How Miliband called McCluskey's bluff

If Len McCluskey were an investment banker, he surely would have been fired a long time ago. Instead, his position as general secretary of the Unite union is secure even though the return on capital invested in Labour leader Ed Miliband is beyond measurement because it’s so low.

Tomorrow, McCluskey and fellow union bureaucrats from affiliated unions will, not unlike turkeys at Christmas, vote for their own slaughter at the hands of Miliband and his party leadership.

Miliband will formally complete a process of “reform” – was ever a word so misused – in party structures that began in the early 1990s, and carried on by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they got the unions to vote to abandon the socialist Clause 4 of the constitution.

This time Miliband has gone when even Blair feared to tread. Out goes the historic links by which members of affiliated unions had a portion of their subs handed over to Labour. Out goes the way Labour leaders are elected, with the unions having a substantial say through a ballot of members.

Out goes the collective and in comes individualism. Margaret Thatcher would be the first to applaud, especially as Miliband gave her a glowing reference recently.

Labour’s national executive confirmed the plans earlier this month with only two votes against. Tomorrow, a special half-day conference will rubber stamp the proposals. After the Nec, one shadow cabinet member is reported as saying:

"At the start, the unions were shocked, but in the end the unions had no option. Ed Miliband was their choice for leader and he wanted these reforms and, 18 months out from an election, they could not defeat him. Unite may be in a different place, but Falkirk [the constituency troubled by a selection row] meant it was impossible for them to lead a rebellion. They feel they have done nothing and are badly bruised.”

McCluskey, in particular, has egg all over his face. Miliband was his choice as leader and in return he has been humiliated. In a belated attempt to recover some poise, McCluskey is now threatening to cut his union’s affiliation fees by £1.5 million because a poll shows that only 40% of Unite’s members vote Labour.

He said: "I know there are some people internally in the Labour party that are beginning to panic because of what we are considering. I am not sure why because it was self-evident from last summer when Ed Miliband made his proposals that there would be consequences. I said that having been challenged by Ed to consider the status quo, I suddenly felt it was untenable. We have one million members paying into the political fund and affiliate the full one million members to the party…. Looking at it, I thought it was difficult to justify even from a moral standpoint".

Last October, the company that owns the Grangemouth petrochemical plant threatened to pull out unless the union agreed to new harsh terms and conditions. McCluskey’s bluff was called and he rushed up to Scotland to overrule local officials and impose a shocking deal on his members.

So perhaps Miliband knows that the Unite union leader is mostly bluster and that when push comes to shove, McCluskey will not rock the boat with just over a year to the general election. In any case, McCluskey has said: “Even if we reduce our affiliations we can still give direct donations to the national Labour Party".

The truth is that investment in Miliband has produced precious little for Unite and its members. One Nation Labour as it prefers to be called as it careers further and further into naked populism, is pledged to uphold austerity and ConDem spending cuts, a public sector wage freeze and to retain markets in the NHS and other services.

Vote for that? You have to be joking!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Unite leaders pin their hopes on Miliband instead of fighting back

To engage in a battle with employers which then ends in defeat or a setback is no disgrace. To run up the white flag at the first whiff of grapeshot is shameful, however hard Unite leader Len McCluskey is trying to spin the Grangemouth debacle.

Stung by references to “capitulation” in the media, the Unite general secretary has used both the Guardian and the Financial Times this week to try and regain some credibility as a militant trade union leader. What happened, however, amounts to the most serious setback for trade unionism in recent times.

The facts are indisputable. Ineos demanded that the Grangemouth workforce accept substantially reduced conditions. A ballot showed a majority of the workforce against the terms and willing to fight. The employers then threatened to close the petrochemicals plant and review the future of the refinery. Both are at the heart of the Scottish economy.

Alarm bells rang at the Unite HQ in London. McCluskey flew up to Scotland and within hours had signed the surrender terms unconditionally. Pay is to be frozen for three years, pensions will be reduced, a no-strike pledge was given and the position of convenor was to be abolished. A few days later, the convenor Stevie Deans, Unite’s branch secretary, resigned before he was sacked over alleged political activities on company time.

In his Guardian article, McCluskey says that what happened at Grangemouth “shines a vivid light on the nature of power in our society today”. He adds: “The central message is clear – the rights of private ownership are unchallengeable, even in a vital economic sector like energy, and the ability of the capitalist to hold workforce and community to ransom is undiluted.”

But with all due respects to the leader of Britain’s biggest trade union, this could have been written at the beginning of the 19^th century. That’s been the nature of the industrial class struggle since the early confrontations. Then, as today, effective strike action was illegal. Then, as today, the employers had the state and the political class on their side.

Of course, some employers are more ruthless than others in pursuit of profit. And at a time of global recession, the bosses are on the offensive to drive down costs, which is what happened at Grangemouth. Jim Ratcliffe, chairman and majority owner of the Ineos chemicals group doesn’t disguise his objectives in this regard.

In the Financial Times today, McCluskey warns others employers that Unite would not be “cowed” by its defeat at Grangemouth and would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with any workforces who were mistreated. But is this anything more than sheer bluster?

The Grangemouth workforce was prepared to fight. If the union leaders had prepared one, they would have taken part. An occupation against closure would have rallied workers throughout Britain. No such plans were contemplated, unfortunately.

McCluskey bemoans the existence of draconian anti-union laws. These were introduced by the Thatcher governments and retained by the subsequent Blair-Brown governments. But why not defy them? It’s been done before – successfully. In the early 1970s, the engineers’ union – now part of Unite – simply ignored the anti-union laws brought in by the Heath government. Discredited, they were repealed by a Labour government soon after.

Four decades later, McCluskey is pinning his hopes on a Miliband government coming to the rescue. But Miliband is pursuing another path. Firstly, he is using the Falkirk candidate selection shambles – which Deans and Unite were heavily involved in – to review the party’s links with the trade unions.

There’s absolutely no way that Miliband and his One Nation Labour populist party are going to curb the power of the employers like Ineos. Miliband, like the Westminster and Edinburgh governments, were on the side of the employers at Grangemouth and against strike action. The global corporations hold the whip hand and Miliband’s ambitions are limited to making capitalist markets work better!

The six million union members and their families are bearing the brunt of the ConDems’ austerity policies. For that to change, they’ll need leaders who will put their money where their mouth is.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor 

Grangemouth workers hung out to dry by Unite and SNP

The fate of jobs at the Grangemouth petrochemical plant now lies solely in the hands of a ruthless corporation that buys firms and then drives them back into profit at the expense of their workers’ wages and benefits.

The 1,800 Grangemouth workers have found that neither the Unite union leaders, who they pay for, nor Labour or SNP representatives they voted for, would stand with them, if they decided to mobilise a real fight against Ineos. In an amazing display of solidarity and determination, the majority of the Unite members had  voted to strike and reject the company’s blackmail.

But within hours of their vote on Wednesday, the message from all sides was that there was no alternative to accepting destruction of living standards and the pensions of any future workers. A media outcry held the workers responsible for the fate of the 10,000 related jobs in the local area.

So yesterday, their union leaders simply caved in. Unite general secretary Len McCluskey left earlier negotiations up to local officials but hurried up from London to capitulate in person. Within hours he had unreservedly accepted the company’s terms, “warts and all”. Shocking but true.

McCluskey has breathed fire and brimstone since the ConDems coalition took power, threatening strikes, civil disobedience, even a general strike against austerity, the public sector wage freeze and pension curbs. When it came to the crunch, he had no fight. Hot air and nothing more.

Later today it will be discovered whether this treachery is enough to keep the plant open or if in reality the company never had any intention of staying their hand. The closure of the petrochemical plant at Grangemouth would reduce global capacity and drive up prices to the benefit of Ineos plants elsewhere.

And that's the big lesson. When it comes down to it, the corporations make decisions on the basis of their own business plans, on the grounds of costs, shareholder value and profits. And so who holds the power?

The Scottish SNP government lined up with the Westminster government to demand that the Grangemouth workers accept the inevitable. First minister Alex Salmond was in talks begging Ineos not to close the plant. Finance minister John Swinney, the great champion of an oil-based independent economy, stood shoulder to shoulder with ConDem Scottish secretary Alistair Carmichael.

SNP claims that a capitalist Scotland would be in some way better for Scottish workers have been exploded. Ineos, like all Scotland's key industries from oil to whisky, is not "Scottish". They are run by freebooting global capitalist transnationals with no care for local conditions, except where they impact on profits.

The adjacent oil refinery, whose waste product is processed at the threatened plant, is owned by Petroineos, a refining and trading joint venture between Ineos and the Chinese government-owned PetroChina. Its other refinery is at Lavera, near Marseilles.

As the recession continues and fracking throws more cheap US coal and gas on to the world market, who knows what will happen to the offshore oil refining business. There is no such thing as security for workers, whatever the status of their country's governance.

The Unite members were ready to fight and their union could have organised an occupation to prevent the dismemberment of the plant, but they did not and will not. Independence will not change that.

Those who limit their vision for the future to achieving a "Yes" vote in the 2014 referendum have missed the point. Independence and self-determination should not be reduced to whether a Scottish elite should be in charge of a capitalist Scotland.

It has to be about acquiring a revolutionary independence, forging a new solidarity across the UK and Ireland, based on the struggle for a democratic state, for the socialisation of Scotland’s resources, for a new commons. That would provide a platform for a sustainable energy strategy that protects both jobs and the environment.

Penny Cole

He who pays the piper doesn't always call the tune

The unseemly row between the Unite trade union and Labour over the selection of a parliamentary candidate could bring to a head the increasingly frosty relationship between the party and its single biggest funder.

Unite contributes around a quarter of Labour’s funds but is getting precious little return on capital invested. Although Unite was a key financier and organiser of Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign after the 2010 election defeat, its influence has, if anything, diminished since.

Miliband has backed the ConDems’ public sector pay freeze, insisted that Labour councils carry out austerity-driven cuts, refused to back strike action over pensions and declined to oppose a raft of government anti-union policies. Now Labour is committed to the coalition’s 2015-16 spending cuts as well.

Not much for Unite general secretary Len McCluskey to cheer about there!

So the union has turned its attention to the constituency parties in a bid to regain some clout. The Farkirk by-election in Scotland led to a massive recruitment campaign by Unite in an attempt to get their preferred choice, Karie Murphy, adopted as the candidate.

But Unite’s organisers got a little too enthusiastic, it appears, and the whole selection process was halted by Labour headquarters as a result of alleged malpractice in the selection process. Clearly, the finger was pointed at Unite. The constituency party is now under “special measures”, that is under the control of HQ.

This is not what McCluskey anticipated. He surely hoped that his close friend Tom Watson, former hatchet man for Gordon Brown and now Labour’s campaign co-ordinator under Miliband, would get it sorted and land Murphy the relatively safe seat.

So what next for McCluskey and Unite? A couple of weeks ago, McCluskey threatened to make Britain “ungovernable” through strikes and civil disobedience in response to the ConDems’ draconian attacks on jobs, welfare, the NHS and services carried out in the name of austerity.

Miliband must be appalled, although it has to be said McCluskey’s bark is, so far, worse than his bite. Labour is desperately trying to distance itself from Tory accusations that the unions call the party’s tune (were that true!). Labour wants a period of social peace before the general election scheduled for 2015.

Enter Kim Howells, former Blairite minister who was also an official in the mineworkers’ union during their 1985-6 strike for jobs. At that time, Howells was a member of the Communist Party and encouraged a return to work against the policy of the national leadership. Not long after, surprise surprise, he was a Labour MP.

Howells over the weekend described the unions as an “interest group” and said the whole “reputation of the Labour Party” was at stake over the Falkirk row. He told the BBC that it was "absolutely crazy" to let unions pay the party membership fees of their members. Howells is stirring the row quite deliberately.

In the end, however, would it matter if Unite got one of their own into parliament? Not really. Labour from its formation has b een wedded to capitalism and to directing the trade unions to seeking redress through parliament. For guidance on this issue, you can do worse than look to Ralph Miliband, the father of the present leader.

In 1960, he published his book Parliamentary Socialism, which is a study “in the politics of Labour” from its beginning right through to the post-war period. He writes:

The Labour Party has not only been a parliamentary party; it has been a party deeply imbued by parliamentarism. And in this respect, there is no distinction to be made between Labour’s political and its industrial leaders. Both have been equally determined that the Labour Party should not stray from the narrow path of parliamentary politics.

Now, of course, even parliamentarism has run its course. Corporate-driven globalisation has seen to that. We have a corporatocracy in all but name. That’s why Ed Miliband has reduced Labour to the party of “responsible capitalism”.

So Brother McCluskey, he who pays the piper does not always call the tune. Over to you.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

McCluskey lets Miliband off the hook

What are we to make of the spat between Len McCluskey, the leader of Britain’s biggest union and Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party who in large measures owes his very position to the man he has publicly castigated?

McCluskey wants Miliband to rid his leadership of three Blairite members of the shadow cabinet or risk losing the next election. For his part, Miliband has attacked McCluskey for a “reprehensible” attempt to divide the Labour and of being “disloyal” to the party.

Wary of attempts by the right-wing press to portray him as a creature of the unions, a spokesman for Miliband added for good measure that McCluskey "does not speak for the Labour Party".

The charge sheet against McCluskey was further extended to accuse him of advocating “the kind of politics that lost Labour many elections in the 1980s”. Considering that McCluskey’s Unite provides 20% of the funding for Labour, it’s a high-risk quarrel.

Miliband is surely aware, however, that McCluskey is unlikely to turn his words into actions anytime soon. And here’s where McCluskey is somewhat disingenuous. In his interview with the New Statesman, McCluskey says his recent re-election as general secretary means the union will be checking up on Labour up to after the next election.

But when McCluskey suggests Miliband must spending many an hour worrying about how to neuter the influence of the Blairites, he has got it 100% wrong. Miliband, it is true, has tried to distance himself a little from the Blair-Brown governments, of which he was a member. But in essence, Miliband is no different in outlook.

Under his leadership, Labour has adopted policies and attitudes which Unite is actually opposed to. These include the acceptance of the ConDems’ public sector pay freeze, cuts in services and jobs at local government level, opposition to strike action in defence of pensions, etc. etc. etc.

As Miliband’s statement says, he believes McCluskey is advocating the politics of the 1980s, which Labour has rejected. Instead, Miliband has embraced “responsible capitalism” as a goal, pre-distribution rather than redistribution (I’ll leave you to ponder that one), workfare and reducing the national debt. He is also vying with Ukip and the Tories to adopt anti-immigration postures and has no plans to end the role of the markets in public services and the NHS.

This is Blairism Mark II, the hunt for the so-called “centre ground” in British politics, which is now overcrowded with politicians from the all the mainstream parties putting forward more or less the same policies.

McCluskey must know this. Indeed, he refers to the dangers of Miliband going into an election with “austerity-lite” policies. But by choosing to attack Blairites like Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy and Liam Byrne, he evades the reality of Miliband’s own leadership and what Labour has irrefutably become.

McCluskey claims that Labour is “at a crossroads” when in fact it passed them a long time ago. Neoliberalism isn’t, whatever McCluskey might suggest, a product of Blairism. Rather, it was the other way round. Blair, like Thatcher before him, responded to the changes in the capitalist system.

Globalisation demanded deregulation and open markets. States and governments fell into line because, ultimately, they serve the same master – the bottom line. The era that went before – top-down state ownership, heavy bureaucracy, capital controls, regulation etc – was swept aside and cannot be reproduced.

Miliband is no fool and he knows this. Having seen what’s happened to Francois Hollande across the Channel, where attempts to rein in capitalism have floundered, Miliband is not about to go down the same path. So when McCluskey says that if Labour fails to emerge as “the authentic voice of ordinary working people” his union would reconsider its position, he is a long way behind what’s already happened.

Unite stumped up the cash to get Miliband elected ahead of his brother after the last election. The political return on capital invested is so negligible that his membership must wonder why they continue to fund Labour. McCluskey is undoubtedly feeling the pressure from his rank-and-file. That’s why he’s spoken out. Now he owes them a debate about where their money goes right now, not at some distant point in the future.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

McCluskey's sleight of hand is cover for Miliband

Go and read Len McCluskey’s lecture at the London School of Economics. It was tremendous and a breath of fresh air, I was told. So I did. Was I disappointed? Not really, because my expectations were not all that high to start with.

McCluskey has always talked a good talk, telling committed socialists what they want to hear.. The rhetoric, the references to Marx, are all well and good. In practice, however, his leadership of Britain’s biggest union Unite is never as half as committed.

Unite has blocked any suggestion, for example, that Labour councillors should refuse to implement Tory-driven budget cuts. The union leadership short-circuited resistance to ConDem pension attacks and eventually signed on the dotted line.

Ultimately, as we will see, McCluskey’s hopes rest with Ed Miliband. In that he is not alone, of course. There are plenty on the left who believe Miliband is some kind of “open book” who will somehow represent the interests of working people if he becomes prime minister.

McCluskey’s address, “A working class politics for the 21st century”, was delivered as the Ralph Miliband lecture at the LSE. The father of Ed and David was regarded as a Marxist and wrote critiques of Labour and reformism in books like Parliamentary socialism.  

The irony was not lost on McCluskey who noted: “ Indeed, it is sometimes said that there is a common thread linking the generations of Milibands – the father spent his life trying to convince our movement that there was no possibility of a parliamentary road to socialism, while his sons have been loyally putting theory into practice, and proving Ralph right!”
 
McCluskey gave a swift overview of the historic role played by the organised working class through its trade unions in fighting for democracy, creating a welfare state and establishing a political voice by “influencing government through the Labour Party”. 

When it came to contemporary history, he was on much shakier ground. The weakening of the trade unions was part of the “neo-liberal offensive” which began in the mid-1970s, he claimed. While this is true, McCluskey’s view that this was “not mainly about economics” is plainly wrong. The mid-1970s signalled the end of consensus politics because the post-war international economic framework collapsed in a heap.

The offensive against the working class was driven by this crisis. It was not, as he suggests, that the ruling élites woke up one day and decided that the trade unions had become too strong. While McCluskey frequently uses the term capitalism in his lecture, the concept of globalisation is totally absent.

Yet it is the emergence of a globalised capitalism, with its tremendous hold over nation states, governments and international institutions, that is the real game changer. McCluskey’s view that the offensive was “about restoring what our rulers regarded as the proper social hierarchy, including getting the working-class out of politics”, he is referring to the consequences rather than the cause.

In his lecture, McCluskey spelled out innovative ways that the unions could rebuild their membership and the role they could play in uniting communities against austerity. He praised Ukuncut and other grass roots movements that have exposed inequality and tax avoidance. McCluskey noted the growing anger at local level against the cuts.

But what, you may ask, is this all for. McCluskey told his audience: “So my message to capitalism – if you can send a message to a system – is this:  Mend your ways or risk mounting social breakdown and disorder.”

And who will do the “mending”? For McCluskey, “Labour is the natural, historic, vehicle” for the working class. And here’s the ultimate sleight of hand. McCluskey said that if “in the future” [emphasis added] there is any return to the “discredited recipes of Blairism”, then the Labour Party will be over for him and others.

The fact that all the evidence points says this is already the case. Miliband’s espousal of pseudo-Tory “One Nation” politics, his support for a pubic sector wage freeze, his opposition to strikes, the Labour leader’s commitment to reducing the deficit through cuts,  the espousal of “responsible capitalism”, the backing for the end of universal benefits etc etc – tells its own story.

It was one that McCluskey had nothing to say about.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor 

Rhetoric and reality in TUC strike vote

The leaders of the Trades Union Congress will need to match rhetoric with deeds for a change if we are to take seriously the unanimous vote yesterday for co-ordinated strike action by public sector workers over pay and spending cuts.

Unfortunately, the experience of the last few years is not a promising indicator of great things to come from the leaders of Unison, the GMB and Unite, the major unions in the sector.

Take the daylight pensions robbery carried out by the ConDem government. Despite the heroic efforts of the civil servants PCS union to sustain co-ordinated strike action, they were essentially left to fight alone. As a result, the Coalition has more or less had its way, imposing higher contributions and reducing benefits.

Or the spending cuts, which have led to thousands of redundancies at local councils together with eliminated or poorer services to the public. Where were the leaders of Unison and the GMB when this was happening? In practice, nowhere to be seen. One of the consequences is a further slump in trade union membership to under six million.

Local activists found it impossible to get sanctions for strike ballots to defend jobs and services, carried out in the main by Labour councils acting as agents for the Tory-led central government.

                             

Where the odd Labour councillor refused to back cuts budgets, they faced disciplinary action. The notorious treatment of Kingsley Abrams in Lambeth is a case in point. He was thrown out of the Labour Group for opposing the cuts, which was bad enough.

It gets worse. Recently no less a person than Len McCluskey, Unite’s general secretary openly attacked Abrams at the union’s executive council. He told Abrams to bury his differences and get himself back into the Lambeth Labour Group. Shocking but true. 

Perhaps the best opportunity the trade union movement had in the past year was to mobilise in defence of the National Health Service, which the ConDems carved up by extending the market right into its heart. Apart from some website campaigning, there was no significant action.

As for opposition to the government-imposed public sector pay freeze, it has been non-existent.

So the auguries are not good. With 80% of the cuts yet to be implemented, food prices starting to rise, energy costs on the increase and rail fares due to shoot up in January, the prospect for low-paid public sector workers is for living standards to fall even faster.

That anger, not of overpaid, well-fed bureaucrats but of the rank and file, was reflected in yesterday’s vote at the annual conference in Brighton.

Now the manoeuvring begins. Despite a plea from PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka for early action “before it’s too late” to start after the October 20 TUC march, the earliest strike action will take place will be spring 2013.

The TUC leaders are using the threat of strikes in an effort to make the ConDems “change course” and abandon the 1% pay cap set for 2013-14 and the year after. But they must surely know that’s not going to happen.

Nor will the trade union movement get the backing of Labour leader Ed Miliband, despite spending millions to get him elected over his brother. Labour backs the government’s pay policy and Miliband told a TUC dinner that strikes were not the answer.

The worst thing would be for the TUC leaders to fritter away trade unionists’ resolve with half-baked actions that are essentially protest strikes which the government then simply ignores because they are not a serious threat.

Yet the ConDems are weak, kept in office by a feeble Labour Party that is for “responsible capitalism” and something weird called “predistribution”, as well as union bureaucrats who won’t commit to all-out action.

The rank and file has to be extra vigilant in relation to union leaders this coming winter and also be prepared to organise independently in local assemblies to bring together all sections hit by unemployment, inflation and service cuts. A key aim of assemblies would  be to get rid of the Coalition and develop real  political strategies and economic alternatives to a catastrophic capitalist system.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

'Big Bang' moment will shatter NHS

Even as the bill dismantling the health service completes its journey into law, older people in care homes have already been abandoned in a foretaste of what’s to come.

There are 376,250 older people living in 10,331 care homes in England and many are frail and vulnerable, with more health needs than most of the population. Around 40% have dementia, many are on cocktails of medication, and the average lifespan in a care home is one to two years.

The residents needed a whole range of medical services, including mental health teams, dietetics, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, podiatry, continence, falls and tissue viability (dealing with wounds, pressure sores and ulcers). Yet only four out of ten soon-to-be abolished primary care trusts (PCTs) make these available to care home residents.

In place of the ineffective PCTs is, however, a new system of commissioning that will put price competition with the corporate sector at the heart of deciding what patients will get. This will tear the heart out of an NHS already ravaged by budget cuts, dodgy “private-finance initiative” deals and the conversion of hospitals into business trusts by New Labour.

Opposition to the ConDems bill even forced its way into the discussion at the Bath Festival of Literature, when leading health academics Colin Leys and Allyson Pollock issued a rallying call to everyone who wants to save the NHS.

"This Bill will destroy the NHS," said Pollock, London University professor of Health Policy and Health Services Research. "If you care for the future, you need to focus now on stopping the Bill. This is a terrifying, Big-Bang moment, because Lansley and his team are moving us to a mixed-financing system similar to that in the US."

Leys forecast that "it will be the end of free care for all". The future he foresaw would be one in which "community care will contract and decline, everyone who can afford to will go private and all we'll be left with is a much-reduced service for the poor".

Today sees two separate rallies in Central Hall Westminster organised by the union Unite and the TUC. But you’d hardly know it. The TUC clearly doesn’t want and isn’t expecting many to turn up. It’s webpage for the event says “Places at the London event will be limited due to seating capacity”. The TUC and Unite and clearly of one mind. Unite’s transport details list consists of one coach each from Southampton, Oxford and Bristol. And that’s it.

Why is the organised opposition so muted? Answer? They simply don’t have an alternative. The not-so-stirring right-to-know demand to publish the Department of Health’s risk register into the impact of the health Bill on services, from Len McCluskey, Unite’s general secretary is about as far as it goes.

Just as on the pensions fight, the continuing wage freeze, public sector job and services cuts and every other reactionary ConDems policy, the union leaders have led one retreat after another. McCluskey’s call for civil disobedience and strikes during the London Olympics is just bluff and bluster to disguise the rout.

There is absolutely overwhelming opposition to the NHS bill, even among Tory supporters. A mass campaign of strikes, sit-ins, marches and rallies should have been organised with the aim of bringing down the government. But compromised by years of watching Labour governments undermine the NHS, and warned off confrontation by Ed Miliband, the TUC has organised a rally just as the bill is about to become law.

The fight to defend the NHS will take something quite different from the approach of the hardly-organised ranks of the opposition. Taking profit-hungry corporations into social ownership will be high on the list of tasks for a new democratic network of Peoples’ Assemblies.

Gerry Gold

They are all in it together!

The evidence of Labour’s collusion with the ConDem coalition has piled up so high that even Len McCluskey, the leader of the Unite union, can no longer ignore it. “The real points of differentiation between Labour and the government on the economy are now very hard to identify,” he admits today.

McCluskey’s union propelled Ed Miliband into the leadership in the vain hope that he would lead the party in a new direction, away from the Blairism of the previous 15 years towards a modernised version of Old Labour.

With shadow cabinet members lining up to support the government’s public sector pay freeze, cuts in education and saying that a Labour government would continue with the ConDems’ austerity policies, a shell-shocked McCluskey hit back – at least in words.

Writing in The Guardian, he says that “this year we have seen one shadow minister after another falling over themselves to endorse savage spending cuts which are hurting real people. Where does this leave the half a million people who joined the TUC's march for an alternative last year, and the half of the country at least who are against the cuts? Disenfranchised.”

The general secretary of Britain’s largest union, whose financial support keeps Labour afloat, says the country now has a “national government” consensus among the three major parliamentary parties. McCluskey tries, without success, to paint a picture of Miliband as a prisoner of the Blairites.

He claims that shadow chancellor Ed Balls's “sudden embrace of austerity and the public-sector pay squeeze” represents a victory for “discredited Blairism” and also “challenges the whole course Ed Miliband has set for the party, and perhaps his leadership itself”. This is desperate stuff.

Miliband has actually set the course himself. His front bench has backed many Tory policies and Miliband himself has declared that his policy is to build a fairer, more responsible, prosperous capitalism. It’s an approach that David Cameron himself has embraced enthusiastically if opportunistically.

The Labour leader attacked the mass strikes in defence of public sector pensions and instructed party-controlled councils to implement spending cuts passed down from the ConDem coalition (a policy backed by Labour-affiliated unions, by the way).

Blairism was an outright adaptation to and acceptance of capitalism and the power of financial markets. It marked the termination of the long social-democratic, reformist tradition in Labour politics, no longer viable within a globalised capitalist economy.

With the world economy in a profound crisis, Labour – along with similar parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal etc – has bent with the prevailing economic wind. It was either that or challenging the fundamentals of the capitalist system itself. Anyone expecting the latter to happen, whoever leads Labour, is living in a fool’s paradise.

McCluskey is also angry, rightly so, that as one of the party’s paymasters, he was not asked about the shift that has taken Labour into the arms of the ConDem coalition.Naturally, he has a remedy to hand if he serious about representing his members’ interests.

He could call a ballot on the case for disaffiliating from a party that clearly speaks for big business, the City and the bond dealers. As his members are, as he points out, disenfranchised, McCluskey could generate a discussion on how trade unionists and their supporters could be better served.

Unfortunately, there is no sign of that happening. McCluskey is desperate to keep the political fight inside a party that is now part of a national coalition against ordinary working people. This is, in practice, a great disservice to Unite members who will no doubt draw their own conclusions when they fight the ConDemLab pay freeze.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Pension strikers should go beyond resistance

Whatever the Murdoch press may say ("Union leaders are off their heads" – The Sun) it is pressure from members, rather than the not-so-steely resolve of union bosses, that forced the TUC to act over pensions.

Finally, they had to do something to express the anger of public sector workers whose living standards have been cut to the bone and who have seen jobs cut by 110,000 in less than a year, with more to come.

Workers from 14 unions – including local government workers, nurses, care workers, civil servants, teachers, prison officers and firefighters – are planning co-ordinated action on pensions in the biggest joint union mobilisation since the "winter of discontent" in 1978/79.

Actions will range from a one-day strike on November 30, involving around 3 million people, to lunchtime meetings, rallies and joint events with community groups, service users and private sector workers.

Throughout New Labour, the major unions convinced members to accept sub-inflation pay rises, making many reliant on tax credits – which have now been cut. They stood by while services were contracted out, and both the public and private sectors cut pensions for new entrants.

Even now, union bosses pray the Coalition government will save them from acting. Unite general secretary Len McCluskey said: "Hopefully the government will see the anger and perhaps take a step back, be a little bit more flexible and less intransigent."

He wishes! But there IS no flexibility and the government is ENTIRELY intransigent. The attack on pensions is driven by the economic and financial crisis. Without cutting pensions the Coalition can't eliminate the deficit.

And as this bankers' government knows, the market will punish any country going soft on cuts. Nick Clegg explained: "Markets have stopped believing that all European governments can service their debts. We simply cannot afford to let that happen to us too."

As the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, Patrick Roach, said: "The attack on pensions is only one element of the assault on ordinary working people, on the public sector and on the welfare state. Be in no doubt – we are in the midst of a perfect storm. A perfect storm of assaults on pay, on jobs, on rights at work, as well as on pensions."

But the lesson from the perfect storms in Greece, Ireland and Italy is that one-day strikes do not force governments caught in the gravest global crisis in capitalism’s history to change course. The big question is what follows?

Why wait for negotiations which are a total fraud? Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander, announced the detail of the pension cuts back in June and nothing has changed since then.

If ever there was a time to defy the anti-union laws, it is now. Ballots are costly, time-consuming, open to endless legal challenges and give the government and their pet media in the BBC and newspapers, the initiative.

Better to just call members out now and save the cash for strike pay. All the unions, including those like the rail union RMT who are not directly involved, should call an indefinite strike to bring down the Coalition.

RMT leader Bob Crow told the TUC Congress that forms of civil disobedience beyond strikes would be necessary, uniting unions with others fighting to defend jobs and services. This is good but cannot be more protest.

At the end of the day, we need to find a way to go BEYOND resistance to a political solution. Otherwise what are we fighting for? To put a Milliband-led Labour, pro-capitalist government in office? No thank you!

This solution can be developed in the course of building People's Assemblies in every community, where union members unite with others – especially those in the private sector – not only to co-ordinate support for strikes and other actions, but also start building an alternative democracy.

Rejecting a state committed to the power of banks and corporations, they can plan a transfer of economic and political power into the hands of the people. Looked at in this way, November 30 can be a springboard to a real social transformation.

Penny Cole

Don't let capitalism off the hook

Embarrassed by the vitality and determination of the student movement against higher tuition fees, some trade union leaders are making militant noises about co-ordinated strike action against the government’s spending cuts. Whether words become deeds is debatable.

Len McCluskey, the new general secretary of Unite, Britain’s largest union, has written in The Guardian that trade unions ought to be “preparing for battle” and should not let the anti-union laws paralyse them in the face of the cuts onslaught.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC), says McCluskey, will meet early in 2011 to discuss “co-ordinated industrial action and to analyse the possibilities and opportunities for a broad strike movement.” But before anyone gets too excited, let’s examine what is happening on the ground.

Yesterday, the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber and union leaders met David Cameron for mince pies and tea at Downing Street at their request. Afterwards, Barber would only say that they had warned Cameron of the consequences of the deficit-reduction plan, as if the prime minister didn’t know already. Only Bob Crow, leader of the RMT transport union, voiced support for McCluskey.

McCluskey, whose union’s endorsement was critical in getting Ed Miliband elected as Labour’s new leader, criticised the party’s front bench for meeting the Tory cuts programme halfway. Somehow he managed to excuse Miliband himself, although the Labour leader accepts that the budget deficit should be reduced. He simply wants the Coalition to move more slowly.

While Miliband quickly distanced himself from McCluskey’s support for strike action – showing that he who pays the piper doesn’t necessarily call the tune – in practice they agree in one key area. Labour-controlled local councils are busily preparing to make substantial cuts. Some like Lewisham have started implementing them already.

Instead of demanding that Labour councils refuse to draw up cuts budgets for 2011-12 based on substantial reductions in central government grant, McCluskey only says they should not be blamed “for the problem” because to do so is a “shortcut to splitting our movement”.

No-one is actually blaming them for the crisis. But local trade unionists rightly are demanding that Labour councils refuse to make the cuts as a matter of principle. Work on drawing up the budgets will begin immediately after the holiday season is over, with a view to getting them through the council by early March.

The TUC demonstration against spending cuts scheduled for March 26 will, therefore, be too late to save tens of thousands of jobs and services from the axe. Conflict between workers and Labour councils is inevitable in the next few months and trade unionists will want to know why McCluskey has nothing to say on this issue.

There is also meeting of minds between McCluskey and Barber on the ground of economic illiteracy. Both insist that the cuts are purely “ideologically driven”, being simply an attempt to destroy public services and the welfare state and are, therefore, totally unnecessary. If only it were that simple.

As we show in our downloadable Beyond Resistance booklet, the cuts are “ideological” only in the sense that capitalist governments are motivated to do everything they can to sustain the profit system. Britain’s budget deficit is part of the same global debt crisis that brought down the banks.

Deficits are a clear and present danger in so far as both governments and the financial markets are concerned. More to the point Barber and McCluskey cannot explain, for example, why parties in Greece, Spain and Portugal who call themselves socialist, have implemented massive cuts and faced down a series of general strikes.

Contrary to what McCluskey and Barber think, economic growth and tax justice is not an alternative to the cuts and lets capitalism off the hook. For any strike action to be effective, is will have to be part of a wider movement to bring down the Coalition while working up plans to replace the present madhouse with a not-for-profit economic and financial model. In other words, we need an ideologically-driven struggle against capitalism itself.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Resistance must go beyond opposition

The question of how to stop the Con-Dem government’s programme of cuts lay on the table, but remained unresolved at the massively attended Coalition of Resistance conference in London on Saturday.

Around 1,300 people from around the country thronged in and out of the overflowing conference hall to hear dozens of speakers in different parts of the building and nearby halls.

The opening plenary featured school students and heard the newly-elected UNITE leader Len McCluskey leader of Britain’s biggest trade union. McCluskey pointedly ignored calls by Bob Crow of the transport union RMT and Mark Serwotka of the PCS civil service union, who spoke in favour of co-ordinated strikes.

Earlier last week, McCluskey breathed fiery words calling for "an alliance of resistance" he claimed would “rock the establishment” and force the Con-Dem government to step back from its plans to "decimate the very fabric of the welfare state".
But, adhering to the Coalition of Resistance’s founding statement, which talks only of general “opposition” to cuts, the notion of taking effective action to disrupt the state’s plans, was not part of his script.

CoR co-founder former NATFHE General Secretary Paul Mackney said it was in transition from being a pressure group to becoming a mass movement. Its success, he said, will be measured not by “programmatic elegance but by the breadth of the movement” – implying that united action was everything and clarity of purpose unimportant.

There were a few references to the raging crisis in Ireland which brought together EU finance ministers in an emergency summit in Brussels yesterday. But in practice, participants struggled to go beyond the low-levels aims set out in the CoR’s founding documents. From the platform, there was a studious avoidance of using the “capitalism” and “crisis” in the same sentence.

In the “analysing the crisis” debate, a wide range of people discussed the nature of the crisis: was it only financial, was it deeper, was it systemic? Keynesian and Old Labour solutions such as increased state spending, more taxation flew thick and fast as did proposals for various levels of protest up to and including General Strike. Film maker Ken Loach, who denounced the trade union leaders and Ed Miliband, was one of the few to point out that there was a crisis of the capitalist system that could not be remedied by policies such as “taxing the rich”.

A group of campaigners from North East England put forward a resolution proposing a “representative structure based on democratically elected representatives from local/regional groups”. In the event, the 120 people were nominated to a national committee due to meet in the coming weeks.

The big turnout and open spirit of the conference, despite its generally limited politics, shows a huge willingness to build a united movement against the government. The ongoing campaign by school students, some of whom will be picketing with rail and tube workers in London today and rallying in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, shows the enormous determination of a new generation not to cave in and to take their struggle to the wire.

They, and millions of working class people who are being offered only mealy-mouthed words by their leaders, are owed a lot more than patronising support. They deserve a real explanation of the crisis and a way out of it that can mount a serious challenge to the bankrupt capitalist system.

The raging debt crisis in Ireland, which on Saturday saw 50,000 people on the streets of Dublin on a bitterly cold day, with their leaders calling for a “campaign of civil disobedience”, was up against the fact that the mainstream opposition parties are signed up to the same cuts as the discredited Fianna Fail-Green government.

Struggles around Europe – from Portugal to Ireland, from students to public sector workers – are up against the same brick wall. The strategy of taking the struggle against the cuts forward to the formation of People’s Assemblies that can become the vehicle for transforming economic and political relations, is the red-hot issue of the day. Come to the December 11 event and start to go beyond resistance.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary