The leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) have refused to condemn Labour right-winger Alan Milburn for accepting a position with the Tory-led coalition government.
Milburn was an ally of Tony Blair and a key member of his government as health secretary, who was forced out because of the massive working-class and middle-class opposition to his privatisation plans.
A press statement issued by the TUC leadership enthusiastically offered Milburn advice in his new role as ‘social mobility tsar’, implying that they are halfway to supporting the Tories and Liberal Democrats as they seek to implement the most savage spending cuts in history.
The Tory Chancellor Osborne, who announced the cuts in his Emergency Budget in June, is trying to spin that the cuts are progressive and that the Tories will offer people ‘equality of opportunity’.
This is the ‘opportunity’ for all working-class and middle-class people to be equally pauperised, while the government protects the wealth of a handful of very rich people at the top of society.
An estimated 200,000 students are to be shut out of university this year, with more cuts to come next year and the years after that, forcing many universities to close altogether.
The poor are being told not to live ‘beyond your means’, which means starvation, since their means are to be savagely cut or withdrawn altogether by freezing, cutting and abolishing benefits, including child benefit, disability benefits and housing benefits.
The TUC is keeping open its lines to the Tories. General Secretary Brendan Barber is upset by Osborne’s decision to raise VAT, but that did not stop him from inviting the Tory Prime Minister Cameron to address the TUC Congress.
News Line responded to Barber’s invitation to Cameron by demanding that the invitation be cancelled, and that the TUC must call an emergency conference straightaway to discuss action to fight the government’s cuts.
The RMT rail union supported the demand and the invitation to Cameron was scuppered. Attempts to invite Business Secretary Cable to address next month’s Congress also failed. This was a body-blow to the right-wing of the TUC.
But they are not giving up in their efforts to collaborate with this government.
The right-wing TUC leaders agree that cuts have to be made to ‘reduce the deficit’, whilst pleading for some ‘tax loopholes’ to be shut to try to cover their betrayal.
The Tories need the support of the TUC leaders and the collaboration of Labour right-wingers in order to impose their savage cuts on the rest of the population.
These right-wing union leaders want the trade unions to sit on their hands and do nothing for the next five years, trying to tell workers that the Tories will then be so unpopular they will be driven from office and another Labour government will take its place.
The working class cannot wait five years! Action has to be taken immediately if millions of people are not to be reduced to paupers and the Welfare State left in ruins.
The News Line is calling for a mass lobby of the TUC Congress when it opens in Manchester on Monday September 13.
The leadership on the General Council has already suffered one body-blow following our call to cancel Cameron’s invitation.
Now delegates attending next month’s Congress must table an Emergency Resolution that instructs the General Council to call an indefinite General Strike to bring the coalition government down, to go forward to a workers government and socialism.
The motion must also call for the immediate expulsion of Milburn, Field, Hutton and the other coalition collaborators from the Labour Party for joining the Tory war on the Welfare State.
An indefinite General Strike is imperative to mobilise the full strength of the working class in the defence of the Welfare State, jobs and living standards, to win this struggle and ensure a socialist future.