THIS week the Tories embarked on a new phase in their assault on working class people and communities. Not content with demonising the poor and the disabled, the Tories have now turned their fire on those in paid work. At least those in paid work who aren’t company directors. Now it’s the turn of trades union members to feel the wrath of the party of the selfish. Trades union members are working people, but working people exist to be controlled and corralled, they’re not to be valued and supported.

The legislation which was passed by a slim majority in the Commons this week has the aim of making it all but impossible for a trades union to take industrial action. Only one Scottish MP supported the measures. There are no prizes for guessing which one. The only prize David Mundell has ever won is the stuffed toy with which he’s frequently confused.

Two hundred years ago, the early trades unionists were imprisoned for organising themselves and for asserting the fundamental right of workers to withdraw their labour. It’s the right to strike and to take industrial action which makes the difference between a free worker and a serf. Without those rights, a worker is no better than a bonded labourer, compelled by law to work even when in the middle of a dispute with their employer. This new law gives the employers all the rights. In the Tory world view it’s only employers who are wealth creators, not the workers. Those who deserve protection are those who cream off the wealth, not those who do that actual work to create the wealth in the first place.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this latest Tory legislation puts workers’ rights back almost two hundred years, and once again reduces us to serfs. The new laws are so draconian that even the leading Conservative David Davis described them as Francoist. This is perhaps unfair to the long deceased Spanish dictator, as he would have balked at the introduction of some of the Department of Work and Pensions money saving schemes on account of the Catholic Church’s strong stand against euthanasia for people with disabilities.

This government, which recently described the official opposition as “a threat to national security”, wants trades unions to inform the police two weeks in advance if they intend to campaign on social media. So if a trades union official wants to tweet a photo of a kitten with a slogan saying that cats deserve clean kitty litter every day, they’re going to have to clear it with the police first. Or the kitten will have to undergo a fit for work assessment and as we all know, you’re more likely to die within a fortnight of passing a fit for work assessment than you are to be murdered. Iain Duncan Smith will be standing beside a canal with a sack. So it’s not looking good for the kitten. Nor indeed for the waste of police time. This new legislation means that the Tories are the first government in history to criminalise LOL Kats.

This government gained its majority because it received the votes of a mere 36.9% of those who voted, on a 66% turnout. Just 24.4% of the electorate opted for Davie Cameron’s merry band of LOL Kat criminalisers, yet the government is now insisting that a union must receive over 505 of votes cast plus the support of 40% of the eligible voters before a ballot for industrial action can be successful.

Unions must also give at least two weeks’ notice of industrial action, allowing employers to bring in agency staff – presumably on zero hours contracts – to fill the gap. The effect of the new law will be to ensure that employers who mistreat their staff are subject to no sanctions at all. The government insists that this is a democratic measure, as it extends to employers the same lack of accountability already enjoyed by politicians.

EVEN if a ballot for industrial action is successful, the government has now decided that union members on a legal picket must be subjected to the kind of treatment formerly doled out to lepers. Rumous has it that it was only at the very last minute that some members of the Tory cabinet dropped a provision demanding that picketers be branded with the words UNIONIST SCUM on their foreheads, but that was only because they feared that it might be mistaken as support for Scottish independence. As a compromise, now picketers only have to wear an armband declaring their leper status, and ring a bell while chanting “unclean”.

The rights of every sector of society are now being curtailed and attacked by the Conservative government. Every sector except those who are already powerful, privileged and prosperous. If you flog dodgy diet pills and fake tan lotions while contracting out your suppliers to sweat shops in south east Asia, you’re a wealth creator to be admired and looked up to. If you’re a hard working nurse, a bus driver, or a binman then you need to be controlled, and criminalised if you’re audacious enough to protest.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned that you’re more likely to die within two weeks of being assessed as fit for work than you are to be murdered. We’ve witnessed the traumas suffered by refugees fleeing wars and learned that the UK accepts fewer refugees than just about any other country in Europe, even when it was partly due to the actions of British governments that the refugees are fleeing in the first place. We’ve discovered that Government MPs are absent for debates then turn up en masse to vote against amendments to Scottish legislation supported by Scottish MPs.

Yet we’ve to swallow all this without protest, while Government ministers refuse to be interviewed and defend and explain their decisions. And now the official opposition is described by the Government as a threat to national security.

There is to be no protest against any of this. There is to be no organising to resist. Welcome to the UK in 2015. The Calton Weavers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs would weep. No wonder the clamour for a second independence referendum refuses to go away. The British state can’t be reformed, all that is left is to leave it.

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