The politicians live on another planet; so let's take over this one!

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Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials
4 October 2023

The Tory party conference in Manchester reached its show-biz anti-climax when Sunak finally ended the "will he, won't he?" speculation over cancelling HS2. He axed it. So, no more London to Manchester to Leeds high-speed connectivity for the so-called "Northern Powerhouse", after all!

    And never mind that over the past 14 years the government has (already) handed over more than £98 billion to an army of consultancies and contractors and that this will leave huge earthworks, craters and unused tunnels all the way up the route to Birmingham and Manchester...

    Whether any parts of the project can be salvaged remains to be seen. The new "Network North" and "hundreds" of smaller rail and road plans announced by Sunak are unlikely ever to materialise either, by the way. But in the next year or so (since an election looms before January 2025) there'll be more than enough time to pay yet more consultants, contractors etc., a lot more billions... Because that's what the whole sorry charade is all about in the first place. Handouts to today's almost wholly parasitic capitalist class.

Their lies and contradictions

Leading up to this display of "bold decisiveness" by Sunak were a series of amazing about-faces. After all, if the HS2 project was an exorbitant white elephant (with 2 of its legs already chopped off) this was only because successive Tory governments - including Sunak's - swore blind until a few weeks ago, that they were 100% committed to it.

    Their capacity to lie and create false scenarios knows no bounds. Grant Shapps, former Rail minister, told Radio 4 this morning that anyway, rail didn't need much investment because passenger behaviour had changed since Covid. When the Radio presenter quoted the increase to above pre-Covid levels on most lines, Shapps came back saying that on the West Coast the figure was only 69%... Indeed. This is the worst-performing line in the country, suffering serial breakdowns and running through the poorest region of Britain, where few can afford the ridiculously high fares. So no wonder.

    But ruling class ignoramuses like Shapps and the whole Tory crew, who speak and act as if they live on another planet, cannot ever be expected to come even close to delivering what's needed - they serve totally different interests. And it might as well be those of the Martians, as far as the rest of us are concerned!

We need to change the way we strike

So it is no surprise that these same creatures from another planet are holding out against the strikes of NHS doctors (but also a large number of ancillary workers like porters, nursing assistants and domestic staff) and of course, the train drivers.

    At least Mick Whelan, unlike other union leaders, is not afraid to call the ASLEF strike this week "political". He admits that he deliberately called it on the same day as Sunak's conference address.

    The trouble is that the train drivers' strike and overtime ban, relying on the muscle of drivers to win for drivers alone, actually shows up a political weakness, which has proven to be the downfall of the whole strike "movement" over the past year.

    Not least because union leaders like Whelan call all the shots, almost replicating the boss-worker relationship within the union. When, on the contrary, unions were meant to be built on the principle of equality and workers' democratic control. In days gone by, they even used to be called "schools for socialism"!

    Of course, unions probably can't be rebuilt on such a model today, nor do they need to be. But after the last 16 months of on-off strikes, which haven't got strikers anywhere close to where they wanted to go, some hard political truths have to be faced. So it's high time that such discussions take place.

    Because this time round, the working class has to come up with its own solutions - and not get side-tracked down the Labour Party's blind alley, nor by populist nonsense. And certainly not by the racist calls led by Home Secretary Suella Braverman against migrant workers, who can only reinforce our ranks, whether they arrive in small boats or large ones, or get here any other way.

    Yes indeed, it's high time for our class to "found" its own political organisations, it's own revolutionary party, with the ultimate aim of getting rid of this pernicious class system, altogether.

    That it will take really unified and determined fights, regardless of the law is without question. But to date there is actually no law which prevents train drivers, car workers, or any other category of worker, from going on strike alongside NHS workers, so that all sections together can win their demands - and in the quickest possible time - in the interests of all!