LAST FRIDAY, the Unite union’s annual policy conference overwhelmingly passed an emergency motion condemning both the local Labour-controlled council and the Labour government over their role in the long-running Birmingham binworkers strike.
Along with condemning the Labour council and government for attacking binworkers, the 800-strong conference voted to suspend Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner from membership of the union along with Labour councillors who are playing a role in effectively firing and rehiring workers on strike over pay cuts of up to £8,000.
The motion went on to say that if the redundancy process was forced through by the Labour council with the support of the Labour government then, said Unite general secretary Sharon Graham: ‘Unite should discuss our relationship with Labour.’
Graham said after the vote: ‘The disgraceful action of the government and a so-called Labour council is essentially fire and rehire and makes a joke of the Employment Relations Act promises’. She added: ‘People up and down the country are asking whose side is the Labour government on and coming up with the answer, not workers.’
On Saturday Graham addressed the thousands of workers attending the annual Durham Miners’ Gala, saying that Unite delegates had ‘decided enough is enough’ and that if the union breaks with Labour ‘we will forge a new vehicle for our class.’
She said this would be ‘A strong independent workers union that follows its own path. An authentic voice for the working class that understands that left politics without industrial organisation is a cause without a class.’
As deputy to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Rayner played an important role in the Labour government with all her posturing as the ‘authentic’ representative of workers.
Following Starmer’s humiliating defeat over slashing benefits for the disabled and sick, Rayner was at pains to reveal she had been a lone voice in Cabinet opposing these cuts. Instead, Rayner proposed attacking the pension rights of migrant workers.
This didn’t stop her faithfully nodding, along with Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves, when they proclaimed that benefit payments were unaffordable for a British capitalist system drowning in debt and desperate to make vulnerable workers bear the cost.
The defeat of Starmer over these cuts by Labour MPs driven by the mass opposition from workers and youth over Labour’s super-charged austerity programme has torn the Starmer government apart.
With the Starmer government imploding amid splits and workers forcing their trade union leaders to end all cooperation with the Labour government there can be no denying that a revolutionary situation has developed rapidly in Britain, with the working class coming into direct confrontation with Labour and the capitalist system it faithfully represents.
At the Unite conference, delegates also threw down the gauntlet to Starmer over Labour’s support and arming of Zionist genocide in Gaza, with a call for the recognition of the Palestinian state and support for ‘worker-led campaigns’ to ban Israeli goods and services’ and for divestment from Israeli companies.
The working class has said clearly ‘enough is enough’ to Labour’s attempts to drive them back to Dickensian poverty conditions of the 19th century and is determined in its opposition to the complicity and arming of the terrorist state of Israel by the UK government.
The time has come to turn these motions and words of condemnation into action by workers demanding the trade union leaders immediately organise an emergency congress of the TUC to call an indefinite general strike to kick out the Starmer government and replace it with a workers government – a workers government that will nationalise the major industries and banks, recognise the independent state of Palestine and provide it with all the material required for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
The immediate issue today is for the working class to take power and replace bankrupt British capitalism with a socialist planned economy.
This demands building up the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists to provide the revolutionary leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
Join today – there is no time to lose.
