We stand in solidarity with the Birmingham bin workers who are under attack from the Labour controlled city council. Notice how in the denunciation of the employers behaviour though the Unite official statement fails to mention that it is the labour party (many of whom are members of Unite) which is carrying out this attack in the bin workers.

https://www.unitetheunion.org/news-events/news/2024/august/birmingham-council-plans-to-attack-bin-worker-pay-slated-by-unite

The 10% price rises that are coming to Britain are simply a case of price gouging. Everyone knows this and can clearly see that the energy companies are utterly parasitic but the entire political system is determined to avoid any discussion of this. They would rather offer endless fake alternatives combined with vague promises that prices will drop in the future. The minimum demand that should be made is that the energy companies should be nationalised without compensation, not a penny, being paid out to the parasitic coupon clippers who have profited from the massive rip off of the working class.

Keir Starmer is over in Berlin today to start the process of undoing Brexit. The Brexit vote in 2016 was a great revolt, largely of the working class, against the wishes of the most powerful sections of the ruling class. That's why the rich hate it and have been working non-stop to undo it ever since.

The TUC Congress in Brighton this week will only prove that what are supposed to be our organisations controlled by our enemies. The "leaders" of the TUC are not there to promote class struggle but to control it on behalf of the ruling class. The left will go and make "demands" of the leaders but the british left are in actual fact partners in crime with the TUC leadership, and both parties are fully aware of this. Rather than addressing demands to the leaders who are dedicated to blocking class struggle anyone remotely serious should popularising the demands to address the basic needs of the working class amongst the class itself. The TUC Congress won't decide anything of value, only the working class moving into action in defiance of these treacherous "leaders" will do that.

The Middle Aged Revolutionary explains why dirge-peddlar-in-chief Billy Bragg is the bard of the trade union bureaucracy.

https://middleagedrevolutionaryblog.com/2024/08/19/billy-bragg-unofficial-bard-of-the-trade-union-bureaucracy/

⏳📚THIS DAY IN HISTORY🇮🇪✊

On September 6th, 1921, the Cork Transport Workers' Union took control of the Harbour Board's offices and the local port, raising a red flag to symbolize Soviet control during the Cork Harbour Strike.

The strike had started due to the Board's refusal to meet workers' wage demands, with laborers seeking a minimum of 70 shillings per week.

The union's bold move to collect dues from shipping agents to support their members quickly forced successful negotiations.

Reaction from the bourgois press was negative, with the Irish Times attributing the unrest to the influence of the Russian Revolution and the country's recent state of lawlessness.

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With deep regret, our new prime minister tells us, his government is being forced to attack the poor in order ‘balance the books’. We have to feel his pain. Clearly it comes from the heart.

After all, who could doubt that waging endless aggressive wars against workers in other parts of the world is definitely far cheaper than heating the homes of our elderly?

And is it not self-evident that the deepening crackdown on every form of dissenting speech and action is a necessary part of filling that ”£22bn hole” in the country’s finances? You know: the one that the Labour chancellor was ‘shocked’ to ‘discover’, and which has apparently been the trigger for Labour’s ‘unplanned’ ditching of its election promises within a few weeks of assuming office?

To ask these questions is to answer them.

And here's another: Is it not crystal clear by now that anyone who tells workers that Starmer, the Labour party, or any of its supposedly ‘left’ MPs (don’t laugh!) can in any way ‘fix’ capitalism, or ‘bring socialism’ (“Forward to the united front!”) are part of the problem, not part of the solution?

https://thecommunists.org/2024/09/09/news/keir-starmer-labour-fix-britain-racism-repression-austerity-war/

Sharon Graham is now pretending to be surprised that the labour party is as reactionary in office as it promised to be before it was in office. The con artistry of the union leaders must be exposed and rejected. It was obvious to all who cared to see it that Starmer was going to be this bad but the union leaders lied to their members and pretended otherwise.

This is a Daily Worker front page from 1953 exposing the war crimes of the British army in Malaya. These crimes included mass beheadings of prisoners, forced expulsion of villagers from their lands, massacres of entire villages seen as being pro communist, burning of crops and much more. This is the reality of British imperialism which the Labour Party and trade union leaders defend both then and now. This is why every time a British politician spouts some garbage about "Russian imperialism" our only response should be to laugh at him.

It was 12 years ago that I realised, though perhaps didn't want to admit it to myself, that there could be no reform of the system here in Britain. I didn't understand why at the time but as I joined the trade union movement I saw that we'd only been going backwards for longer than I'd been alive. The pressure exerted by the ruling class for continual impoverishment of the working class is constant and unyielding yet our "leaders" response to it was always utterly inadequate and pathetic. It took me many more years of defeats to fully realise what was going on, that we were in the midst of a long crisis of British capitalism that would not end and the ruling class had no option but to continually attack us. There were so many defeats and disasters over the last decade that I personally experienced and what it all came down to was the fact that we didn't understand the nature of what we were fighting and too many were still convinced that bourgeois democracy was going to (somehow) deliver reforms to us again. If you don't understand your opponent and his motivations (class interests in this case) then you can't hope to win anything. This is our fundamental problem in the west, the reality of what capitalism is has been masked for far too long and it has been masked by social democracy. Only by ridding ourselves of this rotten legacy can any progress be made. On the positive side if I can work this out then anyone can because I was a member of the most propagandised layer in British society, the university educated public sector management layer.