GMB leader Paul Kenny has told delegates to the GMB conference that the GMB wants a greater say in Labour’s policy making process.
The truth, as far as this proposition is concerned, is that it would be easier to bring the government down than to win back the trade unions’ right to have a say in the policy of the party that the unions founded and have funded ever since 1906.
After all, it was Gordon Brown and Ed Balls who decided that capitalism must be saved at all costs in 2008, after the sub-prime mortgage crisis rocked the US banks and brought down Northern Rock.
They initiated a policy that saw £1.2 trillion put at the disposal of the banks, with the working class and the middle class paying the bill, a policy that the Cameron government has continued with its drive to privatise the NHS, slash pensions, freeze wages and impose £9,000 tuition fees.
Kenny continued that Labour must make major changes or its funding ‘could’ be in jeopardy.
Kenny is alluding to the fact that under the Blair-Brown governments the trade unions put tens of millions of pounds at the disposal of a government whose major achievements were six wars and the widening of the gulf between the rich and the poor.
Labour, under Miliband and Balls has declared that it will not reverse the Tory Lib-Dem cuts, will not scrap the Tories Health and Social Care Act, under which the NHS is being privatised, and are actually supporting the current Tory policy of freezing (cutting) public sector wages.
Balls was booed at the GMB Congress on Monday after once again spelling out this Labour line and making it very clear that his mission was to save capitalism, and that the greater the crisis, the greater the cuts that would be required.
GMB general secretary Paul Kenny said Balls’ position was ‘misguided and wrong’ and promised to continue witholding funding for the party.
The GMB gives Labour around £1.4m a year in affiliation fees but has cut back on more than £500,000 in other donations since Balls said he supported freezing public sector pay.
Kenny, speaking at the Congress, said Balls should have condemned the government, not public sector workers.
He said: ‘The failure to wholeheartedly support public sector workers taking their lawful rights to stop work to oppose a tax on their pensions… was misguided and wrong.
‘And since that time, when the comments were made by Ed Balls, the GMB have actually shut the money box, apart from our affiliation fees and funding for elections and fighting the Tories and the BNP at local level. And that money box is going to stay shut until we see major changes.’
He said Labour was ‘born out of, belongs to and should serve working people’ and the union’s task was to return the party to regular people.
In fact, the Labour leaders from 1997 to 2010, with the support of the trade union leaders removed Clause 4, the nationalisation clause, from the Labour constitution, and diluted the union block vote to place Blair, Brown and now Miliband securely in the saddle carrying out policies opposed by the unions, to please the bosses.
More is required than a token cut in the Labour money supply, and that the GMB will only finance elections, and fighting the Tories, since Labour is pledged to carry on with Tory policies.
What is required is that the trade union leaders call an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition and then ensure that a workers government takes its place, pledged to reverse all Tory cuts and carry out socialist policies.
What workers require is a socialist revolution to save the Welfare State and to put an and to capitalism not a parliamentary reshuffle of MPs seating arrangements.
