CIVIL SERVANTS are angry that Cabinet Office minister, and head of the Star Chamber to force through government policy, Francis Maude, is going to drive emergency legislation through parliament to cut the redundancy payments of civil servants and destroy their Civil Service Compensation Scheme (CSCS).
This legislation will slash the redundancy payments of the tens of thousands of civil servants, and no-doubt the hundreds of thousands of other public sector workers that the coalition is due to sack in the period directly ahead.
Maude, is in a hurry, and has already warned civil service department heads that there will be mass sackings after September 15.
The emergency legislation is necessary because the High Court, in the last days of the Labour government, agreed with the PCS trade union that it would be illegal for the government to tear up an agreement to which it had put its signature.
This left the government, and the Tory-led government that followed it high and dry, and also greatly embarrassed the POA, GMB, Unite, FDA and Prospect trade unions that had agreed to allow the government to rip the redundancy deal up.
Now, the government is going to bring in emergency legislation that will allow it not only to break the law, but to make strike action to defend the redundancy rights of PCS members an illegal action, as far as the coalition is concerned.
Not content with that, the Star Chamber is also moving to bring in legislation to make it much more difficult to win a strike ballot.
The coalition is adopting the plan of the CBI bosses’ organisation, which is to no longer recognise the legality of a strike action if a majority of the workers vote for the action.
This is good enough for parliamentary elections but not good enough for trade union ballots.
The Star Chamber wants a situation where at least 40 per cent, or over, of the workers eligible to vote must vote for strike action, for a majority vote for action to be legal. Such legislation will be used to illegalise all strike actions against the planned savage cuts and closures policy of the coalition.
The Tory and Lib Dem ‘libertarians’ want to chain the working class up with as many anti-union laws as possible to recreate the era of the Combination Acts. They also want to make it extraordinarily difficult to get rid of the coalition, and achieve a parliamentary dissolution and a general election.
The work of the Star Chamber was to be seen in parliament yesterday when the Tory Party’s Lib Dem servants outlined the procedure for achieving a dissolution of the House of Commons and an election.
The figure has now been upped from 55 per cent of MPs to 66 per cent of MPs, where formerly only a majority of one was necessary to win a vote of no confidence and achieve a dissolution.
Before our eyes the bourgeois parliament is giving way to an open bourgeois dictatorship, with the modern ‘Star Chamber’ at the centre of it, acting in a fashion that would not have displeased Charles I.
They are organising a situation where it is going to be almost impossible to organise a legal strike, and where it will be impossible to get rid of a government through parliamentary means.
The whole of the trade unions must stand alongside the civil servants and assure them that they will not be allowed to fight alone.
There must be a meeting of the public sector trade unions to give their full support to the civil servants, and to demand that the TUC General Council meets at once, to tell the dictatorial Tories and Lib Dems that if they push through emergency legislation to smash the civil service redundancy agreement, then the TUC will call a general strike in support of the civil servants.
This will strike a blow for democracy by bringing the dictatorial coalition down and bringing in a workers government.
