DEFY AND DEFEAT CRISIS-STRICKEN TORIES

Workers' livelihoods and rights are being assaulted by an unelected Prime Minister, at the head of an extremist, unelected Tory government.

Whereas 100,000 Royal Mail posties voted to strike in defence of their pay, their working conditions and the public service they provide, a mere 80,000 backwoods Tories elected Liz Truss to preside over the fate of 67 million people. That's a lesser level of democracy than back in the 18th century! Yet the same Tory junta lectures us on how trade union ballots should be conducted, poised to impose more vicious obstacles to workers defending themselves than even Truss's obnoxious idol Maggie Thatcher dared to implement.

However, this is a Tory government ripping itself apart, with internal divisions, plots and crises swamping Tory party conference, and many of their own MPs bolting early to avoid the train strikes timed to hit their trips to and from Birmingham, thereby missing Truss's address to the assembled reactionaries.

They've already been compelled into two screeching U-turns, because of the public fury at rocketing energy prices and their plans to axe the 45 percent tax on income over £150,000. At time of writing, the Tories are likely to be forced into another humiliating U-turn on the question of capping benefit increases to the rate wages have risen, as opposed to the twice-as-high Retail Price Index inflation - which even a right-wing think tank predicts will drive a further 450,000 people into poverty.

Drive Tories Back – Drive Tories Out!

This is a brutal regime which has launched shameless class war on the working class, but one which is ripe to be defied and defeated; not just driven back but potentially driven out, if only the national trade union leaderships harness the growing anger in the population into mass, united and decisive collective action.

The Tories’ mini-budget was a rude awakening to class politics for anyone lulled into swallowing the lie that we are all in this together, in an orgy of cross-class ‘national unity’ which the ruling powers systemically sought to whip up, in two relentless weeks of pomp, pageantry and parades of naked state power after the Queen died.

Kami Kwasi Kwarteng!

Public outrage forced ‘kami Kwasi’ Kwarteng into abandoning abolition of the top 45p tax rate, pleading with the population that this measure had been ‘a distraction’ from the rest of the Tories’ wondrous budget. From an opposite, working-class standpoint, this U-turn is itself something of a distraction; a mere tactical retreat in the war on the working class which the rest of the budget amounts to.

After all, the UK’s top rate of income tax before Maggie Thatcher won power in 1979 was not 45 percent but 83 percent. More contemporarily, the combined impact of freezing the lower income tax threshold and cutting the 20% basic rate leaves everyone earning less than £40,000 worse off.

A millionaire will be £55,000 better off from the Tory budget, whereas the median workers’ wage is less than half that leap in wealth, at £26,000. Naked class-based generosity to the grotesquely rich.

The poorest 3 million of the population will gaìn the grandiose total of 63 pence - per month! - according to the viciously anti-socialist Times newspaper. Across the gaping class divide, £85billion has already been forked out in dividends to big shareholders in 2022.

Nationalise - Don't Subsidise Profit!

The Tories’ alleged restraints on household energy bills means they’ve more than doubled since August 2021, whilst giant energy companies were gifted £100billion in subsidies from taxpayers’ funds – which will further crucify spending on essential services. 

Regressive tax cuts, plus subsidies to giant energy companies, will in part be paid for in an orgy of cuts to public services - on top of real-terms cuts to wages and benefits. 

Public spending cuts to the tune of £60billion (equivalent to almost two years of the Scottish block grant from Westminster), according to new calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.   

Workers in the UK have already suffered one of the steepest falls in real wages in any of the advanced OECD countries over the past year. If the Tories have their way, that mass transfusion of wealth to the rich from the rest of us - to profit from pay - will be greatly added to.

That's where determined, well-prepared collective resistance by the organised workers’ movement is often literally a matter of life and death.

NHS in Crisis

The NHS, widely regarded as the greatest reform ever won by the working class, is in a terrible state of collapse - after decades of underinvestment, accelerating privatisation to gouge profits, and collapsing morale amongst staff after years of being undervalued, understaffed and underpaid.

This crisis precedes COVID-19, which then exacerbated the problem. Many families are losing loved ones to avoidable deaths from cancer, due to horrendous delays in diagnosis and treatment, because the governments of both Westminster and Holyrood have failed to adequately invest, allowing austerity driven by profit maximisation to prevail over people's health.

As the chair of the Royal College of Nursing, Julie Lamberth, declared - as they conduct a ballot for the first strike action in the 100-year history of the RCN –

“Patient care is suffering, staffing levels are unsafe, and members are facing a daily battle on how to feed their family, heat their homes and travel to their work. None of this is new and as we head into another winter, we know it's only going to get worse. This is our opportunity to take a stand for our patients and our profession, to show the Scottish government they must act now and that is why I am urging members to vote in favour of strike action.”

It's an incredible indictment of the state of the NHS that the RCN - historically not even regarded as a real trade union by most of the movement - has now been sufficiently radicalised to step out on the road towards strike action, alongside members of UNISON, GMB and Unite who are also balloting for action, calling for a pay rise 5 percent above inflation!

Strike Wave Rises

Simultaneously, 150,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services union, PCS, are being balloted for strikes by the biggest number of members in the union's entire history. They are demanding an inflation-proofed pay rise; £15-an-hour minimum wage; reversal of plans to slaughter 91,000 jobs - and their redundancy terms to boot; plus a 2% reduction in workers’ pension contributions, after government figures prove they've been overpaying into the pension pot for several years.

Royal Mail workers - over 115,000 of them - are launching 19 days of further strike action against savage attempts to not only suppress their wages, but dismantle the entire Royal Mail, breaking up letters and parcels into separate businesses; scrapping the guaranteed 6-day delivery currently written into the Universal Service Obligation; on top of outrageous attacks on working conditions, whereby posties would have to work late into the evenings, and work longer hours in the winter months than during the summer.

Food Bank Phil

Fellow members of the CWU in BT and Openreach are sustaining strikes of 45,000 workers against the pay cuts being imposed by what they’ve dubbed FoodBankPhil – Philip Jansen, the chief executive whose salary last year rocketed by 32% to £3.5million, whilst several offices have set up food banks for their own staff, such is the crisis in their living standards.

As we report elsewhere, 45,000 railway workers in Network Rail and 15 train operating companies have now been joined by over 2000 ScotRail members of the RMT in strike actions, not just on pay, but on safety for the travelling public as the ‘Railway Rich Listers' try to slaughter at least one-third of maintenance workers’ jobs and cut maintenance services on our railways by half – a sure recipe for death and disaster.

Members of UNISON at several universities are already taking strike action and trade unionists at Dundee University have passed the incredible milestone of being engaged in strike actions for a full year. 

Meantime university lecturers, school teachers, firefighters and control staff are amongst the growing army of workers rising from their knees because everything is rising apart from their wages.

Build a 24-hour General Strike

This welcome recovery of workers’ self-confidence needs to be harnessed by the STUC, TUC and each national union leadership in combined collective action around fighting demands that could transform the lives of millions.

Coordinated and united strikes - including a 24-hour general strike that brings every worker into action in a mighty display of workers’ power - could not only force concessions out of individual employers, but potentially topple the crisis-stricken, divided Tories. It's an opportunity that has not been available to the same extent for several years and needs to be seized.

As an integral part of an expanded, escalating plan of collective action, a 24-hour general strike would not only embolden workers with their own power, and warn off governments, but would be a critical component part of defeating the new batch of anti-union laws being hatched by the Tories. 

The best way to defend the right to strike is to strike – together, across different sectors, in unity.

STUC: Scotland Demands Better

In a welcome move, the STUC has launched a ‘Scotland Demands Better' campaign, around a series of nine quite modest demands on the Scottish government, including wages, benefits, rent controls and genuine implementation of fair work practises.

These demands would at least ameliorate some of the worst savagery against working people and their families. But unless the STUC seriously mobilise - with demonstrations and by spearheading a Scottish one-day general strike - there can be no guarantee of the SNP-Green Party Coalition changing course.

It took determined and courageous strike action by cleansing workers - and the imminent prospect of them being joined by thousands of school workers - to force the same Scottish government into conceding (in round figures) a 10% pay rise, about £2,000 increase for most workers, after months of them insisting it wouldn't break their 2.5% public sector pay cap.

And hot on the heels of workers’ action forcing this Scottish government U-turn on pay cuts, John Swinney announced a ‘difficult choice’ of £500million in cuts to the public sector. In all likelihood deeper cuts still will be added as a consequence of Westminster's escalated butchery.

Don't Buy Petrol for an Arsonist!

There is no need to elaborate on the fact working-class people cannot rely on the Tories - the chief party of capitalist big business, bankers and warmongers.

But neither can we rely for salvation from the Scottish government, which has never once defied Westminster cuts, nor mobilised the Scottish people to win back some of the stolen £billions off Westminster, in order to protect jobs, wages, public services and workers' conditions - which is precisely what a socialist government in Scotland would do.

But any worker who thinks Starmer's Labour is a lifeboat from renewed austerity and class warfare is just as liable to volunteer wads of cash to an arsonist to burn down their own house.

Starmer instructed his Labour Shadow Cabinet members to go nowhere near a workers’ picket line and expelled from office the handful who defied him. 

Whilst spurning even a hint of solidarity with workers, the same Starmer has mobilised his Treasury team in what has been christened ‘a smoked salmon offensive’ - holding at least 250 meetings with Chief Executives of major capitalist companies. They are desperately trying to reassure the profiteering class that Labour is a safe alternative to the Tories, as the latter spook even the moneybags of finance capitalism with their recent mini-budget.

Whilst bending to the rising clamour for nationalisation of the railways - at least in words – Starmer’s right-wing Labour has tried to con people with talk of a publicly-owned Great British Energy, which would merely be yet another energy company (heavily dependent on nuclear power) competing with the existing capitalist Big Polluters - who are driving millions into fuel poverty whilst trashing our planet for profit. So no doubt which side of the class war Starmer's New Blairites stand, then!

SSP: the Workers' Party

In stark contrast, the SSP has no interest in reassuring big business. We instead assure the working class we are on the side of workers and their communities, part of the working class, helping to organise and celebrate every penny extra pay, every minute off the working day, without loss of earnings – but never losing sight of the bigger fight to transform society into a socialist democracy, founded on public ownership of all forms of energy, construction, public transport, telecoms, banking.

We are quite clear: nationalise, don’t subsidise!

Instead of propping up the profits of big corporations – as has just been done for the energy giants – the power of the state needs to be deployed to organise publicly owned industries and services, with elected boards of management and a built-in majority for working-class representatives.

To achieve such a democratically planned economy, the full might of the one productive class in society, the working class, will need to be mobilised for socialist change in the years ahead.

Mobilisations for at least inflation-proofed wages; a £15-an-hour minimum wage; democratic public ownership, and defence of the right to strike in the immediate weeks and months ahead – including through a 24-hour general strike – would be a major advance down that road.

PUTTING VAMPIRE CAPITALISTS IN CHARGE OF SCOTLAND'S FUTURE??

Contrary to all their warm words about 'valuing trade unions' and 'supporting social partnership', the SNP government appointed a corporate lobbyist (Andrew Wilson) and 23 business representatives to produce the Growth Commission on Scotland's future - but totally excluded the STUC and unions which organise and represent over 630,000 workers.

So it's no wonder the Commission's Report advocates a neo-liberal nightmare of ten more years of low Corporation Tax, low wages, insecure jobs, capped public spending, 'fiscal responsibility' - another decade of savage austerity cuts, in plain English.
This is an offer any self-respecting worker will refuse, in anger and disgust. 

Even compared with the milk-and-water SNP government White Paper - 'Scotland's Future' - published in the run-up to the 2014 Referendum, the Growth Commission Report is a monumental, catastrophic retreat. 
Far from painting a picture of the future that would recommend Scottish self-government to the huge swathes of working class people yet to be persuaded, the multiple threats to the material well-being of the working class at the core of this document couldn't be better designed to dissuade them if it had been written by hardcore Blairite Unionists.

But unless the independence movement wins the hearts and minds of the working class majority, no amount of cosying up to big business and the multinationals will convert the 45% into a majority for Scottish self-government.

When people rightly object to the total exclusion of the trade union movement - Scotland's biggest civic organisation, by far - from constructing a vision for an independent Scotland, we have the bizarre spectacle of Glasgow SNP councillor, Russell Roberston, who defected from Labour in 2016, tweeting that inviting the unions into the Growth Commission would be like "letting Dracula control a blood-bank".
This is a contemptuous insult to workers and their families - which, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be denounced by the SNP leadership.

Vampires in Charge of Blood Donors' Future!

In fact, it would be more appropriate to point out that asking a neo-liberal corporate lobbyist and his cohort of business interests to frame the future of the working class majority is like letting Dracula shape the fate of the blood donors - given that it's workers who produce the wealth of the economy, only to see it sucked dry for the profits of a tiny handful.

The STUC and affiliated unions should now combine with genuinely pro-trade union parties to devise an entirely different vision of Scotland's future, in stark contrast to the Blairite dystopia from the SNP's Growth Commission. 

One based on secure, well-paid jobs; a minimum wage based on two-thirds male median earnings; a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week instead of casualised labour; progressive taxation to fund jobs, house-building for rent, and other services; democratic public ownership of all public services, transport, energy, banks and big businesses.

That's what we argued back in 2012-14, with many workers persuaded to vote YES by the SSP and Trade Unionists for Independence, because of the vision we presented of a radical socialist change to the society we live in - not a Mini-Me UK capitalism.

That's the kind of Scotland workers need - not a haven for the tax-dodging rich and corporations.

POVERTY KILLS - £10Now! a matter of life and death!

Poverty kills people. 

That's the clear conclusion to be drawn from yet another damning report on health inequalities in this rich nation. And since the prime roots of poverty and inequality are rampant low pay and cruel cuts to already miserly welfare benefits, this makes the struggle for a national minimum wage of £10Now! - and an end to benefit cuts - matters of life and death.

The authoritative Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) has issued a Report proving that life expectancy is a lottery, dependent on what district and income bracket you're born into. 

Overall, during the past 20 years there's been a rise in life expectancy in Scotland and its biggest city, Glasgow. But the wealth-based gap in the length of life a man lives has remained static, with the rich living 13 years longer than the poor. For women, the situation is even more backwards-going. The latest figures show a rich woman living on average 85.2 years, compared with a near-neighbour who is poor only living 74.5 years. That gap has leapt up from 8.1 years to 10.7 years over the past 15 years.  

The Great Health Divide 

Glasgow suffers shorter life expectancy than the Scottish average. But within the same city, and indeed the same corner of the city, we get examples that illustrate the chasm that separates the rich from the rest of us. Women in Drumchapel, Ruchil and Possilpark can only expect to live 73.1 years, whereas a short drive along Great Western Road, those in relatively affluent Kelvinside and Kelvindale enjoy 84.3 years. And that says nothing about the relative quality of life; the prevalence of illnesses in later life that those on low incomes suffer far more than their rich contemporaries.

The GCPH Report's authors write that "health inequalities are intrinsically linked with social inequalities: household income, life circumstances, education and opportunity..." and go on to cite "a third of Glasgow children live in poverty, which is set to rise - in part as a consequence of current and proposed welfare reforms. Related to this, around half of the population living in poverty in Scotland come from households where at least one adult is working."

Health Experts Confirm Socialist Case 

For many of us, there's nothing new in this Report, nor the root causes it identifies, nor indeed the solutions it proposes - which include, to quote, "progressive tax systems on income and wealth, a national living wage and adequate welfare support", with their conclusion that "reducing inequality is the most effective way of addressing inequalities in health or educational attainment". 

But the great advantage of this Report is that a team of health experts have confirmed - in the cold, harsh statistics they've researched - what socialists have been arguing for decades. 

The Price of Profit

Poverty stunts people's lives. And the ruthless, relentless race for maximum profits by the rich who rule society is at the heart of inequality and poverty, including health inequality. 

The same week this GCPH Report was published, a few random examples of the rotten system we have to challenge and eradicate also emerged. 

Energy giant nPower announced plans to slash 2,400 of its 11,500 workforce, the same week their profits in the UK alone reached £154million. 

The government admitted another rise in the numbers suffering the chronic, stressful, health-threatening insecurity of Zero Hours Contracts - where the average weekly wage is £188, compared with an average £479 for permanent employees. 

Shocking statistics on deaths and serious injuries on building sites showed the horrendous consequences of Tory government cuts to the Health & Safety Executive budget, as a means of letting profiteers cut corners to boost their margins. The number of inspections, enforcement orders and prohibition orders on dangerous sites by the HSE have all plummeted by over 50 per cent compared to 2012/13, endangering workers' lives in the name of profit.

£10 is a real Living Wage 

Governments of several party stripes are instrumental in upholding or worsening the levels of poverty and inequality in capitalist Scotland, alongside their allies in big business. 

The Tories have consciously sown utter confusion in the minds of many about the National Minimum Wage, the National Living Wage, and the Living Wage. As of 1st April, workers aged over 25 will have a miserly enhancement of 50p on the pitiful £6.70 national minimum wage 'enjoyed' by those aged over 21. They'll get the brutally mis-named National Living Wage of £7.20. Not to be confused with the Living Wage Foundation's recommended 'Living Wage' of £8.25 an hour!

This deceitful Tory package belittles the concept of a decent living wage, and actually introduces another layer of inequality, designed to divide, rule and exploit the working class. 

Howls from the Profiteers 

Capitalist companies, including in retail, cleaning and catering sectors, are howling at the horrors of having to pay people £7.20 - whilst they pile up profits measured in £billions rather than mere £millions in many cases. 

Even those firms - such as in retail (the biggest single concentration of low pay) - which have granted an hourly pay rise and won plaudits in media headlines for their generosity, are busily, quietly slashing the terms, conditons, hours of work, jobs and premium payments of their staff to pay for the headline-grabbing pay rates. 

That doesn't reach the mainstream media! But at last week's Scottish Divisional Conference of my own union, Usdaw, when I proposed coordinated action to resist this theft of payments and working conditons, numerous other Usdaw reps agreed, and told of people ripping up their union cards after the Usdaw leadership recently accepted and recommended the deal in Tescos which slashed double-time for Sundays and other premium payments. With Westminster plans to extend Sunday trading, and its consequences in Scotland, this problem is set to escalate. 

Labour and SNP pay cuts 

The SNP government can rightly attack cuts to their budget from Westminster, but when they meekly pass on real-time pay cuts to NHS staff with a 1% rise this year after successive years of below-inflation settlements, the unions should organise to force them to issue a decent pay rise, overcoming the recruitment crisis faced by Scotland's NHS, and then mount a struggle to win the funding off Westminster's dictatorship of and for the rich. 

Labour councils, including Glasgow, have provoked strikes by underpaying the likes of the school Jannies and CCTV staff, whilst boasting they are 'Living Wage Employers'.

Join the Struggle for £10Now!

The rampant disease of poverty pay, galloping attacks on premium payments, alongside vicious benefit sanctions that throw people into literal starvation, are the primary causes of the criminal divide between the rich and the rest of us, including the length of life a child is born to expect. 

That's why it's a matter of life and death importance that the demand for an immediate national minimum wage - for all over 16 - of £10-an-hour, and for enhancements to benefits, not sanctions, is stepped up. That's what the SSP has fought for persistently for years. That's what the TUC congress unanimously agreed in September 2014. That's what candidates of the RISE electoral alliance - to which the SSP is affiliated - are committed to. 

Don't let the robbing rich steal years off our lives in their hunger for profit. Join the struggle - inside your union and in the SSP - for £10Now! and against all benefit cuts, as part of the broader struggle to redistribute wealth and enrich the lives of the millions, not the millionaires. 

CHOOSE DEFIANCE - NOT DESTRUCTION!

You couldn't make it up! 

David Cameron, Tory MP for West Oxfordshire, recently wrote a letter to the Oxfordshire Tory council leader, berating his local authority for (to quote his epistle) "cuts to frontline services - from elderly day centres to libraries to museums. This is in addition to the unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children's centres across the county." 

The MP, claiming "shock and outrage", goes on to demand why the council leader hasn't looked at "back-office savings" - a euphemism for sacking council staff.

Tory Tit-for-Tat 

The Tory council leader replies to the Tory MP that his council has already sacked 2,800 staff, that the cuts they now plan are the only ones left to make, and caustically corrects Cameron's claims in his letter by stating:

"I cannot accept your description of a drop in funding of £72million, or 37% of our budget, as 'a slight fall'."

And of course David Cameron, the Tory MP desperate to express feigned concern at cuts to frontline services, is the same David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister, whose hatchet-wielding Westminster government has hacked the 37% off the local council in the area where he needs to curry favour with voters. 

Tory Axe Maniacs 

Cameron, and his companion in crimes against working class communities, George Osborne, are swinging the axe like maniacs. Osborne's Autumn Spending Review on spending plans for the next three years looms large and ugly. On top of the £35billion cuts last July, it's likely to detail the target of cuts to departmental budgets averaging 30%, a mind-boggling horror story for millions of people who depend on the public sector either for a job, a vital service, or both.

Block Grant Butchery 

One of the multiple cuts the Tories will impose is that to the Scottish block grant. And that comes on top of successive years of budget cuts. In the words of SNP Finance Secretary John Swinney, "since 2010 Scotland's overall budget has been cut by 9%, and its capital budget by 25%."

The crunch question that follows this savagery is stark: what will John Swinney and the SNP government do about it? 

Will they just do the equivalent of writing a letter of complaint before passing on the cuts, delegating the dirty work to further education college boards, Scotland's 32 local councils, and similar public sector services? 

Or will they kick up a storm of resistance, uniting workers, communities and students in a mass movement to stop the Westminster Tory butchery?

Passing On Cuts 

Past experience of the SNP government's reaction is not encouraging. They've rightly condemned Westminster cuts every year, but then meekly passed them on, to the tune of well over £3billion over four years. 

This year, they've even delayed the Scottish government's Spending Review from its usual September slot to the dead of December or early January, claiming this is because they won't know the amount in Scotland's block grant from Westminster until Osborne's pronouncement on 25 November. 

Some people suspect it's also an attempt to hide the consequential cuts to jobs and vital services from intense public scrutiny and organised opposition, made harder to build in the deep mid-winter.

Set a No Cuts Budget at Holyrood! 

If the SNP government seriously wanted to carry out its mandate, showing in deeds what they claimed in words about being 'anti-austerity', they could even take advantage of Osborne's timetable, by setting out their budget for Scotland early, without a penny cut to jobs, pay, capital investment or services, and then mount a full-frontal campaign of the Scottish people to demand sufficient funding off Westminster to balance the books.

It's been done before! 

It can be done. It has been done. I was at the heart of the struggle by the socialist council in Liverpool in the mid-'80s, when we organised mass meetings of council workers, communities and college students, called demos of up to 50,000, organised regional 24-hour general strikes - all to pound the hard-faced government of Maggie Thatcher into conceding the funds to build thousands of council houses, jobs and expanded services. 

We won back over £60million in 1984, through the defiance and mass struggle of one city, led by socialists and socialist councillors. Imagine that method applied to a whole nation - led by a government with a sweeping mandate to 'stand up for Scotland', as the SNP promised to do during elections?

For No Cuts Defiance Budgets

The same points apply to every local council in the land. They face a stark choice: defy the cuts or destroy the services and jobs of hundreds of thousands of people who elected them to oppose the Tories.

Labour and SNP councils alike are declaring mass butchery of jobs and frontline services, in a shameful refusal to stand up for the working class who elected them. 

Trade unionists, user groups, workers and students should pound these politicians to find a collective backbone, set No Cuts Defiance Budgets, and join in a massive movement to 'win back our stolen £millions', off Holyrood and Westminster. 

Pound the Politicians  

All five council workers' unions in Glasgow city council have adopted the fighting policy of setting a No Cuts budget. Union branches across Scotland should emulate this. And socialists in the SSP will stand four-square with council staff, the trade union movement, user groups and other anti-cuts campaigners in demanding that councillors choose defiance rather than destruction. 

Labour councillors have been advised by their party leader Jeremy Corbyn to 'resist Tory cuts'. The SNP won a landslide by claiming to be 'anti-austerity'. In both cases, let's see the colour of their money. 

Stand Up - or Stand Aside!

Empty talk won't save jobs or protect services. But a serious campaign to win back some of the £billions robbed off Scotland, and the £millions stolen off local councils and colleges, would ignite a movement of hope and determination to change the way we live, on a par with the enthusiastic Yes movement during the Referendum. 

Defiance or destruction: that's the choice facing MSPs and councillors. 

The SSP knows which side we are on. Join the battle to make the politicians in power fight the Tories - or stand aside for those of us prepared to do so. 

NATIONALISE TO SAVE OUR STEEL JOBS, SKILLS & PRODUCTION!

The timing could not have been more obscenely appropriate, as a symbol of the cold class warfare facing working class people under Tory rule, and indeed under the rule of capital over labour in general.

Hot on the heels of the destructive closure of SSI steel plant in Redcar, shedding 2,200 jobs, came the devastation of Tata Steel's closure announcement, slashing 1,200 jobs in Scunthorpe, Motherwell and Cambuslang. These closures threaten the permanent end of the steel industry in Scotland.

In both cases, SSI and Tata owners blamed a flood of cheap Chinese steel on the world market for their decisions to wipe out livelihoods for whole communities. 

Royal Banquets for Rich - the Bullet for Workers 

Meantime, Cameron's upper-class regime hosted and banqueted dictatorial Chinese President Xi Jinping at Buckingham Palace. Venison from the Queen's Balmoral estate, west of Scotland Turbot, lobster mousse and 1977 vintage port were some of the items on the menu at the royal state banquet - with callous disregard for the thousands of steelworkers' families who meantime face the prospect of not being able to put a meal on the family table if these closures are not resisted and defeated.

Steel Town - Not Ghost Town

Lanarkshire used to be one of the world centres of steel production, with highly skilled, proud workers, who fought through their unions to conquer relatively good conditions.

Ravenscraig was once the biggest hot-strip steel producer in Europe. Now it does not exist. And plans to build a new town on its former site have been abandoned, but only after £230m was spent on the first phase!

The Dalzell Steel and Iron Works opened in Motherwell in 1872. Clydebridge steelworks in Cambuslang has been there since 1887, and produced steel plates for many of the Clyde-built ships of fame.

They were once part of the nationalized British Steel Corporation, which Thatcher's government targeted in their early crusade to smash the unions and privatize public property for the benefit of the profiteering class. First Corus, then Indian-based Tata Steel took over the plants now facing closure. At their peak, 12,000 workers produced vital supplies and profits in the two plants; as one worker told journalists, they used to allow 15 minutes at either end of the shift to get to and from their place of work in the plant, such was the crowd. Now the remaining 270 have been given 45 days' notice of closure.

A Desert in the Making

These workers and their families face the devastation of lost jobs, in an area turned into an industrial desert by the conscious destruction of manufacturing by Thatcher's pro-finance capitalist regime, added to by this week's announcement of 1,100 council job losses in North Lanarkshire. These two jobs slaughters combined threaten to double the numbers unemployed in the Motherwell district. 

But the area, and indeed the whole of Scotland, also faces the danger of losing the accumulated skills of these workers, in a nation already suffering a skills shortage of monumental proportions.

So it is crucial to the next generation - and this one - that a determined fight is waged to save every job, save the skills, and save production at the steelworks. The SSP will do everything in our powers to combine with the unions and anyone else willing to fight to 'save our steel'.

Steel Glut - Crisis of Overproduction 

The capitalist rich and their Tory puppets spout all the usual platitudes about sympathy for the workforces, whilst excusing the closures. 

Cameron took a break from banqueting the Chinese dictator to crush hopes of a UK government rescue by spelling out that there's a world glut of steel production. According to the figures he used, the surplus global supply of steel is 50 times larger than the UK's entire steel production. 

That explains the catastrophic collapse of steel prices on the world market, to half their previous levels. And that of course is a central feature of the system Cameron and his likes defends to the hilt - capitalism. Because it's a system based on competition between rival capitalist corporations battling for the biggest possible share of the market at the highest possible levels of profit for each of them, the system goes through a phase of massive production, until it goes beyond what can be sold. A crisis of overproduction. 

The current steel crisis is a classic example of this rotten, unplanned system, where the private profits of a few owners comes first and always - whilst workers, families, communities and whole nations are thrown to the wolves.

Rigging the Market

Other specific factors have added to the catastrophe facing steelworkers in this country. The massive growth of the Chinese economy includes huge output of steel. As part of their drive to become the biggest economic world power, their steel corporations are quite prepared to dump dirt-cheap imports on competing nations, including at prices below production costs, so as to win greater world market domination. 

And Chinese steel companies have pulled off tax-avoidance tricks by adding alloying elements to their steel reinforcement bar, such as boron and chromium, despite boron being notorious for causing severe welding failure, but providing no benefits to the rebar. Why do they do this? Because it earns these companies a tax rebate of 9-13% from the Chinese government. 

Chinese Workers not to Blame

That of course is not the fault of Chinese workers. Chinese workers have as much right to jobs as anyone else on the planet. It's the fault of the system. It's the very nature of capitalism. It's part of the DNA of profit-seeking, tax-dodging corporations the wide world over, not just in China. As is the ruthless exploitation of Chinese workers by their employers.

Additionally, the British state has done precious little to support its own steel industry, refusing for example to match the subsidies for energy costs issued to energy-intensive sectors by the governments of other European competitors. The steel union, Community, for example is demanding that the UK government fast-tracks the £220m per annum fund they have for this subsidy.

Tasks for Steel Task Force

The Scottish government has swiftly set up a Scottish Steel Task Force. Nicola Stugeon has repeatedly pledged that the SNP administration "will leave no stone unturned" in their efforts to save Scottish steel, a phrase imitated in every comment by every SNP Minister since. The SNP government is focusing on finding "a new commercial owner". 

As the STUC rightly said, it would be totally unacceptable if the Task Force was deployed to just find alternative jobs for redundant steel workers. It must instead pursue ways to save the industry and the skills of the workforce. 

This issue has a history in previous closure situations. For example, when Motorola shut down its West Lothian plant, instead of finding ways to integrate the expertise of these electronics workers in a government industrial strategy, they were instead 'supported' by a Task Force in pursuit of other job vacancies outwith electronics. As the SSP's Colin Fox often tells me, the next time he met the Motorola workers' representative (they didn't have an actual trade union) he was sweeping the forecourt in Harthill service station. 

Another Private Owner?

No socialist or trade unionist would hesitate to warmly welcome a new buyer for the Tata steelworks, provided they kept every worker in a job, with no loss of pay, terms and conditions. It has now emerged that in their desperation to hold onto their jobs, workers offered to accept pay cuts and reduced conditions to Tata Steel. But why should workers pay the price of a crisis in steel that is not of their making? 

However, putting the entire focus of a rescue mission on attracting another capitalist firm is fraught with pitfalls, to put it mildly. If that's all the Scottish government and its Task Force looked at for the remainder of the 45 days consultation period, it could end in a slow death for the industry and its skilled workers, if no such buyer steps forward. 

This health warning is necessary, because such a buyer wouldn't be investing in the steel plants as an act of charity; in keeping with every capitalist firm, they'd be doing so on the calculation of making a hefty profit. 

And if the world steel glut cuts off the path to such profiteering, what private sector buyer is likely to emerge? Already, Scottish billionaire Jim McColl, who took over Ferguson's shipyard in Port Glasgow when it faced closure last year, has ruled out buying the steelworks. He made the point that if a major outfit like Tata Steel couldn't make it work, he sees no scope for "smaller entrepreneurial Scottish involvement".

Nationalise Steelworks!

The human, social and symbolic importance of saving the steelworks demands urgent, radical action by the government. Whilst pounding the Westminster cabal to save our steel is right to do, the unions and communities affected shouldn't store much faith in that producing favorable action. 

But in contrast to Cameron's government of, by and for the rich, the Scottish government has a sweeping mandate to 'stand up for Scotland'. When the First Minister promises to 'leave no stone unturned' there is one glaring exception so far: the option of the government stepping in and taking ownership of the Tata Steel plants is one 'stone left unturned', at least so far. Yet that is the key and most practical solution.

They did so with Prestwick airport, buying it for a penny. If, as I heard one economist on the BBC object, Tata Steel wasn't inclined to sell the Lanarkshire plants for the token penny, so what! 

They've profited as a capitalist enterprise long enough, with virtually no publicity over the fact that in the quarter up to June 2015, Tata Steel Ltd doubled their profits compared to the same quarter in 2014 - to £76.6million. But now they want to up sticks and run, leaving an industrial desert behind in Lanarkshire.

So the Scottish government should take ownership of the steelworks, as a public asset, with public ownership rather than public funding of the profits of another profiteering capitalist 'entrepreneur' - even if one that is interested actually exists!

A Plan of Production

In turn that throws up the issue of how the steelworks could survive, as a public asset, if the globe is flooded with a glut of steel, a capitalist crisis of overproduction. 

I don't pretend to be a steel technologist! But surely the expertise of the workers involved, their trade union, plus industry experts could be urgently pulled together to devise a plan of production? Surely the Scottish government could use the Task Force to fully involve workers and unions in drafting a plan of what types of steel products the existing technology and skills set of the workforce could be used to link up with a wider industrial strategy? 

Options for Socially Useful Production 

For instance, to produce steel for a desperately needed public sector house-building programme, to tackle the crime of 157,000 families in Scotland being stuck on the housing waiting list? Or production of equipment for flood barriers? Or marine engineering equipment, as part of developing a huge public sector green industry? Or steel products to build the fleets and infrastructure for a vastly expanded public transport system?

Nationalisation of Scotland's steel industry, with a plan of production for local, socially useful need, would help bypass the obstacles of the global glut of steel, created by a system that produces purely for maximum profit.

Energy Profiteering 

Wider questions also arise from this catastrophic situation, including the socialist case for democratic public ownership of not just steel, or the construction industry, or transport - but also the energy industry, renewables included. One of Tata Steel's excuses for closure is high electricity prices - which in turn is largely caused by the profiteering of private capitalist ownership of energy supply. So the longer-term solutions to the human tragedy of workers being chucked on the scrapheap - when it suits the balance sheets of capitalist employers -would require democratic planning of industry, energy and services - something only possible with democratic public ownership.

Solidarity and Socialism 

We need to rally round the workers, their families and the communities faced with ruination by the threatened wipeout of an industry with over 150 years' history in Scotland. 

And the best contribution those of us not directly employed can make is to help popularise the rational alternative of nationalisation to save all steel jobs, skills and production - and put pressure on the elected government to wield the powers and authority they have been invested with by voters to carry out this measure before the furnaces cool and die.