THE RMT’s Bob Crow yesterday issued a ‘call to arms’ to the entire Labour and Trade Union movement and to all the communities under attack.
He called for a ‘sustained campaign of generalised strikes across both the public and private sectors and community direct action to defend public services in the teeth of the fiscal fascism being unleashed by this ConDem government.’
He added: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that it will take general and coordinated strike action across the public and private sectors to stop their savage assault on jobs, living standards and public services.’
He added that ‘The trade unions must form alliances with community groups, campaigns and pensioners organisations in the biggest show of united resistance since the success of the anti-poll tax movement.’
He also said that ‘this administration has no mandate for its cuts’ and that the ‘RMT says don’t fear them, fight them. Our Trade Union has a slogan, “never on our knees”.’
He spoke up on the day that a Treasury leak confirmed that at a time when the Tories and Liberals are getting ready to cut the dole, their own Treasury is predicting an increase in the numbers out of work by 1.3 million by the end of this parliament.
The Treasury has worked out that every year for the next five years up to 120,000 public sector jobs and 140,000 private sector jobs will be destroyed.
Osborne’s original forecast of a 25 per cent cut in all government departments except health and education, has now accelerated to a cut of 33 per cent.
The News Line, the daily paper of the WRP, gives its full support to Crow’s call and urges that there must be a recall TUC Congress this month to organise and mobilise all TUC trade unions and sympathetic organisations for the struggle ahead.
The first thing that has to be done is that the TUC must be bombarded with resolutions calling for a recall conference to organise a general strike, and that the shameful invitation to Tory leader Cameron to attend and address the TUC Congress be cancelled at once.
As well, the TUC must be made to insist that Labour collaborators with the Tory-led coalition’s attack on the working class such as Frank Field and Hutton be expelled from the Labour Party.
The RMT is correct to say that the trade unions must form an alliance with the millions of workers in the local communities.
This is why trade unions must take the lead in setting up Councils of Action. These will mobilise the masses and lead mass actions to occupy hospitals that are threatened with closure, to keep them open, to keep GP surgeries marked out for closure open, and to prevent the evictions of council tenants, whether they be pensioners who have ‘too many rooms’ as far as the Tories or Liberals are concerned, or unemployed families that the Tories and Liberals want to force onto the highways to look for work, outside their areas.
However, the big issue is that it will not be enough to fight the Tories to a standstill, and perhaps see Cameron and Osborne swopped for two other Tories – remember how Thatcher was replaced by Major in 1991 after the Poll Tax uprising, and continued to deprive tens of thousands of people of their jobs and homes after Black Wednesday.
With the capitalist crisis raging, it is a matter of life and death that a general strike action brings the coalition crashing down and replaces it with a workers government.
This will carry out the necessary socialist policies to put an end to capitalism, expropriating the bosses and bankers and bringing in a planned socialist economy that can satisfy the requirements of the people.
This is the way forward in the UK, and throughout Europe and the world, to replace bankrupt capitalism with worldwide socialism.