LAST Wednesday, Dave Prentis, general secretary of the country’s second largest union, Unison, made a speech urging a ‘popular uprising in defence of the right to strike’.
Fighting words from Prentis speaking at a public meeting organised by the Institute for Employment Rights, and billed as the first large-scale response to the Tory bill to make strikes virtually impossible. But what exactly is Prentis proposing with this clarion call for a popular uprising?
He certainly made no concrete proposals at this meeting for action to put a popular uprising into practice. Indeed, just what Prentis means when he promises an uprising was spelt out in a speech he made on the crucial issue of fighting the anti-union laws on the eve of Unison’s annual conference held in June.
In this speech he told union delegates that: ‘Unison will also double its legal funds in order to take on landmark cases – and if the union fails in parliament it will take the government to the “highest court” in Europe to defend members’ right to strike.’
Prentis added that the union will also be calling on the TUC to organise a mass lobby of parliament and a march against austerity. In fact, the TUC are calling, not for a march against austerity and a lobby of parliament, but for a march and demonstration in Manchester to the Tory annual conference in October, calling for the Tories to stop their austerity programme and halt the attacks on unions.
That Prentis is now emphasising the need for a popular uprising and disguising his real belief that unions must rely on bourgeois courts for their survival is due to the tide of anger sweeping his members over all the cuts they face under Tory austerity.
He is being forced to make militant-sounding speeches now as a result of the huge pressure being exerted on the leadership by the broad movement throughout the working class to reject the Tory policies of smashing wages, benefits and the welfare state in order to prop up a bankrupt capitalist system.
When Prentis refuses to say exactly how a popular uprising can be organised it is no accident – he, and the rest of the union leadership, know full well that the only way it can be organised is by the TUC calling an indefinite general strike to remove the government.
This is the only way that austerity and the attack on workers’ rights can be defeated, by an indefinite general strike with the whole working class, and the majority of the middle class in support, to bring down the Tories – but this is the one thing that Prentis, McCluskey and the rest of the TUC refuse to do.
This was made clear at last year’s TUC annual conference when all these leaders banded together to ensure that the official TUC policy of considering the feasibility of calling a general strike was wiped off the agenda pad and didn’t even get a mention.
Having turned their backs on the only possible way of organising the working class in a fight against the Tories, these leaders are reduced to calling for yet another meaningless round of marches to the Tory conference in the full knowledge that this is a complete waste of time, a diversion from any real struggle.
Dressing this up in the cloak of militancy, replete with pseudo-left phrases about popular uprisings, in order to retain some credibility with members who are demanding a real fight, does not disguise the fact that Prentis and the TUC are running a mile from taking on the government.
Instead of marching on the Tories begging them to stop attacking the working class, the WRP and All Trades Unions Alliance are calling upon every young person and worker to march on the TUC annual conference in September to demand that these leaders immediately stop talking about popular uprisings and get on with organising one, through calling a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government and a socialist society.
Those leaders who refuse to lead this fight must be removed from office and replaced by a leadership that is prepared to take this struggle forward and lead a real revolutionary uprising to get rid of capitalism forever.
This is the way forward!
