Over the weekend the Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove issued a call for parents to volunteer to break Thursday’s strike by civil servants and teachers and keep schools open.
At the same time that Gove was making his call for parents to cross picket lines and keep schools open, it was reported that the government were putting ‘under review’ the use of ‘public money to pay union officials to organise’.
The impression they are trying to give is that union officials are given paid time off for organising strikes, this is a blatant lie – union officials are only given paid time off from work for joint negotiations with management, any union organising is done on their own time.
This ‘review’ of union facilities is in fact a threat to derecognise the civil service unions, especially the PCS, whose members balloted overwhelmingly for strike action in defence of their pension rights.
The call for parents to act as a scab force and the threat to outlaw civil service unions go hand-in-hand with the increasingly strident call from within the government for strikes to be made illegal through impossible legal restrictions on strike ballots.
The coalition government are not alone in demanding that Thursday’s strike, which will involve 750,000 civil servants, teachers and lecturers, be called off.
Labour leader Ed Miliband weighed in at the weekend to demand that unions call off the action on the grounds that it will ‘harm their ability’ to convince the public of the justice of their case. This echoed the call from Tony Blair who also condemned the strike, and called for the unions to ‘engage with the process of change’.
Gove’s call for parents to act as a strikebreaking force would appear to be part of the Tory delusion that the current struggles are simply a rerun of the 1926 General Strike.
In 1926 whole sections of the middle class were encouraged to line up with the government against the strike, and Gove clearly dreams of middle class students from Oxford and Cambridge manning the buses again.
Today, students are far more likely to be on picket lines than posing as scabs.
Unlike 1926 the crisis of capitalism and the crash of its banking system threaten to lay waste to the living standards of the entire working class and the vast majority of the middle class as well, not just one section.
While Gove dreams of middle class strikebreakers acting in defence of the banks and bankrupt capitalism, the British Medical Association (not usually counted a bastion of militant trade unionism) is balloting its members for industrial action over pensions as well.
In 1926 the General Strike was not defeated by the strikebreakers, it was defeated by the betrayals of the trade union leadership who were politically incapable of leading a strike that posed the question of power.
These leaders preferred to see their members defeated than bring down the government.
Today’s leadership are no different, they are terrified of the mass movement bringing down the government and challenging the right of capitalism to survive at the expense of the working class, and have attempted to limit any action to bringing pressure on the coalition to ease up on its attacks.
The only way to answer these attacks is by going forward from Thursday to an all-out general strike to bring down this government and replace it with a workers government that will go forward to socialism.
This requires the building of a new revolutionary leadership within the trade unions to replace those who will not lead such a struggle.
