YESTERDAY’S closure of ten London fire stations, with the loss of 552 firefighter jobs and the axing of 14 fire engines, shows how little this Tory-led coalition and its London Mayor, Boris Johnson, care about the lives of ordinary people.
Despite all the bluster about these cuts having no effect on the safety of Londoners, anyone with half a brain knows that you cannot run a vital service like the Fire Brigade down without placing the lives of men, women and children at risk, as response times for emergency call-outs inevitably increase.
This is of no concern whatsoever to Cameron, Osborne and Johnson – who blithely stated last July as he imposed these cuts that he was ‘not minded to provide additional funding’ to keep these stations open.
The only thing Johnson and the coalition are minded to do is to cut every public service to the bone, privatise them out of existence, all in order to pay back the vast public debt run up by bailing out the bankers.
While trillions of pounds in public money is demanded by and handed over to the banks, the Fire Service, the NHS, education and the entire welfare state is being closed down or sold off for the privateers to make a killing.
The threat of lives being lost through fire Stations, hospitals and every other vital public service being closed is a price worth paying for the ruling class in order to keep their bankrupt system staggering on until the next collapse.
But what of the leadership of the trade unions – what has been their response to this brutal attack on their members and the public that FBU members selflessly serve day in and day out?
When the London cuts were announced last year, the leadership of the FBU were quick to condemn Johnson, with Matt Wrack (FBU General Secretary) claiming that the mayor would have ‘blood on his hands’ over these cuts.
But in practice, Wrack and the FBU leadership did absolutely nothing to stop these closures other than organise protests outside the courts in London.
They pinned their hopes on these courts where seven London councils challenged the closure plans on the grounds that they were ‘legally flawed’ and ‘could put lives at risk’.
When their appeal was thrown out by the High Court back in December that was the end of the story as far as the FBU leaders were concerned – nothing further could be done despite all the rhetoric about carrying on the struggle.
The stations would close and hundreds of jobs lost without even the pretence of a fight by Wrack and the leadership.
At a time when FBU members are showing their determination to fight for their conditions and for the very existence of the fire service, these leaders are refusing to do anything that might challenge this government – a government that is weak, divided and universally reviled by the working class and whole sections of the middle class, a government, in short, that only survives because the trade union leaders will not lift a finger to bring it down.
This treachery in the face of the class enemy must be stopped immediately.
FBU branches across the country must demand an emergency conference of the union to call these leaders to account for their betrayal.
They must pass motions of no-confidence in the present leadership and demand that they be removed and replaced with a leadership that will mobilise the full strength of the union to defend every single job, every single fire station and every single condition of service.
There must be a leadership that will organise the occupation of stations threatened with closure and national strike action against all cuts.
Moreover, a leadership that will demand that the TUC and every other public service union facing the same attacks come out in support in a general strike to kick out the government and bring in a workers government that will go forward to a socialist system.
This is the only way forward for firefighters and the entire working class today.
