Trade unions should beware Boris Johnson’s ‘Build Back Better’ strategy because it will demand a high price from workers and their families, the Communist Party warned at the weekend. Former union president Bill Greenshields told the party’s online executive committee that Tory pledges to rebuild British industry and provide better and cheaper energy, transport, housing and health and education services could not be trusted.
‘The Prime Minister told his party conference that this programme of renewal and recovery should be led not by the state but by so-called free enterprise’, Mr Greenshields pointed out.
‘This is the same free enterprise system that had to be bailed out with hundreds of billions of pounds of public money during the banking and Covid crises and which can’t even organise an efficient track-and-trace service’, he added.
‘Working people will be expected to fund the recovery and a new Trident nuclear weapons system through taxation, while billionaires have increased their wealth by more than a quarter during the Covid pandemic according to the Swiss bank UBS’, he accused
Britain’s Communists said the working class now faces a full frontal attack not only on jobs, living standards and safety at work, but also on democratic rights. ‘This Tory government continues to drain powers and resources from local government and has shelved plans to devolve the powers repatriated from the EU to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments’, Bill Greenshields declared.
‘The new danger is that trade unions will face new legal restrictions at the same time as the government and big business demand wage restraint and “sweetheart” and no-strike deals in return for investment and training’, he predicted. The CP executive committee called upon labour and progressive movement organisations to unite in an anti-monopoly alliance, to turn sporadic action into a strategy of resistance aimed at the big capitalist corporations and their Tory government.