There is power in a union

And other Billy Bragg songs we sang on the Guardian's picket line

‘The only thing power respects is power,’ Malcolm X

I’m writing to this while listening to my friends at Coda Story broadcasting a live event with journalists on the ground in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine. We’re living through a moment of tumult, days are years right now, and this is before the second Trump administration explodes across the news cycle from January 20.

Meanwhile my colleagues and I at the Guardian and Observer have spent almost half of the last fortnight, camped outside our offices not doing any actual journalism in a last-ditch bit to protect our news organisation from our own management.

This impromptu speech on the last day by Gary Younge - former Guardian US correspondent who has written at length on the civil rights movement - made this point so eloquently.

‘We are here to defend the values and traditions of this organisation,’ he said. ‘Even when they don’t.’

(Griff, the Welsh collie cross, playing a small but important role to Gary’s right here as a Picket Support Dog.)

The Guardian’s decision to gift a chunk of its news organisation to a rival into which it intends to funnel £5m of readers’ money continues to baffle all onlookers. Yesterday, Oliver Shah, the Sunday Times’s business editor, chimed in with an article in which he compared the Guardian’s management to the disgraced retail magnate, Sir Philip Green and said the deal defied all financial and strategic logic. In an article with many choice lines, this was the standout:

‘Tortoise is a thinly capitalised vanity project in search of a commercial model.’

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The plot thickens

In last week’s meeting, aka ‘the bloodbath’ in which the deal was announced to Observer and Guardian journalists, it included the news that the Guardian would invest £5m of its readers’ money into the ‘thinly capitalised vanity project’. After doing so, a journalist asked the board and management for the identity of their fellow investors.

The Guardian’s CEO said she wouldn’t read out the entire list ‘because it’s so long’ but would send it by email after the meeting. That list has yet to arrive. The union has asked for it and got nowhere. On Friday, I asked the Guardian’s press office and received no answer. Earlier today, I WhatsApped the same question to James Harding, Tortoise’s founder and editor-in-chief: to date, there’s been no reply.

Meanwhile an emergency Scott Trust has been scheduled for Tuesday….

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What we’re meant to be doing…

…journalism. The number of journalistic man hours that have gone into organising a strike, and investigating our own news organisation is one of the many bitter ironies of where we find ourselves.

After two days of strikes last week, I got up long before dawn to finish my piece for this week’s Observer New Review, an interview with one of Britain’s finest filmmakers, Asif Kapadia, on his terrifying new film, 2073.

That plan was blown off course by the announcement of the deal and a day of chaos and urgent union meetings. Somehow, amid everything else, I managed to finish the piece and the Observer New Review team got this interview out and on the page and, for me, it sums up a lot of the reasons why we’re doing this.

Watch the trailer and you’ll maybe understand why. Asif’s film is a landmark. It’s the first time an artist of Asif’s talents has attempted to wrestle with the huge cultural earthquake that we’re living through.

He documents the rise of authoritarianism across the world underpinned by Silicon Valley technologies, our entwined democracy, information and climate crises…but he does so via a sci fi thriller set in 2073 with Samantha Morton in the leading role.

We’ve covered so many of these issues in Observer New Review but as journalism. Asif has transformed into something else. If you’ve seen Amy, the brilliant Oscar-winning doc about the brilliant but badly let down singer, Amy Winehouse, you’ll know about Asif’s gift for emotional storytelling and it’s what hit me, even watching it for the third time this Tuesday when I did a Q&A with Asif at a screening in London.

If you read the piece, you’ll get a sense of why. This story is personal to Asif. He understands this surveillance technology and where it leads. He has skin in the game. And he persevered with this film, in the face of many obstacles not least that this subject is toxic to most Hollywood companies and streaming platforms, flush with Silicon Valley and Saudi money. That translates into an urgent, prescient, moving piece of filmmaking that couldn’t be more timely. Some of the film’s main characters - Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Peter Thiel - are now in control of the world’s greatest superpower.

But the film is also a celebration of journalism. I spoke to Asif on background at the beginning of the project but what I didn’t know until late in the game is that he’d put me in the film alongside two other female journalists, Rana Ayyub in India and Maria Ressa in the Philippines. It’s flattering, of course, but it’s not just or even about me. I’m a proxy for an entire team of Observer journalists and editors behind me.

I’ve worked with Jane Ferguson the editor of Observer New Review and her small tight-knit team for 20 years and it’s been for this section that I’ve been able to roam freely, exploring the intersection of culture, politics and tech in long, investigative pieces, reportage, interviews. Behind Jane are desk editors, sub editors, photographers, designers, lawyers. When we published the big Cambridge Analytica and Facebook stories, it was Sarah Donaldson who wrangled that all into line and who brought those same skills to bear these in these last months and weeks as a union officer organising the strike.

The sheer professionalism needed to get the section out during this maelstrom and to make it beautiful and thoughtful and impactful even while all this was going on goes to the heart of why we’re fighting. We believe in journalism. And we know that we have something precious and unusual at the Observer that we want to preserve.

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Meanwhile, this is Tortoise’s top story right now

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‘Sometimes you have to fight’

In 2073, the biography of Malcolm X is a leitmotif throughout the film. Samantha Morton - who played the pre-cog or psychic who could see the future in Minority Report - owns a battered copy of his autobiography.

‘Sometimes you have to fight. And you cannot guarantee you will win if you do fight but you can absolutely guarantee that you won’t win if you don’t.’

That quote is not Malcolm X. It’s Gary Younge on the Guardian picket line. I knew he reminded me of someone though.

‘There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed.’

That one actually is Malcolm X as quoted in the film. We’re hoping we won’t need it. There’s another screening of 2073 and a Q&A with Asif and I at the BFI Imax on Tuesday. Or for more info about the film, including where you can see it, community screenings and what you can do, sign up here. If you watch it, you’ll understand that this is a civilisational fight that we need to have. We have to take back control of our internet. And this is the start of a campaign to do so.

So much of what we need for that fight is going to come from the history and language and experience of those who’ve had these fights before us. The fight for the rights to our data is this century’s next battle. We need communication platforms not owned by Silicon Valley edgelords that send teenagers to suicide sites. It’s going to require a new civil rights movement. One that builds off our history, right here in Britain and that Billy Bragg so powerfully reminded of this week.

‘You have now joined that great tradition. Pass it on.’

The Guardian was forged in that same history. Its roots lie in a pivotal moment in British working class history, the Peterloo massacre of 1819 when 60,000 working people marched to demand the right to vote. A private militia charged the crowd and an estimated 18 people died and 650 were injured. It was the origins of the Great Reform Act of 1832 and ultimately the establishment of parliamentary democracy. And, also the inspiration for the founding of the original Manchester Guardian.

The idea that 200+ years later, Billy Bragg would be on the pavement outside its offices singing protest songs with its journalists who are striking not over wages but over the organisation’s betrayal of its fundamental values is not something than anyone saw coming. (With the possible exception of Samantha Morton.)

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