The Tories are ripping apart our unions – where is the fightback?

In May and June 2010 the coalition government used a difficult economic legacy, and a particular note, to grasp control of the key political narratives of the parliament. Years of fightback from Miliband and a united Labour party front bench did nothing to repair the lasting damage of this hiatus of opposition.

If it wasn’t patently obvious that the leadership contest, political manoeuvring and ‘naval gazing’ at the start of the last Parliament cost the party dearly, then it certainly is now. Cameron and his new cabinet is using exactly the same lapse in Labour’s presence to grab the political narrative and shift it to the right. On human rights, the media and now workers rights the Tories are challenging and dismantling the consensus on what the public should expect, and the rights individuals and collective organisations have to exercise. And although the proposed reforms to strike ballots are entirely hypocritical, without justification and against the common rights of people to bargain to get a better deal, the response of those apparently wanting to ‘lead’ our political movement has been nothing but silence.

Let’s not kid ourselves on this one, the reforms proposed by Cameron and Javid are nothing but a direct assault on both the ability of unions to exercise the right to strike as a collective but also the efficacy of even bothering to do so in the first place. It is an absolute political irony that just a few days after the campaign to eradicate zero-hours contracts, one of the universally popular policies in the Labour Party manifesto which failed, the Tories not only want to keep them but seek to use them to undercut and displace those with stable employment and good workforce representation.

These changes represent an absolute and total submission to the will of business to dictate the terms of economic prosperity to the mass of the British workforce and a blatant divide-and-rule policy from this Conservative majority government, which seeks in the early days of its tenure to crush any social or political opposition to its cause.

So the message from myself and others in our movement has to be clear. If you in any way seek to lead or play a role in our party now is the time to stand up and be counted. The Conservatives seek to once again change the rules on collective action and further divide and atomise our society. The lack of outrage from the Labour Party front benches is a shocking admission of how confused and directionless the Parliamentary Labour Party has become.

But it’s never to late to make a stand. Now is the time to condemn the Tories for their blatant political sabotage of our movement, and their deliberate attempts to atomise and segregate our working class organisations. If we cant stand up for this, and if our prospective leaders cannot condemn this abhorrent assault on our movement, then is it any wonder that people are starting to ask what the role of the Labour is in shaping our society?