The language they understand

Budget Day is never good news for workers – least of all when it’s under a Tory government. But whilst the Chancellor droned on in Parliament workers were walking out in a new wave of strikes against the austerity regime. Tube workers and train drivers, junior doctors, teachers and civil servants were all taking industrial action over pay.
    Down the ages the employers’ mantra has always been “Management’s right to manage”. In its purest form, it is expressed in the Master and Servant laws of the Victorian era when unions were barely legal, and the ‘corporate’ laws of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In post-war Western ‘democracies’ the corporate class do their best to marginalise unions and limit the right to strike.
    The bosses claim that they have their workers’ best interests at heart and that strikes are pointless and useless. But no-one believes them.
    If it wasn’t for the unions, kids would still be climbing up chimneys whilst their parents slaved away in factories and mines six days a week for just enough to keep them going.
    The five-day week, paid holidays, pensions, free health care and education, all the trappings of what we used to call the Welfare State – were won by the labour movement. Genuine reforms by Labour governments brought in the health and safety legislation and recognition laws that empowered the unions in the 1970s.
    Those days may be forgotten but what workers still know is that free collective bargaining is meaningless without the ability to withdraw one’s labour. And at the end of the day, the only thing Management understands is industrial action.
    

One–Nil to Lineker

Gary Lineker has been reinstated as presenter of Match of the Day following an apology from the BBC. The BBC has wisely backed down over the Lineker saga whilst the Government tries to distance itself from a row that was clearly of its own making.
    The Government clearly wanted to silence Lineker who had Tweeted his objections to the Government’s new asylum seekers’ plan – a widely-publicised but clearly personal opinion made in his own time and on his own Twitter account.
    Many believe that the Government wanted the BBC to make an example of the sporting guru. The Government clearly believed that packing cross-Channel asylum seekers off to Rwanda was a vote winner that would shore up Tory support in the so-called “Red Belt” of northern seats taken from Labour at the last general election. But they were much mistaken.
    Millions of people supported the football guru who was suspended for comparing the language used by the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to introduce the new Tory ‘Illegal Immigration Bill’ to that used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Millions more defended the former England player’s right to free speech – a right supported by Lineker’s colleagues who walked out in sympathy. Even the supine Labour leader was moved by the furore over the sports presenter to call on Rishi Sunak to “stand up to his snowflake MPs waging war on free speech” following the Gary Lineker row.
    What Lineker said was quite right. The Tory plans are indeed “beyond awful”. As he said: “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ‘30s.”