THE TUC’s decision to postpone its annual Congress — the first in-person “workers’ parliament” since the Covid pandemic — reflects real concerns among trade unions.
Aside from its stated nature as a gesture of respect following the death of the Queen, there are practical considerations, including ensuring the voice of organised labour isn’t drowned out by the mainstream media’s relentless focus on royal reminiscence — not that capitalist newspapers tend to report trade union deliberations adequately or accurately.
Unions engaged in ongoing disputes with employers face a dilemma.
Does striking in the immediate aftermath of the death of a monarch, undoubtedly held in affection by millions of people, risk undermining extremely high levels of public support for strikes?
Possibly. But does calling off strike action without naming new dates risk undermining the momentum that has delivered record ballots for action, solid participation and huge turnouts on picket lines? Possible too.
Though most unions have called a halt to public pronouncements over the weekend, it is important that this does not translate to a longer waiting period in which we refrain from putting pressure on ministers over a cost-of-living crisis which threatens extreme suffering over the winter and beyond.
Liz Truss entered office with the Tories trailing badly in the polls, amid huge, palpable anger at a government whose policies are facilitating grotesque profiteering by giant corporations while ordinary people’s incomes drop and prices soar.
With public services crumbling, and a minister’s camera op interrupted by a furious passerby challenging them over the crisis in our ambulance service.
She replaced a prime minister driven out because his dishonesty became so brazen it was making Parliament a laughing stock, and took the keys to No 10 amid the biggest wave of industrial unrest this country has seen in decades.
On Thursday morning, she announced her solution to rocketing energy bills. Unions met it with the scorn it deserved, for handing massive public subsidies to oil and gas giants which are posting obscene profits already.
And for “capping” energy bills at double where they stood at the start of the year.
Poverty is not some shadowy menace that will strike unless Britain takes evasive action. It has been rising for 12 years of Tory misrule.
Trade unionists who were due to meet in Brighton this weekend see the impact of this misrule every day.
Teachers have sounded the alarm over schoolchildren arriving hungry to lessons. Nurses to the chronic shortages on the wards and the yawning backlog of treatments, approaching seven million.
Retail workers will have witnessed a 22 per cent rise in shoplifting in a year, linked to rising food prices. And union after union, even those representing supposedly secure, decently paid jobs, reports members in full-time work being forced to rely on foodbanks.
For these people, capping energy bills at about £550 above their current rates is not deliverance. They face a harder winter than last year and last winter was hard.
There is no freeze on evictions, bill payments or debt collection during the official mourning period and there can be no freeze in the fightback either.
There is no reason to permit Truss to exploit the Queen’s death to pose as a dignified stateswoman, leading a nation as it mourns.
When the government announces — as it did today, with an air of generosity — that the mourning period will not delay implementation of Truss’s energy price plan, we should not stand mute when 24 hours earlier we were tearing that plan apart.
The Tories will use this mourning period — to push a narrative of national unity and sacrifice aimed at deadening working-class anger. To present the gang of liars, cheats and robbers who rule the roost as sombre servants of the British state in its majesty.
They should not be allowed to get away with that.
