What was this year's TUC about and what did it do? It received very little coverage in the media. Keen workers will only have found out from their own delegation reports and from late night TV which showed the live debates. The point is, the keenest will have been interested. Yes, the TUC comes and goes in a flash, but class conscious workers in their unions are not finished — far from it.
When the workers who had provided the response to the London bombings stood on the TUC platform we were all very proud, and proud that it is our gathering that respects most graciously the qualities of courage, humanity and fortitude they had shown. When the TUC (virtually unreported) eventually opposed the EU Constitution almost unanimously — far from dead and still a threat — a bit of history was in the making. When the TUC unanimously called for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq it held firmly onto its place among those calling for a new world order based on peace.
The dignity of many debates in defence of public services, energy supply, manufacturing, trade union rights, pensions, health and education was a gear up from the usual. While opposition to the EU Constitution is the key to linking the various concerns together at one level, at another the connections were still not being made. Education and health will be further privatised because of the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties, which the EU intended to cap with one voice through a Constitution. Academy Schools and the break up of Primary Care Trusts are the expression of this. Blair's millionaire mates are rich and healthy while our people are poor and unhealthy: the politics are clear. Only when the unions wage war on Labour will we be getting somewhere.
Meanwhile in the absence of indigenous energy supplies, and while craven to the EU, the Labour government has to be supine to the US invasion of Iraq. The TUC unanimously condemned the war and called for immediate withdrawal of troops, but it failed to appreciate that it also has the power to force the withdrawal.
The General Secretary of the TUC quipped that he hoped the Prime Minister would enjoy his meal on the way to the UN, as if the Gate Gourmet dispute was more important than ending the war which has targeted civilians and killed 100,000 people mainly women and children. How can unions here get on with their work while our weapons of mass destruction kill workers abroad?
Class consciousness
Class consciousness in Britain resides primarily in the unions. Unlike the USA and most other countries, we have one trade union centre and are not divided on political, religious or other lines. Our movement is about trade, skill and craft, specialism and knowing about your job. You are a union member first and an employee somewhere low down the line. It is the reassertion of this concept that is pulling moribund trade union centres apart elsewhere, especially in the US.
Yet despite the key role of unions here, 20 million workers are outside of them, and few take notice of the annual gathering of workers' representatives whose deliberations carry more political import than those in parliament. It is a strange twist of history. The British working class organised in their unions generally remain more significant and potentially powerful than any other organisation. That is why we must re-engage in the unions. To write them off and to disparage the TUC is so easy to do.
When Brendan Barber joined with the CBI and government to welcome migration of labour into Britain as good for the economy, we saw the worst side. The politics of the lowest common denominator is the politics that the Labour government and capitalism most admire. That is why the Labour Party meets after the TUC. It is why it also comes in force to the TUC to tell unions how powerless they are.
Giving up responsibility to of government and thinking that politics takes place only in parliament, not in the workplace remain the fused ideological weaknesses of British workers and their trade unions.
Pensions back to haunt TUC
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The government waited until after the TUC Congress to table, via the Local Government Pension Scheme, new attacks on pensions. The plans were unveiled at a meeting with the unions on 22 September, and involve changes to early retirement rules, an extra 1% in employee contributions, an end to transitional protections — and further changes, yet to be announced, in 2008.
Industrial action against the previous set of proposals was called off (some would say it was only called so it could be called off) on the excuse that the general election was in the offing. Now, predictably, the proposals are back, and, say the unions, they are even worse than before.
A statement from the unions says they are "back on a war footing".
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Labour Party
When the Labour Party meets next month it will deny and oppose everything that the TUC eventually stood for. With a number of good motions, there has seldom been a TUC closer to resisting unbridled bourgeois power than this one, nor a TUC that has squandered its advances already, by not planning to take its policies assertively forward.
The machine will say we are against the EU Constitution but in love with the EU. That we are against the war, but not for pulling troops out just at the moment. This is about the leadership, a truly appalling thing. Such a dilemma can only be resolved by workers reclaiming their workplaces and playing a part in the democracy of their unions.
We get what we fight for. This year's TUC showed we can now get a lot more.
'Bring our troops back!'
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In moving the unanimously supported motion on Iraq, the CYWU delegate, its president Doug Nicholls, said the following at the TUC:
"Our message is for our government mainly but now that George Bush has taken full responsibility for the disastrous response to the hurricane in his country, let us say to him, time to take your 150 thousand troops back from Iraq and send them to Mississippi and Louisiana to save the lives and rebuild the homes of our brothers and sisters for a change.
"And Congress, as a union with our HQ in Birmingham we say to our own government: if you didn't believe in state intervention to save Rover and the mining industry, you can't afford one penny more than the £5 billion you have already spent on state intervention to devastate Iraq. Bring our nine thousand troops back and invest here.
"There are 27 million people in Iraq. 39% of them are under the age of 15. Half the population are under 18. No surprise then that since the invasion two years ago at the very least 3,500 of the official 25 thousand killed have been innocent kids.
"A quarter of children in Iraq suffer from chronic malnutrition. Diarrhoea killed two out of ten children before the war. Now it's four out of ten. US and British troops have systematically targeted water purification and sewage works. ...
"...The medical journal The Lancet estimates that in reality 100,000 civilians have been killed by the war in its first 18 months. Most of course were women and children. All hospitals and schools need rehabilitation. The poverty of mass illiteracy has returned. ...
"...US and British governments are past masters at occupation. Their tactics are simple, they fan the flames of sectarian hatred and seek to introduce a constitution to divide the country into competing regions. It is they who fan the flames of terrorism.
"And to the terrorists who kill British and Iraqi workers including the 200 building workers blown up this morning, we say you support those you most condemn.
"If you don't believe you can create paradise on earth and have to kill workers to get there, leave those of us who believe we can alone. ...
"...How can we at this Congress really hold our heads high in the struggles we have for manufacturing, public services, education, health and social justice at home while British troops are destroying these things in Iraq? ...
"...The extent to which we are successful in pursuing this policy will be a measure of our success on all the other issues we have debated this week. We are truly not free in Britain as workers while weapons of mass destruction rain down on Iraq."
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