THE ACCUSATION that the Tory government is paralysed waiting on the outcome of the leadership battle between Truss and Sunak is very wide of the mark.
Despite all their internal warfare, the Tories are advancing with plans to take on and smash the working class and the trade unions, plans that whoever wins the contest will immediately implement.
This was made clear yesterday when it was revealed that Tory ministers are planning not just to sack 91,000 civil servants but to cut their redundancy payments by up to a third.
Already, the main civil service union, PCS, is balloting its members for strike action over the derisory pay offer of 3%.
The Tories have thrown down the gauntlet to the civil service unions by signalling that they are prepared to force through wage increases far below the existing rate of inflation, currently 13% and rising rapidly, sack a third of the workforce and screw them out of redundancy money.
When civil servants take strike action to defend their pay and against mass sackings, the Tories have made it crystal clear they will use the full force of the law to break any strike using the newly legalised agency scabs along with courts imposing fines of up to a million pounds on the union for disrupting the smooth running of capitalism.
All these laws, backed up by the police armed with powers to arrest pickets deemed ‘unruly’ or ‘noisy’, have been prepared for a confrontation to the finish with the entire trade union movement under the Tory slogan ‘the right to scab not strike’.
With a national strike wave erupting across the country from the railways, telecoms, postal workers, being joined by bus drivers and even lawyers, while NHS workers are in the process of balloting, the Tories are organising to wage a war to the finish.
In this situation, the slogan ‘Enough is Enough!’ must rate as the understatement of the year.
The general secretary of the RMT rail workers union, Mick Lynch, along with Dave Ward of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have organised a campaign group under the slogan of Enough is Enough which is holding a ‘major launch event’ tonight in Clapham.
In fact, millions of workers and their families have already decided that Enough is Enough as the Tories wage a war to drive the working class back to the extreme poverty conditions of the ‘hungry thirties’ when capitalism’s last great recession forced millions into starvation.
Indeed, the Tories are now intent on driving even further back to the 19th century when trade unions were illegal and workers risked their lives and jail in the struggle to organise against the brutality and poverty inflicted on them by the bosses.
Millions of workers and young people simply cannot afford to live on poverty level wages, insecure working conditions and a Universal Credit system that leaves them unable to buy food or pay for gas and electricity.
They don’t need slogans that only just touch the surface of the crisis and which don’t even begin to address the fact that this Tory government is only just getting going in the war to smash the trade unions and dump the capitalist crisis on the backs of every worker, single parent and pensioner.
What the working class wants is not more slogans but for the trade unions to take real action.
The TUC Congress is meeting in Brighton on Monday 12 September.
Immediately, tens of thousands of workers and youth must organise to descend on the TUC demanding that they mobilise the huge strength of the working class by calling a general strike to bring down the Tory government and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy that will be able to provide for the needs of all.
The working class is more powerful than this Tory government or the bankrupt capitalist system that it serves.
It is time to consign both to history’s dustbin.
Join the TUC lobby on September 12 and demand a general strike as the only way forward.
