Christmas, the Strikes, a night out
Welcome to the last newsletter of 2022. I don't really know what that means except that like most people I am tired, burnt out and a little brain dead from the year that's gone by. I actually missed last month's article because I had basically lost all concept of time and my immune system gave up the ghost.
I have been thinking a lot about what to talk about this month. It felt natural to talk about money-saving tips but seeing as the big spending will be out of the way when I post this it already feels a little last season to do that. However, if you do want a tip to tide you over, on Christmas day I drunkenly made a draft excluder from our wrapping paper by stuffing it in a pair of old tights as there was a disgusting draft blowing through our house, surprisingly effective.
There has been something rolling around in me for a while regarding working class representation and the optics of solidarity. Most of us working class kids that managed to get support to access education are no strangers to the working class tourism that happens in these spaces. It's a well trodden topic, even more so this year as it begins to proliferate meme discourse. People with a lot of family support and money in their banks turn up to pubs, lectures, exhibitions dressed in poor person caricature, never buying a round and never tipping any kind of public service worker. They are sometimes difficult to spot thanks to their ability to assimilate, however something that I think is interesting is how these people are now coping in conversations around solidarity with the current striking workers. There are stressors within the working class with striking for sure, the loss of pay being the primary one - something that was weaponised by Thatcher as she pushed the miners to the point of starvation. Front line workers strike as a last resort, because the working conditions and pay deals are no longer survivable. It's no one's first choice and that is what increases the solidarity, it's why we join picket lines at organisations we don't work for and donate to striker workers funds. A front line service strike affects everyone, especially those striking and that action is taken because the jobs they do no longer provide them with the ability to live their lives. If you have ever lived in a community directly affected by long term striking you know this already. Every industrial action is a chance to learn more about how to provide support for those working in a system that is broken, because one day it might be your system and you will need all the solidarity you can get.
Except if you don't. If you have the joy of being the kid of the director of the company that is offering the unlivable pay deals or person that has a job for something to do, to fulfil an interest, rather than to put food on the table. These people, they don't know how to talk about strikes. The soft Tories who say things like, I mean look what happened to the miners, while dressed in a pair of 3 stripe tracksuit bottoms (with holes of course) and a jumper (actually cashmere - but which the moths have got to).
As someone that grew up in a community devastated by the miners strike and still sees the impact of them almost 40 years on I never realised how much memory trauma these strikes would cause for me, seeing people go out day after day, how much hope you hold for those people because there has to be a way to finally disrupt the system enough that they get a reasonable chance at living through the quagmire of another crisis.
Two things happened to me recently which I feel like this messy stream of thoughts pivot on. First, I was at a dinner with some new friends, dinner with new people for me is tough. I'm fat so people are sometimes (most of the time) very blatantly observant about how much I eat and I’m poor, so the stress over what will happen with the bill is sometimes so consuming it’s hard to focus on anything that is happening during the meal. In this instance, none of this happened and I spent the company with some new people and all was well. Except for one moment (we all know, there always has to be one) where one guest said something so bizarre that it slipped by completely uncontested. This was that the ‘issue’ with the UK diet and its media-associated health problems were that people were still eating stodgy starchy food, like potato based dishes, casseroles etc., which we had no recourse to eat any more. That these types of food were all from when people were doing manual labour, mining, farming and all other related jobs but now we are more of a blue collar, desk based country we don't need as many calories so our national diet should reflect this in order to be a ‘healthier’ country. I really don't know why I didn't speak up at this point, probably because I was trying to stay on brand and had a mouth full of potato, but these are the things I am saying now in response to that statement, that I should have said then. Firstly, manual labour jobs still take up a very high percentage of the job market - that's why we have food on our tables and tables to put food on. Also those types of foods are cheaper and therefore more accessible to many families because we grow them here in this country (grown by the farmers that apparently don't exist anymore). This ‘stodge’ is actually warm foods packed with nutrients because we live in a cold place currently going through a heating crisis. These foods last longer, so are easier to buy in bulk or batch cook and will see some people who can only access a very specific amount of fresh fruit and veg in one pay packet through a whole week. Also just to bring some professional insight into it, I work in a greengrocer and the amount of potatoes and root vegetables I sell in one shift always outweighs any other item, and their prices don't move so much based on season so they are always a reliable option to budget on.
The second incident I am still trying to process. It’s the holiday season, I am a freelancer (I mean fuck why, given that I have never had any stability my whole life but here we are) and as a freelancer this year I got invited for the first time to some holiday parties for places I work in the same field as. A nice thing, really, sorry to slip into capitalist rewards but a nice thing to be at all the same. I was worried about going because I didn't know if I would know anyone there and I didn’t know the vibe but I knew up front it was a free bar and that was very accessible for me. I went, chatted to new people and felt somewhat looked after. There was a DJ, well known in the city I live in. Been around a while and seems politically minded. At the end of the night, after a long and intense set played to many perfectly pleasant but perfectly middle class people, the DJ stops the music and plays a 3-minute excerpt of an Arthur Scargill speech recorded from the picket line during the enduring Tory war against the miners. Scargill's voice screams JUSTICE FOR THE MINERS round the venue. A couple of vain attempts at rousing whoops come from the drunker of the stunned crowd. The speech is full-stopped by 30 seconds of heavy techno and the lights come on, everybody home. What does this mean? Who's consciousness is getting raised from this, certainly not everyone in this room that is absolutely spannered on what must be easily a 4k bar tab. I realise actually I am the only person in the room moved by this. Moved because my history and the history of my community is now an optics, a currency, a way to validate a space, much in a way this has happened to many other marginalised communities.
It's fine (and crucially encouraged) to support a strike but you can't claim to understand it unless you are fully prepared to work within the idea that a working class culture is a lateral culture and not one that is not beneath you. You can support a strike or you can stand in solidarity, but understanding the difference is crucial. Supporting a strike upholds the belief that you want a better situation for ‘them’ the strikers, the ones that are not you. Solidarity means that you believe that justice for the striking worker creates a better community for everyone, including yourself. Because when your time comes, and it will, you will need other people to believe that too.
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"If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night"
Angela Davis.