Dirty Little Secret
I had a lot of time to think about this as my body fell apart in chunks over the last six weeks thanks to two rounds with Covid. Cut off at the knees by having a child in nursery plus working in education, I exist in a world where only the people who can’t evade their own vulnerability now risk testing or disclosing. A just shrug survival strategy.
Nightmares of losing the one thing that I need to earn a not-quite-the-cost-of-living wage, a working brain I morosely wondered if I might manage a career in Higher Education without any actual thoughts. As I watch the news and the institutional layering of spectacular lies and neurolinguistic evasion I decided that having no actual thoughts might serve me well in the employability stakes.
Terrified by the easy breakdown of caring, no hugging or kissing, tickles or jokes it feels like a Siberian wind has entered my home. In my feverish nights I dreamed about the work I did for many years in the former USSR with trade unions back in the 1990s. Workers’ education programmes with trade unions funded by the overflowing EU democracy funding of the time – training on how to use the internet and collective bargaining with employers in the early days of their shocking transition to neoliberalism.
This was no EU funded jolly my friends, it was a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to prepare the Soviet old guard how to be unionists under capitalism. First learn to engage with your members (wait, listen, no wait, try to listen..oh), then to bargain with employers and voila, democratic trade unionism across the largest membership organisations on the planet. As silly as it now sounds, we thought we could help them.
Obviously, we were not in a position to teach them much they didn’t already know about navigating the corrupted economic landscape of the 1990s. At the time I had enough humility to see that they had learned more about us than we did about them, a familiar feeling for people working under authoritarian systems. I now realise that they should actually have been teaching us about how to survive authoritarian regimes and the terror that enters our hearts when behavioural economics are mobilised and weaponized.
Tucked in amongst their heroic stonewalling and cognac fuelled breakfasts, I remember the first time we got an internet connection in the chemical defence trade union’s tiny unmarked office in the Moscow union building on Leninsky Prospekt to heavy applause from the union executive (average age 76). I innocently suggested we send an email to our sister organisation in the Donbass the independent miners’ union of Ukraine who atypically because of their young leadership had an actual email address. As the most senior leader in the room sat down at the keyboard, he paused and then asked me, ‘what shall I write?’. Exactly.
Romania, was the seat of the most savage campaign of control within the Soviet Union. While I was working there on similarly delusional educational programmes, one night I was invited by the leader-in-waiting of Petrom, the powerful oil union, known as the Little Prince. A ‘cultural exchange’ took place as we walked around the national workers’ museum that had been opened just for us that night and I half- listened to a two hour monologue about heroics and solidarity. Peppered with metaphors from the beautiful game and Petrom’s own national football team.
When it became clear that I’d lied when I said I spoke good enough French to understand this regal diatribe I was bundled into a car and taken to what looked like an old theatre. Escorted by sad faced armed security past a series of dining rooms full of old men and young women. Presented to the Little Prince at a candle lit table for two set on the old stage served by a row of silent beautiful waitresses in hopelessly high heals. Five glasses of varying sizes, one for champagne, red wine, whisky, brandy and vodka, all full.
Long before the days of international roaming, I was disoriented and embarrassed that I couldn’t quite register that I had just been kidnapped and taken to a brothel. Five uneaten courses later panic sets in and I ask to go to the toilet at which point I climb out of the window. I jump out into what turned out to be a walled car park, lights flash on, a fuss follows and a furious Little Prince throws me into a car and drives in reverse headlights off across an unknown town. Turns out that we were in central Bucharest and within walking distance to my hotel. I quietly get out of the car and walk into the hotel lobby locking eyes with the two Norwegian oil consultants at the bar and the hotel’s armed security guards. Men surround me and I override my ambivalence about that.
The reason I was there at all was that I had uncovered corruption in the programme I was running and this I guess was an instruction on how to manage that. The next morning I took a flight home, telling no-one I was leaving only breathing once we’d landed.
Romania at that time was still full of the everyday cruelty of authoritarian rule. I was told that during the soviet period there were more children on the Romanian secret police payroll than adults. This was how society was broken, by making it necessary not to speak to your own children for fear that their play and playmates could threaten the family’s survival. The consequences of that writ large across Romania’s orphanages.
This is how we are made silent.
Later that year at a TUC congress I was looking after an international delegation of miners and oil workers from Russia on behalf of a Global Trade Union. Day one of congress we’re sitting up in the gods, tucked away watching the proceedings below with some amusement. Vodka and animal lard is rolled out and an old bloke called Lev Miranov, the then President of the Russian Oil and Gas Workers Union, is trying to teach me how to roll a cigarette with one hand. Suddenly there’s a problem with translation, much fuss over a technical term they have never heard before. Zero Hour Contracts.
As I try to explain this concept to a stunned group of communists the chair announces our presence to the hall and we all stand up and wave at the delegates. In that moment both sides look at each other with pure undiluted pity. From where I was standing, the Russian delegation understood perfectly what lay ahead for us in the UK and they feared for us. A regime of lies dressed up as personal choice, old boy jokes, grotesque characters disarmingly introducing fascism into the everyday. They understood from experience that as soon as we silently accept the lawless dressed up as freedoms, we are all corrupted.
It’s fair and possible to say that Putin, along with Lukashenko, has steadily led the way to re-establish authoritarian rule in Europe. What is also fair to say, but dangerous too as the heroic Carole Cadwallader is testimony, is that the same crony authoritarianism has entered our society. Nudged but not driven by Russia it has happened here on our watch.
I’m not making a flippant joke about the jokers in government, I mean it literally and psychically. When we leave a lawless system unchallenged we are all vulnerable. You are vulnerable to collusion, betrayal, silent poverty, bullying and giving up on ever sticking up for yourself at work. Yes. You.
On Friday last week the Policing Bill, the Borders Bill, the Elections Bill and the Judicial Review Bill were all passed heralding in silent authoritarian shift in power in the UK. In the same week the Health and Care Bill is now due to proceed to Royal Assent and will be brought into law as an act of parliament. The Act will now divide the NHS into over 40 separate units/Integrated Care Systems (ICS) acting virtually autonomously. The NHS is over. And if you weren’t depressed enough just have a shimmy around the Good Law Project portfolio of corruption and human rights cases being taken out against the UK Government.
Why is this government still in power? There’s a chance that this is not a lack of evidence or good journalism, but rather a profound fight between love and hate. A politics of hate and division where nobody can be trusted enough to bother with democracy and society, or the boring stuff of following the law and doing what you say. An everyday politics of being cognizant of our impact on others, caring for the social outcome of the pandemic and resisting the primal urge to join the excited scape-goaters and blamers on Twitter.
A few weeks ago, after moving between three countries, five homes and six jobs I received an Easter card from Romania, simply signed with peace and love from the Little Prince. A reminder of a dirty little secret. And that they still know where I live. This is how everyday authoritarianism has come to live in our homes. This is our battle line.