Bring down the Tories? Yes we can!

Mandate? No WAY. Cameron and Clegg do not have the voters’ backing for their vicious cuts package – the deepest in British history. Their Coalition only has a majority in Parliament because of Lib Dem support, and the Lib Dems only won votes because they promised to oppose the cuts.
What’s more, no one voted for cuts in frontline staff in health and education, and Cameron even said they were ruled out. Now we know he was lying. A staggering 50,000 NHS jobs are under threat and cuts to school budgets put teaching jobs at risk too.
And that’s not all. No one voted for the wholesale privatisation of the welfare state. Now Cameron has announced it anyway, with housing, hospitals, schools and care services up to be handed to “any willing [private] provider”.
Less than a year into the Coalition government, all the polls and by-elections show Labour would win a thumping majority if there were an election tomorrow. It’s a clear sign that a majority oppose the Coalition’s offensive on our jobs, services and living standards.

But that won’t stop the Tories. They are determined to use their Coalition while it lasts, to inflict irreversible damage on the whole post-war welfare state. Someone has to pay the trillion pound price for the crisis caused by their friends in the banks and corporations, and the Tories have decided who: the working class.
If the Tories succeed it is fast-forward to the pre-war past. Privately run schools and hospitals in place of public health and education systems, a new poor law in place of universal benefits, a three million strong pool of unemployed labour to undercut wages and deter militancy, a little bit of guff about a ‘Big Society’ and a gale of racism against Muslims and migrants to keep people divided and turn people into scapegoats.
Action
So what can stop them? The answer is mass action. Like in Egypt and Tunisia, where all out general strikes and mass protests brought down dictators. Like in Wisconsin USA, where a union revival has brought scores of thousands onto the streets and into the council chambers. Like in France and Greece, where one-day stoppages came within a hair’s breadth of beating the cuts and would have won if they had launched indefinite general strikes.
Ed Miliband says general strikes are “not the way you change governments”, but Egypt and Tunisia show just how wrong he is. It is mass action on the streets and in the workplaces that can change things, that can show the capitalists and their governments that we won’t pay for their crisis, and that can force them to back down.
The huge numbers on the streets of London on 26 March show that the mood is there for action and the numbers are there too. So the TUC’s mass demonstration must not be the end of the campaign. We do not need a one-day wonder but a launch pad for a wave of action that shakes the Coalition to its foundations.
A general strike, backed by huge marches in every major city, and occupations of the main squares and government buildings, could make this country ungovernable until the cuts package is dropped and the Coalition falls.
If the people of Egypt can bring down a tyrannical dictatorship with a general strike and mass street action, then the working class in Britain – with our seven million strong trade unions, our mass student movement and our anticuts committees in every city – can bring down the weak regime of Cameron and Clegg.