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Concerned workers should look at the state of our trade unions, at separatism in Britain and at the ceaseless threat from the European Union...

TUC Brighton 2007: time to wake up to the realities of Britain

WORKERS, SEPT 2007 ISSUE

What realities is the Trades Union Congress considering in September 2007? What is reality for the delegates, anyway? A fad, the trend of the day or just....treacle?

Is the reality the one in Germany, where wind farm capitalists are suing one another about who owns the wind? Is it the 6 billion people who are supposedly fixated with how the parasite Paris Hilton survived her drink drive jail sentence? Or how The Quartet – a shadowy group: the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, the USA – employ a failed British PM as a Middle East troubleshooter (more likely troublemaker)?

Concerned workers should look at the state of our trade unions, at separatism in Britain and at the ceaseless threat from the European Union. All of these ideas centre upon and return to the theme of how the British working class can survive and refocus its hopes in the 21st century.

Sometimes piecemeal change is seen as just that. Is it tunnel vision we have? What happens if we are actually in a cul de sac and there is no light at the end of the tunnel? Our biggest error under the Thatcher years was to see each struggle in itself and not all linked together.

Change in the past 11 years has come with machine-gun like rapidity and has been constant, like a permanent Battle of the Somme with ceaseless casualties. The bigger picture of where we are going has been lost. We need to stand back and re-evaluate.

The traditional working class that built Britain is gone, is dead. The traditional majority manual manufacturing industrial working class ceased with the triumph of Thatcher, compounded by Blair and Brown. The past 30 years have transformed our class, changed its consciousness and altered its organisations beyond recognition. We need to get to grips with the "new" working class.

The concept of class – those who work and those who exploit, worker versus capitalist – has more validity now than ever before. We are a nation of workers – more numerous than ever – but with less sense of purpose, identity, direction, with greater division on grounds of race, religion, gender, language and origin than at any time in our history. All the things around which we have historically united in opposition to the boss are now used to divide us; also ironically, the division emanates from our unions.

If the old working class is dead, then it has to be "Long Live the New Working Class". In 1979 we had over 12 million trade unionists – the only country in the world outside of the socialist countries to have ever reached over 50 per cent density of a voluntary coming together of workers. (Ignore the Scandinavian unions as their role is different from the British unions.) Today the figure is about 6.5 million. The overall number of members continues to decline (despite growth in some areas) and has done every year since 1979.

Going global
Everybody in the unions is trying to address this issue, and there are confusing and differing lines. Do we huddle together to create super unions not only in Britain but in Europe and North America? And why not globally or inter-planetary?

There's a trend towards touchy feely campaigns. Let's patronise the poor, let's pursue cleaners at Canary Wharf, even better if they are illegal migrants, or black, or Eastern European, women, etc. But there is no strategy for organising the 400,000 other workers at Canary Wharf; perhaps the question is too difficult, perhaps the mind-set is wrong (and if so, whose?). Let's represent "vulnerable" workers – there is a TUC/government pilot in London to do exactly that: not to unionise them but to enshrine individual, legal, employment and human rights. Individuality versus the collectivity of the trade unions is taken to insane levels.

There are many questions we should ask:


We have the largest number of workers ever employed in Britain – 28 millions. But consider what is the value they are creating. The largest source of wealth creation in Yorkshire is horse racing and stud breeding – in the south east it is luxury yacht building, and in London, finance. Some two million workers are engaged in creativity and media industries.

One in four workers in London is an agency worker – that's effectively the modern day pool of the unemployed and casualised. Unemployment in 1982 was 3,070,621 and everybody clamoured "No return to the 1930s"! Today it is over 4.4 million and not a peep. It's described as "worklessness". Interesting term – the unwilling, the incapable, the denied, the dispossessed, the invisible?

At the same time the TUC says it is economically good to bring more migrant workers in – they do all the jobs you lot won't do. Do we really have a working class too royal to work? Or is it the case, as the Bank of England says, that migrant labour undermines wage rates, terms and conditions.

In Britain and worldwide we are seeing what has been described as "the race to the bottom". Capital is trying to drive all down to the lowest common denominator by reducing wages, undermining living conditions, destroying dignity and diminishing skill. This is not new but ably described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto 160 years ago.

Wanted: flexible slaves
Capitalism does not want an independent-minded, literate, healthy working class but a nation of flexible slaves drowning in debt, popping abroad to sit in the sun for two weeks a year, with a cultural mindset of some US celebrity jailbird.

Likewise, take the European Union – the greatest example of British schizophrenia in history. We are against it – 70 per cent of the electorate are against it, say polls – but the British ruling class has fed the EU since its inception with ideas, direction and purpose.

The European Union was an ideological concept of the Fascist dictators of the 1920s and 1930s. Britain was the only major player in pre-war Europe, outside of the USSR, that defeated the rise of fascism – the only country where the working class defeated fascism.

After the defeat of Nazism and the huddling together of those wrecked capitalist countries, one idea emerged: stop the working class – in the USSR, the people's democracies or any independent working class. British capital was at the heart of that concept. In simple terms – "Unify the Continent to attack Britain; develop a fifth column in Britain to then deliver that objective". And in this the TUC has played a shameful role.

Every strategy, directive, law emanating from the EU and its predecessors was about breaking organised labour, most probably written or connived at in London. The directives on privatisation and competition resulted in the destruction of our industrial manufacturing base. They are now pioneering the present attack on our social care infrastructure with the privatisation of health, education and welfare.

These directives have also overseen the attempted physical destruction and separation of Britain into three countries and the English Regions – the logical consequence of reducing Britain to an off-shore finance tax haven surrounded by parkland and heritage centres.

The renewed "old" EU constitution reduces Britain's (and other European nations') sovereignty, takes control of foreign policy, policing and criminal justice, creates an EU presidency, reduces the ability of nation states to have an independent voice, and consolidates the 3000 laws and directives issued annually from the unelected, unaccountable EU Commission – a tidal wave of change. British voters are opposed to these changes and want a referendum. The response from the listening Brown – the Nelson touch – is to turn a deaf ear as opposed to a blind eye.

So what have we got? We have trade union direction focusing on every conceivable pious do-gooder victim-culture driven issue imaginable but missing the wood for the trees. What about wages? What about employment and unemployment? What about the next generation and the future? What about health and education? What about debt – ours not the Third World's? What about unity?

What is to be done?
So what are we going to do? We should say goodbye, farewell to that first industrial working class. We should say thank you for the lessons learnt and weapons provided. We should say to this new working class: this is your heritage and armoury:
  • A united class not division on grounds of race, nationality, gender, religion, age, occupation, etc;
  • We stand for unity and solidarity because divided we fall;
  • We are for independence and scientific minds not superstition or religious bigotry. The recent establishment of the Council of Ex-Muslims should be applauded – the Reformation in Europe started with similar small and heroic acts;
  • We must reassert Marxist ideas and thought as the answer to capitalism;
  • We must ensure that every campaign, every missile of thought and deed is directed against the EU;
  • We must muster our international allies: recent polls indicate opposition to the EU from 75 per cent of Spaniards; 71 per cent of Germans, 70 per cent in Britain, 68 per cent of Italians, 64 per cent of French. "Out of EU membership" has to be the rallying cry.

What of the future? Listen to the analysis from the Ministry of Defence, whose Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre report on strategic trends from 2007 to 2036 states: "Global Inequality – disparities in wealth and advantage will therefore become more obvious...Absolute poverty and comparative disadvantage will fuel perceptions of injustice among those whose expectations are not met, increasing tension and instability, both within and between societies and resulting in expressions of violence such as disorder, criminality, terrorism and insurgency [which] lead to the resurgence...of Marxism."

Good! So be prepared.

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