THE News Line calls for a massive lobby of the next meeting of the TUC General Council on Wednesday 24th April, to demand the TUC immediately call an all-out, indefinite general strike to bring down the government.
At this meeting, a paper is due to be submitted from the Unite union calling for a 24-hour general strike against the government’s austerity measures.
This call is being supported by Unison, with the proviso that it obeys the anti-union laws and is called in connection with a ‘legitimate’ industrial dispute.
This hedging of bets about the legality of a general strike is a clear sign that a section of the trade union leadership is desperately seeking ways of avoiding any fight against the government, while others are seeking to limit it to a 24-hour protest.
So deep and historic is the world crisis of the capitalist system that it has no other solution for the ruling class other than to smash up every single gain that workers have made over the last hundred years.
To keep the banks afloat, the Tory-led coalition has no alternative but to destroy the Welfare State, slash wages to the bone through pay freezes and destroy income through driving up inflation by flooding the economy with worthless bits of paper masquerading as money.
None of this can be achieved peacefully or indeed ‘legally’ – it can only be achieved through civil war against the working class.
This is the real meaning of the repulsive state organised jamboree that is Thatcher’s funeral.
Thatcher is being venerated today, not as the reviled architect of the Poll Tax that crushed her and the Tory party, but as the Tory leader who set out deliberately to smash the entire trade union movement in the 1980s through her war on the miners and their union.
To this end she mobilised the entire resources of the capitalist state to destroy first the NUM and then the Fleet Street printers’ unions during the Wapping dispute on behalf of her good friend Rupert Murdoch.
Despite the police, courts and the spooks of the intelligence services all being mobilised to destroy the NUM, Thatcher could not succeed in crushing either the miners or the printers.
Instead, she was forced to rely on the treachery of the TUC leaders to betray their struggles with an outright refusal to call the entire trade union movement out in their defence. It also organised in secret to pressurise the NUM to call off their strike.
Today Cameron is cloaking himself in the mantle of Thatcher and using her corpse as an excuse for a massive show of strength by the state designed to intimidate the working class and provide the opening shots in open class warfare.
This is the meaning of putting 700 troops onto London’s streets to protect her body while utilising the state’s professional killers from the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service to provide ‘security’ for this state provocation.
Anyone dissenting from the adulation of Thatcher and thinking of participating in a counter-demonstration will find themselves on a list and liable to being picked up and interned for the duration.
While the TUC worries about the legality of striking, the state is tearing up the law books and declaring war on the working class and preparing to try to finish what Thatcher was incapable of doing – smashing the trade union movement.
At their meeting of the 24th the TUC leadership must be swamped with the demand to stop all this nonsense about legality and pressure, and call an all-out, indefinite general strike with the aim of bringing down this government and replacing it with a workers government that will advance to socialism.
Those leaders who refuse to lead such a strike must be immediately removed and replaced with a leadership that will, and is filled with a determination to win the struggle.