THE Palace may have chosen the wrong weekend to announce its call on the whole country to swear allegiance to the King.
The proposed wording for the national oath-along will, supposedly, mean a “chorus of millions of voices” intones allegiance to Charles III as we watch him being crowned on TV.
Labour’s elections campaign chief Shabana Mahmood describes this as a
“lovely idea to involve the people,”
as if swearing fealty to a monarch were not the opposite of participatory democracy.
Unfortunately for the Westminster set the mood music this May Day is not sycophancy but resistance.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper (who “hopes” we will oblige His Majesty by pledging our undying obedience next Saturday) will only insult workers with his preposterous charge that railway strikes are a betrayal of the Ukrainian people in their hour of need — because they might disrupt travel to the, er, Eurovision Song Contest.
Ministers should have learned by now that cheap smears against striking workers aren’t cutting through.
Portraying strikers as a selfish minority runs up against the experience of millions who have either taken action themselves this year or know someone who has. And there have been few May Days in recent years with so many workers in dispute.
Teachers’ strikes book-end the weekend, with National Education Union (NEU) members taking nationwide action on Friday and Tuesday.
The nurses are out, having rejected a below-inflation pay offer recommended by their own union — a telling sign of the depth of anger among NHS workers, who carried the country through a devastating pandemic only to be told that years of pay cuts are set to continue.
Civil servants took national action on Friday and now are now entering an entire month of rolling strikes.
Striking workers report higher levels of public support than many can remember. Picket lines have become localised festivals of solidarity. Striking hospital cleaners in south London last week found passers-by bringing them food and drink.
This is a context in which strikes can be built into a co-ordinated movement for change.
That is not merely about co-ordinating action itself — though last week’s pledge by four education unions, the NEU and NASUWT (which combined represent over 750,000 educators) plus head teachers’ unions NAHT and ASCL, to do exactly that will be giving ministers sleepless nights.
It is about building on the impressive cross-union solidarity shown on picket lines over the last year to join the dots between strikes and raise pressure at community level for the kind of serious political change we need — one that not only recognises that real-terms pay cuts are unacceptable while monopolistic energy and food firms boast of record profits, but also forces politicians to recognise the urgent need for restorative public investment in services starved of resources by 13 years of Tory austerity.
It means extending solidarity across borders, to French workers fighting attempts to raise their retirement age, to German workers in hospitals, transport and social care who have been striking to save the services they work in.
May Day is International Workers’ Day. The struggles of Britain’s workers have their parallels across the developed world.
Governments forcing down living standards to shore up corporate profits are also pitting worker against worker in a drive towards war, to prop up an increasingly dysfunctional world order policed by the United States.
King Charles III may not be individually significant. But bending the knee to him symbolises submission to an entire state hierarchy that is stripping away our democratic rights to protest and vote while crafting new laws to stop us standing up for ourselves at work.
This May Day should be a carnival of labour, democracy and revolt that inspires us to carry our cause through the rest of the year — including during next weekend’s staged celebration of subjugation to an unelected prince.
Morning Star Editor
Some View on the World 
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