THE TORIES have wasted no time.
More anti-union laws, less social housing, new wars. Cameron and Osborne are railroading Bills through Parliament.
The Tories have launched a class war against ordinary people. So the labour movement has every right to respond by placing ourselves on a war footing. And now we have an anti-austerity leadership we can fight back on all fronts: the political, the industrial and the social.
Politically we have already exposed how weak the Tories really are. The Lords defeat threw the government onto the back foot over working tax credit cuts. Tory backbenchers were panicked, their ministers visibly angry.
Jeremy Corbyn should demand Labour MPs oppose every austerity Bill: tabling amendments to slow down their passage, exposing their callous nature, linking up with protesters outside parliament — and getting every one of our MPs to vote against the Tories.
Recalcitrant Blairites should – to coin a phrase – be whipped into line. Those MPs who still think they are in “New Labour” are on borrowed time. The left have a clear majority in the party and we have every right to replace MPs who vote with the Tories with ones that oppose them.
When workers see their politicians acting as spokespeople for the people, they are encouraged. Red Flag encourages Jeremy, John and the whole Shadow Cabinet to give 100% backing to strike action against the cuts.
Steel workers, whose jobs and communities are threatened, should stop production and occupy the furnaces and mills. That would turn Redcar and Scunthorpe from an embarrassment for the Tories into a crisis for their rotten government.
Today strike figures remain comparatively low. This is in part due to the weak response of the official union leaders, who under the last government failed to mount any sort of effective national resistance on pensions, over Grangemouth oil refinery and over public sector pay.
The TUC tops have backed Jeremy, but there is no sign that they intend to lead an industrial fightback. So it falls to the rank and file to organise a campaign, one that demands co-ordinated and sustained strikes against job losses, including and defiance of the Tory anti-union laws.
Red Flag wants to bring the spirit of the Corbyn movement into the unions, taking democratic control of our own disputes, replacing officials who obstruct action with ones who help us fight, and taking unofficial action whenever our leaders refuse to act.
We want to help build a social movement of direct action: occupations against evictions, blockades against deportations, confrontations with ministers responsible for welfare cuts.
In every town and city, unified and democratic anti-cuts groups need to draw in delegates from workplaces, housing estates and Labour branches. Together we should form local councils of resistance and a national federation.
We cannot afford to wait till 2020. If we do, there could be precious little left to defend. Terrible as it is to consider, if we sit on our hands the Tories could win yet again, as apathy replaces anger.
On the other hand, a wave of struggle could show millions, in practice, that there is an alternative. More than that, those millions could get active, help us transform the Labour party and build a mass movement to bring down the Tories and bring a left wing Labour government to power.
