LABOUR PM Gordon Brown yesterday condemned the BA cabin crew members of Unite for the seven days of strike action due to take place on March 20 and March 27.
He called the action ‘unjustified’ and ‘deplorable’, and ‘against the national interest’ and demanded that it be called off.
This is despite the fact that the action is a legal strike action, agreed by a massive majority, and that the strikers will be exercising their democratic right to strike, and their right to defend themselves against an employer who is acting like a tyrant.
Brown did not utter a word of condemnation of the BA boss Walsh, who has imposed new terms and conditions of service onto the BA cabin crew, and now boasts that he has thousands of strike breakers on hand ready for action on March 20, just five days away.
Walsh has declared war, and is making war on the workers.
The reaction of the Unite leaders to Brown’s condemnation was to be very understanding about it.
Tony Woodley said: ‘I don’t blame our PM for trying to help bring together parties to resolve the dispute. But it is rather unfortunate that governments of all shapes and sizes always want to kick the unions and kick the employees when in actual fact it’s my members who’ve been kicked here.’
To Woodley he is ‘our PM’, even when he is abusing Woodley’s members, who have voted twice for strike action in ballots, which found for such action with massive majorities, after the Unite leadership recommended a vote for strike action.
In fact, the Brown government is a capitalist government whose only concern is to further the interests of the bosses and the bankers.
The Woodley and Simpson leadership has long ago given up any struggle for socialism and has put itself at the disposal of a Labour government which models itself on the government of Margaret Thatcher.
This is why in the last four years they have presided over the Unite trade union handing over to the Blair and Brown governments some £11m.
The end product of this grotesque manoeuvre has been a government which has put the bankers back in business and kicked the members of the Unite trade union in the guts, after swallowing millions from its members’ union subscriptions.
There is no doubt that the Unite union leaders would carry out the same policy again, because they agree with the government’s anti-working class policies.
This is one of the reasons why they must be removed and be replaced by leaders who will fight for their members.
The other major reason is that the current fight at BA must be won, otherwise the same robbery with violence is going to be carried out throughout the whole of the working class by bosses eager to make the workers pay for their capitalist crisis.
Every section of the Unite trade union must warn Woodley and Simpson that there must be no sell-out of the BA cabin crew just to please Premier Brown.
The strike must go ahead and any strike breaking be met with national action by the entire Unite trade union, and by a recalling of the TUC general council to call a general strike.
Once again, this is a struggle that must be won. There must be no forced return to the conditions of the 1930s, under the label of an unavoidable ‘age of austerity’.
To ensure victory and to go forward to socialism a new and revolutionary leadership must be built in the trade unions, based on the theories and practices of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Only the WRP is building the revolutionary leadership that is necessary to win the class war that is erupting, to go forward to socialism.