THE new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband spelt out yesterday his intention to act as a tame and loyal leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, telling the trade unions that he won’t support them if they decide to call strikes against the Tory-LibDem Coalition’s savage spending cuts and that the working class will have to put up with the coalition for at least five years.
By this time, there won’t be a Welfare State left for the trade unions and the working class to defend.
Miliband started his speech to the Labour Party Conference in Manchester yesterday by making it clear that there was nothing ‘red’ about him.
He praised the ‘radical’ Blair and Brown leadership of the Labour Party that simply ‘lost our way’ and said that it was absolutely right to junk ‘Clause Four’ of the Labour Party constitution, abandoning all talk of socialist aims and common ownership of the means of production.
He accepted the Tory-LibDem counter-revolution to level the Welfare State to the ground in the next five years and told the conference he most certainly didn’t want to see ‘waves of irresponsible strikes’ to stop this from happening.
In fact, said Ed Miliband, it was ‘true patriotism’ to slash the budget deficit in half over the next four years.
For this ‘new generation’ of Labour leadership there is no question of any attempt to force the Tories and their LibDem allies to resign.
This is because they are carrying on from where the completely discredited Blair and Brown left off, as the men who unconditionally threw their lot in with the bankers, big business and US imperialism, and reduced the trade unions to being just a source of funds for the Labour Party.
Ed Miliband will now work arm in arm with the right-wing leaders of the trade union movement, of the Simpson-Woodley type, to stop the working class from ‘getting out of hand’ and rising up to overthrow the Tories and LibDems. His role will be to protect the coalition from angry workers.
The ‘new generation’ of Labour party leaders knows that if the working class brings down the coalition what will be on the agenda is a socialist revolution, not some pro-bankers Labour government.
They see preventing this situation as their most important job. They are the true heirs of Blair and Brown to a man and woman.
Miliband declared: ‘I won’t oppose every cut the coalition proposes, there will be some things the coalition does that we won’t like as a party but will have to support and there will be some things they have done that I will not be able to reverse.’
Miliband admitted that ‘some’ of the Tories’ measures will be ‘painful’, but as a former Labour leader now ‘elder statesman’ Neil Kinnock spelt out after his speech, there will be no support from the Labour Party leadership if workers react to this pain by taking strike action.
Kinnock said Miliband doesn’t owe ‘anything’ to the trade union movement, which has given £12m to Labour in a couple of years.
Derek Simpson, co-leader of Unite, agrees with Miliband that strikes should be avoided at all costs. ‘He’s entirely in line with our thinking,’ Simpson said after Miliband’s speech.
The working class and the trade unions with their millions of members are faced with the biggest struggle that they have faced in their history.
To win this struggle they will have to bring down the coalition with a general strike and go forward to a socialist revolution.
This will require the building of the revolutionary leadership of the WRP in the trade unions and the removal of the entire reformist leadership that currently leads the trade unions. There is not a moment to lose.
