Unions & politics

Trade Unions and politics

What I did with my week at the seaside

PARLIAMENT OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT OR BUREAUCRATIC CIRCLE-JERK? YOU DECIDE. If I was to make a list of the ten most enjoyable ways to spend a week in Brighton, I don't think this would figure. Still, life as a revolutionary socialist can't be a laugh riot all the time. So, to be perhaps nearly as bored as I was during most of my time at Congress, please read on... DAY 1: TUC, OFF YOUR KNEES! It's hard to know where to start with an event like this. For AWL members and other revolutionary socialists who have a serious commitment to rank-and-file working-class organisation, it is simultaneously...

A workers’ plan for the crisis

In moments of desperation, capitalist governments reveal themselves. Take these two examples: Alistair Darling’s prognosis for the British economy and the recent bail-outs of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Darling’s admission that the economic crisis will be worse than most people thought, his slashing of growth forecasts and comments about voters being “pissed off” with New Labour paint a pretty picture of the turmoil at the heart of government. Couple this with his intransigent stand at the TUC and we’re reminded that the concerns of this government lie not with the working...

Are the unions getting tough on Labour?

At the Labour Party National Policy Forum starting on 24 July [2008], the unions want to get a “Warwick 2”, a second version of the list of concessions obtained by them at a Policy Forum in summer 2004, in the run-up to the 2005 general election. The Labour Party’s finances make it very likely that the unions will get something. The Labour Party is in deep debt; businesses and the wealthy have cut their donations, disillusioned by Labour’s repeated financial scandals and the probability that the Tories will form the next government; Gordon Brown has no-one but the unions to bail him out...

Brown fobs off union demands. Break with Brown!

The BBC reports (27 July) that: "The Labour party has rejected trade union demands for less restrictive strike laws at its National Policy Forum at Warwick University. Calls for measures to make strike action easier were defeated on the final day of the forum". The National Policy Forum, a vastly less open body than the old Labour Party conference, gives no decisive weight to the trade unions, who command only 30 out of 184 votes there. But, according to the BBC, union leaders have not only been outvoted or outmanoeuvred. They have quietly given up on the issue. "The party and unions issued a...

THE BLUE ROSE OF FORGETFULNESS

THE BLUE ROSE OF FORGETFULNESS The Kinnock Rose is blooming now In Thatcher's shadow trained to grow: It signifies apostacy, --------------------------- An anonymous "young Labour MP" told Radio 4's"Today" programme that the Red Flag should be rewritten as "The Red Rose" "The historical memory of the bourgeoisie is in the traditions of its rule, in the country's institutions and laws, in the cumulative art of government. The memory of the working class is in its party: the reform party is the party of poor memory." — Leon Trotsky. Tune: The Red Flag The Kinnock Rose is blooming now In Thatcher...

A workers' response to the crisis: fight for a workers' government!

By Dan Katz The precise details of the on-going economic crisis can, at best, be the subject of informed speculation. But some general lines are clear. The Chancellor says he expects the crisis to be "profound", Ernst and Young says the outlook is "like a horror movie" and the Economist magazine comments, "Things can only get worse." As Marxists and activists our first concern is to consider the impact of the economic downturn on the organisation, consciousness and combativity of the working class. We aim to suggest policies and slogans that the left and the labour movement can adopt to give...

Rank and file participation and political representation

At the union conferences held this summer, anger at the Brown administration gave the the left the opportunity to pose serious questions about working-class political representation. Everyone agreed that there is a gaping hole in the political landscape that the organised working class need to fill with socialist politics. However, the solutions that organised socialists are proposing fall short of what is necessary. This was made eminently clear by the left’s failure to make any change to the unions organisational and political links with the Labour Party. The Socialist Party’s Campaign for a...

Brown and Picasso

By Colin Foster Gordon Brown dreads union demands for legal rights for workers to take industrial action beyond the most parcellised and regulated because, he says, that would clash with “modernisation”. I read about that the same day that I went to see an exhibition, “Picasso and his collection”, about one of the great modernist painters and the artworks he kept in his house and his studio and took inspiration from. For Brown, “modernising” means servility towards the “modern” wishes of the “modern” ruling classes. Since the 1980s, capitalist governments have redefined their role as “selling”...

Biggest inflation increase since 1997 - for a workers' inquiry into wages!

Interest rates increased by one-tenth from May to June. The leap from 3% to 3.3% is the largest increase since 1997 when a new method for measuring the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was introduced. The increase prompted Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, to write to Chancellor Alistair Darling explaining that the "rise can be accounted for by large and, until recently, unanticipated increases in the prices of food, fuel, gas and electricity". No kidding Mr King! He goes on to explain that in the year to May: "world agricultural prices increased by 60% and UK retail food prices by 8%...

A watershed moment in union politics

At the recent Communication Workers’ Union conference, there was a motion calling for the CWU to campaign to reverse the decision of the 2007 Bournemouth Labour Party conference to ban all political motions to future conferences from unions or local Labour Parties - in effect, to abolish the conference as a conference. It failed to reach the floor. Another motion, calling for a re-balance of the union’s political fund money towards wider political campaigning rather than just funding the Labour Party, and for the union to give financial support only to Labour MPs who support CWU policy, also...

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