IN HIS closing speech to the Tory conference, Cameron pledged that a future Tory government would scrap the Human Rights Act, a position that was reinforced yesterday by the Tory justice minister, Chris Grayling, who announced that the Tories would withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unless they were granted a veto on any decisions they didn’t like.
Both the paper and pledges have been largely seen, even within the ranks of the Tory party, as ill thought-out, containing factual inaccuracies and little more than a public relations exercise aimed at fending off UKIP accusations that the Tories are soft on the EU.
This, however, is a mistake.
Behind all the wild rhetoric about the ECHR being responsible for ‘terrorists’ going free, and preventing criminals from being banged up for life, the real issue as far as the Tories are concerned is with Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights which protects the right to freedom of assembly, including the right to form and join trade unions.
Even this right is subject to the caveat that ‘No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety’.
The passing of the most draconian anti-union laws by the Tories under Thatcher and continued by the Labour government after 1997 are therefore perfectly legal within the terms of Article 11 – but still this is not enough today.
What the Tories are really proposing is to make trade unions and striking completely illegal in Britain, to turn the clock back to the latter part of the 18th century and the anti-combination laws which made it illegal for workers to combine together in trade unions.
These pledges on scrapping this legislation are completely in line with the plans outlined by Tory Home Secretary, Theresa May, to ban all democratic rights under the same lying banner of a war against terrorism.
May’s pledge was that a Tory government would ‘target’ and ban extremists, even those who didn’t break any laws.
The main criteria for determining if an organisation is extremist is that it ‘threatens to alarm or cause distress’ – something that unions and the working class do on a regular basis to the ruling class and the Tories.
The Tories are preparing for nothing less than a police state where the democratic rights of the working class are completely smashed and unions either declared illegal or made completely subservient to the rule of bourgeois law.
All these preparations stem from the desperation of a ruling class forced by the world crisis of capitalism to physically take on and impose austerity cuts far exceeding anything that has gone before.
In seeking to drive workers back to conditions of the 19th century, they are forced to attempt to recreate the same conditions of illegality on the trade union movement.
The working class was never given its democratic rights to organise and defend itself under capitalism – it had to fight for every single gain and wrench it from the hands of the ruling class.
Today, with capitalism so weak and crisis-riven that it is forced to try and destroy these hard-won rights, it is clear that they can only be defended through struggle, a fight to the finish between the working class and capitalism.
This struggle demands an entirely new revolutionary leadership in the trade unions.
The old reformist leaders – who have always refused to fight anti-union laws and who have tried at all costs to keep their members bound hand and foot by the courts – have to go and be replaced by a new leadership prepared to smash all attempts to destroy the organisations of the working class by calling a general strike to bring down the government and go forward to a workers government that will advance to socialism.
This leadership is being built by the WRP and Young Socialists and we urge all workers and youth to join today.
