FIRST of all Prime Minister Cameron wrote that the entire public sector, local government, the NHS and education were to be taken over by the private sector – an announcement calculated to anger every worker in the country.
Now this has been followed up by a media briefing that the cabinet under Star Chamber boss Maude is engaging in war games preparation for a summer war with the trade unions, especially the public sector trade unions.
This preparation includes the organisation of tens of thousands of strike breakers, and the drafting of new anti-trade union laws that would make legal strikes impossible.
This barbaric reality of Tory war preparations shows that ‘the big society’ propaganda is just a smokescreen, while the catchphrase ‘We’re all in it together’, is for consumption by idiots only.
The fact that this preparation has been briefed to the bourgeois media means that the coalition war lords are confident that such news will only further terrify and paralyse the TUC, who are already running scared.
There has been nothing like this since 1925, when PM Baldwin set up the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to prepare the military for moving supplies up and down the country, and also to organise tens of thousands of students and other members of the middle class to become strike breakers.
When the plans were completed the miners’ wages were cut, provoking the 1926 general strike. Machine guns were put at the dock gates while armoured cars were used to escort supplies.
To emphasise the point that the big class battles in this country were always planned battles, there are the Thatcher years, when billions of the new found oil wealth were spent to train the police, and the military, and to amass coal stocks that saw the bosses through a very hard winter, without a single power cut, once the miners’ strike began.
The Tory coalition has even decided the issue that they prefer to fight on.
They have calculated that the public sector union leaders will not be able to convince their members to accept a three per cent additional contribution to their pensions and that union leaders will not be able to stop a mass strike action.
The bosses and their leaders have decided that the working class must be taken on and defeated if their cuts, their price rises and their mass sackings are to be successfully imposed.
However vicious the ruling class may be, and however determined it is to have it out with the working class, the plain truth is that the ruling class is eminently beatable, since it is not what it was.
It has lost its empire, it has lost its manufacturing base, its banks are broke, its middle class is ruined, its youth are disaffected, and its military is disillusioned after the pastings that it has suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan and the cuts that the Tories have only been too willing to impose on it.
The working class is stronger.
However, it has the same weakness that it had in 1926, and in 1984-85. This is that it is led by congenital reformists who are opposed to the struggle, are opposed to socialism, and fear nothing like winning.
In 1926 they surrendered after nine days of the general strike, at a time when more and more workers were coming out.
In 1984-85 the TUC fought night and day to prevent other sections of the workers coming out in support of the miners, who fought for a year on their own.
In 2011 the TUC may well be forced to call, or support, a mass strike, but it will be determined to sell it out as soon as possible.
This is what the weak Tory-led coalition and the weakened ruling class are relying on.
The best way for the working class to prepare for the summer war is to build the WRP and the YS to begin the removal of the TUC leaders, and their replacement by a leadership that will use the huge strength of the working class to bring down the coalition, bring in a workers government, and go forward to socialism.
