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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.

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