LABOUR leader Keir Starmer returned from holiday at the weekend to announce his new ‘robust’ plan to freeze the cap on electricity and gas prices for six months from October.
This is scarcely a new plan. A week ago, the Liberal Democrats called for the Tories to stop the energy price cap rise, while last week the former Labour leader Gordon Brown also called for the energy price cap to be scrapped.
Brown also called for the energy companies to be temporarily nationalised – naturally with full compensation to their shareholders for the inconvenience of being bailed out by the working class.
Of course, all of these robust plans to stop tens of millions of workers and their families being plunged into complete destitution – as many forecasters say energy bills are set to reach £5,000 next year – are meaningless.
The Tories will never carry out any freezes on price caps.
Starmer’s plan is a pathetic attempt to convince workers that a solution to this crisis can be found within capitalism if only the Tories would take heed of Labour’s pleadings.
The working class are having nothing to do with Starmer’s plans but are taking their own mass action.
National strikes on the rail and Underground network, along with the first national strike by CWU telecom workers in 35 years, will shortly be joined by postal workers.
Nurses and and NHS workers are currently being balloted over pay in the fight for pay increases that match the massive increases in energy and food prices.
Faced with an insurrectionary working class refusing to be driven back into poverty on the scale of the 1930s, the ruling class are now preparing a war to impose their crisis on the working class.
This call for an all-out war on workers and the unions appeared in the comments section of the Daily Telegraph on Saturday in an article by Matthew Lynn headed: ‘Amazon is leading the fight against resurgent militant unions.’
The theme of this article was summed up as: ‘Sure, we can all understand why workers are angry’ as their living standards are destroyed, but ‘Businesses need to stand up to the militants – with the deep-pocket tech giants leading the line.’
The latest Tory anti-union laws that allow agency staff to be used as scabs to break strikes Lynn calls ‘marginal’ saying: ‘But in the end, it will be up to companies to turn the tide.’
For Lynn, the giant on-line Amazon company is the ‘one that can make a real difference’ and he cites the massive anti-union campaign it has run in the US in the fight against all attempts to organise workers in unions.
Workers at Amazon, notorious for its appalling working conditions with workers locked in cages in sweatshop conditions, have walked out in a wave of unofficial wildcat strikes in the past few weeks.
Hundreds of workers across the UK have independently staged walkouts, sit-ins and work slowdowns over derisory pay rises of between 35p and 50p an hour.
These unofficial strikes by a workforce denied any union representation has clearly shocked the bosses.
Lynn’s article reflects the thinking that dominates the capitalist class that, with no way out of this crisis and with the working class exploding in official and unofficial strike action, the requirement is to smash the unions, utilising the same tactics carried out by Amazon in the US of intimidation and sackings of union organisers backed up by Tory laws.
According to Lynn, only Amazon at present is prepared to take on the unions but: ‘Eventually, business will have to fight back – and it should be Amazon that leads the line.’
This is a clear warning to workers that what is immediately coming is a class war to the finish between capitalism and the working class.
The only way to win this war is by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories, overthrow the capitalist class and bring in a workers’ government that will nationalise the energy companies and main industries along with the banks, placing them under the management of the working class and bringing in a socialist planned economy to provide for the needs of all the people.
