THE TUC leaders will be meeting in Blackpool on Wednesday evening June 15th just three days before their huge 100,000 plus ‘March for Change’ in London on June 18th.
This march will be a prelude to a major strike action on 21, 23 and 25 June by 50,000 RMT members working for TfL, Network Rail and 13 train operating companies across Britain.
The TUC are being threatened that if they do not call off these strikes, the law will be changed to allow companies to hire temporary workers as strikebreakers, and to legislate that strikers will not be allowed to do overtime to make up for the money that they have lost striking!
Transport Secretary Shapps has emphasised that should the action continue then further measures certainly would come in during this particular dispute, if it can’t be resolved.
‘We will be looking at the full suite of modernisation that’s required,’ he told the Telegraph. ‘The country must not continue to be held to ransom.’
The Transport Secretary assured that any change could involve secondary legislation, which can be signed off by ministers ‘very fast’.
His new threats come less than a month after rail unions reacted with fury to a government threat to make strike action illegal unless a minimum number of train staff remained working during a walkout.
The TUC’s call to workers on the ‘March for Change’ states: ‘Join us – we’re marching to demand action to tackle the cost of living crisis. Inflation is at its highest level in 30 years. Prices are rocketing. Six in ten people are struggling to make ends meet. Energy bills are up by 54 per cent. Food prices are up, fuel is up. Profits are up. Everything’s going up, but our wages …
‘We didn’t create this crisis – we shouldn’t have to pay for it now. It’s time to make work pay. It’s time for a new deal.’ In fact, the Tories are now determined to take on and defeat the working class. Shapps and Johnson are proposing a war against trade unions.
The source of this class war is the world crisis of capitalism. PM Johnson has made the point that the UK is involved in the war in the Ukraine and is determined to continue supplying billions of war materials to the Ukraine until Russia is defeated.
He accepts that this war is leading to massive food and oil inflation all over the planet but insists that this is a price worth paying to defeat Russia and secure world domination for the US-UK capitalist alliance. This war is seeing prices rise on a gigantic scale in the UK and all over the planet.
Johnson in his Blackpool speech last week ruled out wages keeping pace with inflation. He is out to make the UK working class pay the price for imperialism’s attempt to overthrow the Russian government, to restore the old world capitalist order.
He is now calling for UK agriculture to be rapidly developed so as to be able to feed the UK people, who will not be able to afford the gigantic prices that inflation worldwide is producing.
In fact, inflationary catastrophe threatens to return the working class to the poverty existence after the 1929 collapse. If the inflationary crisis is allowed to develop, Johnson will soon be hinting about a return to war-time ration books!
The truth is that world capitalism is going down the pan and that the bosses are planning to dump its cost entirely onto the backs of the working class.
This is why the TUC leaders when they meet on Wednesday evening must feel the full pressure of the working class, telling them that they will not be allowed to back down.
In fact, they must be made to call a general strike, beginning on the day of the mass demo on June 18th.
A general strike must stop the whole country and bring down the Johnson government, bringing in its place a workers government and a socialist planned economy. This is the only way forward out of the worldwide disaster that capitalism has created.
The British socialist revolution will spread all over Europe and give the Russian workers the confidence to restore the USSR and Soviet Democracy, restoring workers democracy and ousting the dregs of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
This is the way forward. The TUC must be made to call the general strike. This will begin the British socialist revolution, a vital part of the world socialist revolution!
