- Back the PCS motion for a weekend demo
- For workers’ unity against racist division
Editorial of the Socialist issue 1381
This Sunday, 13 September, Britain’s trade union movement comes together in Brighton for its annual congress. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) will be made up of delegates representing 6.5 million workers. It should be a council of war. It is the third Congress since Labour won the general election in 2024. The leaders of the overwhelming majority of TUC-affiliated unions campaigned for Labour in that general election, but the Labour government has not acted in the interests of the working class. Average household income is still below pre-Covid levels while the cost of living has continued to rise. Over seven million low-income households went without essentials in the past six months, and nearly four and a half million went into arrears on their bills.
It is overdue for the trade union movement to show its power and organise a serious fight to defend our jobs, pay and conditions. The National Shop Stewards Network is lobbying the TUC to demand exactly that. In particular, it is campaigning for the motion being moved by the civil servants’ union, PCS, for the trade unions to “urgently call a national Saturday demonstration this autumn for investment in public services, against austerity and for pro-worker policies” and for “all public sector unions to join a united campaign on pay, and, if needed, to plan for coordinated industrial action to secure real gains for workers.”
Workers’ unity
That fight should also be linked to a clear call for workers’ unity and opposing racist division. Tied to this should also be the development of trade union stewarding organisations, to be mobilised where needed to defend the workers’ and anti-racist movements against groups of far-right thugs, which – while still small – are clearly growing in confidence.
No doubt some in the trade union movement will argue that that the action proposed in the PCS motion is unnecessary now we have a new prime minister. But it would be an enormous mistake for the workers’ movement to take the approach of ‘waiting to see’ what the Burnham-led government is going to deliver. Unfortunately, the basic facts are already clear. The new prime minister knows far better than Starmer did how to talk in the language of working-class people, but the fundamental approach of the government has not moved an inch.
John Healey, the new chancellor, was defence minister under Starmer until he resigned. He didn’t resign over the cuts to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners or to disability benefits – he supported those – but because he thought military spending wasn’t increasing enough. Now as chancellor he is singing exactly the same tune as Rachel Reeves. He has been quick to unequivocally rule out corporation tax rising above its current puny level of 25%. He has promised to “control public spending” but that doesn’t apply to weaponry. Instead, he pledged to find the funds needed to meet Starmer’s parting promises to increase military spending, even though that means filling a totally unfunded £4.7 billion gap, plus another £8.7 billion in cuts to other departments.
But while Healey sets out to prove how extremely reliable he intends to be in defending the interests of the capitalist class, there are no such firm pledges when it comes to improving working-class peoples’ lives. On the contrary, there is nothing to see but U-turns when it comes to policies which would have any significant effect on lifting working-class living standards or rebuilding public services.
Burnham’s talk of mass council housebuilding has been dropped. Rent controls have been ruled out, as has an increase in the level at which workers have to start paying tax. Even on the pension triple lock, Healey just ducked the question when asked. Yet capitalist politicians of all stripes have defended the lock for fear of the electoral consequences of doing otherwise. Healey’s avoidance of the issue reflects the growing pressure by the capitalist class for the government to break the lock. Meanwhile, Burnham might have claimed to want Labour to stand for workers, but he has followed Starmer and so far left the 50% threshold on strike ballot turnouts on the statute books, a clear attempt to try and limit workers’ power.
‘Burnham bounce’?
No wonder that the well-known pollster John Curtice has declared that the ‘Burnham bounce’ in the polls is over. The limited number of council by-elections that have taken place since Burnham was crowned prime minister back that up. Both Labour and the Tories have seen a net fall in their number of councillors, while the Greens and Reform have made net gains.
Of course, at the moment there are still faint hopes that Burnham has to be at least a bit better than Starmer, perhaps particularly among trade union activists. Most of the national trade union leaders are doing all they can to fuel those hopes. However, the reality is that it is only by the trade union movement launching a determined struggle for working-class interests will any serious steps to improve our living standards be won. The TUC should act, but if it doesn’t then a ‘coalition of the willing’ trade unions will be needed to spearhead a fightback.
That also poses the urgent need for the workers’ movement to launch a discussion on how our class can have a political voice. At last year’s Unite policy conference a motion for the union to “discuss” its “relationship with Labour” was passed almost unanimously. Beginning that discussion is now extremely urgent. Like other unions, the Unite executive voted to endorse Burnham for leader – although the Socialist Party and others did not support this move – and many Unite members will already be starting to think that in reality he is, like Starmer before him, acting in the interest of the capitalist elite rather than the working-class majority.
If the workers’ movement does not act independently, putting its own stamp on events, other forces will step into the vacuum. Understandably many trade unionists sighed with relief when the ‘Burnham bounce’ put Labour ahead of Reform in opinion polls for the first time in over a year. The deluge of mainstream press stories about Reform’s sleazy money grubbing have also helped, and are also a demonstration that the majority of the capitalist elite would prefer a Burnham-led government to have some breathing space, confident he will use it to defend their system. But any government that does so, including Burnham’s, will suffer the same fate in the polls as Starmer sooner or later.
The increase in support for Reform in the recent period includes voters from different backgrounds, but has been highest – at 39% – among workers in ‘routine and manual jobs’. The trade union movement could cut across that if it was prepared to launch a workers’ party that put forward a socialist programme in the interests of the majority. Remember that in 2017, when under Jeremy Corbyn Labour had an anti-austerity programme, around a million voters for Reform’s predecessor UKIP switched to Labour.
The potential for a genuine workers’ party to gain mass support has been demonstrated repeatedly over recent years. Most recently, just over a year ago more than 800,000 people signed up to support the declaration for a new party from Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Unfortunately, that opportunity was squandered. Your Party, as it is now called, has not met its potential as a result of a top-down approach and a failure to orientate towards the trade unions. Those trade union leaders who stood aside last summer rather than give a clear lead for a new workers’ party, are also responsible.
Holborn and St Pancras election
The result of this failure to act is the situation in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election triggered by Starmer’s resignation as an MP, taking place on 8 October 2026. In the 2024 general election Andrew Feinstein, who was then already part of the Your Party pre-discussions and later of its launch, stood and got 18% of the votes, while the Greens got 10%. This time Feinstein has ruled himself out of standing, instead backing the likely Green Party candidate and party leader, Zack Polanski. Jeremy Corbyn has been MP in a neighbouring constituency for decades, yet Your Party is not ‘a contender’ in the by-election.
No doubt voters in Holborn and St Pancras wanting to protest against austerity will vote for the Greens on this occasion, and it is possible they could win the seat – demonstrating the extreme weakness of the Burnham bounce. However, the trade unions simply backing the Green Party does not, in the view of the Socialist, represent the way forward. The Greens are not a workers’ party, not even having the same commitment to socialism in their rules as many trade unions do, and certainly not a broad socialist programme to transform society in the interests of the working class. Nor do they have a democratic structure through which trade unions could decide policy or hold party leaders to account. Building a workers’ party does not mean deciding which political ‘brand’ the trade unions should fund, but instead the trade unions fighting for their own political voice.
What matters now, however, is to urgently begin a discussion on these issues throughout the trade union movement. That does not mean retiring to the ‘debating chamber’, however. It should be combined with serious action, starting with a Saturday demonstration this autumn to launch a long overdue struggle against austerity and in defence of workers’ rights, calling for workers’ unity not racist division.
