THE Tories are down but they are not out!
The trade unions must mobilise for action at once to deliver a knock-out blow to bring this discredited Tory-LibDem coalition crashing down.
This means that even at this late hour, with 500,000 workers due to take action on May 10th in defence of their pensions – civil servants, Unite health workers, teachers, university lecturers and many others – a national demonstration must be called for that day to give all those who hate the coalition an opportunity to show themselves on the streets.
The unions must take action. This means Unite giving up its current role of trying to stop a tanker drivers’ strike, and calling it so that the millions of people affected by petrol price inflation will have an opportunity to take to the streets and back the road haulage and other workers who have pledged to blockade the oil refineries to prevent the army being used to break such a strike.
There must be an emergency TUC to call coordinated mass strike action, a general strike in fact, in defence of jobs, wages, pensions, the NHS, the Welfare State and state education, to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers’ government.
To the TUC leaders who say that such action would be illegal, we respond that they are capitulating to Tory class law, and that the working class has every right to take these actions, since this coalition was not elected as the government by the people.
After 13 years of betrayal by the Blair and Brown governments, the fact of the matter is that the Tories were unable to get a majority vote, even though the Blair-Brown leadership was seen to be bankrupt.
There was no mass enthusiasm for a Tory government. They became the government after the treacherous LibDems agreed to tear up the programme that they had put to the electorate for some of the spoils of government.
This is no legitimate regime. This is why it got its true deserts in the council elections.
The elections did not lie. The 32% turn-out revealed that the masses want the Tories out, but also understand that returning Miliband as the PM, and putting the remnants of the Blair-Brown gang into office, will not solve their problems.
The trade unions must now act to represent the majority of the British people by taking the action that the 99 per cent want to see to get this poisonous coalition out and a workers’ government in.
However, we warn that the council election defeat for the Tories will see the trade union leaders move to the right not to the left.
They will now say in chorus that industrial action, especially politically motivated strikes, will only harm Labour’s chances of winning an election in three years’ time.
So it will be back to three more years of grin-and-bear-it (savage cuts), with the trade union bureaucracy seeking to prevent strike actions or selling them out, if they can.
This reformist ‘tactic’ will only serve to give the Tories the breathing space that they are so desperately seeking in order to carry on with their Welfare State-busting policies and also resolve the crisis in their leadership.
Labour and the trade union leaders will work might and main to give the Tories this breathing space.
We urge workers and youth to join the WRP and the Young Socialists to rapidly build up the alternative revolutionary leadership in the trade unions that is not afraid of winning the struggle and bringing the Tories down.
This is the only possible answer to the latest Tory propaganda line that families are just as responsible for the crisis as the bankers!
Forward to the general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government to get rid of capitalism.
