Unity! Communists at the TUC
Monday 13th September 2010
That’s enough!
Two million workers took to the streets in France last week in protest at plans by Sarkozy to raise the pension age to 62. The key to the French success in mobilisation is the thousands of local committees uniting unions and the public. In paris 100,000 marched but in 200 cities and towns throughout France there were large local demonstration.
Our public services are the key battleground by Jane Carolan The ConDem victory in May was a victory for blue blooded neoliberalism over its more pink tinged New Lab o u r counterpart. The Blair and Brown failure to move from the economics of finance c apitalism, combined with an espousal of privatisation and reactionary social policies saw the Labour core support neglected. These are the people for whom a Labour Government should have meant a substantial benefit but Labour was offering only more of the same. The new government has a right wing, reactionary neo-con ideology committed to ruling in favour of
one class only – its own. The declared Con Dem agenda is not a rational economic one – from the viewpoint of standard economic theory reducing public expenditure is the economics of the asylum. But if it is not rational in economic terms, it is entirely rational in terms of the stated aim of shrinking the state. In short, the post 2nd World War consensus based on the welfare state of Beveridge report – health care, education, homes for all and benefits for those in need – is being ripped apart. Reforms announced so far begin the process of dismantling universal benefits and ending the provision of public services by a workforce directly employed by democratically accountable public bodies. The NHS is likely to become
a brand name, attached to a few failing services for those without private insurance. Local schools provision by Councils from nursery level up will be at the bottom of a hierarchy of education dominated by academies and frees schools in middle class enclaves. The latter will be bastions of privilege. Desperately needed social housing for 1.6 million on council waiting lists will simply not be built - a tragedy for those without homes and for building workers without jobs. Adding to these social pressures, all forms of welfare are being attacked. Deemed scroungers by the right wing tabloids, those millions surviving on the poverty line as a result of unemployment, sickness or disability will see their inadequate incomes cut
and state provided employment services decimated as civil service jobs are sacrificed. Across the country, councils are preparing redundancy notices for essential workers from classroom assistants to social workers, from dinner ladies to home carers. Even for those of us who lived through the Thatcher regime, what is in prospect under this government is terrifying. The only victors are likely to be the privatised providers of those services deemed too essential to be scrapped, turning taxpayers pounds into private profit. The key to winning a sufficient consensus to oppose these changes is to demonstrate the value and quality of publicly provided provision, not easy when on a daily basis the media derides them. Shouting slogans demanding ‘fight back’ are easier than immersing unions in community and workplace based campaigns. continued overleaf