THE September strikes by RMT union members on London’s underground system are just the latest challenge to the super-austerity policies of PM Keir Starmer’s Labour government. These are to force the working class to pay for the terminal financial crisis engulfing the British economy and to plug the growing ‘black hole’ of an estimated £50billion debt in public finances.
Amidst surging inflation of 4.5 per cent and soaring food prices, the strike wave in the public sector to defend wages, conditions and services is set to explode in the autumn and involve millions of workers.
The tube strike is due to take place for a week starting from Sept 5, with backroom staff including signallers, engineers and service control personnel downing tools on different days to win their demands.
The RMT union announced its strike after members rejected a 3.4 per cent pay offer.
Eddie Dempsey, RMT general secretary, said his members are not after ‘a king’s ransom’, but that ‘fatigue and extreme shift rotations are serious issues impacting on our members’ health and well-being – all of which have not been adequately addressed for years by the Underground management’.
Striking Birmingham bin-workers, Unite members, are still solid on their fifth-month long strike against the Labour council’s ‘hire and fire’ attacks to cut wages by up to £8,000 annually.
Unite, Labour’s biggest financial backer, is threatening to cut its political funding to the party over the dispute. It has also suspended the membership of Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, over her failure to back the strikes and for ‘bringing the union into disrepute’.
The autumn strike wave is set to continue with GPs, resident doctors and nurses preparing for strike ballots over demands for proper pay and funding.
Resident doctors in NHS hospitals walked out recently over demands for their pay increase for 2026, and they have a mandate to strike again until January.
Nurses may join them on the picket line after ‘overwhelmingly’ rejecting a 3.6 per cent pay offer, while other healthcare workers, ranging from paramedics to cleaners, have all rejected pay offers in recent months.
Meanwhile, bin collectors are poised to continue a five-month walkout until Christmas over pay cuts, with similar attacks on council staff looming on financially crippled local councils across the country, several of which, like Crawley, are already bankrupt.
The walkouts threaten to further increase the pressure on Rachel Reeves, Chancellor, who is scrambling to plug a black hole in the public finances of up to £50bn.
But Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said on Thursday that ministers had a ‘responsibility’ to stand up to public sector pay demands to help support the Prime Minister and Chancellor.
It is clear that the government have no intention of funding pay increases, but intends instead to offload the entire public financial crisis onto the working class by destroying and privatising the NHS.
Individual protest strikes by any single unions will not change Labour’s austerity attacks.
It has been also hit by the mounting crises in the private sector with Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Steel company in Rotherham, the UK’s third largest, announcing its collapse into government administration on Thursday, with the loss of 1,500 jobs.
Along with Labour’s austerity war on the working class at home, its continuing complicity with Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has enraged hundreds of thousands of youth and students against the annihilation of the Palestinian people.
British capitalism is bankrupt and must be overthrown by a general strike to stop all military and other support for Israel and to nationalise the big UK companies, banks and utilities .
The TUC Congress has enormous power, but so far has taken no action against Israel and Starmer’s government.
At its annual Congress on September 7th it must be forced to organise a general strike to bring down the Labour government and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
This is the only answer to the death agony of the capitalist system.
The TUC Congress meets in Brighton on 7 September and workers and youth must take the opportunity to lobby them and insist the delegates decide on calling an immediate general strike against this Labour regime and bring it down.
It must then go forward to bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
We urge workers and youth in their thousands to join the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists and to lobby the TUC in Brighton. Forward to Socialism!
