I'm All Right, Juan: A Peculiarly Spanish Strike

How's your general strike going to be?

Bliss. Day off, an hour's lie-in, putting the feet up, a trip to the pub or a pleasant long walk on the beach in the autumn sun. The satisfying feeling of not having to bother with the world for 24 hours; a bit like a Sunday.

Being British, we don't do general strikes. Not since 1926 anyway. My great great uncle Albert may or may not have driven his omnibus for part of May that year. I really couldn't say. That'll be because, as far as I'm aware, I had no great great uncle Albert. But the strike of 1926 still has the power to evoke memories and tall tales of distant relatives' militancy. Its pretext was worsening conditions and reductions in pay. Nothing new, even under a Spanish sun. Same conditions apply.

The thing with general strikes, or their near equivalent, is that they are their own pretexts to enjoy a bit of quality time without the worry of having to put in a full day's shift. Quality time, such as that down the pub.

It's 1984 and all that. The miners are on strike. There is a day of action, otherwise known as a day of inaction. It's a pub in London, just down the road from my office. There are those from the City, those from the Civil Service, and myself, who has willingly taken capitalism's publishing shilling. Somehow, we've all managed to sling a legitimate day of action sicky in order to go and get bladdered. Which is what we do. The joy of strikes.

1984 was the nearest thing to a general strike for over two generations. The day of inaction occurred, conveniently perhaps, a week or so after Orgreave, the awfulness of which should have shocked us out of the facile faux-agitprop of a day's downing of pens and early PCs. It did, up to a point. And we persevered with our distant support, giving a small infant in hand at a Saturday shopping centre a pound coin to toss into the cap of a miners' contribution. But this was London, a city unpopulated with mining communities but filled with those of us who still held some flame for the socialism and communism learnt at university and who agonised as to the obvious contradictions as to the benefits we had derived under Thatcher and our loathing of the woman.

1984 was the tipping-point. It was the breaking of unions and the putting together of the smug societal complacency that followed and which still exists: complacency that has been an inoculation against empathy with the less advantaged. It is the ironic transplantation of the "I'm All Right, Jack" couldn't-care-lessness of Peter Sellers' shop steward. In a different context, it manifested itself, or rather failed to, through the embarrassed feet-gazing submissiveness of a nation, doormatted by Blair over Iraq, that failed to take to the streets in disgust.

But that's Britain. Spain is, or was, something different, before it, too, joined the European complacency union. It can still throw up a beardy ogre such as Cándido Méndez, head of the UGT, but some day soon, on the equivalent to "Have I Got News For You", he will appear on it, as cuddly as Bob Crow once was on the original.

General strike, Spanish-style in 2010, is a quaint parody of union muscle. Spain still does general strikes, and so they come around now and then, like irregular fiestas. But when the call goes out, fiesta-like, everyone heads off to the bar. There is not the sense of a descent into the chaos verging on anarchy that has been prescribed for Greece. The crisis has been a particularly Spanish crisis, one of a bit of a protest for form's sake, combined with a docility of aspirational wealth. To borrow from Marx, the changes in Spanish society, the product of the boom years, have been the opium that sedates the people in worshipping the religion of self-interest. And who, in truth, can blame them, despite the potential for losses in earnings and pensions, the basis for the general strike? 2010 is Spain's tipping-point, and chances are it will follow the same pattern hereafter as Britain.


QUIZ -
Yesterday, Gene Pitney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7BRraVMZzc

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