People who dislike Labour love reminding themselves of when Denis Healey had to ‘beg’ to the IMF for a loan to keep Britain afloat. Labour took a long time to shrug off the notion that unions were intrinsically evil, and served to destabilize the effective running of Britain. Britain in the late 1970s couldn’t even to bury the dead.
Unfortunately, in the 2010s, Britain may not be able to look after the living adequately. The over-zealous attitude by the spending review has been observed by many pundits as being rather macabre, and misfiring in a number of critical areas. For example, Iain Duncan-Smith has provided a programme of welfare reform, but has been unable to put a figure to it. In the meantime, many genuine disabled people who indeed aspire to go to work have been terrified by what it all means, by the continuous torrent of mistrust from the Coalition politicians towards the poor and/or the disabled.
We all know where intuitively the autumn of discontent would be likely to happen, but the Unions have now specified that the strikes are going to be due to spending cuts, pay and pensions in the public sector. The tables motioned for the Trades Union Congress have called for co-ordinated action by various unions.
The scale of this is not going to be a joke. The reason for this is many hard-working citizens, especially the low paid, feel embittered. They realize that the state owes them nothing, contrary to popular media, but the issue is that they do not feel responsible for the mess that Britain is in. They are simply not accepting the argument that “there’s no money left”, put forward by Liam Byrne of all people. Instead, they have fully accepted that spending in a recession was necessary to stop the economy going into a complete standstill, and the proof of the success of this policy has already been demonstrated by stable growth figures and a lack of inflation thus far. However, the cuts threaten to lessen investment in both the private and public sector, produce inflation, increase unemployment, and therefore increase substantially the benefit budget.
Unison, Britain’s biggest public sector trade union with 1.3 million members, has called on unions to join a Europe-wide day of action in September. Unite has been hard at work, or non-work, in Manchester. Workers at the Manchester office of one of Britain’s largest finance firms are being balloted for strike action in another outbreak of industrial unrest. Staff at Capita Life and Pensions have begun voting over proposed changes to their pensions, which Unite national officer Rob MacGregor said were a “clear attempt by the company to profit at the expense of our members”. Unite have provided that staff at Capita Life and Pensions will lose thousands of pounds in retirement income if the plans go ahead.
“Our defence must be built on generalised strike action and community resistance,” said the RMT general secretary, Bob Crow, predicting the biggest public mobilisation since the anti-poll tax riots of 1990.
That things have come to a head so early on has caught many by surprise. If Labour elects too supine a leader, who won’t support its major paymasters and adopts a “wait-and-see” approach, Labour will achieve nothing for the poor and/or vulnerable. Many are yearning for a true left-wing agenda with a leader with the courage of his convictions, who won’t come to this with any populist overly right-centrist baggage. Ed Miliband could therefore, as the only electable socialist candidate, be the right man at the right time.
David Cameron, who is likely to be on paternity leave during the TUC conference, has declined an invitation to address the congress. Quelle surprise?
