Anyone who calls upon the TUC for succour or leadership is a faudster. And there were plenty of them at the TUC Congress in Brighton...
The TUC and the missing-card trick
WORKERS, OCTOBER 2008 ISSUE
The TUC has come and gone. Perhaps best summed up by the BBC report of how Unite, Britain’s biggest union created by merger and fictional membership claims, failed to deliver its block vote in support of the Prison Officers Association, which was fronting for the general strike strategy proposed by the “lefts”. Unite had forgotten their voting card. Such revolutionary posture and rhetoric lost in the oldest social democratic trick of cowardice and sleight of hand.
Anyone who calls upon the TUC for succour or leadership is a fraudster. Either you are beaten in dispute or are looking to pass the blame to some other scapegoat. There has only been one General Strike in British labour history, in 1926, and it was a failure. The class has never gone down that road again.
There is a false polarisation of the “left” trade unions – Unite, PCS, CWU, with the GMB and Unison tailing along at this year’s TUC. The yet-again attempt to masquerade as something which the trade unions in Britain are not by trying to bolt on some phoney leftist organisation has only one result – the working class is noticeably absent.
Those calling for a general strike are an unholy alliance of lefty entryists. This motley crew, combined with the junketing and freebies, believe they have “taken over” the TUC and trade union structures. It’s all a sad delusion, as the structures are already pretty empty, especially of ideas!
Symptoms of collapse
The inner core of dying social democracy is mutating. If social democracy’s role is to run capitalism on behalf of capitalism with a pleasant face and no warts, and it fails, what reason for its continued existence? In the trade unions this is presenting a revolting spectacle of a “left” fascism. All working class principles are despised and belittled.
A political cleansing of all but fellow travellers is occurring – left not class is the badge; droves of cadre appointments into the structures of the unions by fellow entryists intended to artificially create a “left” unionism in Britain; that is about exclusion of the class other than as sheep to be herded. What is resulting is the elevation of division based upon a left-driven apartheid of 21st century Puritanism defined by environment, gender and race.
What relevance the TUC? Seemingly little in the dying days of the Brown government, with malaise, indecision and waffle. The Tories and TUC reveal they have been exploring each other’s positions in recent months. Have they both forgotten the history of the relationship during the last 150 years?
These are but the symptoms of the implosion and collapse of social democracy and the unwillingness of the class to take responsibility for its future. Not as a ‘left’ creature but as a class determining the future of itself as a working class, the nation state and Britain. The working class is neither left or right, neither sinner or saint but 28 million workers and their families and dependents who need to determine a path out of this morass of daily life in capitalist Britain.