Following the terrorist atrocities in Paris on the 13th
November 2015 I quickly resolved to attend the European Championships as
planned (many thanks Matt and Pierre). I realise there is an element of risk in
doing so but, rather than superimposing a tricolour over my Facebook picture, I
thought this was a tangible method of demonstrating both my solidarity with the
French people and my disdain towards the terrorists and their misguided
agendas.
For the last three months however, the French people have
been facing up to another foe – their own government and the multinationals
behind the TTIP
Agreement. Proposed
changes to the maximum working week of 35 hours have grabbed the
headlines, but other changes, that make it easier for larger employers to make
workers redundant for instance, are included. It is for the French to resolve
but, just days before the tournament kicks-off, it is clear that large protests
and threatened strikes by railway workers and airline pilots have the potential
to effect some of those attending the Tournament.
I, for one, will accept such a fate should it happen. For
while the reforms may not mean “a
surrender to wicked, Anglo-saxon, ultra-liberal capitalism”, they do
represent the thin end of a wedge very familiar to British families over the
last thirty-five years. A wedge that has led to the ‘illegal’ employment
practices of Mike
Ashley. And the tax-dodging / ‘carpet-bagging’ antics of Philip
Green being rewarded by a government post and a knighthood.
Such practices have repercussions’, and wealth distribution
in the
UK is now the joint sixth most unequal globally (France is
fourteenth). Compounded by a steep decline in social
mobility, these unsustainable trends represent the end game of Thatcherite
policies that required the assistance of a militarised police force to
dismantle Trade Unions termed 'the
enemy within', before making targeted attacks upon other elements of
‘working-class’ culture.
The Wapping dispute and the Miners’ Strike, which led to the Battle
of Orgreave, are two examples of the state’s attack on collective
bargaining and working class communities nationwide. The
Battle of Beanfield, which led to the largest mass arrest of civilians
since the Second World War, attacked New Age Travellers and green politics,
while acid house parties were also targeted. And, of course, there was the
sustained attack upon football, regarded by ‘decent folk’ at the time as “a
slum sport played in slum stadiums, and increasingly watched by slum people who
deter decent folk from turning up”. This attack upon the ‘people’s game’
involved the caging
of supporters, the introduction of now omnipresent CCTV systems, a
proposed national ID
Card Scheme and even electrified fences at Chelsea’s Stamford
Bridge ground. But this campaign reached its nadir with the Hillsborough
disaster and the subsequent cover-up by South Yorkshire Police.
Although calls are being made for another inquiry into
Orgreave, Hillsborough represents a solitary victory for those who were
targeted by the state at that time. But it came too late. Football, as coherently
argued in Hillsborough survivor Adrian Tempany’s book And
the Sun Shines Now, was transformed, on the basis of the
Sun's accusations of hooliganism, to appeal to the middle classes.
So successful was this transformation that many of the working-class fans,
whose predecessors’ had sustained football for more than 100 years, can no
longer afford to attend matches or – deep irony alert – pay Rupert Murdoch’s
satellite TV subscriptions.
In industry those initial, but highly significant, victories
opened the door to ever more changes and amendments designed to undermine Trade
Union powers and hard-won employment
protections increasingly shored up by the European Union (EU Law had
its own footballing cause célèbre in Jean-Marc Bosman of
course) but, as the current referendum on the UK’s membership of the European
Union demonstrates, divide and rule politics, aided by a predominantly
right-wing media, is thriving. The creation of the all too obvious, but
effective, schism between ‘private’ and ‘public’ sector workers over pensions
and the like, is simply the next step in alienating the working classes from
each other.
Following the loss of what were higher wages in the private
sector, good public sector pensions are an easy target, but the omnipresent
demands of employers for ever more ‘flexible’ workforces, and the use of zero
hours contracts effect all realms of work in the UK today. In football
parlance; ‘we was robbed’. The UK is, therefore, an apposite example of what
may be ahead for French workers should they surrender too much ground. From the
outside it appears that workers in all sectors are united in this struggle and
I will stand in solidarity with the French on this and terrorism – even if it
means missing a much anticipated football match or two.
