THE Margaret Thatcher look-alike, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, is seeking to sound like, look like and act like Margaret Thatcher, as she vows to take on and smash the trade unions in the UK.
Within a month of becoming the Tory PM, she plans to bring in new anti-union laws that will make it much harder to call strikes and then allow legal strike breaking, and the sacking and jailing of workers who dare to take strike action.
Faced with the rail unions’ strike actions, Truss has railed: ‘Once again we’re seeing militant trade unions holding our country to ransom with members of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party keeping them company on the picket lines.
‘As Prime Minister I’ll crack down on the debilitating strikes that cripple the vital services that hard working people rely on.’
Truss is planning new anti-union laws within a month of taking office, that will raise ballot thresholds to make it harder for strike action to take place across all sectors. A mandatory cooling off period will also be introduced so unions can no longer strike as many times as they want in the six months after a ballot.
However, the essence of the matter is that British capitalism is on its knees, and cannot even survive in the world where it is now fighting on two fronts.
It is spending billions arming the Ukrainian fascists to try desperately to weaken Russia, despite the fact that this policy has led to oil and gas prices erupting upwards, bringing in a type of inflation that is already dictating to many working families that they cannot expect to eat a meal on a daily basis.
The Tories and bankrupt capitalists are now wedded to a policy that in order to try and push Russia backwards, they are willing to see a massive tidal wave of inflation imposed on UK-US and EU workers. They plan to pay for their capitalist crisis by starving millions of working class families.
UK-EU and US workers will not stand idly by and watch the ruling classes imposing poverty on a massive scale, so that capitalism can stand up to and even try and weaken Russia.
Of course, the working class in the UK, and the EU and the USA will rise up against the capitalist imposed crisis. Truss is no Thatcher. The Iron Lady prepared her struggle against the miners and the working class.
She built up vast stocks of coal, and oil all over Europe, and made a special deal with Gorbachev to allow Polish coal into the UK.
The army was won over in the Malvinas, where Thatcher was able to persuade Reagan to resupply the British who had just been exoceted by the French!
They came back with a banner saying ‘Start a rail strike and we’ll organise an air strike’.
Today there have been many and continuing rail strikes. The UK ruling class is being crushed by the massive inflationary crisis that is developing, and that it has actively helped to create in order to attack Russia.
What the Thatcher-would-be Truss is relying on, is the trade union leaders deciding to avoid the ‘provocation’ of a general strike, that would bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism – that is a UK socialist nationalised and planned economy.
The trade union bureaucracy is hoping that the number of strikes currently taking place, with a bit of a union campaign, will yet see a Starmer-led right wing Labour government or even a Starmer-led National Government, to save the day for the bosses.
The only way forward out of this crisis for the working class is through the building of a new and revolutionary WRP leadership in the working class movement. This must be built in the days ahead in the organisation of a general strike in the UK to bring down the Tories.
The TUC Congress is meeting on Monday September 12 in Brighton.
This must answer the Truss threats by calling an indefinite general strike and by the setting up of Councils of Action to sustain it and develop it, to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and a nationalised and planned economy under workers control and management.
This is the way forward to the successful British socialist revolution! There is not a moment to lose!
