YESTERDAY, the High Court in London ruled that the strike action by nurses on May 2nd was unlawful under existing Tory anti-union laws.
Pat Cullen, head of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) had previously said that taking the RCN to court was treating nurses as ‘criminals’.
Cullen is correct, the Tories are making the right to strike a criminal offence and are building a brutalised police force that they will need to take on the powerful UK working class, that is refusing to passively accept having its lives destroyed for the profit of the bankers and bosses.
The working class is more powerful than the capitalist courts, the police and the entire capitalist state apparatus.
The time has now come for the working class to use this strength by forcing the TUC and trade union leaders to stop holding back and tamely submitting to Tory laws but to call an indefinite general strike.
Yesterday’s state attack on the nurses will be answered by workers and young people on next Monday’s May Day march insisting that the TUC make it the start of a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers government.
This will expropriate the bosses and bankers, disband the corrupt police forces and replace the completely bankrupt capitalist state with a workers state and socialism.
However, the Tories are preparing a class war against the working class, with their propaganda that workers will have to get used to going hungry and that this is the best that modern British capitalism, bankrupted, demoralised and corrupt to the core has to offer.
Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, at the launch of the Public Safety Foundation, which promotes itself as a ‘back to basics’ police think tank, claimed that police who get involved in ‘contested’ issues are undermining public confidence in the force.
She said: ‘When police chiefs spend taxpayers’ money, that could have been spent fighting crime, on diversity training that promotes contested ideology like critical race theory, the reputation of policing as an institution is damaged in the eyes of the public.’
The police, Braverman insisted, needed to be ‘politically impartial’ and stop ‘virtue signalling’ in order to concentrate on ‘common sense policing’ and prioritising the fight against crime.
She said: ‘The perception that some police are more interested in protecting the interests of a radical minority engaged in criminality than they are protecting the rights of the law-abiding majority is utterly corrosive to public confidence in policing.’
The ludicrous proposition advanced by Braverman is that all this supposed fraternisation with protesters, that she claims takes place during demonstrations, has trashed the reputation of policing.
What has trashed the reputation of the police, of course, has been three public inquiries over the years that have found the Metropolitan Police force, along with all the rest, as being institutionally racist, misogynistic and corrupt.
It is a force that can recruit and harbour in its midst officers like Wayne Couzens convicted of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, or the convicted serial rapist David Carrick.
Even the new head of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley, said this month that several hundred of his officers should be kicked out, and that one in every 200 had criminal convictions, most of which were committed before they were recruited.
Every time yet another scandal or atrocity has blown up, the response of the police authorities has been to express shock and horror and promise to implement new procedures to weed out existing miscreants, and set up better recruitment criteria, to stop criminals and sex offenders from joining in the future.
Braverman and the Tories have no time for such wishy washy ‘liberalism’ as she, and Rishi Sunak, later boasted of recruiting 20,000 more police under all the existing recruitment criteria.
May Day will give an opportunity to many workers to tell the TUC leaders that if they do not call a general strike to smash the Tories, they will be removed and replaced by a new leadership.
May Day must be the day when the masses make clear to the union leaders what must be done, starting with a general strike to smash the Tories and bringing in a workers government and socialism.
