The Tories have leaked the news that, in order to claw back some of the astronomical spending incurred due to their idiotic lockdown policy, public sector workers are to again face a pay freeze. Of course, the degree of spending and borrowing is now so huge that it will take far more than such a pay freeze to make up the debt. It is, a far cry from all of that moralising about "Our NHS", the weekly clap, and talk about essential workers that led naïve liberals to talk about how it would be inevitable that such workers would have to be rewarded when the dust had settled. Anyone with an ounce of political sense, knew how it would actually turn out, and yet, today, we have had Dave Prentis of UNISON, on the TV, bleating about how unfair it all was!
But, the truth is that if public sector workers want to look for who to blame for this turn of events, they need to look further than just the immediate culprits in the Tory Party. The fact is that they are now facing many years of pay freezes - that will turn into pay and job cuts - for one simple reason, and its not COVID19. That reason is that the economy has been wrecked as a consequence of the deliberate policy of implementing the idiotic lockdowns - and it could yet be further deliberately harmed as a result of Brexit, on top of the damage that the prospect of Brexit has imposed on it.
And, the imposition of that lockdown, which has caused that catastrophic damage was backed not just by the Tories, but also by the Labour Party, and by many of those public sector trades union leaders that are now bleating about the inevitable consequences of it! Indeed, they were from the start demanding that the Tories impose even more economic damage by imposing harsher lockdown sooner and longer!
In his bleating, today, Prentis argued that rather than freezing public sector workers' wages, the way to pay for the deficit was by growing the economy. However, he did not explain how you are to grow the economy at the same time as demanding that workers be prevented from working, which is the policy they have been insisting on, in the form of lockdowns over the last 8 months! He and others like him seem unable to grasp the basic fact that growing the economy is a consequence of more labour being undertaken, and that for more labour to be undertaken workers have to be allowed to work, and not prevented from working as a consequence of lockdowns! There is a total separation in their minds between the economy, and labour, apparently based on some confused notions about the economy being determined by what governments and central banks do, and simply pumping out endless amounts of worthless banknotes to expand this economy, but without in any way increasing the amount of goods and services that are to be bought with them. Indeed, rather than increasing those goods and services, they are to be severely curtailed by preventing workers form producing them as a result of lockdowns!
Rather than arguing for growing the economy over the last 8 months, the Labour leaders have been arguing for its deliberate contraction as a consequence of lockdowns. The reactionaries of various stripes who were not unhappy to see various things close down, who relish the thought of a constrained capital, and would like to take us back to some form of peasant economy, now have to face the reality of what they wished for, when its not just the workers in the local nail bar, or hairdressers losing their job, but millions of other workers, including those in the public sector, in the provision of healthcare, education and so on, or who, if they do not lose their job, will see their wages cut.
The trades union leaders, like the Labour leaders completely failed to provide an independent working-class perspective and solution in relation to COVID19. They should have opposed lockdowns from the start. They should have said that the vulnerable needed to be protected, and that all resources be devoted to such protection. They should have emphasised the need to keep production going during such a period, precisely so that society had the resources it required to deal with the situation. It is precisely the conditions when the trades unions should have insisted on the need for their Health and Safety representatives to take a lead role in ensuring that workers safety was maintained. They should have insisted on creating committees of Workers' Inspection to ensure that such safety was ensured, and so on.
The leadership of the labour movement, both in the trades unions and the Labour Party has been abysmal throughout. It has failed to put forward any independent working-class perspective or solution based upon the self-activity and self-government of the working-class, instead relying on the capitalist state to provide solutions throughout, and in the process has simply fallen back on to an opportunistic criticism of the Tories on that basis, of simply accusing it of not doing enough, rather than criticising what it was that it was doing. It couldn't do that, because its own solution did not differ from that of the Tories.
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