AT prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak told MPs that he was planning ‘tough’ legislation to outlaw strikes completely.
However, the right wing press are increasingly turning against the Sunak government, denouncing it as weak in the face of the unprecedented wave of strikes across both public and private sectors.
Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph carried an article by Lord David Young (who served as a minister in the government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) headed ‘Who governs Britain?’ which lamented that all the anti-union laws brought in by Thatcher to stop strikes through imposing restrictions on balloting had failed miserably.
This refrain has been taken up by the right wing Spectator magazine this week with an article which damned the response ‘of our nominally “Conservative” government’ to strikes in the NHS and transport and called for the Tories to ‘emulate’ the US president, Ronald Reagan, when in 1981 he gave striking American air traffic controllers 48 hours to go back or be sacked.
Over 11,000 were fired for refusing to obey Reagan’s order.
This is the type of response that growing sections of the ruling class through the Tory press are demanding – that the Tories declare a state of emergency like Reagan, making striking illegal, and sacking many thousands of workers.
This is precisely what the Tories are planning.
This was made clear yesterday by the education minister Gillian Keegan who, in an interview on LBC radio, said she was in favour of banning strikes, citing the police and military as examples where striking is illegal, and arguing that this needs to be extended to cover NHS, rail workers, Royal Mail staff, airport baggage handlers and civil servants.
They want the entire working class placed under a state of emergency enforced by the military and police.
Workers must take warning from events in Germany this week, where 25 people were arrested, suspected of being part of the ‘Reichsburger’ (Citizens of the Reich), which plotted to storm the Berlin parliament and establish a new government headed by Prince Heinrich XIII, a 71-year-old German aristocrat.
This was no fanciful plot by a group of demented, thuggish street fighters. Included in the estimated 21,000 members of the Reichsburger, were members of the military (including special forces), an ex-MP, a judge and a dentist. As one German newspaper said, these were ‘people who you’d normally expect to be pillars of democracy’.
In fact, the pillars of bourgeois democracy are crumbling fast under the impact of the world crisis of capitalism, as it plunges into recession, economic depression and a permanent war against the working class.
It would be dangerously stupid to dismiss the German coup plotters. Hitler wasn’t taken seriously after his first failed coup attempt – the Beer Hall Putsch – in 1923.
When the great recessionary crisis of the 1930s smashed up the German economy, the pillars of German democracy crashed, aided and abetted by the treacherous leadership of the German working class.
The German trade union leaders refused to fight Hitler and when he came to power the unions were banned and placed under the dictatorship of the Nazi party.
World capitalism in its death agony today is similarly dumping the pretence of bourgeois democracy and turning to police/military dictatorship, or open fascist rule, in order to keep this dying system from collapse by inflicting mass poverty and starvation on the working class.
However, the working class is not a defeated class but the most powerful force in history. In fact, the time has come for the working class in Britain and across the world to put an end to capitalism.
This demands the building up in the trade unions and amongst the working class and its youth a new revolutionary leadership that is prepared to organise a general strike to bring down their governments and go forward to workers’ governments in Britain, Europe, the US and across the world.
Workers’ governments will expropriate the bosses and bankers, abolish the capitalist state, replacing it with a workers’ state and socialism.
Only the WRP in Britain and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International are building up the revolutionary leadership to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
Join the WRP, build up sections of the Fourth International all over the world – there is no time to lose. Smash capitalist barbarism with the world socialist revolution!
