Separating rhetoric from reality over general strike call

Talk of a one-day general strike against ConDem policies is being floated, led by the Unite union. While any action against this most reactionary of governments is to be supported, we need to separate the rhetoric from reality.

Last September, the TUC Congress voted to investigate the legality of a general strike. Most legal opinion indicates that, given the scope of anti-union laws, all-out action would be deemed unlawful and challenged in the courts.

So a general strike would have to be in defiance of the draconian legislation introduced by the Thatcher government and upheld by New Labour. For over 30 years, the trade union bureaucracy has run absolutely scared of the laws that prohibit spontaneous strikes, solidarity action and mass picketing.  

Any defiance wouldn’t, naturally, have the support of Labour, which is heavily dependent on Unite’s money. A Labour spokesman said: “There is no consensus for a general strike across the trade union movement. Strikes should be a last resort, and we are not in favour of a general strike.”

The record of actual resistance to the ConDems’ austerity drive by trade union leaders is poor to non-existent. Apart from the civil servants’ PCS union, whose members are on strike again today, there has been no sustained challenge.

Unite and Unison have constantly thwarted strike plans against cuts in jobs and services at local council level. When the ConDems announced plans to reduce public service pensions, Unison general secretary said he had a “war chest” of £20 million to back strike action. In the end, the government went ahead with its plans with minimal opposition.

In a submission to the TUC, which meets later this month to discuss the issue, Unite says it  believes a 24-hour general strike "would be a landmark in our movement's recovery of its morale, strength and capacity to play a leading part in a society crying out for credible and honourable leadership".

But any general strike – even a one-day protest - is much more than that. It is a challenge to the state and its power, its authority and legitimacy.  

You can be sure that the ConDem coalition will meet any challenge in the spirit of Stanley Baldwin, the Tory prime minister at the time of the historic 1926 general strike. He famously declared: “Constitutional government is being attacked… the General Strike is a challenge to Parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin.”

The TUC had threatened a General Strike as a negotiating tactic to try and prevent a cut in miners’ pay and a lengthening of their working day. But their bluff was called and the strike got under way without any serious preparation.The army and the police were mobilised and strike-breakers recruited.

TUC leaders quickly entered into secret negotiations and the indefinite general strike was called off after nine days, with the miners abandoned to their fate.

In 1926, between 400 and 500 Councils of Action emerged in the course of the general strike. Made up of strikers and their supporters, they took responsibility for co-ordinating the strike, propaganda, communications, transport, entertainment, picketing and the delivery of food. They represented, in effect, the emergence of potentially alternative sites of power to the state at local level.

A showdown is coming with the ConDem government and the state as justified grievances over a pay freeze, spending cuts, the break-up of the NHS and the attack on the welfare state, come together.

Instead of waiting for union leaders to get serious, trade unionists and their supporters ought to prepare for confrontation now. They should create People’s Assemblies in each area, bringing together trade unionists, the unemployed, private sector workers, older people, campaign groups, small businesses, students, black and ethnic minority communities and everyone in the firing line.

Assemblies can do what the union leaders won’t – take seriously the implications of a general strike and the question of who rules Britain. They can plan for a transfer of political and economic power away from a ruinous capitalist elite and their lapdog politicians into the hands of ordinary people. In other words, going beyond resistance.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Relief for the rich but council workers to suffer

Jeremy Hunt’s appearance at the Leveson inquiry yesterday was obviously a good day to bury bad news, and not just on the part of the government. While chancellor Osborne was abandoning plans to limit tax relief on charitable donations, unions were signing off a pensions deal that will leave over a million worse off.

Osborne’s budget U-turn – the third this week – will please those among the super-rich who use donations to charity as a way of reducing their tax liabilities. But for ordinary workers in local government, the opposite was true. They’ll be worse off from 2014.

Unison and the GMB union leaderships have been desperate to avoid a repeat of last November 30’s massive strike against the government’s plans to make public sector staff work longer, pay more and get less on retirement.

Yesterday they agreed a deal with local government employers that includes the ditching of payments linked to final salary. Instead, the scheme will be on the government’s terms, with pensions linked to career average salaries. And adjustments will be made on the base of the CPI inflation index, which is always lower than the RPI index.

The retirement age will be brought into line with the state pension age, which is heading towards 67 and ultimately 68 under Osborne’s plans. While lower-paid workers will pay no more, higher paid staff will face increased contributions in 2014. All in all, the deal is expected to save the state £600 million a year at the expense of working people.

Heather Wakefield, head of local government at Unison, claimed “we have achieved the best possible outcome”. That’s not how the rank-and-file will see it, and a campaign to reject the deal will surely take off.

On the same day, perhaps in return for services rendered to the government, the head of Unison, Dave Prentis, was made a non-executive director of the Bank of England on the recommendation of Osborne himself. Quite rightly, Prentis is considered a safe pair of hands in a crisis and not someone who is going to rock the boat.

In practice, the collusion between big business and the government stretches right round to the trade union bureaucracy. How else to explain why a government which resembles the maiden voyage of the Titanic, and which is despised by the majority of people, is still in office?

In a little over two years, the ConDems have savaged public services, created the conditions for the privatisation of healthcare, undermined state education and sabotaged the welfare state. Yet the resistance from the trade union leaders, with a few honourable exceptions representing civil servants and transport workers, has been reduced to a whimper.

The truth is that the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress are doing everything to avoid a confrontation with the coalition. The last thing Ed Miliband wants is to be propelled into Downing Street on the back of a popular struggle. Miliband knows that a Labour government would be doing more or less the same in response to the  gravest economic crisis since the 1930s.

While Labour, the TUC and the ConDems conduct an elaborate political dance at our expense, the rest of us are effectively disenfranchised by a corporatocracy where big business and the state share the corridors of power. If Leveson has achieved nothing else, his inquiry has made this absolutely apparent for all to see.

When the pomp and pageantry surrounding the unelected, hereditary head of state’s jubilee is over, we will be back in the real, harsh world of inequality, mass unemployment, failing services and declining pensions. And facing the challenge of creating a real political and economic democracy in place of the present façade.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

TUC divides pensions fight

At the first whiff of grapeshot, the right-wing leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), history will show, turned and ran straight into the arms of the ConDem coalition over cuts to public sector pensions.

Yesterday the TUC ruled out any further co-ordinated industrial action along the lines of the November 30 strike which brought two million public sector workers out on to the streets.

A fear of what a repeat of this action could lead to was undoubtedly instrumental in the decision of the TUC’s public sector liaison group to block calls for more strikes and, instead, to seek a deal with the government through further negotiations.

Last year, Derek Prentis, secretary of the million-strong Unison union, was making firebrand speeches at his conference and got the backing to hold a strike ballot. As one suspected, it was hot air and no substance.

Prentis, supported by TUC secretary Brendan Barber, saw November 30 as something to get out of the way before making a deal on the terms set out by the government. This will mean higher contributions, working longer and reduced pensions on retirement.

Other unions, representing another one million teachers, civil servants, local government and health workers, have declined to sign up to the general framework agreement announced by the government just before Christmas.

Most are willing to resume negotiations but one, the civil service PCS union, doesn’t even have that opportunity. It has been excluded from future talks because of its outright rejection of the “agreement”.

PCS's national executive committee yesterday unanimously reaffirmed the rejection of the government’s plans to increase contributions from April, link the retirement age to the state pension which is rising to 68, and impose a switch in indexation that means a cut in the value of pensions of around 15% to 20%.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: "We will continue to call for proper negotiations on the key issues of paying more and working longer for less.” The PCS will try and work separately with other unions holding out to organise more strikes.


Behind the split in union ranks, which will gladden the government no end, is undoubtedly the hand of Labour. The party distanced itself from the November 30 strike and wants no repeat. Prentis, who has refused to support action against spending cuts by local, often Labour-led, councils, would not have needed much persuasion.

It remains to be seen whether other Labour-affiliated unions like Unite take their resistance much further. Don’t put your money on it. Their aim is to wait until the next scheduled general election in 2015 (!) and hope that Labour is re-elected in the forlorn hope of a few favours returned. With Ed Miliband accepting that further spending cuts will have to be made and planning Labour’s very own austerity package, public sector pensions will stay under siege.

Ultimately, the TUC bureaucrats fear the consequences of the crisis of capitalism which is driving the government’s attack on the public sector. They hope that by appeasing the ConDems, ministers will back off. This is an illusion. As outright recession becomes a real possibility, the government is in no position to weaken its resolve, especially as it will have to borrow more not less on the international money markets.

The decision of the PCS to lead further resistance is welcome but it is in a position to go further. Politically, there are no solutions to hand, with a ConDemLab coalition taking shape, while the economy’s woes are revealed as a crisis of the system itself. By sponsoring a conference to initiate a discussion on creating political and economic alternatives the PCS could make a real contribution to the struggles ahead.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Fight the great pensions betrayal

Only a rank-and-file revolt in defence of their pension rights stands between leaders of most public sector trade unions and what will surely rank near the top of a long list of betrayals.

With the honourable except of Mark Serwotka, leader of the PCS civil servants’ union, virtually every other official – leader is definitely the wrong term in this context – signalled in one way or another the end of the short-lived campaign over pensions.

They almost fell over themselves to meet a pre-Christmas deadline set by the ConDem coalition to reach a negotiated settlement covering more than two million local government workers, NHS staff, teachers, lecturers and civil servants.

Whatever agreement is reached, it will inevitably cut further into the living standards of public sector workers who are already the victims of a government-imposed pay freeze (which union officials, with their own fat pensions preserved in aspic, have meekly accepted).

On the eve of the talks, the government announced that it would unilaterally impose higher pension contributions on teachers and civil servants. Most civil servants and teachers will pay an extra 0.6-2.4% from April. Did the teaching unions walk away in the face of such a provocation? Not at all.

The only outright opposition yesterday came from the PCS which said it had rejected “the government’s latest attempt to force public servants to pay more and work longer for less in retirement”. It was promptly excluded from further talks.

And so the apparent unity of the 29 unions who staged a one-day strike of at least 1.5 million workers less than a month ago was fragmented at a stroke. The government’s strategy of divide and rule proved more successful than this feeble coalition could ever have imagined.

At a meeting at the Trades Union Congress headquarters, general secretary Brendan Barber, who has been in secret talks with the government throughout, stressed that further industrial action was off the table and negotiations would resume in the new year.

“We have reached a stage where the emphasis in most cases is in giving active consideration to the new proposals that have emerged rather than considering the prospect of further industrial action.” The proposals include the abandonment of the final salary basis for pensions in favour of career average salaries.

To seek a negotiated settlement after giving it everything you’ve got is honourable; to run up the white flag with a hardly a short fired is nothing short of cowardice in the face of an enemy that is waging open class warfare.

For all the fiery talk of general secretary Dave Prentis, the leader of Unison, it was predictably hot air. The union’s head of health, Christina McAnea, admitted that “we always knew this would be a damage limitation exercise aimed at reducing the worst impacts of the government's pension changes."

The TUC and union bureaucrats have implicitly accepted the principal reason for the attack on pensions – the government’s budget deficit that is the result of a recession precipitated by capitalism’s financial meltdown.

Public sector workers are, in effect, being told to pay for the crisis through higher contributions and worse pensions. Behind the scenes, the leadership of the Labour Party has worked might and main to get unions to abandon further strikes and do a deal with a government.

The last thing Ed Miliband wanted was a long-running strike campaign that could have fatally wounded a weak and divided coalition whose policies his party barely opposes (except to demand a harder line on crime).

PCS general secretary Serwotka, urged unions to fight the changes: "We should call further industrial action in the new year because this is so unfair, we have got to stand up against it... Our message really is that those unions will have to be accountable to their members for what they do."

A campaign to reject the sell-out over pensions (and the wage freeze) has to mobilise rank-and-file anger in ways that are linked to the removal from their posts of all those involved in this shoddy surrender. In some ways, it’s a last chance to save the trade union movement from total disaster.

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

Miliband takes union cash - and does a runner

In the summer of 2010, some union leaders met together and decided that they could buy their way to happiness by backing Ed Miliband’s campaign to become the new leader of the Labour Party.

With the help of the three major union bureaucracies of the GMB, Unite and Unison, Miliband squeaked home ahead of his brother David, who enjoyed most of the support from constituency parties.

Money down the drain, throwing good money after bad, a bad investment, a gamble that went wrong. All these phrases describe what has happened since. Miliband, to no-one’s surprise except that of the union leaders’, has become little more than Blair Mark II.

In fact, Miliband’s speech speech to the Trades Union Congress today was uncannily Blair-like in its content. “You know the new economy that emerges from this crisis must be built on foundations of co-operation, not conflict, in the workplace,” he said.

Co-operation? Trade unionists are being sacked in their thousands and/or losing hard-won rights and working conditions. Many are victims of cuts imposed by Labour-led local authorities.

If delegates were expecting some support for their upcoming struggles, they were soon disabused. Miliband acknowledged that Labour backed public spending cuts in the order of 12% (rather than the Tories’ 20%), defended opted-out academy schools and the Coalition’s new free schools.

And, naturally, Miliband repeated his assertion that strikes by civil servants and teachers in June against government attacks on their pensions were wrong and indicated he would take the same position in the event of more industrial action

Some delegates heckled during Miliband’s speech and Paul Kenny, leader of the GMB, struggled to find words of comfort for his hard-pressed members. In one of this week’s more vacuous statements, Kenny said:

"As Labour Leader he is not embarrassed by his association with trade unions and trade unionists. His engagement with trade unionists on the ground will bring to the fore what needs to be done to get the economy moving and to bring fairness to our communities."

Thank you and good night is all you say after reading that!

Even Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union, appeared to pull his punches, saying afterwards that "Ed Miliband needs to decide just whose side he is on” and warning the Labour leader that he was on “political suicide mission”.

The stark truth is that Miliband knows which side he is on – and it isn’t that of trade unionists and workers in struggle. Labour became a full partner of globalised capitalism back in the 1990s and stands by that position.

For the Milibands of this world, there is no alternative to rescuing the broken market economy to create the “prosperous capitalism” that the Labour leader called for in a speech earlier this year.

Were Labour in power now, you would hardly notice the difference between their policies and those of the ConDem government. In fact, many of the Coalition’s policies are a development of what New Labour did to the NHS and the welfare state.

Labour is happy taking the money from the trade unions to finance the party - and then doing a runner with it. Union leaders from Unite, Unison and GMB know this. But they are in denial mode.

Their members don’t have that luxury, however. Their jobs and pensions are on the line and they are waiting to see if, behind all the militant speeches, their leaders are actually prepared to do battle with the government.

Not having Miliband on their side is excellent news for the rank and file. The fact is that the alternative to the Coalition is not Labour (or any other combination of parliamentary parties). What is demanded is a democratic political system that responds to people’s needs. Achieving that goal will require independence of thought and action.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

General strike is a defining moment

Union leaders threatening sustained and co-ordinated action, if there is no agreement with the government on pensions, intend to use what would amount to a general strike simply as a negotiating ploy. That is a serious, fatal miscalculation.

An indefinite general strike is a political weapon with revolutionary implications; the ruling classes understand this even if the bureaucrats at the Trades Union Congress and Unison general secretary Dave Prentis do not.

A general strike is a challenge to the state and its power, its authority and legitimacy. Looking at such action in any other way is dangerous and foolhardy. General strikes as protests have little effect, as the experience in Greece demonstrate.

You can be sure that the ConDem coalition is preparing to meet the challenge in the spirit of Stanley Baldwin, the Tory prime minister at the time of the historic 1926 General Strike. He famously declared: “Constitutional government is being attacked… The General Strike is a challenge to Parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin.”

The TUC had threatened a General Strike as a negotiating tactic to try and prevent a cut in miners’ pay and a lengthening of their working day. But their bluff was called and the strike got under way on May 4 without any serious preparation. Baldwin refused to talk while the strike was on. But secret contacts were made and the strike was called off after nine days, with the miners abandoned to their fate.

Moving on to 2011, and we learn that secret talks are already taking place over public sector pensions, which the government intends to erode through higher contributions and making people work longer before entitlement. What is their to negotiate about, you may well ask?

Any changes to pension schemes can only be to their detriment. Take firefighters, for example. Currently most pay a massive 11% of their salaries into pensions, but that may rise to 14% under government plans. A survey of nearly 8,000 members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) suggests that 27% are considering leaving if contributions rise.

In addition, most public sector workers have had their wages frozen, resulting in a pay cut due to inflation and tens of thousands are facing the sack because of spending cuts.

When Prentis talks of a “campaign of strike action without precedent” if the government fails to negotiate in “good faith”, we should be wary. Prentis is riding a tiger of a membership angry with its leaders for refusing to fight the cuts or oppose New Labour’s introduction of the private sector in the NHS.

Prentis boasted that unlike the miners’ strike of 1984, Unison members would not be starved back (the union has reportedly built up a £20 million strike fund). But the miners were not starved back. They were isolated by the TUC, who ran scared of Tory anti-union laws and refused to back the miners.

Nevertheless, the Coalition may call Prentis’ bluff and confront the trade union movement over pensions. The changes are central to the government’s spending cuts and part of the reorganisation of the state driven on by the capitalist crisis.

In 1926, between 400 and 500 Councils of Action emerged in the course of the General Strike. Made up of strikers and their supporters, they took responsibility for co-ordinating the strike, propaganda, communications, transport, entertainment, picketing and the delivery of food. They represented, in effect, the emergence of potentially alternative sites of power to the state at local level.

A showdown is coming with the ConDem government and the state. Of that there can be no doubt. Instead of waiting for it to blow up when the government chooses, trade unionists and their supporters ought to prepare for confrontation now and develop the Councils of Action approach.

They should take the initiative and create People’s Assemblies in each area, bringing together trade unionists with students, the unemployed, private sector workers, older people, community groups, small businesses, black and ethnic minority groups and everyone in government’s firing line. Assemblies can do what the union leaders won’t – take seriously the implications of a general strike and the question of who rules Britain.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Healthcare market already worth £29 billion

David Cameron claims the mantle of Tony Blair in defending the Coalition’s plans to impose market-driven changes in the National Health Service. He is absolutely right and that’s why trade union opposition to the government’s plans is reduced to a letter to The Times.

You would think from union protests that the market had just made its ugly appearance in the NHS. Far from it. By the time New Labour left office last May, an estimated 6% of all NHS work was carried out by private firms, thanks to a series of market-led reorganisations from 1997 onwards.

According to market research consultants Key Note, in 2009, the total UK market for private healthcare was worth almost £29bn, having risen in value terms by almost 22% compared with 2005. Acute care and psychiatric care rose in value terms by 24% and 42.4% respectively.

“The overall market has expanded within the last 5 years as a result of the growing shift from public to private provision, with the NHS making increasing use of private sector healthcare to cut waiting lists,” says a recent report which notes that the market continues to “attract attention and investment from overseas firms, as well as private equity operators”.

The Coalition plans to deepen what New Labour started, of course, not only in its plans for the NHS but in areas such as tuition fees and academy schools. Doctors will control the purse-strings and be able to select private providers on the grounds of price and bureaucratic primary care trusts (PCTs) will be abolished.

Health union Unison general secretary Dave Prentis accuses Cameron of "cutting away at the heart of society" and adds: "The NHS is not safe in Tory hands. [Health secretary] Lansley's proposals are unnecessary, untried and will cost the taxpayer dear. They threaten the very founding principles of the NHS."

The question is: where was Prentis from 1997-2010, while the NHS was being carved up by New Labour? Where was the opposition when private firms like Ramsay Health Care and Care UK were signing contracts to provide services to the NHS at a profit to the companies? To ask the question is to answer it. Union bureaucrats sat on their hands the whole time.

Take Ramsay Health Care. From its early days in Australia, the company has become a global brand, operating more than 100 hospitals and day surgeries in several countries, including 22 acute hospitals in England. Last December, the group announced an upgrade in profits thanks in part to a rise in patient admissions in Britain. Results for the five months to November 30 showed the company was on track to report a first-half net profit 26-28% higher than the same period in 2009.

Ramsay runs the Clifton Park clinic in York, which is at the centre of a claim for compensation by 50 local people after hip replacement operations went disastrously wrong, as the York Press reported:.

“Many claim they are suffering frequent dislocations or excruciating pain resulting from metal-on-metal debris getting into their bloodstream. Some can only walk with sticks; other symptoms include audible popping and cup loosening.” All were fitted with products manufactured by US company DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. which were recalled last August by DePuy after being on the market for seven years.

It seems the NHS will have to pick up the bill for any eventual compensation settlement.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Time to remove cuts councillors

Absolutely savage cuts in council spending announced by the Coalition yesterday will lead to tens of thousands of jobs losses and the devastation of essential local services. The question is: How can this be stopped?

The reduction in government grant will hit poorer inner-city areas hardest. Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Manchester, Rochdale, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Doncaster and South Tyneside face grant cuts of nearly 9% from next April.

With council tax frozen by Whitehall order, the only way these councils can balance their books is to sack workers and shut down services. And it will get worse, with similar sized cuts scheduled for the following three years.

A number of things are already clear. Many if not most city councils are Labour controlled – and they are without question going to make the cuts. This is already happening in places like Manchester, Doncaster, Lewisham and Lambeth.

The official leaders of council trade unions like the GMB, Unite and Unison, agree with Labour councillors. In fact, Unite is calling Labour councillors to meetings to tell them what they wanted to hear and were already planning – that they should not defy the government. Labour leader Ed Miliband is backing this message.

Unison yesterday came out with the obvious statement that “the scale of the cuts means that communities will be feeling the pain for years to come.” Its main campaign is get a million signatures for public services, as if that will make the slightest difference as far the Lib-Con government is concerned.

Unison is supporting the TUC’s call for a demonstration for public services on March 26 next year – by which time the cuts will have been made.

Britain’s record budget deficit – with interest payments on loans alone heading towards the £100 billion a year mark – is what lies behind the cuts. In turn, the deficit results from the global recession that followed the 2008 financial meltdown.

From a capitalist point of view, the Coalition has no choice but to slash and burn. And inevitably, the burden of the capitalist crisis falls on local communities, which will resemble wastelands if these cuts are allowed to stand.

As the students have discovered, the Coalition has no intention of yielding to protest. Nor will Labour councillors, who overwhelmingly are New Labour types without principle or backbone who would like to be allowed to get away with say "we are only carrying out government orders".

A broad strategy is required that goes beyond resistance.

Councillors that refuse to stand up for their communities have no right to continue to represent local voters. A campaign should begin immediately, organised by council trade unionists, to force them to step aside.

They could organise their own ballots on the cuts as a way of mobilising local communities against those planning to vote for job losses and shutting down services.

Trade unionists and communities have to be prepared to take over the town halls themselves and block all attempts to pass cuts budgets.

Local government democracy was wiped out a long time ago. Councils exist to carry out government orders and communities have to create their own local democratic process.

Council chambers should become a base for creating genuine People’s Assemblies in local areas. A network of People’s Assemblies emerging out of the fight against council cuts would be in a position to defy central government and challenge the authority of Whitehall.

Assemblies could begin to work on economic and financial alternatives to a capitalist system that has patently broken down.

A groundswell of resistance is building throughout Britain. Hundreds of council workers marched through Doncaster yesterday against the Labour council’s plans to slash £80 million off spending. They were joined by students from Sheffield University and applauded calls to strike and occupy council offices to fight the cuts. They are heading in the right direction.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

All bark and no bite

There was dismay and anger amongst the several thousand trade union members who crowded Westminster Central Hall; some including a large number from the prison officers union, couldn’t get in to the TUC’s anti-cuts rally. People had travelled from Lancashire, Devon, Cornwall, Northamptonshire and around London to take part in the protest meeting and lobby of MPs.

As well as the Prison Officers Association, there were big delegations from Unison, actors’ union Equity, rail and transport workers, public services unions UNITE and GMB, the National Union of Teachers and the Right to Work Campaign. Screen actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Lloyd Pack said they opposed cuts in the arts which will privilege the rich. They all shared a deep anxiety as it emerged that around half a million jobs are to go by 2015.

Tony Woodley, joint secretary of the UNITE trade union, pointed out that for every four public sector jobs scrapped by the cuts, three more would follow in the private sector. He pointed out that the Lib-Con coalition has no mandate for the cuts, and that people “did not vote for the dismantling of their schools, hospitals and communities.”

“Cuts on this scale make no sense,” he said – but they make sense to the coalition, the bankers and the IMF. It’s the survival of the capitalist system that is at stake for them.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber continued the myth that the cuts are just a political choice, not an economic necessity for the ruling class: "They want us to believe....this is economic necessity. Yet economic experts across the spectrum warn us that the cuts are too deep and too rapid.”

Dave Prentis of Unison warned that if the government doesn’t listen, “we will be back. For every one of us in this room today, we will bring a hundred more. We’ll march in our thousands and we’ll vote in our millions,” he said in a fit of demagogy. But vote for what? For New Labour Mark 2?

None of the trade union leaders have any answers. In fact they are determined to hold back any serious movement by workers in the face of the re-shaping of the entire British state. Asked why the British workers were not angry as those in France, Woodley cited the anti-trade union laws making striking difficult. But if they were serious about halting the cuts, trade union leaders would bring every member out and let the law go hang. By directing all their fire towards parliament and the next election nearly four years hence, they hope to act as a lightning rod to defuse and disarm any movement.

And where was Milliband? He was in hiding from the trade union leaders who got him the Labour leadership. The reality is a New Labour government would be doing the same – and it may not be too long before they too are co-opted into this government of desperate decline.

Today’s spending review is not the result of a nasty bunch of old-style Thatcherite Tories. It is a response to the most serious economic and financial crisis of the capitalist profit-based system. As Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, speaking in the Midlands, made plain. Deep tensions underlay discussions at the International Monetary Fund meeting last week, he said.

Global currency conflicts, particularly between the US and China, are evidence of profound disagreements about the way to deal with the crisis. A 1930s-style collapse of business activity and international trade is possible. So much for the cuts being an “ideological exercise”! They are the ruling class’ response to an uncontrollable crisis of the system.

Fighting against the cuts agenda means challenging the ruling class by working for a transfer of power, property and control to a democratically elected and accountable network of peoples’ assemblies http://aworldtowin.net/frontline/BuildPeoplesAssemblies.html. Come to the Beyond Resistance conference on December 11 to make this come alive.

Corinna Lotz and Peter Arkell
A World to Win

Coalition prepares for showdown with unions

A massive provocation against the trade unions in the public sector is openly being prepared by the Coalition government as it prepares to force through spending cuts that will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and wreck vital services.

The question is: how will union leaders respond to the Coalition’s relentless assault on jobs, wages, pensions and redundancy terms that is building on a daily basis? 

In the last 24 hours alone, there are reports of:

• government departments being asked to prepare cuts in budgets amounting to 40% of current spending, which would terminate much of what they do
• new laws to toughen the already-draconian anti-union legislation introduced by the Thatcher government and sustained by New Labour
• legislation to impose reduced redundancy terms on civil servants after the courts ruled that New Labour’s attempt at the same was unlawful.

Staging an effective strike in Britain is well nigh impossible – if unions stay within the law. Solidarity action in support of other workers is illegal, as is mass picketing. Even sticking to the rules on balloting is no longer sufficient. Employers are challenging virtually every ballot, enjoying favourable judgements in most cases.

Now the Coalition is reportedly planning to toughen the ballot regulations even further. At present, a simple majority of those voting is required. The government is discussing plans to impose a higher threshold and is also being lobbied by business to allow striking workers to be replaced with agency employees.

All this follows hard on the heels of a two-year pay freeze, which even Cameron admitted amounted to a salary cut as inflation moves ahead; immediate cuts to local authority budgets with job losses; and plans for higher public sector pension contributions. In October, the Coalition will announce details of unprecedented spending cuts which will take effect from 1 April 2011.

Cameron and Clegg are calling the bluff of the trade union leaders, who – with a handful of honourable exceptions representing firefighters, rail workers and civil servants – cosied up to New Labour for 13 years to no avail. The biggest public sector union, Unison, sat back as Blair/Brown carved up the health service and public services. Loads of cash was sent New Labour’s way, however, even though muted pressure to drop the anti-union laws was treated with contempt.

Union membership has declined to 6.9 million from over 12 million and is barely present in the private sector. But unions represent almost 60% of public sector employees and so are in a position to organise against the cuts. So far the signs are not inspiring. At its annual conference last month, Unison adopted a 1,300-word motion on the “austerity agenda” that in the same sentence referred to “working with employers who share our aspirations “(!), and being ready to take industrial action “where necessary”.

This will simply not cut the mustard. The Coalition is preparing for war while the main trade union leaders are looking for a deal. There is no compromise on offer, however. The crisis of global capitalism deepens day by day and this is what is driving the Coalition’s attempt to transfer wealth to big business at the expense of working people and the millions who depend on public services.

In September, the Trades Union Congress will meet in Manchester from 13 September. Those who are up for the fight like the rail union RMT have a responsibility to take the fight into Congress. Nothing less than the preparation of a co-ordinated, indefinite General Strike against the Coalition, alongside anti-capitalist policies that answer the crisis, will measure up to the task in front. The time for cheap talk is over.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Winning the council workers' claim

The 48-hour strike by 600,000 council workers is testimony to the strength of feeling among the low-paid, rank and file of the Unison and Unite unions. Whatever doubts they may have had about striking would surely have vanished yesterday when official inflation figures showed prices rising at their highest rate since 1992.

With the cost of feeding a family shooting up by 10% in a year, the 2.45% offered to council workers by the employers – backed up by the New Labour government – is the equivalent of a substantial pay cut. Eggs have soared by over 37% in price, butter by 31.%, fresh milk by nearly 20% and potatoes by 17p in the pound.

The impact is felt greatest by those with the least amount to spend – those on strike today and tomorrow. In the pipeline are huge increases in gas and electricity, while the cost of petrol rises almost on a daily basis as the global corporations try to maintain their profit margins.

The question is: How is the modest claim for an increase of 6% or 50p an hour more to be won? The government has made it plain that “fighting inflation” is its priority. In ordinary language, that equates to holding down wages in the public sector while prices soar. New Labour is backed by the Tories, who control the employers’ negotiating body.

If union leaders like Dave Prentis of Unison are really serious about winning the claim – and there are real doubts about their intentions - they must make this week’s strikes a starting point for a campaign to defeat the government because, make no mistake, that’s what is involved. One or two-day stoppages will not achieve this and run the risk of demoralising strikers.

Unison and Unite leaders must prepare for all-out, indefinite action which is co-ordinated with other unions who have outstanding pay claims, like the teachers and civil servants, some of whom are also out on strike today. A decade of cosying up to New Labour has produced few results, as shown by the 48-hour strike. Now union leaders must listen to their members and totally reject New Labour’s policies, which are aimed at offloading the crisis on to the backs of ordinary workers.

The unions should lead a real fight against inflation which would rouse public support by campaigning along the following lines:

* Creating price committees of producers and consumers. These should analyse the real cost of food and fuel, exposing the profiteering and price-fixing that goes and propose sustainable, not-for-profit alternatives.
* Demanding that supermarket chains cut prices. Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Morrisons racked up £4.5 billion in profits last year alone by exploiting producers, staff and consumers. Instead of distributing profits to shareholders, the profits should be used to reduce prices.
* Campaigning for common ownership and control. If, as is likely, the supermarket chains refuse to play ball, the unions should campaign for them to be taken into common ownership and run on not-for-profit lines.
* Reorganising government priorities. By ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cancelling the Trident nuclear missile replacement programme, state subsidies could be made available to make food and fuel affordable.

Just like the Tories, Brown and company are tied hand-and-foot to big business interests. If winning the strike involves breaking, even bringing down, New Labour, the government’s demise would be no great loss. Such an event would create a unique opportunity for trade unionists and other workers to discuss new political possibilities as well as real solutions to the deepening economic and financial crisis.

Paul Feldman
AWTW Communications editor