The TUC must call a General Strike to get rid of the Tories!
On February the 1st, hundreds of thousands of workers have joined together in the biggest day of strikes in thirty years: teachers, college and university staff, railway workers and bus drivers, and about 100,000 public employees from various government’s departments. A day of strikes that end up in massive demonstrations called by the TUC in seventy-five cities that brought together more than half million people.
One of the reasons for these protests has been to fight the new legislation of the Tory government which attacks the right to strike. The new law has already been approved by Parliament but which still has to go through the House of Lords and its aim is to cut the right to strike for hundreds of thousands of workers by setting out abusive minimum services in some sectors: transport, firefighters, border workers, the NHS and education.
A Law that can also be modified, that is, worsened, by ministers and Government after the parliamentary process, having accepted the so-called Henry VIII clause. A new example of the growing authoritarianism of the British capitalist regime and the state machinery, showing the real democratic standards of those who justify their intervention in the imperialist war in Ukraine in the name of sacred democracy.
Despite the hopes of the Conservative Government that time would wear down the movement, the use of the army to try to replace the strikers without success (600 soldiers on the 1st February), or the successive initiatives to further restrict the right to strike, the rebellion of the working class not only does not give over but is strengthening and radicalizing. A rebellion that, and against Tories’ forecast, has broad support and sympathy from the majority of the population.
And the reason for the latter is obvious: increasingly unbearable hardship, with thousands of working families forced to go to food banks and real cases of starvation, as the bourgeois press itself is forced to admit. And this situation also shows no sign of improving, with an economy already in recession and inflation prospects for 2023 of 8%, far from the 4.6% forecast by the IMF for western economies and 6.6% worldwide.
For this very reason and because the working class has said enough, the government's attempts to diminish the strikes by offering crumbs, with wage increases of 4 or 5% to nurses, teachers and railway workers, have not deceived anyone, and have been massively rejected.
On the other hand, those unions that are promoting these strikes, which position themselves as more militant, are getting stronger. This is what is happening with the National Education Union (NEU) among teachers, the only one that has approved the call for strikes, and that has seen its membership grow by 32,000 new teachers, as only union members are allowed to take industrial action .
For the General Strike!
Despite all the difficulties and obstacles, the harsh anti-union legislation, the repression, the scabbing role of Starmer's Labour Party, and the indecision of TUC’s leadership and other big unions like Unite and Unison to coordinate and to unify seriously and decisively the wave of strikes, the coordinated strike action is being achieved from the rank and file, through direct action in the struggle. February 1st protest, that the TUC leaders wanted to reduce to just rallies and demonstrations, became in practice a day of general strike by the public sector that has paralysed the country.
In this context, and with Sunak's conservative government on the offensive against the right to strike, it is more necessary than ever to raise the slogan of the General Strike. There are no excuses for not doing so. The working class is demonstrating in practice that has the strength and willingness to organize it and carry it forward. The poor arguments about the impossibility of calling it as a result of anti-union legislation, as raised by the general secretary of the TUC, Paul Novack, fail to remember the history of the British labour movement and show the tremendous cowardice that grips the union officialdom.
In the 1970s, unions and the working class had to confront with savage anti-union legislation. In 1971 the Conservative government of Edward Heath approved a harsh anti-union Act, and in 1972 jailed 5 dockers' union leaders for calling for "illegal" strikes. Finally, the extension of the strikes in solidarity with the dockers and the threat of a general strike, in a situation similar to the current one, knocked down such legislation and released all the detainees [1].
And the same thing happened in the fight against Margaret Thatcher 's Poll Tax [2] . Militant, a revolutionary Marxist organization with mass influence, did not hesitate to promote and organize a massive campaign of disobedience against such tax that led to the imprisonment of one of its MP, Terry Fields, but which finally overthrew the Poll Tax and definitively ended with the Iron lady.
If the TUC and the big unions inside, call for a 24-hour general strike, the Government and the state machinery will not hesitate to attack them, cut their funds, confiscate them, and even try to prosecute union leaders and activists. But, are they not already acting in this way with two anti-union laws, against the right to strike, approved in less than a year? Are they not already using the army against strikes? Doesn't this require a decisively response? Isn't this right to strike decisive in defending the wages and living conditions of the working class?
The enormous strength of the strike movement, which is already a fact, is not only the way to stop these attacks and those that will come, but it is the only way for the working class to stop sinking into misery. Victory in each of these strikes goes hand in hand with their unification, their extension, and their transformation into a political conflict through a General Strike that definitively puts an end to the Tories and puts expropriation of the banks and the big capitalist monopolies on the table in order to solve the serious social problems that condemn the working class majority.
Notes:
[1] How British Workers Toppled the Anti-Union Industrial Relations Act
[2] The Community Charge – literally “tax on the community” – also known as Poll Tax, was a tax that forced the payment of an equal amount to each citizen regardless of their income or any other personal or social circumstance, especially affecting to the working class and the most impoverished sectors.
