UK Morning Star Editorial: In 2022, the Working Class is Back – but Its Party is Not

Mick Lynch, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) speaks to the crowd at a rally in Victoria Square, outside the Conservative Party annual conference at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. Picture date: Sunday October 2, 2022.

IS 2022 the year “the working class is back,” as RMT leader Mick Lynch famously put it this summer?

As we approach Christmas it would seem so. So widespread is current strike action that the Daily Mail tried to panic its readers with talk of a “Christmas general strike.”

Postal workers walk out again tomorrow, nurses have taken their first UK-wide strike action in the last two weeks, paramedics and civil servants have walked out. All three rail unions are engaged in industrial action. Teachers in Scotland are striking; their counterparts in England and Wales are balloting on whether to follow suit, while university workers are on strike too. Firefighters are voting on strikes.

Alongside the raft of national disputes runs a steady stream of strikes hitting bus and ferry companies, waste disposal, food production, you name it. In localised disputes unions are chalking up win after win, as employers give ground before a new militant mood from workforces who “refuse to be poor any more.”

General union Unite has put hundreds of millions of pounds into workers’ pockets through targeted strikes backed up by hard-hitting research exposing bosses’ profits and following the money through the tangled web of modern ownership structures.

These wins motivate the furious response planned by our Conservative government. The purpose of its 2016 ballot threshold laws was not to ensure strikes had the backing of the workforces concerned: it was simply to try to stop them happening at all.

Since unions have risen to the challenge, building strike-ready workplaces and honing their communications and organising tactics, the Tories want to go one further, with a planned minimum service law that will order unions to break their own strikes, to designate which of their members are to cross picket lines and put them at risk of sequestration if those members refuse.

If the working class — as a “class for itself,” to use Marx’s phrase — is back in 2022, the government wants to ensure in 2023 it goes away again. That adds a level of urgency to current struggles. Strikes of the sort we are now seeing will be impossible in a year’s time if the Conservatives have their way.

The Tories have collapsed in the polls over the course of 2022, as living standards plummet due to sky-high inflation. It is hard to see how they could win the next election, though this owes everything to the cost-of-living crisis and very little to anything Labour has done.

But they are not required to have an election in 2023 and do not need one to force through these anti-strike laws. Once passed, it is not clear how easy they will be to dislodge. Labour promised to repeal them at the TUC Congress, but Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves declined to confirm that when pressed by business leaders a few weeks later, with Reeves saying a promise to undo anti-strike legislation would be “jumping the gun.”

Labour’s mendacity — reflective of its refusal to support the strikes now dominating the news — shows the other side of the coin. If the working class is back, the party of the organised class is not.

The pressures that have forced down wages for years, that are ruining our public services, are systemic: yet the Labour Party that offered fundamental change a few years ago is gone, and its continued ruthless hounding of its own members demonstrates its determination to ensure no such political offer returns to the table.

Without a political challenge to the government, these anti-strike laws will pass. Pay will continue to fall; public services will continue to fail. The need for a real opposition is urgent.

Unions have the confidence of their members and the support of the public. In 2023, our movement must find ways to make that count in the corridors of power.