Britain already has the tightest and most worker-hostile trade-union laws in the European Union.
And now what do they want to do now, the bosses, sections of the press, and sections of the Tory party? To tighten the laws even further! To hog-tie the workers and our unions even more than we are hog-tied already.
They have the jitters about what the labour movement will do when the details of the government's cuts programme are spelled out on 20 October.
The bosses' "trade union", the Confederation of British Industry, has called for a series of new laws.
Ballot decisions to strike should be invalid unless the "yes" vote is over 40% of those balloted as well as over 50% of those voting.
All strike ballot papers should go with a statement from the employer and "a notice warning that pay and non-contractual benefits can be withdrawn if an employee goes on strike".
Even after a strike ballot victory, the delay before a strike can be legally called should be extended from seven to 14 days.
Employers should be able to use agency temps to break strikes.
Financial penalties for unions should be raised.
And more.
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who normally presents himself has a lovable bumbling buffoon, has dropped the mask and come out snarling, like the vicious right-wing Tory he is, against the right to strike which London Underground workers still have and make good use of.
He wants a new law to say strike ballots must get 50% of those balloted (not just the CBI's 40%).
The Lib Dems already favour a new law to give the government power to ban strikes in "essential services". Vince Cable reaffirmed that policy during the election campaign.
The CBI, Boris Johnson, and the rest are building up a head of steam in an ongoing campaign. The labour movement would be foolish to dismiss it as idle talk.
The Tories and their Lib-Dem stooges are frightened men and women. They plan to plunge British back decades in terms of welfare provision and living standards. They say they have no choicde because the deficit has to be reduced.
This Cabinet of millionaires and glib public-school-trained guardians of the interests of the rich is set on making the working class and the poor pay for the almighty mess which their friends, the bankers and financiers, have made.
They don't know how the working class will respond. They fear a social rebellion like that provoked by Thatcher's poll tax two decades ago - and more.
Compared to what the Government plans to do now, the poll tax was pretty small beer. Polls show that most people accept that some cuts are "necessary". Most of those who say that will not accept a cut as being "necessary" when they themselves are targeted. And millions are being, and will be targeted.
Lots of people think it reasonable that well-off people should not get child benefit. That has not prevented a backlash among mostly Tory-supporting people, now faced with losing a sizeable chunk of money.
So it will be, and more so, when people learn on 20 October what "reducing the deficit" will mean for them, personally.
The agitation against "the unions" and against workers' rights to withdraw their labour is a pre-emptive blow against the resistance.
In the social crisis which engulfed Britain in the first years of the Thatcher government, the half-demented brutality of the press against "loony left" Labour councils was a major factor.
We are slipping back to a so-far-mild version of that. The Daily Mail carried idiotic front page headlines denouncing the very moderate new Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, as "Red Ed".
What do they think they are doing?
In part the bosses and the press are trying to intimidate the Labour Party and trade union leaders, as they intimidated them in the 1980s. That they feel the need is a measure of how jittery the ruling class and its militant supporters are now.
Any new anti-union legislation will build further on the Thatcher anti-union laws. Those laws combined with economic slump to hold down the working class during the Thatcher years. Laws alone would not have done it, but, combined with mass unemployment and many factory closures, the anti-union laws were no small thing.
Outlawing solidarity strike action, those laws outlaw effective trade unionism beyond narrow limits.
It was a crime for the Blair and Brown governments not to have repealed the Tory anti-union laws. It was a crime for the union leaders not to insist on their repeal after 1997, when New Labour came to government.
It will be a crime now if they don't insist that Ed Miliband's Labour Party pledge itself to repeal the Thatcher laws, and any new anti-union laws which the Tory/ Lib-Dem coalition government brings in, at the first opportunity.
The union leaders should be pressed to say that they will where necessary defy both the old and any new anti-union laws. The labour movement across the European Union can be got to raise an outcry against Europe against the repression of its British sisters and brothers and the denial of their full trade-union rights.
The Tories and Lib Dems are readying themselves for serious class war in the period ahead. If the labour movement does not do the same, then we will be steamrollered by the ruling class and their Cabinet of sleek and callous millionaires.
The entire labour movement - in the first line, Labour councils - should pledge itself to resist and defy anti-union laws and any coalition cuts and impositions which hurt the interests of the working class.
