The Continuing Betrayals Of The Labour Aristocracy

The Scottish TUC Have Taken Just As Rotten A Position As Their English Brethren Over The NATO-Russia War

Recently, the TUC Conference endorsed a motion on the Ukraine war that wholly endorsed the line of US and British imperialism. This was following on from the fact that the Scottish TUC (STUC) had already endorsed a similar motion in April of this year. Both motions were promoted by the absurdly named “Ukraine Solidarity Campaign” (USC), and this group merits our attention because it is another case of an organisation doing the exact opposite of what its label suggests.

As we stated in our previous article on this matter, the current Ukrainian regime is a product of an anti-working class coup that took place in 2014. Since then, the Ukrainian ruling class has been relentlessly attacking working class political organisations and has made war against the most strongly organised and militant section of the working class in the Donbas region. The regime that came to power in 2014 ripped up the 1991 Ukrainian constitution, under which it declared its independence from the USSR, and empowered instead the fascist ideas epotimised by the figure of Stepan Bandera, a mass murderer and war criminal from the 1940s.

The coup of 2014 marked a further escalation of attacks on Ukrainian workers by a ruling class that had been looting the country since it gained independence in 1991. It was this foul and parasitic oligarchy which funded the Ukrainian fascist movement and has attacked all geuinely independent workers organisations in the country as well as banning the Ukrainian Communist Party and imprisoning many of its members and sympathisers. Since 2014, the economy of Ukraine has been sold off, Russian speakers have been persecuted, religious freedom done away with and workers orgaisations suppressed. In the war waged by the Ukrainian state, at the behest of NATO, in the east, over 14,000 people had died by the time the Russian government launched the special military operation in February of 2022. Ukraine is not an independent country. Its sovereignty was trampled by the coup in 2014, and it is a wholly owned puppet state of US imperialism.

What the ludicrously titled “Ukraine Solidarity Campaign” are actually in solidarity with is not the workers of Ukraine: They stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian capitalist class who sold their nation to US imperialism. This campaign stands with them and their murderous fascist gangs who have been brutalising Ukrainian workers since 2014. The Scottish TUC has put itself in league with the murderers of Ukrainian workers and with US imperialism, the enemy of workers all over the world.

This is a disgusting action from an organisation which is supposed to represent the working class of Scotland. What a grotesque insult to the memory of the Red Clydesiders: John Maclean, Willie Gallacher, and Mick Mcgahey. Much like its English equivalent, the STUC must be swept aside. Clearly, this is an organisation that is totally dominated by class traitors and frauds, which will lead Scottish workers nowhere.

It is better to begin again than head any further down this dead end.