Skip to main content

A disgusting spectacle in Liverpool

a New Worker editorial

This year’s TUC annual conference summed up all that is rotten in the British labour movement. The bureaucrats, left-wing posers and the rest of the gravy-trainers were all there in Liverpool to pass the usual platitudes that pass for working class solidarity these days.
     Sir Keir Starmer joined the assembled general secretaries for a back-slapping eve of conference dinner but left it to his deputy Angela Rayner to assure the union bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie as a whole that they can sleep soundly in their beds when Starmer gets to Downing Street.
 The most sickening episode was when delegates voted overwhelmingly for a motion backing the provision of “moral and material aid”, including arms, to the puppet regime in Ukraine.
     Moving the motion, Barbara Plant, the president of the GMB, said Ukraine was fighting for its survival in the face of a brutal Russian onslaught and claimed that denying the Ukrainians of the means of self-defence would be like the arms embargo that crippled the Spanish republic in the 1930s.
 Seconding the motion, Aslef Assistant General Secretary Simon Weller claimed Ukrainian unions were not subject to bans, while Russia’s recent declaration that the International Transport Federation was an “undesirable organisation” would put the rights of many workers, particularly seafarers, at risk. And needless to say, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak got up to tell conference that the General Council backed the motion.
     Though a handful of unions including the RMT, UCU and the NEU abstained only the firefighters’ and the small bakers’ union took the principled stand to oppose the motion. Jamie Newell of the Fire Brigades Union, condemned the way debate on Ukraine has been shut down in Britain. “We do not think the escalation of war is in the interests of the Russian or Ukrainian working class,” he said.
     The “Solidarity with Ukraine” motion committed the TUC to supporting “Ukrainian unions’ calls for financial and practical aid from the UK to Ukraine”, and “the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014”— including Crimea and the eastern Donbas regions – exactly the same demands of Anglo-American imperialism and the rest of the NATO pack.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No No2NATO Platform for Fascists!

  No No2NATO Platform for Fascist David Clews! Since 2014 the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), and its predecessors have campaigned in solidarity with the people of the Donbass, and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics they created after the fascist Maidan coup backed by US imperialism. As part of the struggle against imperialism and its Ukrainian fascist puppets, we defend the Special Military Operation of Russia to crush the fascist threat from the US backed Azov, Aidar, Kraken, Svoboda and other such fascists who are the dominant forces in the Maidan Ukraine state apparatus. We support the defeat of this regime and the “Denazification of Ukraine” as the Russian government rightly set out as a key war aim. Opposition to the NATO proxy-war in Ukraine is not confined to internationalists who act in solidarity with the victims of imperialism.  Most of the far right are showing solidarity with the NATO-funded Nazis who infest and dominate the Ukrainian regime,
2 comments
Read more

Lenin Was Right: The Ukrainian war proves that

International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity held a successful 'hybrid' meeting in central London earlier in November. Speakers from Britain, Ireland, Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Poland spoke on the platform or via Zoom on the topic 'The struggle against Banderite fascism and the future of Ukraine'. This is the contribution from Konrad Rękas, a Polish journalist and political commentator. In 1913, the world was convinced that the threat of war was completely impossible, which was related with the progress of civilisation, the development of science, and especially the international system based on the so-called concert of powers, international conferences during which colonial empires shared global spheres of influence. However, in reality, under the skin of this alleged belle epoque there were insurmountable contradictions and class conflicts, and enlightened minds already saw the spectre of a crisis that would surpass all previous problems of capitalism. Ne
Post a Comment
Read more

The Donetsk Declaration

On 9th October 2023, the Donetsk Declaration was adopted in the city of Donetsk. We call on all political parties, trade unions, public organizations and movements to discuss the text and join the Donetsk Declaration. Today the world is in grave danger. The financial capital of the United States and the NATO countries, acting together with the Ukrainian oligarchy, brought the Ukrainian bourgeois nation to the state of Nazism, provoked the war in Ukraine, using its people as a battering ram directed against Russia. The imperialist goal of the United States is the weakening and dismemberment of Russia into a number of warring entities. All this was supposed to make it possible to seize the economic territory and natural resources of Russia, as well as to establish control over political processes with the help of a puppet government.  At the same time, the imperialist efforts of the United States are aimed at maintaining its hegemony by unleashing bloody conflicts in different part
Post a Comment
Read more