YESTERDAY’S mass picket lines outside NHS hospitals are a direct result of the fact that the Tory government is insulting workers and will not even discuss a nurses’ pay rise for this year. Instead it discusses the privatisation of the NHS!
Nurses and health care workers, and all workers, would need at least a 19% pay rise just to keep pace with the galloping inflation rate that has slashed the value of wages world wide.
Far from being concerned about the value of nurses’ wages, and the wages of the working class as a whole, the Tories are deliberately embarking on policies that will mean a continual slashing of the wages and the working conditions of workers and the bankrupting and privatisation of the NHS.
New anti-union laws are being brought in that will end the right to strike and put the trade unions under state supervision and control like some new Nazi Labour Front.
The Tories are in fact creating the conditions for bankrupting millions of workers with their pouring of armaments into the Ukraine in a frantic attempt to weaken Russia and strengthen the world position of the US-UK imperialist axis.
When it is pointed out that this gigantic rearmament of the Ukraine has pushed food prices sky high and brought a savage inflation of food prices world wide, and a real hunger to many parts of the world, the Tory response is cynicism of the crudest order.
They say that workers should be proud to go hungry, or having to move into warm centres to keep the cold out, because the number one policy aim of the Tories is to weaken Russia, whatever the cost to working class living standards, while its second major policy is to bankrupt the NHS so that its remnants can be handed over to big business.
All this is to be achieved by driving the working class back to the conditions of the 1930s! However the working class has made up its mind not to accept anything of the sort and to take the Tories on and beat them!
The determination of workers has forced the TUC to call on February 1 a massive day of demonstrations in the UK to fight new anti-strike legislation ‘every step of the way’, and to smash it.
The TUC has been forced to hold a national ‘protect the right to strike’ day on Wednesday 1 February.
It says: ‘Members of the public will be invited to show their support for workers taking action to defend their pay and conditions.’
The TUC has vowed to fight the new strike curbs ‘every step of the way’ – including through parliament and the courts. It however refuses to call a general strike.
The TUC says the government’s new anti-strike plans are unworkable and almost certainly in breach of international law, in other words its plans are illegal.
TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak said: ‘These draconian new curbs will tilt the balance of power even more in favour of bad bosses and make it harder for people to win better pay and conditions.
‘Nobody should lose their job if they take lawful action to win a better deal. But ministers have gone from clapping our key workers to threatening them with the sack.
‘Unions will fight these plans every step of the way – including through parliament and through the courts.
‘On February the 1st will we hold events across the country against this spiteful new bill – which is unworkable and almost certainly illegal.’
Every member of the trade unions in the UK must insist with the TUC that it must make February 1 the first day of an indefinite general strike to bring down the illegal Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
The leaders of the Unite, RMT and CWU trade unions must tell the TUC General Council that the time for dodging its responsibilities is up. Enough is enough!
The unions must convene a special meeting of the TUC General Council to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
Capitalism must be dumped into the dustbin of history. There must be no return to the 1930s. The NHS must be strengthened and developed and a planned socialist economy introduced whose ambition will be to replace the robbery of capitalism with a society whose axiom will be ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’
