Now strike together !
- build St Andrews Day showdown
By Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
Those marching on 1st October should take a look around them, and taste the potential power to stop the cuts.
The power of people marching united, in their tens of thousands, to halt the butchery to jobs, services, benefits, pay and pensions.
The power of strike action by Quarriers staff, dedicated to caring for vulnerable kids and adults; driven to distraction by 23 per cent pay cuts, reduced pensions, sickness and maternity pay; driven to strike action to stop their families being made homeless by a social charity established 140 years ago to…protect families!
The power of council workers marching against horrendous job losses and pay cuts; firefighters defending pensions and life-saving services; low-paid civil servants rising up against repeated waves of attack by governments of the rich; NHS staff furious at the lies peddled about their sector being protected, whereas they’ve lost thousands of jobs and are now asked to bail out the bankers’ debts – again – through higher pension contributions; teachers and lecturers joining forces with students in revolt at the slaughter of courses, colleges, jobs, conditions and pension rights. The private sector workers marching against attacks on their communities, and for equalisation upwards of pension rights, not a race to the bottom.
TASTE THE POWER
The power of working class communities resisting the total wipeout of lifeline services, such as those for the disabled, when successive Tory, Labour, LibDem and SNP government Ministers have assured us that ‘frontline services’ will be safe in their hands.
You can’t get much more frontline than Coastguards, who are battling closure of Clyde and Forth stations.
Or the Accord Centre for disabled adults in Glasgow’s east end, resisting closure by a Labour council who want to win prestige from a bus park for the 11-day Commonwealth Games instead of providing lifelong facilities for some of our most vulnerable citizens.
Or Quarriers workers, expected to pay for the cuts from Westminster to Holyrood to councils to the ‘Third Sector’… all for the sake of the bankers.
What next ?
We are all marching together, demanding no cuts, demanding justice for the majority against the greed of the millionaire minority. But what next? That is the key question as we all head home from the mass STUC demo.
People First: why should working class people pay though cuts for the mind-boggling profiteering of the bankers and billionaires?
In 2008, the public purse, our money, our taxes, was plundered to the tune of £1.3trillion to bail out the collapsing banking system. That didn’t stop the bankers from shedding tens of thousands of jobs, amongst bank-workers who commonly earn £15,000 a year – whilst devouring £7billion in bonuses for themselves last year.
Last October 2010, smug, smarmy Tory butcher George Osborne declared £81billion cuts – to help pay for the bankers’ bailout. He blurted out “From the perspective of filling the hole in public finances, we will deliver an additional savings of £1.8billion a year in the cost of public sector pensions.” There you have it: workers in their millions are being asked to pay more, work longer and then receive less on retirement – to help pay for the bankers’ bailout.
Pensions: daylight robbery
The Cuts Coalition – made up of 23 millionaires and 4 ex-bankers – are raiding public sector workers’ pockets in a double taxation scheme; not a penny of the increased pension contributions will go to improve pensions – but to the Treasury’s coffers. It’s daylight robbery, on a grand scale. Not a word is spoken, not a step taken, to seize one penny of the £120billion a year in taxes that big business and the obscenely rich avoid, evade or just don’t pay.
The Scottish Socialist Party is determined to put people first – not profits. There are plenty of ways to achieve this modern, honourable, socially progressive aim.
For instance, take the richest one hundred Scots, stick them in a small, hot room, sweat a modest 10 per cent wealth tax out of them, and their combined wealth of £16.5bn – yes, 100 of them have £16,500million between them! – would produce more money for jobs and services than was cut by Westminster from Scotland’s budget. Simples, as a socialist meerkat would say.
But we won’t get taxation of the rich – to create the means to expand jobs, services and incomes instead of slashing them – by begging for it, by grovelling. We need to stand up on our hind legs and fight for it, as the working class has always had to do for every modest advance.
We marched together, now strike together
This march is a boost to all, a reminder of the potential power we possess. We are many, they are few.
Communities marching, protesting, even occupying threatened facilities is one critical strand to our struggle against cuts, to put people before profit.
Students in revolt can add vitality and audacity to our common cause.
But the greatest potential power in the land, if mobilised, is the organised working class, the people who produce the wealth of goods and services, the trade unionists and potential trade unionists who have the ultimate weapon of withholding their labour – of striking.
Unions representing 3 million workers are preparing for joint strike action against the cuts on 30 November. This St Andrews Day Showdown could be the biggest strike action since the great unrest of the early 1970s.
Civil servants, teachers and lecturers led the way on 30 June with a strike of 250,000. Now the biggest unions – UNISON, UNITE, GMB – and many, many others are balloting members to strike that day – together. In a startling illustration of the depth of rage against the cuts, the National Association of Headteachers is balloting for the first time in their 114-year history!
St Andrews day showdown
Those who march together on 1st October need to strike together on St Andrews Day – and persuade the rest of Scotland’s 600,000 public sector workers to do likewise.
That would not only be a massive hammer-blow to the Cuts Coalition at Westminster, who have already had to do U-turns and partial retreats on forestry privatisation, some benefit cuts, some of the coastguard station closures and other plans when faced with opposition from tiny fragments of the working class.
A mass strike, with rallies demanding 'No cuts – tax the rich', would also be a powerful challenge to the axe-wielding SNP government. They are even more susceptible to pressure, being closer to home, and desperate to make gains in next May’s council elections. They were elected to give shelter from the storm of Westminster cuts, but instead have issued a Spending Review that will add tens of thousands of job losses to the 25,000 already lost last year in Scotland alone.
United in decisive action we can win. Far stronger governments have been beaten by waves of strikes and people power in the past - Heath's Tories in 1974, Thatcher and her hated poll tax in the 1980s.
We can win: the butchers are divided
Those wielding the axe to jobs, incomes and services in 2011 are vicious, but they are weak and divided. The butchers have the knives out for each other.
Whilst acting as the Tories' Mini Me sidekicks, the treacherous LibDems felt obliged to lambast their Tory pals at their recent conference - because they fear obliteration from an angry public. The Coalition is weak, divided, and has no mandate to rule and ruin Scotland.
Labour and SNP councillors are blaming Holyrood and Westminster, and the SNP government blames the Coalition. Not one of the MSPs or councils so far has had the backbone to imitate the actions of Scottish Socialist Party councillor Jim Bollan. He presented a No-Cuts Defiance budget, and demanded back the stolen millions off Holyrood to balance the council's books. This won the backing of all local council unions and tenants' groups.
It shows the path that councils should be pounded by people power to pursue. It points to what we demand the SNP government should do; stand up for Scotland, demand back the stolen £billions off Westminster, and demand Scottish government control over Corporation Tax - not to halve it to 12 per cent as the pro-capitalist SNP want, but to double it, as the pro-working class SSP do.
People not profit: join the SSP
Protest, occupy and strike together to make the politicians retreat. Make St Andrews Day a Showdown with all the butchers, a day to turn the tide.
And to achieve more lasting solutions to the cruel deprivation facing working class people, join the one party that says 'people first - not profit', the SSP. Join our battle to tax the rich, and if the multi-nationals squeal about being taxed, demand the assets built up by generations of working people be taken into democratic public ownership, as a step on the road to a cuts-free, poverty-free, independent socialist Scotland.