By AJ Byrne

Mick Lynch
 

What do we make of the first two months of Starmer’s Labour? Well, Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), is well pleased, as he explained in his Guardian article of September 2, Under Labour, unions can do their job at last. The Telegraph is not on board but, “As the Guardian noted recently, even the International Monetary Fund has published a working paper recognising that weak unions mean massive income inequality and an increase in household debt.”

He goes on to list the good things Starmer has done:

1. The new deal for working people, and the repeal of the 2016 Trade Union Act and the hated minimum service levels legislation.

2. In order to prevent a repeat of the P&O ferry scandal there is Labour’s promise for strong mandatory employment protections in the ferry sector.

3. Labour’s rapid progression of legislation to nationalise the train-operating companies has shown the government is acting decisively in the interests of passengers.

Reading the news

He finishes:

“Reading the news, you’d think unions are about to ruin Britain. It’s because we’re finally making progress under Labour… The trade unions refuse to be used as cover for attacks by the corporate media on the new Labour government. We stand independently on our own strengths, putting our own case for our members and a better society, and we want a robust but positive relationship with the government. September will be the first TUC congress under a Labour government in 15 years. Instead of peddling scare stories about unions that bear no relation to the truth, the media should see the gathering as the vital voice that all workers need if we are to make the changes in society we want to see and encourage Labour in the right direction.”

Isn’t there an elephant in Mick Lynch’s room? The IMF may say that “weak unions mean massive income inequality and an increase in household debt” but trade union membership is still falling in Britain and internationally with the continuing vicious oppression in the so-called gig economy and it’s only members of strong unions that get the benefit of the strikes. He has missed the genocide in Gaza, Nato’s war on Russia via Ukraine and the two-child benefit cap, the cutting of pensioners’ Winter Fuel Payment, the rise in energy bills.

Starmer refuses to take the most obvious and quickest solution to these problems, a windfall tax of the profits of energy companies and others and a serious wealth tax on the billionaires, whose wealth have enormously increased over the last few years. According to the Equality Thrust, “The wealth of the UK’s billionaires has skyrocketed by over 1000% between 1990 and 2022, ballooning by around £600bn. The number of billionaires exploded from 15 in 1990 to 177 in 2022. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, billionaire wealth increased by almost £150bn.”

The Labour Aristocracy

Well there’s several elephants that Mick Lynch has failed to notice. We are witnessing the obscene spectacle of a so-called ‘left militant’ trade union leader, speaking for the rest, like Sharon Graham, Unite, Gary Smith, GMB, Christina McAnea, Unison, etc., welcoming the reinforcing of the aristocracy of Labour where strong unions welcome the booty of empire and Nato wars to gain privileges for themselves and their members whilst the poorest families and old age pensioners face starvation and death through the horrible choice of heating or starving with only the massive explosion of food banks to save some of them.

It is no accident that the explosion in the numbers of billionaires is directly mirrored in the explosion in the numbers of foodbanks; see below.

The working class acts as a class for itself when its strongest, best organised members fight for the weakest and most oppressed members of the class and all the oppressed. That’s the lessons of history from the 1888 Bryant and May’s Matchgirls, to the 1889 Dockers Tanner strikes to Dublin Lockout of 1913 to the 1914-21 Triple Alliance to the strikes in WWII led by Trotskyist militant against the Stalinist support for Churchill’s National government to the great miners strike of 1984-5. And it was the patriotism and loyalty to empire and the despicable role of the trade union bureaucracy as the main prop of capitalism within the trade unions that betrayed these. ▲