RUTHERGLEN AND HAMILTON WEST BY-ELECTION RESULTS: INITIAL THOUGHTS

Labour leaders Sir Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar are waxing lyrical about the result of last night’s Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election being ‘seismic’; proof of the looming certainty of Labour sweeping into government; an indication that people see the need for ‘a fresh start’ and that they’ve entrusted Labour as the party to bring about ‘change’ from the ‘incompetence, inefficiency, and divisiveness of two governments’ – Tory and SNP.

A sense of proportion is important in politics, and above all a willingness to dig beneath the surface of things.

There is no denying Labour crushed the SNP in the vote – winning a 58% share of votes cast, compared with the SNP’s 27%. Undeniably, that is a huge turnaround from the voting shares in the 2019 general election in this seat, when the SNP won with 44% of all votes cast, against Labour’s 34% share.

Polarised Vote Between Labour and SNP

We predicted a massive polarisation and crushing predominance in votes between Labour and SNP, in a battleground that could help determine the fate of both Labour leaders and Humza Yousaf - which would crush and squeeze other parties, including the SSP.  On the day, Labour and SNP votes combined accounts for 85.3% of the total votes cast!

But despite the superficial talk of ‘a 20% swing from the SNP to Labour’ – heralding a Labour government next year, with at least 20 seats gained by Labour in Scotland - this vote was no ringing endorsement of Starmer’s right-wing Labour.

Labour’s vote actually fell by 700 since 2019. And the most crushing indictment of what is on offer to working-class voters from the major, ‘mainstream’, pro-capitalist parties is that a derisory 37% of registered voters turned out to vote – a catastrophic collapse from a 66.5% turnout in December 2019.

People were clearly sending out the message ‘a plague on all your houses’, ‘we’re fed up with the lot of you’.

Catastrophic Collapse for SNP

Chief victims of the consequences of this widespread voter disgust are the SNP – whose vote collapsed from nearly 24,000 to 8,399! That has huge repercussions for Humza Yousaf and the SNP.

Voter desertion from the SNP was undoubtedly driven – amongst a few factors – by anger at the Covid rule-breaking by former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier. Despite being chucked out of the SNP by Nicola Sturgeon on discovery of her cavalier breach of Covid rules, and sitting as an Independent MP since, Ferrier was still widely regarded as linked with the SNP – with not just the necessary 10% of the electorate but 15% of them turning out in July, photographic ID in hand, to cast their vote in the Recall Petition, triggering the by-election.

In tandem with that, we witnessed widespread, often scathing criticism of the SNP, in part driven by unionist media vilification, but more importantly by the lived experiences of thousands of people who feel bitterly let down and disillusioned with the SNP in government – compounded by the crises surrounding the police inquiries into their financial affairs, and the unprecedented divisions on display during the recent SNP leadership contest.

Workers’ Collective Action puts SNP on the Spot

In my opinion, underpinning all these factors is the eruption of workers’ collective conflict with the SNP/Scottish Green Party government, in several sectors such as FE colleges, schools, local government generally, the fire service, and previously on the railways – in stark contrast to previous years when they got away with appearing to be ‘all things to all classes, workers and employers alike’, during a period of very low levels of class struggle.

Now they’ve been put on the spot in wage struggles, trade union action on jobs and public services – leading to the frequent comments we encountered in the by-election along the lines “the SNP have had their chance, now I’m voting Labour.”

Tory Votes Collapsed into Labour

However, superficial commentary on ‘a 20% swing from the SNP to Labour’ misses another key factor; the Tory vote collapsed, catastrophically, from over 8,000 in 2019 to 1,192. And we have plenty of anecdotal evidence that many of them didn’t just stay at home but turned out to vote Labour “to get the bloody SNP out”, as more than one of them said to us.

Likewise, Labour will have gained some ex-LibDem votes, given the latter’s vote plummeted from 2,791 to 895.

No Enthusiasm for Labour

Above all, people abstained en masse, with a mere 37% turnout, down from 66.5% in 2019! So, no ringing endorsement of Starmer's and Sarwar's Labour; there was no enthusiasm for Labour on the ground, and even many who voted for them on the day told us of their contempt for what Starmer represents. 

Yes, this by-election result reinforces the likelihood of a Labour government next year – primarily as a backlash against the corruption, incompetence, and class cruelty of the Tories. But the great advantage of the by-election - and in particular our courageous decision to stand an SSP candidate despite our accurate predictions of a polarised domination of the voting between Labour and SNP - is that it has helped unmask Labour in the eyes of thousands of people, including many who voted Labour whilst ‘holding their nose’ at the stench of betrayal emanating from Starmer’s weekly retreats on policies.

Change? No Change!

Starmer, Dame Jackie Baillie, and their tame parrot, Michael Shanks, trotted out clichés about the ‘need for change’ and ‘a fresh start’. But in the same breath they effectively warned people not to get their hopes up of either change or anything resembling a fresh start under a Labour government!

Despite our modest resources, the SSP played an invaluable and very incisive role in exposing Labour’s act of ‘getting their betrayal in first’, long before being elected.

SSP Exposed Labour’s Continuity Tories

We denounced – on street meetings, in leaflets, and press statements – their escalating reversal of previous promises: to abolish the bedroom tax; scrap the vicious two-child benefits cap and its attendant rape clause; ban all zero hours contracts; levy a wealth tax on the rich; take any action on climate change that differs from the Tories, such as stopping the 100+ new licences to tax-dodging Big Oil to plunder and pollute in the North Sea for profit.

We exposed their refusal to promise a £15 minimum wage; their refusal to breach Tory public spending limits and branded them as ‘the Continuity Tories’ – a phrase on our street meetings and leaflets which caught a lot of attention.

SSP Under a Labour Government

This was an important preparation for the role the SSP will have to play if or when Labour wins next year’s general election; warning working-class people of their capitalist politics, their support for the same rotten poverty, inequality, exploitation, and pollution as we’ve suffered under years of Tory rule. And more importantly still, popularising a genuine, hard-hitting, socialist alternative.

SSP Vote

As we expected and predicted, the SSP – along with all other parties and candidates – was squeezed by the polarised binary battle between Labour and the SNP, in the entirely undemocratic, unrepresentative Westminster First Past the Post voting system.

We lost count of the people who said, “I agree with what you’re saying, but you’re not going to win”. Unfortunately, they proceeded to waste their votes on either Labour or the SNP, sometimes despite believing that would indeed lead to ‘no change’.

We came a respectable 8th out of 14 candidates. We had to fight ferociously for every vote, and for every column inch in the media.

I will leave a fuller account of our outstanding campaign for a further article. For now, suffice to say we probably had more local activists campaigning than the victorious Labour – who mostly relied on MPs, MSPs, councillors, and hired party staffers to swamp the area. They came from all over Britain – including at least as far afield as London, the Midlands, and Cornwall!

Vibrant SSP Campaign

We were the only party to hold countless street stalls and street meetings at least twice a week, often simultaneously in two or three of the four towns.

We had two brilliant public events: a night of film and music, featuring the oft banned “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn! The Big Lie”, exposing the conscious sabotage of Corbyn’s election prospects by Starmer and the right-wing Labour machine; and an inspiring SSP public meeting, with speakers from the FE Unison strikes, University strikes, Fire Brigades Union, SSP candidate Bill Bonnar, and myself.

Both were regarded by SSP members and totally new people in attendance as one of the best events they could remember, adding several recruits to the SSP on top of those who’d already joined us in the three months of campaigning prior to then.

On the day, we came 8^th out of 14 candidates.

Another tiny group on the left – who we asked to stand aside in favour of giving the SSP a free run in a constituency where our party has a history of activity for the past 25 years, including contesting parliamentary and council elections at least 12 different times, and where they have literally never stood before  – added some confusion amongst voters attracted to a socialist alternative.

Whilst the SSP got about 160% as many votes as them, the pity is that our combined votes would have put us in at least 6^th place, beating the two reactionary parties, Reform (ex-UKIP) and Family Party.

Indeed, if they hadn’t indulged in such a sectarian act, the vote for the well-established SSP would have been even greater than the sum of the two divided parts, as I asked them to recognise when we met to try and get them to stand aside.   

Popularising Socialism; Building the SSP

Our vote was never the prime criterion for us standing. We popularised a socialist alternative on the streets, had two brilliant public events, recruited large numbers of quality new members, helped train many members in the battle, and got a lot of very hard-earned press coverage. The SSP’s profile has been enhanced immensely.

Despite our modest vote, the campaign was a great success. It lays firm foundations for the future role of the SSP, as the growing socialist opposition to a mercilessly right-wing, pro-capitalist Labour government in the year or so ahead.  

It took great courage, and bucketloads of vision and dedication, to put up a socialist challenge in the specific circumstances of this by-election; we can be proud of all the SSP members and future members who waged this relentless socialist campaign for nearly four months.

 

IT'S OFFICIAL: LABOUR ARE THE REAL CONSERVATIVES!

“Labour are the real conservatives.” 

So says Sir Keir Starmer, making official what most of us already knew. 

The knight of the realm went on to elaborate: “Somebody has got to stand up for what makes this country great”, declaring his intention of making Labour “change its DNA”, in a project he described as “Clause 4 on steroids”. 

The latter refers to the infamous Tony Blair’s purge of socialist members and socialist aims from the Labour Party thirty years ago – scrapping the socialist Clause 4 Part 4, which pledged Labour “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” 

So Starmer’s ‘Clause 4 on steroids’ mission to make Labour ‘the real conservatives’ leaves little to the imagination. 

Beware of False Friends 

As growing hatred for Tory atrocities against working-class people obliterates over 1,000 of their council positions in England, and opinion polls speak of Scottish Labour winning seats off the SNP, working-class people desperate for change should beware of false Labour friends. 

There are some good and decent people in the ranks of Scottish Labour, trade unionists included. And the Scottish Socialist Party has a proven record of organising with them in common cause on picket lines, in building solidarity with strikers, in taking action against the profiteers, racists, fascists, and other human dross. But we have no illusions in Scottish Labour as a party of the working class. 

When Anas Sarwar made bogus claims about supporting workers’ rights, when he addressed the recent STUC Congress, he should have been called out for rank hypocrisy, given that for years he refused to even let USDAW recruit workers in his warehouse, let alone recognise the union for negotiations. Then he tried to disguise his track record by handing over his shares to his young children in a trust. It's no coincidence he did so after I and others in USDAW had called him out for his anti-trade union antics, when he was seeking the support of our union as deputy leader of Scottish Labour, with the unqualified support of USDAW’s dominant right-wing leadership. 

The truth is Scottish Labour have long since abandoned the working class and only make noises about supporting trade unionists in a cynical play to exploit workers’ votes, as the increasingly discredited SNP/Scottish Green government comes into collision with trade unionists. 

The hunger to dump the Tories is in danger of getting a New Tory PM

Starmer Abandons All Promises 

Under the centralised dictatorship of Keir Starmer, Labour has abandoned even the timid reforms they previously promised. As the giant energy companies rip billions of profits out of people in desperate fuel poverty, Starmer has abandoned Labour's previous policy of a public energy company - which in any case merely amounted to a state company competing with the existing profiteers, rather than the necessary full-blown public ownership of all forms of energy which the SSP advocates. 

Starmer’s Labour have likewise dropped the demand for nationalisation of Royal Mail and done a complete U-turn on abolition of student tuition fees down South, which had been a policy that mobilised tens of thousands of young people behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. 

Blair's landslide election in 1997 left Tory laws and inequality intact

Labour Denies Democratic Rights 

The ‘Starmtroopers’ - as Sir Keir’s disciples rather stupidly and distastefully decided to label themselves - are not even democrats, let alone socialists. 

They point blank refuse even the right to a referendum vote on Scottish independence, with the same devotion to (literally and politically) wrapping themselves in the blood-stained flag of British imperialism - the Union Jack - as the Tories. 

When the vicious anti-protest Public Order Bill of Rishi Sunak was rammed through parliament on the eve of the coronation and used to arrest peaceful protesters calling for a republic on the day of parading a parasite king around in a gold, bejewelled carriage costing millions to public funds, Labour's leadership refused to pledge that they would repeal this anti-democratic legislation. 

The pathetic excuse given by Labour's Foreign Affairs spokesperson, David Lammy was “It would take up too much parliamentary time. Labour can’t come into office picking through all the Conservative legislation and repealing it.” 

What contemptible scorn that shows towards people's civil rights. And what an alarming signpost towards what a Labour government will do with the most repressive anti-union laws in the western world. 

History of Betraying Workers 

When it comes to anti-trade union legislation, Labour seems to have cooled off even on its very specific, limited earlier pledge to scrap the Tories’ brutal Minimum Services Level Bill. This threatens workers with the sack if they refuse to go to work on strike days, despite their union having cleared all the high hurdles required to carry out a legal ballot for industrial action. 

However, these unforgivable stances by ‘modern’ Labour are no accident or aberration. They are merely the modern manifestation of a long, inglorious history of pro-capitalist Labour leaders siding with the employers’ class against workers - deploying the full force of the law, and more, going back decades. 

During recent ambulance workers’ strikes, Labour MP Stephen Kinnock publicly supported the Tories’ use of the army to break these frontline workers’ action in pursuit of decent pay. He's the son of the ermined Lord Neil Kinnock, who refused to support the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5, despite representing a South Wales mining community, and then joined the chorus of denunciation of those heroic workers in the latter stages of their desperate fight for survival. 

Labour Kept Tory Anti-Union Laws 

Throughout the 13 years of Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010) they steadfastly refused to repeal the vicious battery of anti-worker, anti-union laws imposed by Thatcher’s Tories in the aftermath of the miners being defeated. The only real exception to that was that they lifted the ban on trade union membership at the GCHQ spy centre… but that was only conceded on condition of a strict no-strike clause. 

During the mid-1990s, when council workers in the Labour-led Glasgow City Council were driven to take strike action, Labour council leader Frank McAveetey threatened to jail the rank-and-file union leadership, courtesy of the Tory anti-union laws. 

Blair converted Labour into a nakedly, proudly capitalist party by scrapping the socialist aims encapsulated in Clause 4 part 4 - “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” - by neutering the influence of trade unions over party decision-making, and by shutting down Labour Party democracy to prevent socialists within its ranks winning any influence, nationally or locally. 

He achieved his openly stated mission by converting Labour into the equivalent of the American Democrat Party; another capitalist institution, which certainly exploits and abuses workers’ votes, but doesn't even pretend to be a workers’ party, let alone a socialist one. 

1945 Labour government used troops against dockers 5 days after being elected  

Serialised Use of Strike-breaking Troops 

However, even so-called Old Labour, which preceded Blair’s New Tories, has a history stained by the use of anti-union laws and even the deployment of troops, to break the will of workers in struggle. 

A few random examples suffice to show that whilst up until about 30 years ago Labour could be defined as a mass workers’ party with a primarily pro-capitalist leadership, that meant they refused to challenge the capitalist class and frequently sided with the exploiters against the workers whose votes they relied upon. 

It was a Labour government which is 1977-8 deployed troops against striking firefighters, earning the derision of working-class people when the army's Green Goddesses often had to be push-started, such was their state of dereliction, as they feebly tried to respond to fires.

The 1964-70 Labour government of Harold Wilson drafted “In Place of Strife”, a package of anti-union laws lifted straight from the Tories’ playbook, which was only halted by the ferocious opposition of the organised trade union movement, driven from the bottom upwards. 

Labour government used troops against firefighters' strikes

Concession and Repression 

Even the frequently lauded post-war Attlee Labour government of 1945-51 has a chequered record. It's true that under the mass pressure of demands for radical change and the fear of revolution that swept Europe, they carried out the most radical reforms in the history of Labour in power - creating the NHS, welfare state, and building tens of thousands of council houses. 

Alongside that they nationalised a series of collapsing industries, such as coal mining, railways, gas, and electricity. 

But the same Labour government sent troops in against striking dockers five days after being elected – and again used 21,000 troops to break dockers’ strikes in the autumn of 1945. On 14 different occasions, between July 1945 and October 1951, the Labour government sent troops in against strikers, including dockers, gas workers, and lorry drivers at Smithfield meat market. 

Those examples could be greatly added to but suffice to show that any party which accepts the continued rule of the capitalist class, and refuses to mobilise workers for socialist change, will frequently side with the sworn enemy of working people and utilise the same anti-democratic, anti-worker, anti-trade union laws that the open enemies of the working class in the form of the Tories readily use. 

Indeed, that also applies to the SNP, who recently declared their intention to use the army to break a firefighters’ strike, after the sweeping majority vote for industrial action was announced by the FBU.

Whilst SNP threaten use of army to break firefighters' strike, SSP stand with workers

Build a Working-Class Socialist Party 

Workers need a genuine workers’ party. Socialists need to be organised in a socialist party. 

The Labour Party does not qualify for either definition. Their historic track record, their readiness to do deals with Tories, and their abandonment of even the mildest reform policies make them unfit for the loyalty and votes of the working class. 

Individual socialists in Scottish Labour are nothing short of political prisoners. They should be released and offered a home in the SSP, which genuinely stands up for the historic socialist aims of full trade union and civil rights; democratic public ownership with workers’ control; and a socialist democracy where the fabulous wealth of the nation is used in a Socialist Green New Deal that could reverse the capitalist onslaught on jobs, incomes, public services, and the health of the planet we live on. 

No trust in Starmer’s and Sarwar’s New Tories! 

Join the SSP and help build a genuine working-class socialist party!

https://membership.scottishsocialistparty.org/join_us/

THE TITANS OF TIMEX, DUNDEE 1993

A typical early morning picket, Timex 1993. Photo: Craig Maclean

Thirty years ago, on 29 January 1993, workers in the multinational Timex Dundee factory launched a seven-month battle that electrified workers across the UK and far beyond.

A mostly female workforce of 343, they fought with heroic courage to stop the decimation of jobs, wages, holidays, pension rights and other conditions, but were confronted by mass police intimidation and press smears. 

At a localised level, this titanic battle between workers and a ruthless capitalist employer, backed to the hilt by a press lie-machine and a virtual police occupation of parts of their own city, had many of the hallmarks of the great miners' strike of 1984-5. 

This showdown occurred under a Tory Westminster government that had constructed a mountain of anti-union laws to block workers’ resistance to being exploited. But the workers and their shop stewards drove a coach and horses through the Tory laws designed to help multinationals and millionaires profit from generations of workers and then toss them aside like squeezed lemons. 

They ignored the limit of six to a picket day and daily. They fought on despite elected shop stewards being banned from the picket line, with court interdicts and threats of being jailed. They confronted a diluted version of apartheid South Africa’s pass laws, which banned pickets from areas of their native city - which were saturated by police.

Waves of Solidarity

This courageous fighting militancy triggered waves of admiration and support from tens of thousands of workers across the UK, who collected in their workplaces for the Timex workers’ hardship fund, and travelled hundreds of miles to join them on the mass pickets and demos that were an almost weekly occurrence for much of the 7-month showdown.

And if the national union leaderships and STUC had shown half the determination and courage of those who mounted daily 24-hour pickets in all weather; regular mass pickets; protest demos and solidarity strike actions with the Timex workers, they could have won a clear, history-changing victory.

Timex had a Dundee branch factory for 47 years, with 5,000 workers in the 1970s. It was one of the shiny new electronic industries - alongside the likes of National Cash Registers - that was bribed to set up shop in the former city of 'jute, jam and journalism', as shipbuilding and heavy industry collapsed, with an array of council and government grants and tax breaks. 

But as the SNP government of today would do well to heed, reliance on multinational capitalists setting up branch plants in Scotland for its skilled, cheap labour and generous business tax regime is a recipe for the creation of urban deserts when they up sticks and move on to even richer pastures, devastating whole communities in their global race for maximum profit. 

The Sussex Spiv 

Timex, whose HQ was in Connecticut, brought in a ruthless Sussex spiv, Peter Hall, as £100,000-a-year director of operations in Britain. He started to strip the Dundee plant of jobs and working conditions. Before Xmas 1992 there was open talk of layoffs. On 5 January the workers each got a letter, some of them 'thick', meaning they were sacked, others 'thin', not laid off. 

The workers responded to this vicious attempt to divide and conquer by occupying the canteen. The slippery Hall promised negotiations with their union, the AEEU (now part of UNITE), and up until 29 January the bulk of the workers did rotating shifts to fill the gaps created by layoffs, awaiting the promised negotiations. Meantime they voted by 92 per cent to strike, which they did on 29 January when it was plain the promised talks and attempts to bring in ACAS weren't going to happen.

Women workers were the backbone of the inspiring Timex struggle

Strike and Lockout

Round-the-clock pickets were mounted, rotas arranged, food and shelter organised on the Harrison Road gates.

Mass meetings of strikers had agreed to march back to work en masse on 17 February, united, demanding reinstatement of all. The Timex bosses locked them out, demanding lay-offs, a 10 per cent pay cut across the board, loss of holidays, increased hours, cuts to pension rights and other humiliations as the price for opening the gates. The workers refused to be cowed, and were locked out for the next 6 months, until Timex eventually gave up their attempt to run the factory with unskilled, untrained, underpaid scab labour and closed down its Dundee plant on 28 August 1993.

Eight years after the defeat of the miners, the defiant stance of Timex workers was an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of workers across the UK, who for years had faced managerial dictatorship and multiple setbacks in the wake of Thatcher’s Tories inflicting defeat on the vanguard of the trade union movement, the miners. 

The Timex revolt occurred at a time when the miners and rail workers were gearing up to strike together against job losses, and public sector workers planned action against the 1.5 per cent pay limit of the time.

Scottish Militant Labour - the biggest single component forming the SSP 5 years later - played a major role in mobilising solidarity and discussing tactics with the Timex strikers

Scottish Socialists 

Some of us who went on 5 years later to be founding members and organisers of the SSP gave our practical and political support to the strikers throughout their battle. We held regular discussions with pickets and the Strike Committee, and organized solidarity speaking tours round workplaces and public meetings all over the UK and Ireland, and even through contacts in other parts of Europe. 

Women workers blossomed as public speakers, winning the hearts and minds of tens of thousands. As one of them expressed it at the time, "When I was in there in the factory I felt like a nobody, now I am somebody. I feel ten times more important than anyone in there [scabs]".

Mass Pickets

One of the key means of building wider support for the locked-out workers was mass pickets, often on a Monday morning, with buses and carloads from all over the UK arriving. On several occasions at least 1,000 thronged outside the main gates; arguably the biggest pickets in Scotland in modern history.

Two schools of thought competed. Some top union officials, who had done nothing to call or build these expressions of workers’ solidarity, wanted just a passive gathering. Others, including the Strike Committee and pickets themselves, agreed with those of us who advocated mass human walls of solidarity outside the factory entrance to block buses ferrying in scabs. 

We argued that to be fully effective, and to sustain the momentum and involvement of workers trekking across the country to join them, the mass pickets needed to aim at halting the buses, halting production, even if only for a few hours or a day. And on some occasions, Hall gave the scabs a day off when a mass picket had been announced - a tremendous boost to morale at the time.

Police were mobilised from across the UK to escort scab-carrying buses through the pickets

Police thuggery

Mass police operations were mounted to block the pickets from being effective, with police violence and snatch squads. Some of their actions were beyond belief for the workers, a harsh eye-opener to the role of the state. 

They crushed pickets up against fences whilst they escorted scabs into work. A young woman had her arm broken during arrest by snatch squads on the picket line, was dragged into police cells, then taken to have her arm set on the hospital, and brought back to the cells for 27 hours before being released - without charge!!

A Glasgow socialist who drove a minibus to the mass picket to drop people off was arrested and charged with attempted murder, but after the fury that erupted at the arrest she had her charge reduced to dangerous driving; from ‘attempted murder’ to ‘attempted driving‘!!

Despite the peaceful nature of the pickets themselves, Tory prime minister John Major denounced "picket line violence“. The majority of the press took their cue from this monstrous lie, with headlines like "mob fury". 

Police chiefs and editors collaborated with Timex bosses to demonise the pickets and their supporters, in a vain attempt to isolate them from the mass of workers.

Union Right-Wing Treachery 

But the most scandalous aspect of this was the way right-wing AEEU and STUC officials and Labour politicians aped the Tory talk of ‘picket line violence‘. 

Needless to say most of them had never attended a picket, especially during the 90-day sacking notices. But when the Timex workers’ resilience and mass pressure for action from below by active trade unionists obliged the STUC's general secretary Campbell Christie to lead a special STUC General Council trip to the picket on 19 May, he rightly stated, "There will be no peace and tranquility at the Timex factory until all sacked workers are reinstated". 

But he went on to wreck the impact of that comment by telling TV cameras, "We will be asking people to come to Dundee...but we don't want anyone to come to break the law or create violence." 

As I wrote at the time, "Who did Campbell have in mind? Was it over 500 'outsiders', bussed into Dundee at public expense, fed and paid overtime from the public purse, who fought desperately to clear the road for Peter Hall’s hired scabs...and who dress in distinctive blue uniforms?"

AEEU leaders Gavin Laird and Jimmy Airlie went far further in their treacherous treatment of 343 members who had inspired fellow workers across the land. 

They wrote to Timex workers threatening them with expulsion from the union. They threatened to withdraw the modest £30 a week strike pay these workers got. They tried to ban a prominent strike leader from speaking on socialist public meeting platforms.

Boycott 

Instead of these acts to undermine the fight, they should have thrown the weight of the union behind the boycott of Timex products that had been gathering pace across the UK. And as we argued at the time, they should have been organising AEEU workplace meetings with Timex speakers alongside national union leaders calling for a 'boycott' of Timex at firms that supplied them and were their chief customers, such as Creda, IBM and Electrolux.

General Strike

Alongside mass pickets to blockade the scab factory to actually halt production, and union-organised boycotts of Timex supplies and products, the other chief strand of struggle was unified solidarity strike action.

The call for a 24-hour general strike, initially in Dundee, later Scotland-wide, was repeatedly discussed, debated and pondered on the picket lines and Strike Committee. Those of us advocating this did so in the context of mounting opposition to the Tories from numerous sections of workers, including teachers, firefighters, miners, rail workers, NHS staff, council staff and postal workers. In the latter case, posties took unofficial strike action - and won!

The wave of support for Timex was shown by the 10,000 who marched with them as early as mid-March. On several occasions, we advocated that the STUC should call a one-day strike, at least in Dundee, and then build for it through workplace meetings. That was no mere socialist wishful thinking, plucked out of the air, but based on the fact that partial walkouts were organised from below in the absence of a fighting plan being forthcoming from either the AEEU or STUC leaderships. 

One of many large solidarity marches, mostly built from below by shop stewards and union activists

Strikes From Below

In mid-April, the STUC called a demo, and 1,000 joined the mass picket earlier that morning. Big contingents of Dundee workplaces walked out to join the 6,000-strong demo, in the likes of NCR, Valentine’s, Bulkbag, Holochrome, Ninewells hospital laundry and Dundee district council. In some firms, management gave time off work as they faced a 2 or 3-hour strike anyway. 

If union national leaders had built on this, solidarity strike action even in the Dundee area itself would have divided employers, as they lost production due to the stubborn refusal of Timex to reinstate their workers.

But instead of taking up this, the best the STUC could do after 92 days of struggle was to promise “to consider demonstrations against those who supply Timex”, with Campbell Christie declaring “There will be no secondary action and we will not be calling for secondary action”, and BBC TV reporting “He rejected the call for a 24 hour general strike despite repeated calls for it.” 

Christie explained, “Tory anti-union laws are unfair and the STUC want them changed, but the Timex campaign has to operate within the legal constraints introduced by the government.” 

The real fact of life was that Timex workers defied these vicious laws for the previous 90 days, and inspired such vast working class solidarity that the bosses dare not use Tory laws to remove all bar 6 pickets, for instance.

One STUC General Council member took the next logical step, arguing against Strike Committee members who advocated a 24-hour general strike, advising them to “wait for a Labour government”. If they had swallowed that line, all too common in the unions at the time, they would have had to wait 4 years - and then get treated to Blair’s New Tories in office!

John McAllion, Labour MP at the time, now a member of the SSP. Photo: Craig Maclean

Handpicked Workforce

After the 90-day sacking notices expired on 17 May, Timex bosses would have dearly loved to pick and choose who to reinstate. But the workers made it plain it was ‘one back, all back’, demanding removal of the scabs and reinstatement of all 343 under their old contracts with continuity of service. 

The Strike Committee called more mass pickets and a rally, appealing to workers across Scotland, who responded in their thousands.

Instead of escalating the action, the AEEU leadership of Laird and Airlie had secret phone calls to Timex, who came up with a new “offer”. This was, as one woman picket described it, “diabolical crap”! 

They offered a 27 per cent pay cut, loss of shift premiums, loss of the Xmas bonus, and skill tests for workers’ own jobs so as to weed out those they wanted to be rid of. 

Despite Laird recommending this, a mass meeting threw it out by 341 to 2, and I witnessed women literally chasing him down the street to the train station in fury!

Timex next tried to cow the workers and clear the gates of pickets with a threat of closure by Xmas, with vague talk of enhanced redundancy payments and taking back 100 or 150 workers on reduced wages. 

Women told us, “We will hunt down Fred Olsen [Timex owner] across the world and destroy him” and “If Olsen pulls out of Dundee we will drive him out of Europe.”

Factory Occupation

The time had arrived for a new tactic to stop asset stripping of the machinery and to force reinstatement, either by bludgeoning Timex bosses into submission, or a Tory government alarmed at rising turmoil into intervening: a factory occupation. 

We discussed that with the Strike Committee, who were open to the idea, but all the obstacles thrown up by mass policing and the cowardly role of national union leaders meant it didn’t happen. 

Nevertheless, the plan Timex bosses had of bringing back some of the skilled workers to bolster production, with predictions of at least £25m sales in the remainder of 1993, and to then either continue production in a high tech factory with a skeleton workforce of skilled workers on Third World wages - or to sell it off for a good price - collapsed in the face of incredible tenacity by the workers. 

They were forced to pull out of Dundee in late August - possibly afraid the workers would precisely seize the factory. They caught them unawares with such a sudden closure.

Permanent Closure

That was a tragically sad day for a city whose workers had piled up Timex profits for generations, with whole families working there. 

But for most of the heroic fighters who had inspired a generation during their prolonged battle, it was the lesser of two evils; a better outcome than to let a ruthless multinational cast aside its skilled, organised workforce for a slave camp geared to churning out profit on the backs of super-exploited workers.

This chapter in Scottish workers’ history is rich in lessons - too numerous to cover in one article. But above all, it proved the willingness of working people - working women in particular - to stand up and fight for their rights if they are given even half a lead. 

And it underlined the need to construct a fighting leadership in their unions, in contrast to those over-paid union officials who quake in their well-heeled boots at the thought of defying vicious anti-union laws designed to enslave workers for profit. 

We should never forget the women and men of Timex who showed such courage, tenacity and ingenuity - in a titanic battle that could have been won with a different type of leadership at the head of the unions. 

A new young generation of workers should be inspired to follow their example - and learn from it.

UNITE WITH A 24-HOUR GENERAL STRIKE

“Things have changed in the last few months. There's a real feeling of change that's great to see, and so many young people getting involved, adding their energy.”

Those were the words of a train driver to me on the most recent TransPennine Express picket line. 

The scale of the strike wave keeps expanding. Of course, there are ebbs and flows in individual disputes, but the general direction is towards increased armies of the working class entering the fray; rising up off their knees in rebellion at being robbed of their wages, their livelihoods, quite often their jobs and rights at work, as well as of the services they provide to the public.

A Million Strikers

About a million trade unionists across the UK are now either already engaged in strike action or have live union ballots to do so.

Rail workers have been forced to declare escalated strikes after brutal rejection of their appeals for reasonable offers during negotiations. They may have suspended previous strikes in good faith, after promises of ‘intensive negotiations’, but the railway bosses have spat in their faces, under instructions from a Tory government hell-bent on making workers pay the price of a crisis we did not create.

Over 115,000 Royal Mail workers are stepping up their strikes amidst escalated attacks not just on their wages but with the threat of 25,000 job losses. Gangster capitalists who seized control of the 500-year-old public service seem hell-bent on transforming it into yet another gig economy cash machine for the profiteers, slaughtering conditions of work, making posties deliver later at night, putting in longer days in the dead of winter than during summer months, and replacing existing unionised staff with casualised, lower-paid replacements.

Scottish teachers, members of the EIS, have launched the biggest strikes in their history - and indeed the first in nearly 40 years - with vibrant, colourful mass pickets and massive rallies. They are overwhelmingly young and majority female workers, fresh in the battle and determined to win their demand that the Scottish government ‘Pay Attent10n'!

Universities across Britain are witnessing mass pickets both of academic and professional services staff as they take the most widespread action ever on pay - which has been slashed by 25% since 2009 – cuts to their pensions of at least 35%, and rampant casualisation and job insecurity. An incredible 68% of research academics are on fixed-term contracts and 41% of teaching academics are on hourly paid contracts. Perhaps what best sums it up is that on average, university staff work more than two unpaid days a week. That's the equivalent of working 20 weeks of the year totally unpaid!

Civil service workers - who for many years held the line against government attacks, frequently standing on the field of battle on their own - are about to stage a wave of strikes in the biggest collective action in the history of the PCS union.

Mood of Radical Change

Perhaps most incredible of all is the declaration of pre-Christmas strike dates by the Royal College of Nursing; an organisation which historically sheltered people who were opposed to the whole notion of taking strike action and had a no-strike policy throughout the 106-year history of the RCN. 

Such is the fury of NHS staff at being underpaid, cruelly overstretched and understaffed, suffering burnout particularly after the horrendous experiences of the Coronavirus, that nurses and other health workers are prepared to withdraw their labour. Strikes not just in defence of their livelihoods but indeed for the safety of the patients who suffer the consequences of it being commonplace to have only one nurse to a ward of 30 patients.

There is indeed a mood of radical change, with new forces coming into struggle, new faces on the picket lines compared to previous strikes at the same place, and an encouraging number of younger workers taking part in most disputes, after years of low participation by young people in unions.

The mood and readiness to fight back must not be squandered. Opportunities to broaden and deepen the fight, for a greater share of wealth for those who produce it in the first place, don't come all that often.

For 6 months, the Scottish Socialist Party and I have consistently advocated maximum coordination of the strikes in different sectors, to enhance their impact and demonstrate the power of united workers’ action - not only to workers themselves, but to the employers and governments they confront in this class war, launched by the Tories and capitalist profiteers. Specifically, we have advocated serious preparation of a 24-hour general strike.

Imagine if the national trade union leaders agreed the date for combined strike action by – at the very least - the one million workers who have already voted for strikes, with mass rallies in town centres and outside the Parliament. It would certainly concentrate the minds of the employers and the governments as they wield the axe to pay and services.

STUC Budget Lobby, 8 December

In a very welcome move, the Scottish TUC have called a Rally at the Scottish Parliament on Thursday 8th December, a week before the Scottish government declares its Budget.

The STUC’s modest demands include a real pay rise for all public service workers; warm homes through municipal energy companies; action to tackle rents; universal free school meals; cheap publicly controlled public transport; a social security system that loosens the grip of poverty; more support for childcare, and enforcement of Fair Work.

Scottish and UK union leaderships should have named the 8th of December as a day of action, including combined strikes, to mobilise the pressure on the Scottish government around these modest demands.

As a minimum they and the STUC should now use this pre-Budget Rally to declare and systematically build for a 24-hour general strike to bring the full might of united working-class action to bear on governments and employers alike.

Demand a 24-hour General Strike

Union branches and stewards’ committees should bombard their own leaderships with demands for this concrete course of action, in the knowledge it would gain widespread support from workers.

After I had been invited to speak at the UCU strikers’ rally outside Strathclyde university and raised this demand - to warm applause - many strikers came up asking, “How close do you think we are to a national strike?”, others commenting “Absolutely, we need a general strike instead of us being out all sorts of different days in different workplaces. After all, we are all fighting around the same demands, so why not come out together?”

Conversations we've had on numerous picket lines of posties, school teachers, railway workers, university staff and Coop coffin factory workers over the last month have evoked similar agreement with the need for a one-day general strike. 

The mood for combined action needs to be harnessed with urgency by national union leaders - not allowed to dribble away as employers seek to divide and conquer workers in their crusade to rob pay for the benefit of profit.

The Tories have declared all-out class war on workers. Any hesitation by trade union leaders will be perceived as weakness.

Stand Up for the Scottish Working Class

Scottish workers now face not just one but two governments of austerity. The Coalition government of the SNP and Scottish Green Party plead “We have a fixed budget”, that “We have no more money.”

Humza Yousaf tells NHS workers he cannot pay them any more. Shirley-Anne Somerville appears on TV to tell teachers the same. Deputy First Minister John Swinney responds to being forced into conceding substantial pay increases (£2,000, roughly 10%) to striking local authority workers by immediately announcing £500million cuts to public services – only to top up his planned cuts to £1.2billion weeks later. 

The SNP/Scottish Greens rightly condemn Westminster, but display a complete and utter lack of any plan of action to win back more funding; to defy and defeat the Tories’ butchery. John Swinney repeats his mantra, “We have nowhere else to go.”

Defy Tory Austerity

As we have consistently argued, the Scottish government face a stark choice: defy or comply with Tory cuts to pay, public services, jobs and community facilities.

The SNP-Scottish Green Coalition can either mobilise alongside the trade union movement and working-class communities to forcibly demand and win back some of the £5billion stolen from Scotland by Westminster since 2010 – or devolve the devastation to communities who elected them as an anti-Tory, anti-austerity government.

So far it seems clear they've chosen the latter course, with John Swinney announcing £1.2billion cuts to public services - and the Scottish Greens acting as the green mudguards for the SNP’s dirty work.

Workers cannot afford to wait for a Labour government, which in any case only offers so-called ‘economic stability’ from a Starmer leadership just as unwilling to promise to halt and reverse Tory austerity as they are unwilling to give one word of support to workers who, here and now, are fighting back. 

It would be dangerous folly to pause the struggle and wait for the capitalist Second Eleven to come into government, where fundamentally nothing will change.

Pound the Politicians

The renewed, replenished trade union movement of course should pound the SNP/Green government with demands that they defy all Tory cuts; to set a No Cuts Budget on 15th December that protects every single job and local service, and that funds pay rises to (at the very least) insulate workers against the ravages of inflation. And then join forces with workers and communities in protests, strikes and civil disobedience to compel the Westminster razor gang into conceding the funds to balance the books.

Why should workers be presented with the choice of either cuts to pay OR cuts to services? That is what the Holyrood government is doing; blaming workers in desperate need of pay that matches inflation for government butchery to services just as desperately needed by working-class communities – including the same workers striking on pay! 

The SNP/Green government must not get away with trying to rob Peter to pay Peter!!

Trade unionists, communities and socialists need to take things into our own hands – not meekly wait for or plead with the Scottish government to save us. The STUC should help mobilise masses of people against cuts to pay, jobs, services and workplace rights, regardless of whether this wrecking ball is wrapped in a blood-stained Union Jack or tartan ribbons.

For an Independent Socialist Scotland

The national question in Scotland can be divisive – or turned into another weapon in the hand of workers against the brutality of the 222nd-richest man in Britain and his unelected Tory government.

It should go without saying, the SSP will continue to build solidarity with workers in struggle regardless of whether they are for or against Scottish independence. Workers are and can be united in fighting to protect their wages, working conditions and lifeline services regardless of their views on Scottish self-government.

But how on earth can any conscious trade unionist or socialist wishing to stand up for the interests of the working class cling onto the tired old arguments against Scottish self-government? It’s the obvious escape route from Tory rule and ruination of working-class people, who haven’t given the Tories a majority in a single election in Scotland since back in 1955!

The Tories have absolutely no mandate to dictate over the working class anywhere, after a mere 200 MPs chose the latest Prime Minister to preside over the lives of 67 million people; that’s even more the case in Scotland.

A Means to a Socialist End

However, independence is only a means to desirable ends for the working class, not the actual solution to the crisis facing the majority of the population.

Unless we forge a movement boldly declaring for a Scotland that guarantees a Scottish minimum wage from the age of 16 upwards, based on at least two-thirds male median earnings; wage increases to match inflation; abolition of all zero hours contracts and a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for every worker who wants it; pensions and benefits based on a decent minimum wage; abolition of all anti-union laws – why would any worker be persuaded for independence?

Unless we battle for a self-governing Scotland that takes all forms of energy, public transport, construction, major industry and banking into democratic public ownership, and uses that power over production to provide clean, green affordable energy; build 100,000 new, environmentally sustainable Council houses for affordable rent; install free insulation, draught-proofing, eco-boilers and fast broadband in every house; and build a vastly expanded network of public transport, free at the point of use – how otherwise can we tackle the agonising levels of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation in Scotland?

Two families own more combined wealth than the poorest 20 per cent of the Scottish population: two families have more than a million people in the same nation! Is that the kind of Scotland the current Scottish government offer us after independence?

Another ten years of austerity, as ‘promised’ in the SNP government's Sustainable Growth Commission Report, subsequently adopted as SNP policy? What’s attractive about that for any working-class family, let alone those still to be convinced of the benefits of independence?

These are obscene statistical reminders of the need not to change flags, but to change whole systems; for an independent socialist Scotland, instead of the butchery to working-class living standards - either by the Westminster Tories or the current Scottish government, as it lies on its belly in submission to Tory austerity.

People not Profit

The tidal movement of workers from numerous occupations striking back is the most hopeful prospect for years, if not decades. The leaderships of the organised trade union movement have a duty, responsibility and opportunity to harness that movement, unite it to the maximum, including through a 24-general strike in the short term, and provide a vision of an entirely different society worth fighting for.

The case for socialist change has never been clearer, or more urgent. Join the SSP in advancing the cause of a socialist future where the working class not only produce the goods and services in society, but own and control them collectively, putting people’s lives, health and happiness before profit.

First published in The Scottish Socialist Voice on 3 Dec 2022

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DEFY AND DEFEAT CRISIS-STRICKEN TORIES

Workers' livelihoods and rights are being assaulted by an unelected Prime Minister, at the head of an extremist, unelected Tory government.

Whereas 100,000 Royal Mail posties voted to strike in defence of their pay, their working conditions and the public service they provide, a mere 80,000 backwoods Tories elected Liz Truss to preside over the fate of 67 million people. That's a lesser level of democracy than back in the 18th century! Yet the same Tory junta lectures us on how trade union ballots should be conducted, poised to impose more vicious obstacles to workers defending themselves than even Truss's obnoxious idol Maggie Thatcher dared to implement.

However, this is a Tory government ripping itself apart, with internal divisions, plots and crises swamping Tory party conference, and many of their own MPs bolting early to avoid the train strikes timed to hit their trips to and from Birmingham, thereby missing Truss's address to the assembled reactionaries.

They've already been compelled into two screeching U-turns, because of the public fury at rocketing energy prices and their plans to axe the 45 percent tax on income over £150,000. At time of writing, the Tories are likely to be forced into another humiliating U-turn on the question of capping benefit increases to the rate wages have risen, as opposed to the twice-as-high Retail Price Index inflation - which even a right-wing think tank predicts will drive a further 450,000 people into poverty.

Drive Tories Back – Drive Tories Out!

This is a brutal regime which has launched shameless class war on the working class, but one which is ripe to be defied and defeated; not just driven back but potentially driven out, if only the national trade union leaderships harness the growing anger in the population into mass, united and decisive collective action.

The Tories’ mini-budget was a rude awakening to class politics for anyone lulled into swallowing the lie that we are all in this together, in an orgy of cross-class ‘national unity’ which the ruling powers systemically sought to whip up, in two relentless weeks of pomp, pageantry and parades of naked state power after the Queen died.

Kami Kwasi Kwarteng!

Public outrage forced ‘kami Kwasi’ Kwarteng into abandoning abolition of the top 45p tax rate, pleading with the population that this measure had been ‘a distraction’ from the rest of the Tories’ wondrous budget. From an opposite, working-class standpoint, this U-turn is itself something of a distraction; a mere tactical retreat in the war on the working class which the rest of the budget amounts to.

After all, the UK’s top rate of income tax before Maggie Thatcher won power in 1979 was not 45 percent but 83 percent. More contemporarily, the combined impact of freezing the lower income tax threshold and cutting the 20% basic rate leaves everyone earning less than £40,000 worse off.

A millionaire will be £55,000 better off from the Tory budget, whereas the median workers’ wage is less than half that leap in wealth, at £26,000. Naked class-based generosity to the grotesquely rich.

The poorest 3 million of the population will gaìn the grandiose total of 63 pence - per month! - according to the viciously anti-socialist Times newspaper. Across the gaping class divide, £85billion has already been forked out in dividends to big shareholders in 2022.

Nationalise - Don't Subsidise Profit!

The Tories’ alleged restraints on household energy bills means they’ve more than doubled since August 2021, whilst giant energy companies were gifted £100billion in subsidies from taxpayers’ funds – which will further crucify spending on essential services. 

Regressive tax cuts, plus subsidies to giant energy companies, will in part be paid for in an orgy of cuts to public services - on top of real-terms cuts to wages and benefits. 

Public spending cuts to the tune of £60billion (equivalent to almost two years of the Scottish block grant from Westminster), according to new calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.   

Workers in the UK have already suffered one of the steepest falls in real wages in any of the advanced OECD countries over the past year. If the Tories have their way, that mass transfusion of wealth to the rich from the rest of us - to profit from pay - will be greatly added to.

That's where determined, well-prepared collective resistance by the organised workers’ movement is often literally a matter of life and death.

NHS in Crisis

The NHS, widely regarded as the greatest reform ever won by the working class, is in a terrible state of collapse - after decades of underinvestment, accelerating privatisation to gouge profits, and collapsing morale amongst staff after years of being undervalued, understaffed and underpaid.

This crisis precedes COVID-19, which then exacerbated the problem. Many families are losing loved ones to avoidable deaths from cancer, due to horrendous delays in diagnosis and treatment, because the governments of both Westminster and Holyrood have failed to adequately invest, allowing austerity driven by profit maximisation to prevail over people's health.

As the chair of the Royal College of Nursing, Julie Lamberth, declared - as they conduct a ballot for the first strike action in the 100-year history of the RCN –

“Patient care is suffering, staffing levels are unsafe, and members are facing a daily battle on how to feed their family, heat their homes and travel to their work. None of this is new and as we head into another winter, we know it's only going to get worse. This is our opportunity to take a stand for our patients and our profession, to show the Scottish government they must act now and that is why I am urging members to vote in favour of strike action.”

It's an incredible indictment of the state of the NHS that the RCN - historically not even regarded as a real trade union by most of the movement - has now been sufficiently radicalised to step out on the road towards strike action, alongside members of UNISON, GMB and Unite who are also balloting for action, calling for a pay rise 5 percent above inflation!

Strike Wave Rises

Simultaneously, 150,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services union, PCS, are being balloted for strikes by the biggest number of members in the union's entire history. They are demanding an inflation-proofed pay rise; £15-an-hour minimum wage; reversal of plans to slaughter 91,000 jobs - and their redundancy terms to boot; plus a 2% reduction in workers’ pension contributions, after government figures prove they've been overpaying into the pension pot for several years.

Royal Mail workers - over 115,000 of them - are launching 19 days of further strike action against savage attempts to not only suppress their wages, but dismantle the entire Royal Mail, breaking up letters and parcels into separate businesses; scrapping the guaranteed 6-day delivery currently written into the Universal Service Obligation; on top of outrageous attacks on working conditions, whereby posties would have to work late into the evenings, and work longer hours in the winter months than during the summer.

Food Bank Phil

Fellow members of the CWU in BT and Openreach are sustaining strikes of 45,000 workers against the pay cuts being imposed by what they’ve dubbed FoodBankPhil – Philip Jansen, the chief executive whose salary last year rocketed by 32% to £3.5million, whilst several offices have set up food banks for their own staff, such is the crisis in their living standards.

As we report elsewhere, 45,000 railway workers in Network Rail and 15 train operating companies have now been joined by over 2000 ScotRail members of the RMT in strike actions, not just on pay, but on safety for the travelling public as the ‘Railway Rich Listers' try to slaughter at least one-third of maintenance workers’ jobs and cut maintenance services on our railways by half – a sure recipe for death and disaster.

Members of UNISON at several universities are already taking strike action and trade unionists at Dundee University have passed the incredible milestone of being engaged in strike actions for a full year. 

Meantime university lecturers, school teachers, firefighters and control staff are amongst the growing army of workers rising from their knees because everything is rising apart from their wages.

Build a 24-hour General Strike

This welcome recovery of workers’ self-confidence needs to be harnessed by the STUC, TUC and each national union leadership in combined collective action around fighting demands that could transform the lives of millions.

Coordinated and united strikes - including a 24-hour general strike that brings every worker into action in a mighty display of workers’ power - could not only force concessions out of individual employers, but potentially topple the crisis-stricken, divided Tories. It's an opportunity that has not been available to the same extent for several years and needs to be seized.

As an integral part of an expanded, escalating plan of collective action, a 24-hour general strike would not only embolden workers with their own power, and warn off governments, but would be a critical component part of defeating the new batch of anti-union laws being hatched by the Tories. 

The best way to defend the right to strike is to strike – together, across different sectors, in unity.

STUC: Scotland Demands Better

In a welcome move, the STUC has launched a ‘Scotland Demands Better' campaign, around a series of nine quite modest demands on the Scottish government, including wages, benefits, rent controls and genuine implementation of fair work practises.

These demands would at least ameliorate some of the worst savagery against working people and their families. But unless the STUC seriously mobilise - with demonstrations and by spearheading a Scottish one-day general strike - there can be no guarantee of the SNP-Green Party Coalition changing course.

It took determined and courageous strike action by cleansing workers - and the imminent prospect of them being joined by thousands of school workers - to force the same Scottish government into conceding (in round figures) a 10% pay rise, about £2,000 increase for most workers, after months of them insisting it wouldn't break their 2.5% public sector pay cap.

And hot on the heels of workers’ action forcing this Scottish government U-turn on pay cuts, John Swinney announced a ‘difficult choice’ of £500million in cuts to the public sector. In all likelihood deeper cuts still will be added as a consequence of Westminster's escalated butchery.

Don't Buy Petrol for an Arsonist!

There is no need to elaborate on the fact working-class people cannot rely on the Tories - the chief party of capitalist big business, bankers and warmongers.

But neither can we rely for salvation from the Scottish government, which has never once defied Westminster cuts, nor mobilised the Scottish people to win back some of the stolen £billions off Westminster, in order to protect jobs, wages, public services and workers' conditions - which is precisely what a socialist government in Scotland would do.

But any worker who thinks Starmer's Labour is a lifeboat from renewed austerity and class warfare is just as liable to volunteer wads of cash to an arsonist to burn down their own house.

Starmer instructed his Labour Shadow Cabinet members to go nowhere near a workers’ picket line and expelled from office the handful who defied him. 

Whilst spurning even a hint of solidarity with workers, the same Starmer has mobilised his Treasury team in what has been christened ‘a smoked salmon offensive’ - holding at least 250 meetings with Chief Executives of major capitalist companies. They are desperately trying to reassure the profiteering class that Labour is a safe alternative to the Tories, as the latter spook even the moneybags of finance capitalism with their recent mini-budget.

Whilst bending to the rising clamour for nationalisation of the railways - at least in words – Starmer’s right-wing Labour has tried to con people with talk of a publicly-owned Great British Energy, which would merely be yet another energy company (heavily dependent on nuclear power) competing with the existing capitalist Big Polluters - who are driving millions into fuel poverty whilst trashing our planet for profit. So no doubt which side of the class war Starmer's New Blairites stand, then!

SSP: the Workers' Party

In stark contrast, the SSP has no interest in reassuring big business. We instead assure the working class we are on the side of workers and their communities, part of the working class, helping to organise and celebrate every penny extra pay, every minute off the working day, without loss of earnings – but never losing sight of the bigger fight to transform society into a socialist democracy, founded on public ownership of all forms of energy, construction, public transport, telecoms, banking.

We are quite clear: nationalise, don’t subsidise!

Instead of propping up the profits of big corporations – as has just been done for the energy giants – the power of the state needs to be deployed to organise publicly owned industries and services, with elected boards of management and a built-in majority for working-class representatives.

To achieve such a democratically planned economy, the full might of the one productive class in society, the working class, will need to be mobilised for socialist change in the years ahead.

Mobilisations for at least inflation-proofed wages; a £15-an-hour minimum wage; democratic public ownership, and defence of the right to strike in the immediate weeks and months ahead – including through a 24-hour general strike – would be a major advance down that road.