Well done to Mick Lynch for his handling of this line of questioning. He could see what #KayBurley was trying to do. I could see what Kay Burley was trying to do. And he wasn't having any of it.Oh, and solidarity to all @RMTunion members on strike today!✊🏽 pic.twitter.com/L0TQBPZ2g9— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 21, 2022
Real opposition works. People like it and people resonate with it.
The tories are on the backfoot here, they miscalculated that people would be against the strikes because the country was hurt by covid but instead what it's done is make it really easy for people to shrug this off. Working class people are used to being disrupted right now, covid disrupted them many many times more than this strike, people have just stayed at home, there's no road chaos, there's no train station chaos, everything is just empty. People are chilling and they've absolutely failed at this early stage to turn public opinion against this strike.
They should have waited 5 days for the public to get a bit antsy before starting their campaign against it but they've fucked it up now. Country will rally behind the strikers and probably won't change their opinions until a good offer is on the table. I think 5% is where they'll settle.
Very much this. It's a consequence of the Tories basically having no political opposition. They've gotten used to just being able to bulldoze through everything and they just couldn't hold themselves back from laying into the unions preemptively. The media will support them unconditionally of course, but they've overplayed their hand here I suspect.
They just went in far too early, complete miscalculation. I guess they thought they needed to set the narrative from the start but they've fucked up by demonstrating very very clearly that they're not unbiased and that's set the working public against them.
This will set up all the other unions for followup action and all of them will get public support. The only ones that I have concerns about are the energy companies, people may conflate workers there with the 50% to 300% price rises they're feeling in their households and that they don't deserve it. I'm not completely confident that people will split striking energy workers from their bosses and company owners in germany and the rest of europe.
It might be possible to solve that by simply including them in a General Strike rather than having their own independent strike.
Agreed, a general strike apart from being obviously stronger would help keep the focus where it should be. Short of that, if energy workers strike they need a strong line and narrative that neutralises that attack; something along the lines of "our members work for these price-gouging companies and, like millions of others, don't even get paid enough to afford their own outrageous energy bills".
There's no guarantee they'll let a union rep into the media again after Lynch, can't rely on being able to properly publicise that message to the audiences that the media reaches who do not get their information from any other source.
In a General Strike situation I imagine they won't, but while it's individual unions I suspect they will to try and pick them apart, look for weaker links who can be bullied by the media, and try and play them against each other. Mick might not be getting many more bookings before long though, although saying that it's not his first time on the media merry go round anyway.
But you're right that the messaging has to come from outside the traditional media too; union releases, Twitter campaigns, friendly independent media, satellite figures etc and of course in the street too ideally.
What we desperately need to take advantage of is any opportunity in media to plug alternative media. Tell people to view direct sources for information, the RMT twitter, Trades Union Congress, etc etc. Take every opportunity given to us in the media to plug alt-media because it disempowers traditional media.
In the UK we should genuinely be looking at Trump and his attack on the media in the US as a model to follow but from the left. Get people to recognise television as not presenting the whole story and tell people to go to the source and hear it directly from us because you're not going to get the right information when they decide to put a liberal Labour MP next to a Tory MP to talk about it instead of the union reps.
Absolutely. This has been my go to for a long time.
It's just a shame the left in this country doesn't have better signal boosting media. Novara (despite often being pretty cringe) aren't bad for union boosting stuff, but they're shite at playing the social media algorithms and seem to have pretty much stagnated in terms of reach. For all the many, many challenges for leftism in the states at least there's a more robust alternative media with more reach.
Novara are unfortunately targeting middle class and university-educated audiences which would be completely turned off by algorithm chasing shit because they're not as poisoned as americans are. The online landscape being all american companies is an issue and there's no low-brow bottom of the barrel left media that's willing to do anything and everything regardless of reputation it might create for chasing the bottom of the barrel that all these shite american social media companies promote.
The other side of this is also that chasing algorithms doesn't actually get you in front of British audiences, it gets you in front of Americans. I do think we need more some bottom of the barrel leftist media here though, right now we've got Novara, Double Down News and a rough coalition of independents. It's not nearly enough. We need a genuinely funny dirtbag left group with preferably rev-left tendencies but played skillfully. We have enough middle class and academic targeting shit between Novara, Owen Jones etc.
Real opposition works. People like it and people resonate with it.
The tories are on the backfoot here, they miscalculated that people would be against the strikes because the country was hurt by covid but instead what it's done is make it really easy for people to shrug this off. Working class people are used to being disrupted right now, covid disrupted them many many times more than this strike, people have just stayed at home, there's no road chaos, there's no train station chaos, everything is just empty. People are chilling and they've absolutely failed at this early stage to turn public opinion against this strike.
They should have waited 5 days for the public to get a bit antsy before starting their campaign against it but they've fucked it up now. Country will rally behind the strikers and probably won't change their opinions until a good offer is on the table. I think 5% is where they'll settle.
Very much this. It's a consequence of the Tories basically having no political opposition. They've gotten used to just being able to bulldoze through everything and they just couldn't hold themselves back from laying into the unions preemptively. The media will support them unconditionally of course, but they've overplayed their hand here I suspect.
They just went in far too early, complete miscalculation. I guess they thought they needed to set the narrative from the start but they've fucked up by demonstrating very very clearly that they're not unbiased and that's set the working public against them.
This will set up all the other unions for followup action and all of them will get public support. The only ones that I have concerns about are the energy companies, people may conflate workers there with the 50% to 300% price rises they're feeling in their households and that they don't deserve it. I'm not completely confident that people will split striking energy workers from their bosses and company owners in germany and the rest of europe.
It might be possible to solve that by simply including them in a General Strike rather than having their own independent strike.
Agreed, a general strike apart from being obviously stronger would help keep the focus where it should be. Short of that, if energy workers strike they need a strong line and narrative that neutralises that attack; something along the lines of "our members work for these price-gouging companies and, like millions of others, don't even get paid enough to afford their own outrageous energy bills".
There's no guarantee they'll let a union rep into the media again after Lynch, can't rely on being able to properly publicise that message to the audiences that the media reaches who do not get their information from any other source.
In a General Strike situation I imagine they won't, but while it's individual unions I suspect they will to try and pick them apart, look for weaker links who can be bullied by the media, and try and play them against each other. Mick might not be getting many more bookings before long though, although saying that it's not his first time on the media merry go round anyway.
But you're right that the messaging has to come from outside the traditional media too; union releases, Twitter campaigns, friendly independent media, satellite figures etc and of course in the street too ideally.
What we desperately need to take advantage of is any opportunity in media to plug alternative media. Tell people to view direct sources for information, the RMT twitter, Trades Union Congress, etc etc. Take every opportunity given to us in the media to plug alt-media because it disempowers traditional media.
In the UK we should genuinely be looking at Trump and his attack on the media in the US as a model to follow but from the left. Get people to recognise television as not presenting the whole story and tell people to go to the source and hear it directly from us because you're not going to get the right information when they decide to put a liberal Labour MP next to a Tory MP to talk about it instead of the union reps.
Absolutely. This has been my go to for a long time.
It's just a shame the left in this country doesn't have better signal boosting media. Novara (despite often being pretty cringe) aren't bad for union boosting stuff, but they're shite at playing the social media algorithms and seem to have pretty much stagnated in terms of reach. For all the many, many challenges for leftism in the states at least there's a more robust alternative media with more reach.
Novara are unfortunately targeting middle class and university-educated audiences which would be completely turned off by algorithm chasing shit because they're not as poisoned as americans are. The online landscape being all american companies is an issue and there's no low-brow bottom of the barrel left media that's willing to do anything and everything regardless of reputation it might create for chasing the bottom of the barrel that all these shite american social media companies promote.
The other side of this is also that chasing algorithms doesn't actually get you in front of British audiences, it gets you in front of Americans. I do think we need more some bottom of the barrel leftist media here though, right now we've got Novara, Double Down News and a rough coalition of independents. It's not nearly enough. We need a genuinely funny dirtbag left group with preferably rev-left tendencies but played skillfully. We have enough middle class and academic targeting shit between Novara, Owen Jones etc.