The sheer hypocrisy of the Tories’ latest attack on trade unions shows their complete disdain for democracy, in unions, in workplaces or in the country as a whole.

As Paul Kenny of the GMB has pointed out, if you applied this test to the 303 Tory MPs who took up seats at the last general election, only 15 of them would have been elected.

And yet they were quite happy not just to take their seats but to go on and form a government.

Indeed, if they wanted to do something to increase participation in industrial action ballots they would start by scrapping anti-union laws which force postal ballots on trade unions and bring back workplace ballots.

But of course this proposal has nothing to do with democracy.

Rather, as TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has said, it is about effectively ending the right to strike in the public sector.

Unfortunately, the response from Labour’s Ed Miliband, while criticising the Tory policy, calls far short of the pledge which is needed to repeal Margaret Thatcher’s anti-trade union laws.

There is, however, a useful lesson here in the nature of state power in Britain.

The fact that this power can be directed so clearly and so fundamentally against working people who make up the majority of the population sweeps away any idea that the state is a neutral player in class struggle or that the majority rules in our parliamentary democracy.

Indeed, it makes it clearer than ever that regardless of form — constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy — the nature of our political system is determined by the rich and powerful elite who have bankrolled not just this government but also their new Labour and Tory predecessors.

In a very real sense, from the privatisation of our public services to the assault on wages, from the attacks on benefits for the most vulnerable in society to the removal of the right to strike, our parliamentary democracy is in practice nothing more than the dictatorship of capital. The sooner working people wake up to that reality, the better.

Of course that is what really frightens the Tories. The wave of strikes across the public sector since 2010 has shown a trade union movement which is beginning to awaken.

Our movement is comprised of 6.5 million members, working in every industry in Britain. But it is also much more than that.

It represents many millions of workers, whether trade union members or not, up and down this country.

It represents their families, their neighbours and their communities, both rural and urban.

Our movement represents the young unemployed workers who cannot get jobs because this government took them away.

It represents the parents who have not only seen their children’s education destroyed by privatisations and fragmentation but have also been hammered by changes to the tax system.

It represents the children who turn up hungry to school every day because the government has forced their families into poverty.

When that movement begins to awaken, the Tories and their paymasters are right to be afraid.

And they will use every trick in the book, both legal and extra-legal, to protect their power and their privilege.

The time to fight back is now. Sweeping away this government of the rich for the rich at the general election in May will be a first step, but it is no more than a beginning.

It is the entire political system which is rotten and that rot needs to be cut out from the core.