Activists vote for ’super-union’

Hundreds of activists have voted to create a "super-union" by merging Amicus and the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G).

Tony Woodley, T&G general secretary, said the merger was about "working class unity".

The decision follows a meeting of more than 300 T&G members and both trade unions' members will be balloted on the merger in February.

Together, the two would create the UK's biggest union of some 2 million people.

Amicus has 1.2 million members and the T&G has 800,000.

T&G members debated how a merger would affect links with the Labour Party and TUC, industrial relations and the organisation of the new body.

If a merger move does win backing at the conference, the "super-union" will be launched in May 2007.

Amicus has already given its backing to the plan.

Iranian media reflects on turbulent week

Iranian media reflects on turbulent week

Mass demonstration in support of the leadership after six days of pro-reform rallies

The liberal Iranian newspaper, the Iran Daily, on Thursday hailed what it said was a "new chapter" in the country following the mass rallies on Wednesday in support of the Islamic system.

"This development in and of itself marks a new chapter in the history of political activism in the country," the paper said in an editorial. The violence of the previous few days would not, it said, be manipulated "in the interest of the enemies of Islam and our people .

"It will, and rather should, strengthen the Islamic establishment from within and also lead to a new era of revolutionary political activism," the paper said.

"The election of Mr Khatami to the presidency was the direct consequence of a strong national and religious will of 60 million people for reform and sustaining a vibrant Islamic establishment. This is the general consensus of the nation. Hence, no act of lawlessness or sedition will be tolerated by the people.

"Today every right-minded Iranian knows that national security is the key to a brighter tomorrow. Having accepted this undisputed fact Iranians at large must pursue their political activities free from violence and never allow foreign puppets and ill-wishers to penetrate their ranks," the editorial went on.

Devoted

"The nationwide rallies on Wednesday in support of the leadership revolution and government, once again brought into the open the plain truth that our people remain devoted to the declared goals of the Islamic establishment and, to the best of their ability, will safeguard their religious and national values," it concluded.

Other papers took a similar line that "infiltrators" had taken over the student protests.

"It was clear that the street riots in the last two days were not created by the people or the students," managing director of the Arya newspaper Mohammad Reza Zohdi said in an interview with the Tehran Times.

"We should be cautious about the enemy who is always after creating tension in the society," he said.

The political editor of Neshat, Ali Reza Raja'i, agreed.

"The infiltrators who came among the students shouted hard-line slogans and conducted sabotage. The students held a gathering on Enqelab Street, but the sabotage was conducted on other streets," he told the Tehran Times.

Radical elements

The Ettela'at newspaper continued the theme of radical elements taking over the protests, and took it one stage further.

The initial attack on the student dormitory at Tehran University, which led to the disturbances, was "part of a premeditated plot against the country's national security," the paper said on Wednesday.

Agents provocateur were trying to undermine the image of the Islamic system before the international community, it said.

Meanwhile, splits within the media over the coverage of the riots deepened.

The Iran Daily launched an attack on the way the issue had been handled by state TV and radio – IRIB.

"IRIB's dissemination of information is consistently less effective than Pink Panther stories," the paper said in an opinion piece. "The approach seems to be this: it is far more appropriate to totally undermine an incident than help find a solution to it."

"IRIB, which is undoubtedly a very significant mass medium, totally undermined the entire affair, as if nothing had happened."

But this was not the right way to deal with the story, the paper said. "It was simply wrong to ignore the matter."

"If IRIB had performed more responsibly and covered the development, then perhaps one could dare say the affair would have been under control by now," it said.

Source: IRNA news agency, Tehran, in English 15 Jul 99

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.

Watching Britain from afar

From the soup-eating habits of the middle classes to the application of face cream – a pioneering study of everyday life in Britain is celebrating its 70th birthday… and was the inspiration for Victoria Wood's double Bafta-winning drama.

A common criticism levelled at reality TV shows such as Big Brother is how they have fetishized the tediousness of daily life and turned it into a spectator event. But, as far back as 1937, the belief that mundanity had a currency for historians spurred three young men to start an ambitious and radical project.

When Mass Observation began, members of the public were invited to help with a new research project on daily life in Britain – a "science of ourselves".

As well as asking volunteers to keep diaries, Mass Observation's researchers interviewed people in the street, listened in to conversations, and observed public behaviour in places like pubs and factories.

It wanted to thwart the tendency in modern society to live our daily lives deadened by habit, "with as little consciousness of our surroundings as though we were walking in our sleep".

Mass Observation, or MO, churned out millions of words on mundane subjects such as filling in the football pools, the contents of sweet shop window displays and the way that smokers held their cigarettes.

For a brief period, Mass Observation's interest in our daily lives captured the public imagination. One of its early books, simply called Britain, shifted 100,000 copies in its first 10 days.

After World War II, though, the project petered out as its volunteers dispersed and its founders moved on. For years MO's findings were largely forgotten. But 70 years after it began, it is re-entering public consciousness – and Victoria Wood's ITV drama is not the only sign.

Some of the other diaries written by MO volunteers during and just after World War II have been collected in three bestselling anthologies by Simon Garfield. Such writings seem to anticipate our current interest in personal testimony, be it ghost-written celebrity autobiographies or memoirs of ordinary people.

The MO archive at the University of Sussex has also informed books such as David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, which is currently riding high in the bestsellers' lists, and Jon Savage's recent Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945.

If you visit the archive today, you will see that the files have wonderfully banal headings, obviously provided by someone with a quirky sense of humour:

• Implications of Peckham
• The application of face cream
• Upper and middle-class soup-eating habits

These files are the perfect resource for the growing trend for "history from below" – the story of ordinary people rather than of political and cultural elites.

Voice to the ordinary

But MO's observations can also teach us something about our own lives today. One of its original aims was to challenge what it called "the voicelessness of everyman". It wanted to make ordinary citizens' lives and opinions better known to the people who governed them.

When it began in the 1930s, opinion formers made no real attempt to find out the views of voters. Ordinary people were rarely seen or heard on film or radio.

MO's founders were annoyed by the lazy assumptions about "the man in the street" by the media and political elite – "a tiny group, with different habits of mind, ways of life, from those millions they are catering for".

MO's most significant legacy is that it made ordinary people visible and audible, perhaps for the first time. Nowadays, ordinary folk are seen everywhere, from reality TV shows to street-corner vox pops. Their opinions are endlessly canvassed about everything from political leaders to ice-cream flavours.

So it's fitting that MO is still going – revived in 1981 with a smaller-scale version of the panel of volunteer-diarists. These people, who number about 400, continue to send in their writings today, in response to questionnaires about mundane subjects such as junk mail, the National Lottery and, most recently, the ban on smoking in public places.

Joe Moran's book Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime was partly inspired by the Mass Observation project, and has just been published by Profile.

It was the decade of the Beatles, the Post Office Tower and the UK's first shopping centres. Send your memories of the 1960s using the form below.

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