THE Brown government is showing clearly and conclusively that it stands with the bosses, the bankers, and the employers against the workers and their trade unions.
Among Brown’s first actions as PM was to give unelected right wingers Digby Jones and Ara Darzi ministers’ jobs, using the House of Lords as their means of entry into his government.
Jones, the ex-CBI bosses leader, refuses to take the Labour whip and has refused to state that he will vote Labour in the next general election, but he is 100 per cent reliable when it comes to beating up the trade unions as a trade and investment minister!
Darzi could not wait to get started as a health minister, and has just announced that he intends to close up to 24 of the 32 District General Hospitals in London, and replace them with polyclinics, ie. goldmines for the private sector.
To rub salt into the wound Brown brought Damon Buffini onto the government’s Business Council.
Buffini’s Primera equity group has asset-stripped the AA before selling it on to Sega. The trade unions consider him to be one of the unacceptable faces of capitalism. Brown loves him.
These appointments to push forward the government’s wage cutting, job cutting and privatisation agenda have stoked up a massive opposition in the working class and the middle class.
Not even the moderate BMA leadership can go along with the mass closure of District General Hospitals and their replacement by polyclinics.
In every area of the country there will be a steely determination to stop the closures of the DGHs, which will lead to occupations by doctors, nurses, patients and local residents to keep them open.
Already the RCN nurses union is to ballot its members at the end of this month for industrial action against the decision to pay their measly 2.5 per cent ‘wage rise’ in stages, a decision that will reduce the rise to 1.9 per cent in annual terms.
Already nurses are insisting that they want to see strike action – with emergency cover in place for the patients.
Yesterday three trade unions, the GMB, UNISON and the TGWU, said that they are meeting today to organise an industrial action ballot of all local government workers, after they cancelled a meeting with the employers when they told the unions that they would not improve on the Brown government’s 2 per cent pay offer.
Yesterday evening the CWU stopped work for 24 hours against the government supported Royal Mail plan to cut their wages, casualise their jobs and smash their union.
Already postal workers are demanding indefinite strike action and the establishment of a public sector alliance to defeat the Brown-bankers’ government.
Behind the postal workers stand the civil servants of the PCS, who are facing a Brown government attack that will cost 100,000 jobs.
It is crystal clear that the Brown regime is seeking to destroy the public sector, and privatise and casualise it for the benefit of the bosses and bankers.
A public sector alliance must be formed at once to organise indefinite strike action to defend the public sector and defeat the Brown plan.
Local union branches must form councils of action to organise all local union branches and all community organisations to defend the NHS, state education and the Royal Mail against the privateers and their government by organising mass demonstrations, occupations of hospitals facing closure and mass strike actions.
These actions will create the conditions for building a new leadership inside the trade unions and for organising national strike action to defeat the privateers and the bosses.
This can only be done by bringing down the Brown government and bringing in a workers government that will carry out socialist policies.
This is the only way forward.
