TENS OF thousands of workers and youth are taking part in today’s historic Durham Miners’ Gala at a time when the capitalist system is gripped by its greatest crisis ever.
It has become glaringly obvious that in the interests of the working class, the majority of the middle class and the mass of youth, it must be overthrown and replaced by a socialist society, or else it will drag humanity into an abyss that will prove to be more horrific than the hungry 1930s and the great imperialist wars that it led on to.
Never has the crisis of leadership in the workers movement been so clear as it is today.
The Tories are proceeding with their plan to smash the NHS and destroy the Welfare State, destroying its universal benefits, and throwing the youth, the working class and the pensioners to the wolves.
We have now entered the Britain of Bedroom Taxes, Food Banks, Payday Loans at a 100% or more rate of interest, and mass austerity and privatisation programmes, with wage cuts and rampant food price inflation, while it is being openly stated that scores of hospitals must be closed so that the sick can be cared for by some non-existent ‘care in the community’.
This financial and economic crisis of capitalism is the source of the greatest crisis of leadership in the workers movement since the crisis that resulted in the Ramsay Mac National Government with the Tories in 1931.
We now have a Labour Party leadership that is turning on the trade unions with a savagery that has been borrowed from the Tory party, which is egging it on.
At a time when the Welfare State is vital, when millions have been threatened with pauperism, the Labour Party leaders have publicly stated that they will not reverse a single Tory cut, and that if elected as the government they will even bring in more savage cuts if they become necessary to save capitalism and its ruling class bankers and bosses.
They have responded to the Tory jibes that this cannot be done if the party depends on trade unions, by turning on the trade unions and openly boasting that they will turn the Labour Party into another US-style Democratic Party, complete with the election of candidates by primaries open to everybody who signs in that they support Labour!
The Labour Party, that was founded and built by the trade unions, at the behest of the bosses and the bankers is turning its fire on the trade unions and has adopted the historic Tory policy of ‘One Nation’ and the ‘national interest’ – that is the interest of the ruling class. The Labour Party leaders are ditching the trade unions in order to be able to form another National Government with the Tories!
While Miliband and Balls, and behind them Blair, Cameron and Co, lash out at the trade unions, the union leaders ‘fiddle while Rome burns’.
The Welfare State is being destroyed under their very noses, and the NHS is being privatised along with the entire public sector (the latest target is Royal Mail to be privatised in record time). The union leaders do nothing but prevaricate.
Last September, at the TUC Congress, a resolution was carried unanimously, that the General Council ‘would examine the practicalities’ of calling a general strike.
Ten months later, with many more workers sacked, with many more youth out of work and with ordinary people being terrified by ‘bedroom taxes’ and other financial devices, the TUC are still ‘considering the implications’, ie doing nothing.
They are paralysed with a political fear. They are refusing to use the great strength of the trade unions to dump Miliband out of the leadership of the Labour Party, and are refusing to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and go forward to a workers government and socialism, the only way out of the crisis.
The union leaders plead that they cannot fight Royal Mail or any other privatisation, including that of the NHS or the Welfare State, because it would be illegal.
Well, of course, at one time trade unions were illegal but that did not stop workers forming them! The defence of the basic gains and the basic rights of the working class is a fundamental responsibility. This must be done whether it is opposed by bourgeois legality or not. If it is declared to be illegal then bourgeois legality itself is revealed as just another way of oppressing the working class and must be treated with contempt.
The trade union leaders must be made to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.
This is the only way to halt the privatisation drive and defend the NHS and the Welfare State.
Trade union leaders who refuse to carry out this action must be removed and replaced by those who will.
Only the WRP is fighting for this policy and perspective. Join it today to fight for the full strength of the working class to be used to get rid of crisis-ridden capitalism and bring in socialism.