PM Cameron has celebrated his government’s first 100 days by launching an attack on the enemy within, that is the working class and their trade unions, pledging 100% academisation of schools, and the enemy without, migrants who have been forced to flee from the chaos that his government has helped to create in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Their crime is that they want their right to asylum and to live in the UK.
On the issue of migrants he was unrepentant. The Refugee Council’s comment that his talk of ‘swarms’ of migrants was ‘irresponsible’ and ‘dehumanising’ cut no ice with the Tory leader. He not only defended his language – he added to it saying: ‘They are economic migrants and they want to enter Britain illegally and the British people and I want to make sure our borders are secure and you can’t break into Britain without permission.’
However, the imperialist powers did break into Iraq, Libya and Syria, wreaking havoc and making them unlivable, and without anybody’s permission. He knows full well that the millions of Syrians, Iraqis and Libyans are not ‘economic migrants’ but are fleeing countries that he has helped to destroy.
Cameron also pledged total academisation of schools – that every school in England will be given the chance to convert to academy status. He said that he ‘profoundly believed’ this was the right way forward. That is why in the first 100 days we have brought forward legislation to transform all failing schools into academies, and for the first time taken the power to convert coasting schools into academies too,’ he told the Daily Telegraph.
Cameron said: ‘This means schools with strong standards and discipline, offering our children a firm foundation for future success. It also means giving great headteachers the freedom to run their own schools with the ability to set their own curriculum and pay their staff properly.’
In fact, the schools will be free of Local Authority control, have private sponsors and will set the wages and conditions of their staff – the 100% academisation programme is a plan to privatise education and to break the teaching trade unions and their negotiated national wage rates and conditions of service.
Every headteacher in England should be able to set their own curriculum and decide salary levels free from the influence of ‘bureaucrats’, is the Cameron line. This 100% academisation is to be achieved in a situation where new anti-union laws will make strikes illegal, make mass picketing illegal – where organised agency strike-breaking will be legal while attempts to stop it will be illegal!
Alongside the onslaught on migrants and the assault on state education, the Tories are seeking to impose new contracts on doctors, which junior doctors have just rejected on the grounds that they will have to work 30 hours a week more – 90 hours in place of 60 hours – for less money, and under conditions where tiredness will make patient safety an issue.
The new contract is part of the seven-day working plan designed to smash the BMA, as a prelude to wholesale NHS privatisation. Health Secretary Hunt is already on record as pledging that the new doctors’ contracts will be imposed by the government regardless of the opposition of the doctors and the opposition of the NHS trade unions.
Cameron and Hunt are in fact introducing a Tory dictatorship where trade unionism will be illegal, and contract imposition and forced academisation of education by Tory ministers will be the rule. Smashing unions and imposing an open dictatorship is in fact the only way that the Tories will be able to impose the privatisations and savage cuts necessary to save bankrupt UK capitalism.
Forced academisation and imposed contracts will, and must be, resisted by the trade unions. In fact, an injury to one is an injury to all! This is why the TUC must be made to call an indefinite general strike at its September Congress to bring this government down.
