British labour movement militancy on the rise

Jim Selby, AFL Staff

In reaction to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s attempts to involve the private sector in public services like health and transportation, the British labour movement is becoming increasingly militant.

Under Blair’s leadership, the Labour Party has increasingly divorced itself from the trade union movement, reducing the party’s financial dependence upon labour and reducing labour’s influence on policy formation. As the Party has adopted more and more of a centrist-Liberal program, it has lost its historic support from labour activists and leaders.

Now, the Blair government is pursuing "private-public partnerships" as the resolution of its election promise to deliver better public services. Unions representing postal workers, teachers, hospital workers, government employees and transportation workers are threatening strikes in the response, in the most impressive show of labour militancy since the early Thatcher years.

Blair himself has responded to the election of a new generation of more militant, socialist labour leaders and activists by describing them as "wreckers" and comparing them to Trotskyite radicals expelled from the Labour Party.

However, new leaders like Bob Crow of the 60,000 member Rail Maritime and Transport Union are unimpressed. "I’m a socialist and proud of it," said Crow, who is the first general secretary for over a hundred years who is not affiliated to the Labour Party.

Crow points out that the privatization of Britain’s railroads has produced the worst transportation system in Europe. Crow was elected by a massive majority on a platform calling for an aggressive strike policy for his union and for the renationalization of transportation in Britain.