THE HEADLINE of The Sunday Telegraph’s editorial yesterday is very much to the point. It insists: ‘The teaching unions must be defeated,’ and continues, ‘It ought to be no surprise that they are resisting the government’s plans to reopen schools gradually and safely.’
The brazen Telegraph continues: ‘Restaurants are experimenting with take-away only services, and manufacturers have restarted work with safety measures in place. Why should schools be any different.’
To put safeguarding children’s lives on the same level as ‘experimenting with take-away-only services’ will make workers furious that their children’s lives and safety are being treated in such a cavalier fashion.
The Telegraph’s conclusion is that: ‘The government must be uncompromising.’ It is urging that the measures be forced through and that anti-union laws be used to force the teachers unions to treat the safety of millions of children with the same contempt as being displayed by the Tory party.
The Tory party is presiding over the biggest crisis of capitalism in its history and is determined to champion the interests of the bosses to return children to school and workers to work, under unsafe conditions, where the latter will be super-exploited.
This is what the change of slogan from ‘Stay at Home’ to ‘Stay Alert’ but return to work means.
In the Telegraph’s business section there is a declaration that Britain is heading ‘for an eighties-style unemployment crisis with over half of the workforce braced for a hit to incomes …’
Andy Haldane the Bank of England’s chief economist said that more than half of the nation’s 33 million-strong workforce was already unemployed, furloughed or working shorter hours as a result of the Covid-19 shut down.’
The Telegraph continues: ‘Threadneedle Street is also examining tools such as negative interest rates and expanding the scope of its quantitative easing (QE) scheme “with somewhat greater immediacy” …’ The bank is already expected to add another £100bn to its £645bn QE purchases in June …’
The UK debt is enormous. It is the working class that will be forced to pay for it by the rapacious bosses and their Tory party.
This is why, the lockdown has been breached and ‘Defeat the virus’ has been changed to ‘Stay Alert’ as the virus flourishes, and you must return to work and even school.
The Tories are determined to force the teachers back to school, and then to treat the rest of the working class in the same way plus wage freezes, since this is the only way out of the crisis for the bosses, to screw the working class and make it pay for the crisis.
In fact the Tory party’s heart, if it has one, was never in the fight against the virus. In 2016 the Tories conducted the Cygnus exercise on how to stop a pandemic from taking over the UK.
Their conclusion was that they could not, so they got on with the job of smashing the NHS by taking on and seeking to defeat the junior doctors.
When the pandemic emerged with force in March in the UK the Tory reaction was to empty the hospitals of the elderly and put them into care homes, where they died in their thousands from the coronavirus.
The unprepared NHS had neither access to PPE equipment nor to the necessary ventilators. The virus ran riot, with the Tories considering that the day would be saved by ‘herd immunity’ – that would solve the problem for them, after the older generation was wiped out.
The elderly in the care homes died in their thousands. There was no herd immunity, but the US and UK economy collapsed, while the two states were number one and two in the number of deaths that the virus has caused, 34,466 in the UK and 90,113 in the USA.
The Tories are now determined to defeat the trade unions starting off with the teachers’ unions and the BMA who have supported the teachers.
Workers must force the TUC to support the teaching unions and the BMA by calling a general strike and a national march on Parliament to drive the Tories out and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
