Britain: For Class Struggle to Defend Public Sector Jobs!

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 214 (Spring 2011), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.

On 26 March, a massive turnout of up to half a million trade unionists demonstrated in London against the savage budget cuts announced by David Cameron’s government. The demonstration consisted of a sea of trade union banners, representing local council workers, teachers and lecturers, health workers and firefighters—in a show of anger against the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s assault on healthcare, social services, pensions and much more. The public sector jobs massacre saw 132,000 jobs lost in 2010, while the overall unemployment figure stands officially at 2.5 million, the highest for 20 years.

Low-paid public sector workers, a high proportion of whom are women and minorities, are the core of the trade union movement today. But rather than a strategy to mobilise that social power for a class-struggle fight to defend jobs, the TUC’s [Trades Union Congress’s] “March for the Alternative” was intended to channel this anger into supporting another Labour government. For the first time in over a dozen years, a trade union demonstration in Britain was addressed by the Labour Party leader. Ed Miliband, who was elected leader last September with the support of the trade unions, intoned on the platform that “there is an alternative,” adding that “there is a need for difficult choices, and some cuts” to reduce the budget deficit, but this government “is going too far and too fast.” For a clue as to what Miliband’s “alternative” might be, one only has to recall that before the last election Labour promised cuts deeper and tougher than under [1980s Tory prime minister Margaret] Thatcher.

Deep cuts, fast or slow cuts: these are the “choices” being offered to the working class by the servile trade union bureaucracy. Throughout Europe—from Greece to Ireland and Spain—every capitalist government is trying to force the working class to pay for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—a crisis that was caused by the capitalist system itself. An effective defence of jobs today requires hard class struggle—strike action across the public sector. But the trade union leadership is an obstacle to the kind of fight that is necessary because they too share the political framework expressed by Miliband, that the alternative to “Tory cuts” are Labour government cuts.

The ground for the present devastating public sector cuts was prepared by 13 years of Labour governments that relentlessly attacked jobs, pensions, health and education services; froze pay below inflation and slashed tens of thousands of civil service jobs. And all the while, the union leaderships stood by and refused to lead battles against the Labour government. Recall then FBU [Fire Brigades Union] leader Andy Gilchrist calling off the firefighters strike in 2002 when it threatened to “hinder” the armed forces preparing to invade Iraq.

Visit any of the public sector unions’ websites and find “alternatives,” not for a fight to beat back the rapacious bourgeoisie but for solving British capitalism’s budget deficit. [The public sector union] Unison’s recipe calls for “a 50 per cent tax on bankers’ bonuses” and a “Robin Hood Tax” on bank transactions. The Public and Commercial Services union, which organises civil servants, offers similar counsel to the bourgeois rulers including “We could free up billions of pounds by not renewing Trident [submarine-launched missile system].”

The “socialist” outfits who ride Labour’s coattails look to none other than the bold class warriors of the TUC to call a general strike, while cravenly rebuilding illusions in the election of a Labour government. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) runs the National Right to Work coalition, whose slogan is “Break the Con-Dem Coalition!” (read: and replace it with a Labour government). When Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership contest last year, they enthused that his win was “another avenue to bring pressure to bear on Labour to fight” (Socialist Worker, 25 September 2010). In the meantime a poster on their website lists their own recommendations to the capitalist rulers, “Why There’s No Need to Slash Spending.” Cuts can be avoided by taxing the rich, clamping down on tax evaders, and cutting defence spending—the tired, hopeless call of reformists everywhere to reorder the priorities of the capitalists in favour of the working class.

The Socialist Party, after calling for a one-day public sector strike and a 24-hour general strike, go on to showcase their abiding faith in the capitalist state, and Labour, approvingly quoting an article from Labourlist.org: “A cascade of ‘no cuts’ budget decisions by local authorities could be the most effective resistance to the cuts so far.” The Socialist Party continues, “By using their reserves and borrowing powers to avoid making cuts, councils can gain time to build a mass movement in their support,” and “Ed Miliband could promise that an incoming Labour government would write off all local authority debts incurred from avoiding cuts” (Socialism Today, March 2011).

What is necessary to fight against the massacre of public sector jobs and social services is to mobilise the multiethnic working class in a fight for jobs for all, through a shorter work week with no loss in pay, and to undertake union organising to draw into their ranks all of the working class, including its minority and immigrant components. In the course of class struggle, workers must replace the Labourite cringers atop the unions with workers’ leaders who aim to win battles on the picket lines. Striving to forge such a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of the fight for a multiethnic revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery through socialist revolution.