After the TUC demo – Build a 24 hour general strike
Come to the Socialist Party Scotland meetings this week
This was a not a wave, neither a stream nor a river, not even a sea. The more than 500,000 who marched against the savage cuts of the Con-Dem government formed an ocean of humanity in London on Saturday. An ocean that has the potential to become a tsunami that can stop the Con-Dem cutters in their tracks and sweep away this rotten government of the millionaires.
The TUC organised protest was a mass mobilisation of the working class and specifically the trade union movement in Britain. For decades we have been told that the trade unions were powerless. Class struggle was old-fashioned and out-dated. Yet Saturday’s mass protest was the largest specifically trade union demo in more than 100 years. Now it must be turned into the biggest strike movement the capitalists have seen in decades.
The march was still leaving the starting point of the Embankment four and a half hours after the start of the march had reached Hyde Park. Thousands of others could not even complete the march as they had to leave to make their buses and trains home.
Public sector workers formed the majority of the protest. Local government workers, NHS staff, transport and civil service workers and their families marched in their hundreds of thousands. Many had never marched on a demonstration before. But workers from the private sector were also out in force. From the car plants, Heathrow airport, the Cabin Crew workers from British Airways among others. It seemed as though all those who had been involved in struggle against brutal employers, the students who have inspired millions in their protests before Christmas, the anti-war activists who had marched in 2003 against the war in Iraq sought a path to this march.
It was a marvelous demonstration of the potential power of the working class. But this march, as historic and inspiring as it was, must be the prelude to the main act. The need now for mass organised and coordinated strike action. The first step of which is a 24 hour public sector general strike. It is to that that we must now turn all our energies in the trade unions, workplaces and communities. The TUC leaders failed to put forward any proposals to take the struggle forward. In effect they accept the logic of cuts – because they have no alternative to capitalism itself. But we need to build mass pressure to ensure the trade unions call strike action and quickly.
We need a mass movement to beat the brutal cuts of this savage government. Saturday was a warning to the Con-Dems and the ruling class in Britain. You will not be allowed to inflict the pain you are proposing without provoking an uprising.
Come to the Socialist Party meetings this week and discuss where we go from here, the case for socialism and how we can build mass action to beat the cuts.
Socialist Party Scotland meetings
Glasgow – Monday 28th March 7pm
McConnell’s Bar (downstairs) – 335 Hope Street
Dundee – Tuesday 29th March – 7.30pm
Baxter Suite, Dundee University Tower Block, Perth Road
Edinburgh – Wednesday 30th March – 7pm
Methodist Church, 25 Nicolson Street
