IT IS now becoming obvious that the furore over parliamentary expenses and their alleged misuse, involving at least one leading Tory MP, was just a Trojan Horse to allow the Tory-led government coalition to mount a major attack on the workers movement, and bring in new anti-union laws including further attacks on the right to strike and ending the right of trade unions to sponsor and support a political party that fights for the interests of the working class.
In fact, the historic move of the working class through the trade unions to found and finance the Labour Party from 1900 to 1906 and onwards changed the course of history and led to the formation of the Welfare State in 1948, which the Tory party and big business have been striving to eradicate ever since.
Now at a time when the capitalist system is in its deepest crisis ever, and the need for the Welfare State is at its greatest, the bankers and the bosses are moving into action to abolish what has been won and consign the workers, the poor and the majority of the middle class back one hundred years or more. They are seeking to end the organised political role of trade unions.
It is also no accident that the Cameron-Osborne move saw daylight just hours after Miliband and Balls announced that Labour is willing to begin the removal of the universal benefits that are at the heart of the Welfare State.
There are, no doubt, a large number of Labour MPs and not a few trade union leaders who would be willing to sign up for such a programme.
With the economic crisis deepening by the hour, the prospect of the Tory-LibDem coalition being replaced by a Tory-Labour right wing coalition is not out of the question. The object of such a coalition, with its ‘iron discipline’, will be to put an end to the Welfare State and all of the gains of the working class to save the bankers and the bosses.
To do this, first of all, the trade unions have to be further weakened.
There is no doubt that the working class will react with fury at its basic organisations, the trade unions, being compared to the parliamentary lobby rackets of MPs! This is the ultimate political insult.
Already, the coalition is boasting that it will introduce a statutory register of lobbyists by July to clean up politics, and at its centre will be new laws to politically neuter the trade unions.
The law will rewrite union rules and outlaw the political levy. Labour leader Ed Miliband has already promised to back legislation to tighten up the rules on lobbying. The Tories now intend to make him, Balls and the Labour Party right wing bend the knee further, if not get down on all fours.
On Monday afternoon, after Balls’ ‘iron discipline’ speech, it was revealed that the planned bill would also include tighter controls of third-party funding of general election campaigns, and moves to make it harder for unions to take strike action.
The third-party funding rules will apply to organisations affiliated to political parties – such as trade unions – as well as those making major donations of more than £100,000 a year.
If the bill becomes law, the full cost of campaign expenditure by such organisations will count towards a party’s election spending cap at a local and national level.
The bill will also require trade unions to carry out an annual audit of their membership and demonstrate that the figures they produce are accurate, in a move to end the current system of self-certification, in order to curb strike action.
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady commented yesterday: ‘The government is cynically trying to exploit a political sleaze scandal to crack down on unions – which are democratic and accountable organisations’. They are doing this so as to be able to advance to crush the NHS and the Welfare State.
Therefore, they must be answered. The TUC must call a general strike to bring down the government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
This will complete the work that was begun in 1900 with the formation of the Labour Representation Committee and then the Labour Party, under the political control of the trade unions and the working class. The working class that won the Welfare State must now defend it with a socialist revolution.