THE DAILY Telegraph yesterday called to ‘Combat strikes with contingency plans’ after observing that ‘What has been billed as a Winter of Discontent in the public sector has moved into Spring with no sign of a let-up.’
It observes that ‘Junior Doctors are in the middle of a 96-hour stoppage, which is extreme even by historical standards of industrial action.’
It adds: ‘Meanwhile teachers in England are planning further stoppages … The National Education Union has called its members out for 2 days on April 27 and May 2, which will coincide with the exam season.’
It further observes that ‘the militancy of the BMA and the NEU is concerning’ and adds: ‘If this is to continue the government needs to be far more proactive in drawing up contingency plans to counter the impact . . . Parents or former teachers prepared to monitor classrooms or invigilate exams should be encouraged to do so, and retired doctors recruited to fill in for strikers … Ministers cannot just stand by and let the unions do what they please.’
In fact the Telegraph is propagandising for the government to follow in the footsteps of the Baldwin government which prepared for the 1926 general strike by setting up a strike-breaking organisation termed ‘The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies’ (OMS).
It was established in 1925 to provide volunteers in the event of a general strike. During the General Strike of 1926, it was organised by the government to provide vital strike-breaking services, such as transport and communications.
On ‘Red Friday’, 31 July 1925, the government avoided a confrontation with the Miners Federation of Great Britain, which was expected to be followed by secondary industrial action by the railwaymen of the National Union of Railwaymen, and a wider confrontation.
As Stanley Baldwin said later, ‘We were not ready’. The government had an emergency plan but inadequate means of implementing it. He thus established a Royal Commission and provided a subsidy to enable the mineowners to maintain the miners’ existing wages and hours of work
In early August, Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks reported to the cabinet on the state of preparations for a class war, and his recommendations were approved. The OMS had its public outing in the letters page of The Times, where many were calling for the formation of a volunteer organisation to take over the jobs of striking workers, in the event of a general strike.
On 25 September 1925, the Home Secretary announced the formation of just such a group, the new OMS
The organisation, to be run by a committee chaired by Lord Hardinge, was to have branches in every city and to recruit volunteers in five classes, four of which were based on the men’s fitness and age. The fifth was for women, who were to be set to work only where they could avoid any ‘rough handling’. Lord Jellicoe and other top military men sat on the committee, to give the OMS a military discipline and to instill public confidence in the group that such important figures were involved.’
The boss class today has been shaken by the strength of the labour movement and is now setting up its own strike-breaking organisations basing itself on the experience of the 1926 general strike which saw the OMS acting with the army and the police to engage in strike-breaking.
This time round the Tories will have legislation on the books to make strike-breaking and banning unions legal. The 1926 general strike was sold out by the TUC after six days. The TUC was frightened that the working class was about to take the power.
Today, the working class is determined to put an end to capitalism and its massive inflation of prices and debt. There is no doubt that the working class is more powerful, than the bosses.
However the TUC will sell out the working class as it did in 1926, to keep the Tories in office. It is already terrified that the working class is about to get rid of capitalism once and for all.
There is a huge crisis of leadership in the workers’ movement. Only the WRP and its youth organisation the YS are seriously organising to bring down the Tories with a general strike and to go forward to a socialist nationalised and planned economy
Join the WRP and the YS today! Forward to the General Strike! Forward to the British Socialist revolution.
