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The Trade Union Bill and
How to Kill It
(CPB, £2)
THIS new Communist Party pamphlet is a guide to the kind of action needed for workers and democrats to defeat the Tories’ latest assaults on trade union activity, as spelled out in their Bill to criminalise trade unionists and their onslaught on civil rights.
The publication dovetails with the Communist Party’s linking of daily struggles and the fight for socialism as set out in its programme Britain’s Road to Socialism and its authors — all with outstanding records at different levels of the labour movement — champion broad-left organisation, in which communists play a considerable part.
Laurence Platt, the party’s Midlands industrial organiser, succinctly sets out the details of the Bill and the areas in which it must be contested, stressing that: “Mass defiance by workers and their unions must be at the centre of our response but we must also reach out to the widest sections of our society and bring them into action, particularly around the threat to the freedom of expression and opinion.”
He argues for activities that could stiffen the opposition in Parliament and render new laws inoperable by drawing in official union backing for workers who take action, defending effective collective bargaining, internal union democracy and union rights to support the Labour Party.
At the publication’s centre is a call for a massive campaign by workers to defend their conditions, law or no law.
Declarations of opposition, demonstrations and debates in Parliament alone cannot deliver the goods and Kevin Halpin, a previous CPB national industrial organiser and leader of the rank-and-file movement in battles against anti-union laws, puts the current campaign in its historical context.
He shows how it was the defiance of anti-union laws, foremost in workplaces, that provided the fulcrum around which solidarity was mobilised to defeat them.
The party’s current national trade union organiser Graham Stevenson argues for greatly extended trade union membership and organisation.
He points up the absolute imperative of building the strength of the Communist Party to win working people to defeat the laws and simultaneously to raise their ambitions and set their sights on the perspective of gaining a socialist society.
For the young — and not-so-young — this publication is a well-written introduction to how communists see the organised working class as essential to achieving victory, in contrast to many protest movements against austerity and cuts in services of all kinds.
It’s about a vision for a better society that needs the muscle of the workers to be added to public statements of commitment and protests against Tories and like-minded Blairites within the Labour Party.
That vision would add to the protests and propaganda the essential and too often missing ingredient of actual defiance of laws that attack democracy, along with the structuring organisation that links all protests and other forms of struggle through taking solidarity action with people hit by anti-union laws.
The anti-Tory movements have the Morning Star as their sole daily backer in the media and this pamphlet is another indispensable contribution to them.
Review by Mick Costello
- The pamphlet is available from communist-party.org.uk