THE main trade union leaders are determined that the crisis of the Labour government should be kept out of the TUC Congress in Brighton.
They try to depict the trade unions as a neutral force as far as the battle for the leadership is concerned. They are simply the people who are going to write out the blank cheques so that the Labour government can finance itself after the near bankruptcy resulting from the loans-for-peerages scandal.
Neither Prentis, Simpson, Woodley nor Kenny will spell it out that Blair must go now, and that Brown is essentially the co-author of Blair’s policies and therefore, as far as the trade unions are concerned, ruled out as the next leader of the Labour Party and government.
The nearest the conference delegates will get to the crisis of the Labour leadership is when Blair addresses the conference, after making it clear that he is as pleased as Punch that he will be addressing the TUC for the last time, so great is his loathing of it.
If the leaders of the TUC had any principle they would be telling workers that since this is the way that he feels about the invitation, it is withdrawn.
They haven’t and they won’t withdraw Blair’s invitation, despite the fact that his hands are dripping with the blood of the Iraqi, Lebanese and Palestinian masses, and that he has spent the last nine years as a servant of globalisation, trying to wipe out the Welfare State and dump the trade unions out of the Labour Party.
Behind the scenes and at their fringe meeting, the TUC leaders will be trying to convince Gordon Brown that he should move a degree to the left to allow them to claim that he has changed and to swing the support of the trade unions and their cash behind him and the next general election campaign.
Brown will not make the required shift in policy for them, since all of his policies have to be OK’d by the CBI and the global capitalists.
When push comes to shove, Brown will simply inform the trade union leaders that he is to be the leader, the City of London is refusing to work with anybody else, and that they must simply hand over their votes and the workers’ cash or else be responsible for the return of the Tories.
There is no doubt that faced with such an ultimatum, the trade union leaders will bend the knee and hand over both votes and cash to Brown.
The truth is that the reformist trade union leaders have no independence from the bourgeoisie and its political servants. This they have proven with their 100 per cent loyalty to the Blair-Brown government of globalisers over the last nine years.
The time has come when the delegates at the TUC Congress must break with the craven reformist approach and grasp that the only way to keep the Tories out is to remove the Blair-Brown leadership of the Labour Party and decisively and publicly dump its Thatcherite policies.
Delegates must put down an emergency motion withdrawing Blair’s invitation, and calling for the resignation of Blair and Brown.
Congress must spell out that the trade unions will only vote for and finance a leadership, which will see to it that the Labour government adopts a socialist programme and socialist policies.
These policies must be:
• the restoration of student grants and the abolition of tuition fees;
• the ending and reversal of the privatisation programme of the NHS and education ;
• the repeal of all anti-union laws and all racist immigration acts;
• the linking of rises in the state pension with rises in average wages, and the guaranteeing of public sector final salary pensions;
• the launching of a programme for the building of millions of council houses to solve the housing crisis;
• the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The only way to keep the Tories out is to purge the Labour Party of all its Blair-Thatcher policies.
