The Socialist Labour Network sends greetings to workers everywhere this May Day 2023.
British workers are suffering the sharpest ever fall in living standards. We are facing a nightmare of crippling price rises. Energy bills to heat our homes this year have quadrupled. The prices of staple food items have soared by up to 20%. Interest rates have shot up, putting an extra squeeze on mortgages and threatening to plunge families into negative equity and homelessness. Food banks are collapsing and children are going hungry. Millions of families face a winter in freezing homes.
No wonder the British establishment is in turmoil, with five prime ministers in the last six years. And no wonder the working class has had enough! We’re witnessing a mass revolt by millions of workers resisting poverty: railway workers, postal and telecoms workers, dockers, airport ground staff, bus drivers, nurses, GPs, hospital doctors, teachers, university lecturers, barristers, delivery drivers, fast food workers, office cleaners, Uber drivers…. Calls for a general strike suddenly sound almost commonplace.
But not everyone is complaining. Britain’s 177 billionaires got richer by another £55 billion just in the last year alone, to a total of £653 billion – the equivalent of £10,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s time the rich paid the price for the crisis of their system!
Millions are looking for a political voice to confront this government of speculators, hedge fund sharks and black money launderers, and to speak out for the workers on poverty wages, the families living off food banks, the households without heating, the youth without a future. We can’t afford to pay for a crisis that is not of our making.
And yet the sole surviving political voice of the working class has been stifled. Under its hired stooge Starmer the ruling establishment has destroyed the Labour Party as a potential agency of resistance and change. Today the working class needs to mobilise its forces and rearm itself politically by taking concrete steps to rally forces for a new mass working-class political party.
The British workers only need to look across the Channel to see the exemplary upsurge of mass resistance in France, where millions have engaged in marches, occupations and general strikes to resist the dictatorial imposition of pension cuts and protect their hard-won rights.
The SLN will be at the forefront in supporting mass campaigns of direct action: marches, demonstrations, pickets of the energy companies; occupations of supermarkets and food monopolies; strikes, blockades and pickets.
Workers of all countries, unite!