THE PRIOR anti-union proposals are core of the Tory attacks on the working class and oppressed. Thatcher and the employers know that their policy to increase unemployment, hold down wages, and slash the welfare state and basic rights, will lead to a massive fall in the living standard and conditions of working people.
If the working class has the means it will fight back against these attacks.
The Financial Times summed up this situation for the employers in its editorial on the budget:
'If the problems (of capitalism) are to be tackled at all ... this involves not only a change in attitudes, but a change in the balance of industrial Years in which militancy consistently WOLL trained people to respond to a militant lead...
*Breaking this psychology has in fact been done in some enterprises — means bringing home the realities of risk and reward... Elsewhere it could be a more brutal matter of resisting defeating militancy. This It is to carry out that "brutal matter of resisting and defeating militancy that the Тогу proposals have been put forward.
These proposed single picket line in the 1972 and 1974 miners strikes would be illegal under the new proposals. Every single strike which took place to free the Pentonville Five or defeat the Industrial Relations Act would now be against the law. solidarity the pickets Grunwick would have been illegal.
Any time a trade unionist went down to a Jelow worker s pickel would be illegal. The trade movement would be faced constant threat of literally hundreds of frame-up trials, not dissimilar to those used at Shrewsbury against Des Warren, Ricky Tomlinson and the other building worker pickets.
Every single trade engages in any serious fight to defend Jobs, wages, or fight the cuts is under direct attack from these laws. They are in some ways an even greatst threat than the
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prospect for the near term.' Brutal