Why the National Gallery strikes could turn me Tory

Whose side are you on? I was hoping never to have to answer that question again. For so long, the big divisions of the British left were invisible. Not only are they here again, as blood red as they were back in the 1980s, but the demand to take sides won’t leave me alone even in the National Gallery.

Seriously. I’ve never voted anything but Labour in my life. Can’t you at least let me alone when I’m looking at Titian? I have to be a socialist in the museum now? Is it blacklegging to look at Leonardo?

Presumably so, because this week Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union, wrote to the retiring director of the National Gallery to say his members’ strike action there is to move up a gear. After months of totally fruitless stoppages, there is to be an all-out strike from mid-August.

If I don’t immediately break into a chorus of The Red Flag, it may be because Serwotka also appeared this week alongside Jeremy Corbyn in the runaway hard-left campaign that is among other things, reviving the political influence of trade unions. That Labour party I’ve voted for all my adult life and in the past belonged to? They’re about to make it unelectable. And the National Gallery dispute looks to me like it just might be a cynical act of muscle flexing by a union that is at least as ideological as it accuses the museum’s trustees of being.

The case for supporting the National Gallery staff has been made powerfully elsewhere in the Guardian. But I have some questions.

First, how is the union’s avowed desire to “defend the functions of a national institution”, in Serwotka’s words, served by closing many of its galleries to visitors for 52 days so far, with worse disruption to come? It’s nonsense to claim the staff are putting the art first if they stop people from seeing it. The visitors being affected are kids in the summer holidays, as well as visitors who come from all over Britain and the world – a lot of ordinary people being denied the chance to see great art.

Perhaps the management of the National Gallery really are savage neoliberal ideologues, but when I meet them they mostly seem to be learned people who love art. It’s hard to believe their greatest ambition is to grind down the workers.

Could it possibly be that the real ideologue here is not Nicholas Penny, the retiring National Gallery director who writes books about Raphael, but Mark Serwotka, the avowedly politicised union leader who speaks alongside Corbyn?

Let’s face it, the National Gallery is a soft target. Its rooms full of old oil paintings strike many on the left as the stuff of posh upper-class art – even though it has a long tradition of being free to everyone. The crass philistinism that sees Renaissance art as toffs’ culture is inclined to side unthinkingly with closing down rooms and rooms of great paintings. If it were Tate Modern, many on the left might look harder at this dispute.

Is the National Gallery really the worst employer, the most extreme provocation, among all the public service contexts in which PCS members work? I can’t help suspecting it is much easier to pick a fight with this gentle temple of the arts than it would be with government departments and the civil services.

I don’t think this is just a struggle for rights. I think it is a chance for Serwotka’s union to throw its weight about. I didn’t think that before the election, but I seriously suspect it now that anti-austerity ideologues in the trade union movement are about to put the Labour party out of power for much of my lifetime and all of my daughter’s youth.

Whose side am I on? Not Mark Serwotka’s. Go on, call me a Tory. I am crying because the hard left is probably going to turn me into one.