THE TORY-led coalition is working overtime to privatise the public sector and turn it into a bonanza, a big killing for the big business speculators, as they have done in the case of the the Royal Mail, now privatised where union recognition and the current terms and conditions of service are to remain for just three years.
The speculators who have grabbed the Royal Mail are now plotting to casualise it, in a huge race to the bottom, and to turn it into a licence to make super-profits by union busting, ripping up agreements, and bringing in the £1 stamp.
The destruction of the UK industrial base was pioneered by Thatcher. She said that all the UK needed was huge banks and service industries. The bosses are now determined to make their billions though privatising every state-owned service.
They will wreck them to cut costs, and then de-unionise them, smashing negotiated agreements to make super-profits, as they did in the rail, gas, oil and electricity industries, which are now unaffordable as far as tens of millions of ordinary people are concerned.
The fact that 70% of the people are opposed to Royal Mail privatisation does not mean a thing to the tiny capitalist minority of the bosses and bankers, and their political representatives. They are only interested in profits.
They laugh at notions such as the ‘will of the people’ and instead rely on force, the state, anti-union laws and their class determination to see that the tiny minority of the capitalist class has its way.
Lenin used to say that if the working class could summon up just 10% of the ruthlessness that the ruling class shows every day, as it conducts its business, socialism would have been achieved a long time ago.
The Royal Mail is a case in point.
The vast majority of the people are opposed to privatisation. Even some Tories are opposed to it. Yet it is being done.
Why? Because the ruling class are being allowed to do it! The leaderships of the trade unions nationally say that it is nothing to do with them, while the leadership of the CWU said that a strike to stop privatisation would be illegal, and placed its hopes in the Labour Party.
The trade union leaders have stood by and allowed it to be privatised, with the speculators virtually dancing in the streets.
Speaking to a meeting of CWU members yesterday CWU Assistant General Secretary Dave Ward said that he was ‘fed up’ with the way that the Labour Party had treated the issue.
Labour treated the issue in the same way that it treats every issue, from the point of view of what benefits capitalists and capitalism.
That the Labour Party stabbed the CWU and the working class in the back with its declaration that it would not renationalise the Royal Mail is just par for its capitalist course, and does not shock or even surprise us.
It will do the same for the Fire Service, the NHS and state education when their sell-off drive really gets under way, since this is the only way that bankrupt British capitalism can make any profits.
Today the firefighters are marching and on Saturday they are striking. The teachers are taking strike action in a number of major areas on Thursday, while the result of the CWU strike ballot to defend their terms and conditions of service from privatisation will be announced today.
There is not the slightest doubt that the Tories have the same privatisation solution in mind for the education, fire and NHS services as they had for the Royal Mail.
The lessons of the Royal Mail struggle must be rapidly learnt.
Those who are about to be privatised must unite to take joint strike action, together, to fight privatisation.
They must put down a motion at the TUC general Council that the TUC call an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government that will renationalise all of the privatised industries – rail, gas, BA, oil, electricity, Royal Mail etc, and also nationalise the banks and the major industries under workers management.
Workers must build a new revolutionary leadership in the trade unions that is willing to use their full strength, leading the mass of the people to get rid of capitalism and advance to socialism.
Only the WRP fights for this perspective. Join it today!
