Like many my first reaction to the votes by the Tories and Lib Dems to murder our National Health Service was that it was an act of outright treachery. After all neither party said in their election campaigns that they would do such a thing. In fact I seem to remember that the Tories, in particular said that there would be no more top down reorganisation of the NHS. They clearly spoke with forked tongue!
To my mind the whole thing was as much predictable as it was treacherous. This is all their Christmases at once. It's the perfect storm of financial and economic crisis that allows them to make the sort of changes to the economic and social fabric of our country that they have only dreamt of. I could just imagine these toffs sitting there in their public schools and posh clubs years ago saying things like " if you could change anything what would you do?" I would imagine decimating the NHS would be pretty near the top of the list next to smash the unions and tighter immigration controls. All very predictable.
It seems to me that we need to be a lot more sophisticated than being surprised by some seemingly treacherous behaviour by these very rich career politicians. We need to understand that this was always going to be the challenge we faced and to concentrate on building the resistance. Politicians of whatever political shade understand only one thing - power!
I happen to believe that as working people, particularly through unions, we have the power to defeat the reactionary politics of this coalition government. Not just by sitting in front of the tv and cursing their latest atrocity but but engaging and organising for power in our workplaces and power within our communities. We have the power to defeat these people but only if we believe that we have the power and do not just succumb to the line we are fed that us mere plebs should know our place and accept the inevitable.
It feels like belief is in short supply. One of the tasks of the leaders of our resistance is to help to instill that sense of self belief.
3 comments:
Yes, so come on then Roger - what is Unison GOING TO ACTUALLY DO . . . ? The Country needs some political leadership, it wont come from Labour, it has to come from the unions . . . we are listening
Yes, so come on then Roger - what is Unison GOING TO ACTUALLY DO . . . ? The Country needs some political leadership, it wont come from Labour, it has to come from the unions . . . we are listening
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Unison will do what we have been doing for months now. Thousands of our members are already involved in industrial action ballots or are actually on strike (which I presume is what your talking about). There will undoubtedly be more over the coming weeks to join brothers and sisters at (to name but a few) Birmingham (the largest local authority in Europe), Southampton, Quarries (Scotland), Shropshire, Barnet and others. I dare say, as we have said before, there is a string chance of national co-ordinated industrial action ballot and strike over pensions.
Hope you are able to show your support to these thousands of workers. We actually have more members on strike right now than many of the unions and factions have members.
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