THE GMB has suspended its Christmas Strike date for ambulance service workers, right at the time when the Tories are reeling from their deadly economic and political crisis and the massive support that NHS workers have received from the working class and the middle class.
Instead of getting rid of the Tories, they are trying to prop them up! They are prepared to give the Tories a second chance, a ‘kiss of life’.
The union stated: ‘The NHS is on its knees and the public are suffering every day because the government has failed to properly resource and plan for our health service. Nowhere is this clearer than in the appalling delays experienced in getting an ambulance and then getting into A&E.’
Rachel Harrison, GMB National Secretary said: ‘We are overwhelmed by Wednesday’s amazing public support for our paramedics and ambulance staff. People across the country have been wonderful in backing us and we care so much about them too. That’s why we are suspending the proposed GMB industrial action on the 28th December.’
The Tories have been dealt a heavy blow by the working class, and the response of the trade union bureaucracy is to help them off the floor!
The would-be ‘love letter’ to the Tories continues: ‘We are here 24/7. Any time, any place. Over to you Steve Barclay. Everyone is waiting.’
Steven Barclay is the Tory Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who wrote on Wednesday that: ‘Ambulance unions have made a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients’ – and is refusing to negotiate with the NHS union leaders a wage rise for NHS workers that keeps pace with the galloping inflation rate.
In fact, the Tory leaders are very conscious of their extreme weakness, and that a broken UK capitalist system is in a desperate crisis, that can only be resolved through driving the working class back to the wages and living conditions of the 19th century.
They are planning to make the working class pay for the economic collapse of capitalism that is emerging. They want to abolish the NHS and bring in a private medical system. They want to bring in savage anti-union laws that will compel the working class to accept super-exploitation and low wages.
Workers have no intention of allowing the British capitalists to return to the Dark Ages.
Currently, 1,000 Border Force workers are currently defying the use of British Army strikebreakers as they begin strike action against a miserly 2% pay offer at airports and ports around the country.
On the picket line at Heathrow Airport, PCS Border Force Terminal 5 Rep Manish Udani told News Line: ‘With inflation at 11% we’re fighting for a 10% pay rise, which is extremely reasonable considering that our last pay rise was back in 2013.
‘We are also fighting to defend our terms and conditions which are coming under attack. We are all out across the airport, solid, 100%.’
At the same time the Royal Mail workers are out – the CWU is also in the wars. General Secretary Dave Ward told strikers yesterday: ‘For Royal Mail Group to reject our offer just hours after receiving it demonstrates that they were never serious about saving Christmas for customers and businesses.
‘When a company openly boasts of having built a £1.7 billion fund to crush its own workers rather than use that money to settle the dispute and restore the service, then you know dark forces are clearly at work. Their sole intention is to destroy the jobs of postal workers and remove their union from the workplace. Our members will not stand for this, and further action will take place in 2023.
Asked at the airport, if he supported the call for a general strike, Labour MP John McDonnell replied: ‘We are now actually seeing coordinated strike action across the public sector and you could describe it as a general strike.’
It is not a general strike. The TUC must be made to call everyone out so that the Tory government will be brought down, and capitalism and the ruling class consigned to the dustbin of history with the working class taking the power and bringing in a nationalised and planned socialist economy where production is planned to satisfy people’s needs.
The TUC leaders are quaking with fear that workers will force them to call a general strike that will bring down the Tories and open up the way for the British socialist revolution.
Only a planned socialist economy, with the working class in charge can lay the basis for a civilised society where production is planned to satisfy the needs of the people and the rule for the socialist society is ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their need!
Forward to the general strike and the British socialist revolution! Join the Workers Revolutionary Party today!
