Swing Out Sisters and Brothers

Protests without leaders - the Arab spring, the Spanish Indignants, the Occupy movement – are a product of the digital era. With no single person or group having ownership or rights to the name, it is a franchise of rebellion that can be used by anybody, anywhere and at anytime, allowing protests to grow in size and spread to other areas; a truly modern phenomenon that gives voice to the voiceless against the forces of wealth and power and one that could never have taken place without the proliferation of social networks in the internet age. Except that the Swing Riots that took place in rural Sussex in the autumn of 1830 were just that: a rapidly spreading outbreak of dissent that united poor farm labourers, under the banner of the mythical figure of Captain Swing, against the oppression of the landed class.

Farm labourers at that time would earn very little money but would receive a large part of their wages in kind as food and accommodation. Threshing – literally separating the wheat from the chaff – was work that took place on the farm between November and January and was the bridge between harvest-time and sowing that meant secure, year round employment. There was nothing idyllic about this life: it was a subsistence existence of hard, physical work and little pleasure.

And then along came the threshing machine. The mechanisation of the labourers’ winter work provided an opportunity for further rationalisation, leading farmers to offer lower wages for the human element of the process of threshing and laying off workers in the harshest months of the year. The machines represented a dire threat to already low wages and job security.

The uprising began in Kent. Mobs would break into farms, search for the threshing machines and destroy them. This spread panic amongst landowners who soon began to receive letters, signed ‘Captain Swing’, demanding that the machines be destroyed else barns, houses and haystacks would be fired. Many acquiesced, those that did not found out that the threat was not an empty one.

The rebellion quickly spread into Sussex as more acted under the name of Captain Swing; he did not exist, of course, but became a figure of fear and his name was taken up and widely used to give power to the worker’s campaign against reduced wages and seasonal employment.

As rioting spread westwards, the military were called in and stationed at Uckfield. Hundreds of rioters were prosecuted and a few were hanged; most received long prison sentences or were transported to Australia.

The rioters were not revolutionaries but simply wanted to protect their existing conditions of employment against creeping capitalism. Captain Swing gave a voice to the very weakest - the rural poor – and in many cases he was able to ensure that landowners did negotiate with the workers. Agricultural wages rose in the southern counties of England as a result of the protests and many of the destroyed machines were not replaced. The Captain Swing riots of 1830 represented the last major revolt of agricultural workers in England but his spirit lives on in those leaderless expressions of protest that we see spreading through the digital world today.

Stand Together in 2012

As 2011 winds down, it is hard not to make comparisons with 1981. Then, as now, the whole country was in the grip of ideologically-driven Tory austerity with attacks on the fundamental pillars of the state and the most vulnerable in society; unemployment was at record levels, as is youth unemployment today; there was also rioting on the streets, although the mass shoplifting of 2011 does have some differences to the eruption of anger at police oppression and hopelessness in England’s major cities thirty years ago.

Back in 1981, the trade union movement was at the forefront of opposing the attacks on working people and, as a young local council worker, I found myself striking to defend jobs and services; in 2011, and now a teacher, I have twice had to take industrial action in protest at the government’s attempts to raise an additional deficit tax from public sector workers under the guise of pension reform. How essential public sector workers ended up being the villains, whilst the bankers who haemorrhaged the economy continue to award themselves bonuses, leaves me feeling sad and angry; but not surprised.

A Tory party that receives 51% of its donations from the financial services sector was only ever going to treat the real villains favourably. Osborne deferred any real reform of the banks for eight years and Cameron went as far as trashing Britain’s role in the EU to, supposedly, protect an industry that only accounts for 10% of the economy. This is set against the fact that manufacturing in this country relies on the EU for 48% of its exports; but at least he has made those swivel-eyed Europhobe back-benchers of his happy.

There has been no support from the Labour Party, of course, for those who are standing up to the Tory bullies and, even now, union leaders have begun to say that the protest was always about “damage limitation”. It seems certain that there is about to be a compromise – in other words, a defeat - on the pensions issue. Our actions in June and November will have been for nothing. All of the public sector workers and trade unionists I have spoken to were not trying to limit damage, they were striking in outright opposition to plans to make us pay more, work longer and get less.

Despite this capitulation by most union leaders, we should continue to oppose this pernicious government of Tories and Liberal Democrats and their class war. With increases in pension contributions and pay still frozen, 2012 will be another difficult year: evermore creative ways to make ends meet; no holiday for the kids; any entertainment carefully rationed. We might be under the yoke but we will get by on what we need; and we should fight back. Major political parties are morally bankrupt and we must support each other through groups and networks that are available. The Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition and the Hastings Anti-Cuts campaign are both groups of individuals, community campaigns and local trade unionists standing together to fight the cuts. In 2012, get involved and stand together because in 1982 things got even worse. Happy New Year.