UNITE general secretary Sharon Graham has accused Labour of ‘pickpocketing pensioners’ telling Labour leader Keir Starmer to ‘accept it’s an error’ to push ahead with the plan to scrap the Winter Fuel Allowance for over 10 million pensioners.
Graham, who leads the UK’s biggest union and is the largest donor to the Labour Party, speaking on BBC’s Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday morning, accused Starmer’s party of deciding to ‘pick the pockets of pensioners’ while leaving the rich ‘totally untouched’.
She said that Starmer needs to be ‘big enough and brave enough to do a U-turn on this choice’.
Unite has tabled a motion at the Congress calling for a 1% tax on assets above £4 million, which they estimate could raise about £25 billion a year.
Over the weekend, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak also made similar pleas to Starmer, telling Sky News that he had ‘real concerns’ about scrapping the allowance of between £200 and £300 paid to pensioners before Christmas providing a lifeline for all those struggling with inflated fuel bills.
Nowak called on Starmer’s chancellor Rachel Reeves to find ways to mitigate the policy saying: ‘I don’t want any pensioner going into the winter worried about putting the heating on.’
So concerned was Nowak about the prospect of millions of pensioners freezing over the winter while the energy companies reap billions in profit that he couldn’t even be bothered to mention the fuel allowance in his opening speech to the Congress.
The single most explosive issue that highlights the contempt of this Labour government for the lives of the most vulnerable workers didn’t even warrant a mention.
Instead, delegates were treated to Nowak pledging the TUC will ‘roll up its sleeves’ and work with the Labour government to ‘rebuild Britain’.
He is working hand in glove with a Labour government that Starmer pledged over the weekend is ‘going to have to be unpopular’ and make hard decisions to create ‘change’.
In fact, there is no change from the economic policies of savage austerity inflicted on the working class by successive Tory governments.
Like them, Starmer and Reeves are pledged to cut the massive national debt – currently standing at over £3 trillion and growing at a rate of £5,170 per second!
The working class had enough of austerity driven by the Tories, and the change is that the UK capitalist class is now relying on a Labour government, treacherously supported by a servile TUC leadership, to impose cuts to benefits, the welfare state and wages demanded by the bosses and bankers.
Smashing the gains made by workers in the fight to establish the Welfare State is accompanied by the plot by the imperialist powers to destroy Palestine.
The ruling class is relying on Starmer’s government to hold back the massive opposition to Israel’s genocidal war to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, to expand the Zionist state, and ensure its role as imperialism’s military dominant power in the oil-rich region.
The Labour government was forced by the massive opposition of workers and youth to implement a token ban on 30 arms licences – a mere 10% of the total, and a ban that specifically excluded components for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets used to bomb and kill Palestinians in Gaza.
At the same time Starmer insisted this would not hinder Israel’s right to bomb and murder Palestinians with impunity. The latest death toll stands at 41,664 Palestinians killed since October 7th.
This is the Labour government that Nowak has pledged to work with in order to push through the war on workers at home and to continue its ‘iron clad’ support for genocidal war on the Palestinian people.
The trade unions have the power to end this war on two fronts by demanding this TUC Congress end all complicity and grovelling support for Starmer’s government, and by demanding the organisation of a general strike to bring down this Labour government regime and bring in a Workers’ Government that will expropriate the bankers and bosses and immediately recognise and give all the support required for establishing the independent state of Palestine.