Predictable Betrayals

If you had a pound for every time a trade union leader announced their disappointment with a labour party leader you’d have almost as much money as has been wasted by those same trade union leaders on funding the labour party. The latest ineffective whinging has come from Sharon Graham, the great “rank and file” leader of Unite, who has responded to Keir Starmer’s incredibly predictable U-turn on workers rights by expressing shock in a recent tweet that the document they though they had agreed with the labour party leadership had been diluted more than a bottle of homebrew gin.  According to an article in The Big Issue the document that has ended up being watered down following a lobbying campaign from the likes of Deliveroo.  The labour party has been making ineffectual promises to tackle zero hours contract and (so called) flexible working since the days of Ed Miliband but given the presence of companies using zero hour contracts in the British economy has only grown over the last five years it is not a surprise that Starmer is now starting to pander to them. According information both from the Office of National Statistics and the Statista website the number of workers employed on zero hours contracts rose exponentially after 2012.

This is no coincidence as the the British economy had already been in a recession for four years by then and the only way that employers were going to start hiring again in large numbers was if they could obtain a workforce that was able to be subjected to greater exploitation. This means getting rid of overtime payments, minimising employers pension contributions and allowing the bosses to fire workers at a moments notice.  This is the model that the British capitalist class wants to have imposed over the rest of the country and they will vehemently oppose any attempt to alter it even in the mildest way. The Labour Party’s job, of course, is not to represent the working class but to act as the “second eleven” for British capitalism when their traditional party (the Tories) becomes too exhausted, corrupt and despised to carry on in government. The job of the labour party is to carry through, in a more underhanded fashion, the attacks that the ruling class want carrying out on the working class. The ruling class are demanding an ever more “flexible” employment model be imposed and so this is what Keir Starmer will dutifully deliver for them. Just as Blair and Brown pushed more casualisation hidden behind talk of “full employment” so Starmer will do the same.  Sharon Graham and the other left wing union leaders like Mick Lynch know full well the record of the labour party and what it did during it’s 13 years in power up to 2010 but they continue to say that it is worth workers voting for and paying for this party which will only carry out attacks on workers but will do so hidden behind “pro worker” phrases.  If the likes of Sharon Graham actually wanted to try to get even the most moderate of reforms out of the labour party then she should at least issue a credible threat of Unites disaffiliation from the Labour Party. That she won’t do this, ever, is testament to the fact that the leaders of the trade union movement in this country have, in effect, chosen to aid Starmer in his attacks on the working class. The only word we can use to describe such behaviour is treachery.