A working class united in their trade unions and campaigning organisations needs to build towards collective extra-parliamentary action, write Kate Ramsden and Tom Morrison.
There was a definite air of cynicism during the final session of the Morning Star Conference on 15th September, as the gathering heard from two Labour MPs. Andy McDonald, MP for Middlesborough and Thornaby East, spoke first about the Green Paper, ‘Labour’s New Deal for Working People’. He had worked with unions on the report that underpinned the paper, which includes many provisions that workers would support: sectoral collective bargaining, day one rights, inflation-proof pay-rises, an end to zero hours contracts and fire and re-hire. It also includes the repealing of anti-union legislation including the 2016 Trade Union Act. But Andy’s warning to all of us on the Left and in the trade union movement to be watchful as the Green Paper is translated into law, seemed like a portent of doom.
Euan Stainbank, MP for Falkirk echoed the importance of ‘making work pay’ both to improve living standards and to fend off the rise of the far right. The input should have been uplifting, but the spectre of the new Labour Government’s failure to lift the two child benefit cap – a move that could have taken 250,000 children out of poverty at one fell swoop – and the recent decision to means test winter fuel payments for pensioners, lay heavy on the atmosphere.
It seemed to be a microcosm of how the wider Left community in Scotland is feeling about the Labour Government at Westminster. So far there is little sign of progressive politics that in any way put the needs of the many first. The rhetoric at Labour conference, despite the avoidance of the language of austerity, suggests quite the opposite. It’s almost as if no lessons have been learned from the Tory/Lib Dem austerity agenda of 2010.
You might think a party set up by the unions to champion the interests of the working classes would have an eye above all to equality and fairness and to ending the massively growing inequality of income and wealth in the sixth richest country in the world. You might think it would have moved away from the economic policies of its predecessors. But no sign of that.
So what does this mean for Scotland, at a time when the SNP government has fallen from grace to such an extent that it looks like a centre-right Scottish Labour Party may well gain power at the next Scottish elections in 2026? It can feel hard to be optimistic when we rejected a chance for a more equal, socially just society under Corbyn and now have to settle for the kind of Labour government that the vested interests in big business and the media will allow us to have. If ever there was a time when you might hope the working class would rise against the ruling class, you’d think it would be now. Instead we see the rise of the far right giving a populist narrative to the woes of the most marginalised in our society, feeding on the hostile environment policy of the last government. The ruling class tactic of divide and rule is heavily in play. Racism is widespread, stoked by the rhetoric of the tabloid press and the likes of GB news. “They are taking money off the pensioners and giving it to these migrants”. You hear it over and over.
So it is to the organised working class, the trade union movement, that we need to turn for the alternative with class politics at its core. Trade union councils carrying out street work report that when they are engaging with ordinary folk, they find some agreement with our economic arguments about the need for a redistribution of wealth and power. Almost everyone is enraged by the cut to winter fuel payments. Despite delegates voting against it at their own conference, Labour leaders seem oblivious to the widespread disgust. It is only exacerbated by politicians accepting freebies from the rich and powerful who will be looking for something in return. But there is no widespread socialist consciousness. Raising class consciousness is our fundamental task, otherwise Reform will be making significant inroads in the Scottish elections in 2026.
It is an easy win to raise the anti-racist case at trade union conferences, but we need to do the hard work of going beyond the conference hall and taking up these arguments in the workplace and the streets. A big responsibility lies with the lay activists in trades councils and local union branches to carry out this task and put forward the alternative. We need to show the links between campaigning in the workplace and developing the capacity of our communities to build a more just society.
Starmer’s authoritarian Labour government is not going to challenge the fundamentals of Britain’s capitalist economy. Neither would a Scottish Government led by Anas Sarwar or the SNP, as we have seen. The challenge needs to come from a militant, politicised trade union movement. A working class united in their trade unions and campaigning organisations needs to build towards collective extra-parliamentary action.
You wouldn’t know it listening to the mainstream media but Starmer’s government is built on sand. Only one in five of the electorate voted Labour. They are vulnerable to external pressures as big business only knows too well, hence their intense lobbying. But the threat from the far right is real and we need a bottom-up approach to counter it. That means talking to people on the streets and in workplaces about how we can raise living standards, divert funds from weapons manufacturing into crumbling public services, and tackle the disaster of climate change. To pay for it the superrich and the big corporations need to be squeezed, and their power curtailed. We need to stop talking to ourselves and get out there.
Kate Ramsden Kate Ramsden is a life member of UNISON, and member of Aberdeen Trade Union Council and ROSE (Radical Options for Scotland and Europe).
Tom Morrison is secretary of Clydebank Trade Union Council, and a member of ROSE (Radical Options for Scotland and Europe).