PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

29 RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 ::february 2023 :: RMTnews President’s column Lat month RMT members from London, Newcastle, Manchester, Coventry, Bristol and beyond joined hundreds of trade unionists outside 10 Downing Street to protest the Tory government’s so-called Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill 2022- 23. Never mind collapse of our NHS caused by 12 years of Tory cuts to pay and staffing levels and 25 years of the Private Finance Initiative bleeding our health service dry for private profit. This government has a plan for the NHS. They plan to sack and jail nurses and ambulance staff for taking strike action. Ignore the cuts to our fire and rescue services, which have closed fire stations and withdrawn fire appliances across the country in the last decade. In November 2022 the Fire Brigades’ Union identified cuts to fire services in East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service as a risk to public safety. According to FBU Hastings branch chair, Leo Cacciatore: "In recent years we have seen devastating cuts to our service losing one in every five firefighters nationally and an on-call duty system that has fallen well behind ... we see huge gaps in fire cover with fire appliances regularly unavailable. This is becoming a daily event and we are hugely concerned about public safety". But the government has a plan for the emergency services. They are going to conscript firefighters to work during strike action. The latest Tory legislation - the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill - is a sure sign that the government by seeking to ban democracy at work has lost control. Having been found guilty in the court of public opinion of inflicting a crisis of falling wages and rising prices on working people, the government has decided to make strikes illegal for workers in six key sectors: health, fire and rescue, education, transport, nuclear and border security. The fundamental human right to withdraw your labour has been trampled on by successive British governments for forty years. In 1997, Labour leader Tony Blair boasted that British laws were “the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world". Since that time, despite the extension of individual rights, such as those enshrined in the Equality Act 2010 and other legislation, our collective rights as workers to organise, bargain and when necessary to withdraw our labour by taking strike action, have been further attacked and weakened. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill was drafted at the initiative of Tory Business Secretary Grant Shapps, a man who goes by many names, but who in over three years in his former post as Transport Secretary refused to meet a single trade union general secretary. Shapps is a coward who hides in his Whitehall office and won’t face workers who staff the services he was responsible for. Now he wants to turn us into a low-paid, conscript army. We need to see the back of Shapps, his boss Sunak and their government, which truly has the stench of death about it. In 1819, the poet Percy Shelley wrote ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, his satirical broadside against Lord Liverpool’s Tory government after the massacre of striking workers in Manchester - the so-called “Peterloo massacre”. We should treat our current government with the same implacable disdain which Shelley voiced two hundred years ago and proclaim with him: 'Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you - Ye are many - they are few’. Alex Gordon OUR RIGHT TO STRIKE P roud Cornishman and RMT regional organiser for the South West Barry West received his 40-year badge and medal from the general secretary and the president last month. Barry joined the railway on April 16, 1982 working for British Rail and became a member of the NUR on the same day. He worked in St Austell on the Permanent way as a trackman. “The work was very seasonal and the majority of it was preventative maintenance or renewals. “Unlike today there seems to be more of a reactive approach to trackside operations undertaken by those who work on and around the lineside,” he said. Through attending branch meetings and encouragement to get involved he became a safety and LDC rep and travelled extensively to be a part of negotiations, consultations and high-level working parties on many different aspects that focused on safety improvements. “I have been privileged enough to serve under four general secretaries and I am proud to have served members and RMT, alongside many others that have shown determination and demonstrated the true spirit of seeking fairness, equality and respect for all,” he said. 40 FOR BARRY RMT president Alex Gordon, Barry West and RMT general secretary Mick Lynch present award at Unity House.