‘We did it before’, trade unions can build a new party of the working class
Matt Reid, Unite the Union convenor in the Birmingham bin strike, addressed an online meeting of trade unionists on 8 June, discussing the campaigning taking place within the different trade unions, for steps towards a new party of the working class.
I’m not going to go into 18 months of bin strike.
I’m just going to tell you how the Labour Party affected our strike. It started off, Birmingham City Council went into effective redundancy and a Conservative government, at the time, sent commissioners into Birmingham.
The way things were going, we knew the election was coming and we were hoping it would be a Labour majority getting in to Parliament. At that point, our managers sped up the process of making the changes and making the cuts that would eventually affect our members with up to £8,000 a year reduced in their salary and a cut in grade.
We got a majority Labour government and our managers were panicking, thinking: ‘Oh they’re going to change everything around, they’re going to do it…’ They were worse than the Conservatives.
They were more supportive of the Labour council that were doing this to us.
We had Angela Rayner visiting Birmingham and didn’t visit one single picket line. She visited scab workers who were doing the clear up, patting them on the back on camera, on TV, telling them what a great job they were doing.
She didn’t visit one single picket line, one striking worker.
We had Rachel Reeves come and visit and basically give the: ‘Get back to work, you’re a lazy so and so’ argument, which I never thought I would hear from a Labour MP.
They’re our party – they were our party – and I think we’ve given them so many second chances to prove that. Because we know that the quickest way to turn this around, the quickest way to stop Reform taking over is to have something in place, and that’s the Labour Party.
It’s just, how many second chances do we give them? Do we move to the Greens to be an established party that can put up a fight against the far-right straight away?
Or do we have to rebuild, concede ground to the far right, and then rebuild and come back stronger?
And I think our delays, our delay or indecision is going to cost us in the end.
In Birmingham we’re fighting against the Labour government, the Labour council and Labour commissioners. They’ve tried everything they can to sack us. And this is coming from a Labour council for who it was actually an option to sack striking workers.
They’ve listened too much to management. They haven’t stood by their values.
That’s why people voted Labour, it was because they had stood for communities, for working people, for trade unions.
And I’m of the belief now that they’ve had far too many chances and we need to re-establish ourselves as a trade union, build our own party again.
We did it before, we did it before with the Labour Party.
They seem to have failed now.
So I feel that it’s the right time to rebuild, whether we conceded ground to the far right while we rebuild – as I think Your Party proved, that it’s not as easy as we thought it would be to actually get that momentum going, that groundwork.
But I can tell you that the feeling out there is that the Labour Party let us down in Birmingham, but the trade union movement and our movement as a whole has not let us down.
We’ve had amazing support from around the country and you really do see that there are people out there that care.
And I think with that strength of force then we can be unstoppable. We just need to harness that and focus it, and I think that the far right wouldn’t stand a chance.
That’s pretty much without going into 18 months of strike where I am at the moment, feeling let down by a Labour government and a Labour council.
