TORY Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will be delivering his Budget speech today in the middle of a massive strike action across the country of up to half a million workers.
250,000 members of the teaching union NEU began two days of strikes in the fight for the union’s demand for a ‘fully funded above inflation pay rise’.
The NEU has organised a mass march and demonstration from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square starting at 12.00pm.
Teachers will be joined by 133,000 civil servants, members of the PCS union as their strike action has been escalated by 33,000 additional civil servants voting recently to join with the 100,000 who walked out on February 1st.
The demand is for a 10% pay rise, better pensions, job security and no cuts to redundancy terms. The Tories have rejected these demands as ‘unaffordable’ just as they have rejected all demands for pay increases to protect workers from spiralling inflation.
75,000 junior doctors in the BMA have been on a three-day strike action this week in their fight for a pay increase that compensates them for the massive real terms pay cut of 26% they have endured under Tory austerity cuts.
1,500 London Underground workers, members of the RMT and Aslef unions are out, with Transport for London warning Tube passengers there will be ‘little or no service’.
40,000 rail workers are joining this mass action today.
Meanwhile, anyone in London looking for updates on the Tube closures and the strikes on BBC radio are in for a disappointment, as National Union of Journalist (NUJ) members take strike action in protest at plans to cut local radio programmes.
While hundreds of thousands of workers across the country take to the streets and strike against the Tories and their insistence that a bankrupt British capitalist system can’t afford pay increases, the leadership of the TUC has remained totally silent.
The TUC has not said a word about today’s mass action, let alone organised anything that might lead to a conflict with the Tories.
The TUC has stabbed workers in the back with a mealy mouthed ‘budget submission’ to Hunt which begs the Tories ‘to boost pay, deliver plans for strong public services’ and ‘protect families from the cost-of-living emergency.’
There is no call to action and for solidarity in the struggle against a Tory government intent on using its anti-union laws to make striking illegal while forcing workers to scab or face instant dismissal if they refuse to cross a picket line.
Instead, there is just an impotent appeal for help from a Tory government that can raise an extra £5 billion for the British military while pledging unlimited billions of pounds for the imperialist war against Russia. Billions for imperialist war on Russia and nothing but food banks and poverty for the working class, along with the destruction of the NHS and all public services.
The mass strike today, along with the wave of strikes throughout country, prove conclusively that the working class has indeed had enough and is demanding real action to defend their wages and conditions from a Tory government that is determined to make workers pay for the recessionary economic crisis strangling British capitalism.
Meanwhile, the TUC spends all its time trying to hold this mass movement back from the throat of the Tories in the knowledge that such is the strength of the working class, mobilised in a general strike it would bring down this weak Tory government and create the conditions for going forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
Workers must demand that the trade union leaders immediately force a recall of the TUC Congress and clear out those reformist leaders who would rather see the working class defeated than lead a struggle against the Tories and capitalism.
They must be sacked and replaced by a new leadership that will immediately organise an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers, and build a socialist planned economy.
There is no other way forward!
