The leader of Britain’s biggest trade union said in Brighton today (Monday 25 June) that the government was at war with the public.
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey opened his union’s policy conference at the Brighton Centre by saying: “Most of the time this is a government at war with much of the British people.
“It is a cobbled-together coalition government united on only one thing – that the poor must pay for the bankers’ crisis.
“It is a government that sits and watches as another forgotten generation of young people proceed straight from school to the dole queue.
“More than a million of our kids facing a future without hope is nothing short of shameful.
“It stamps on the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people with the politics of fear, threatening to cut the benefits of vulnerable low-paid workers who stand up for their rights, and will impose cuts for the next decade that will sweep away the services we value.
“This is a government forfeiting the right to rule.
“Cameron and Osborne be warned: we will not stand by and let the hopes of ordinary men and women be crushed.”
He said: “If you wanted to make the case for the importance of trade unionism today, I would point to just one image, that of unemployed young people being forced to sleep under London Bridge before getting up to work for nothing on the day of the jubilee celebrations.
“Even in the 1980s, even when Mrs Thatcher was at her worst, I do not recall such naked slave labour being used.
“But that is the world you get if business, the rich, have all the power and if trade unionism is attacked and reduced.
“This government will never lift a finger against that system, in fact they want to go further.
“But if they do seek to put the basic freedoms which are normal across the rest of Europe beyond the law, then we are not going to submit to that.
“Unite will take whatever prudent steps are necessary to support our members come what may.
“We will not lie down before injustice.
“As Bob Dylan once sang: ‘To live outside the law, you must be honest.’
