RMT Young Members held their largest ever conference on 25-26 February.
Fifty delegates might not sound a lot for a union of 80,000 members, 11,000 of whom are under 30. But four years ago there were just nine delegates. Young RMT activists have worked hard to build the conference over recent years; this reflects increasing participation of young RMT members.
The conference focused on the fight against cuts. RMT General Secretary Bob Crow described the Government’s cuts as an attack on the working class of historic scale: “This will be the first generation where parents leave behind worse social provision than the previous one.”
President Alex Gordon described the devastating effects of 28% cuts to public transport budgets. In Cambridgeshire, public subsidies to bus services are being cut by 100%. Nationwide, there are parallels with Dr Beeching’s 1960s axe to provincial rail services, making this “Beeching for the bus industry”.
Nearly every hand in the room shot up when we were asked who would be on the TUC anti-cuts demonstration on 26 March.
By the end of the day, 50 enthusiastic young members had been politicised and inspired to go back to their workplaces and communities and fight.
The AWL’s two delegates made a valuable contribution. Nearly everyone bought a copy of our paper Solidarity and was interested in talking about politics with us.
When Bob Crow dismissed the protests in Egypt by saying, “It’s all very well to go on about Egypt but I say what about fighting the attacks in this country?”, I criticised him for neglecting our duty of solidarity to the Egyptian workers.
It caused a bit of a stir but we showed that union leaders can be questioned by the ordinary members, including the younger ones.
