However, head teachers cannot demand to know which members of staff these are, and members do not have to tell their bosses if they intend to strike. This meant that some schools told parents they would have to close. 

Mrs Keegan said she had been “surprised” to learn that teachers were not required to give advance notice. 

Of course, the Telegraph also found space for the view from an opaquely funded, wildly named think tank:

John O’Connell, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Hard-working parents still need to plan their day. Industrial action should come with clear guidelines on how it will impact households.” 

The quote demonstrates again the tactic of separating trade union members from “the public”; teachers are incredibly hard-working and they are also taxpayers but the Taxpayers’ Alliance should be more accurately named The Small Number of Taxpayers Who Want To Pay No Tax Alliance. It’s less catchy though and might not get them as many calls from newspapers and lazy talk radio producers.

It’s no accident that The Telegraph quotes Keegan, O’Connell, and another Conservative MP, Andrew Lewer, before it quotes the NEU’s joint general secretary, Kevin Courtney, explaining that “[the UK] already [has] the most stringent trade union laws in Europe” which “are designed to reduce the voice of working people”. In print, that means many readers will not reach the union’s argument, while online lots of them won’t scroll to the end. It’s not a news story; it’s propaganda by government PR people who just happen to be financed by the surviving Barclay brother.

In the opinion section, Jill Kirby writes a spittle-flecked rant beneath the headline Selfish teachers owe children an apology:

Have teaching unions no shame? For two years, evidence has mounted showing the harm inflicted by Covid lockdowns on children of all ages… But union leaders who insisted on school closures during lockdown have now found a new way to disrupt children’s lives — forcing schools to close all over again as teachers strike apparently for higher pay.

Teachers continued working through the lockdowns; schools remained open for the most vulnerable children. Teachers’ pay has declined consistently since 2010, despite the claims in the Telegraph yesterday which Kirby leans on in her column. Teachers deserve an apology from two-bit hacks like her who have pumped out this bile for years now; it will never come. Shame is a professional liability for a columnist.

And, on the subject of the shameless, I come to the final example of the day: Rod Liddle writing in The Sun. Liddle — a self-confessed danger to children — wrote under the headline Pampered public sector will bring nation to its knees – the main reasons are greed and selfishness:

Teachers in England work fewer hours than almost any others in Europe, a survey suggests.  And they will work even fewer this year, as they’re out on strike. Again. All strikes are disruptive. But when the teachers strike it brings the economy to a grinding halt.

They know this. That’s why they’re doing it.

So are they badly paid? You’ve got to be kidding.

British teachers are the seventh best paid in the entire world, the survey from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says. 

Liddle quotes from old OECD figures — just as columns and ‘news’ stories did yesterday — and makes the same easily disprovable claims about the hours teachers work (notice he doesn’t name the survey and The Sun doesn’t link to it, just in case a reader goes to check and discovers he’s lying). But he also faux-wearily pretends that teachers are striking “again”; the last national teachers’ strike was in 2008.

As the column continues, Liddle twists the figures again:

So why do our teachers carp? Well, they say they have faced a “real terms” cut in wages. Prices have risen sharply. You’ve noticed, no?

To repeat what I said in the last edition of this newsletter:

Real terms cuts date back to the Lib/Con coalition in 2010. Overall, salaries for experienced and senior teachers have fallen by 13% in real terms since 2010. Teachers in the middle of the salary scale have seen cuts of around 10% and starting salaries are down 5% in real terms.

Liddle knows this but his ‘argument’ is easier if he pretends that teachers are merely complaining about the most recent economic blow rather than 13 years of decline.

He continues:

… teachers don’t give a stuff about anyone else. It’s hard to believe they give a stuff about kids, either.

Far too many youngsters, especially in the primary sector, got next to no schooling during the pandemic.

The civil servants decided to take the day off today, too. Though I’m not sure anybody noticed. That’s another group who were swinging the lead during Covid.

A pampered public sector is for ever clamouring for more money for less work.

Rod Liddle is the man who wrote in a Spectator column from 2012 — which is still online — that:

I seriously contemplated being a teacher once upon a time, when I was a lot younger. It seemed to me an agreeable doss, and one didn’t have to be too bright or too ambitious, or possess any great quantity of knowledge…

… the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one. We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called. I just thought we ought to clear that up early on.

“I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten…” Children in Year 10 are aged between 14 and 15. That’s the man The Sun thinks is best placed to lie, dissemble and disparage teachers. The lesson here is that there’s no one so disgusting that the British press won’t deploy them in service of slander.

This was not news. It was counter-revolutionary action.

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Thanks to DKD for reading the draft today.

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1. In the case of the teachers’ strikes, the NEU has given 14 days’ notice.