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Soon after Sir Keir Starmer’s accession to the Labour Party leadership the Socialist Party wrote to the RMT transport workers union, in June 2020, proposing to relaunch the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) – which the RMT’s Bob Crow had been central to establishing in 2010. In response a minority group on the union’s national executive committee (NEC), including the then acting general secretary Mick Lynch, produced an alternative report which scoffed at our argument that Starmer’s victory meant that “once again working-class voters face being effectively disenfranchised” with no mass party available which represented their interests.

“The real threat to members at this present time is the Tory Party”, they said. The union’s decision at a special general meeting in 2018 to “align itself towards the Labour Party” under Jeremy Corbyn’s radical leadership – which led to TUSC suspending all its electoral activity, having already stood aside in the 2017 general election – was now interpreted by them as not being “dependent on who is leader of the Labour Party” but as standing policy.

One month after Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party was ‘swept to power’ by a paltry 20% of the electorate – the lowest support base of any government since the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1918 – violent protests and riots, instigated by far-right groups, broke out across the country. For those trapped in asylum-seekers’ hostels or mosques under brutal attack from gangs of rioters, the experience was terrifying. More generally, many Black, Asian and Muslim people feel that their safety is increasingly under threat. Tell Mama, a monitoring group tracking Islamophobic hate crimes, reported a five-fold increase in threats to Muslims compared to the same time last year.

March 17th 2022 will now always be synonymous with P&O as far as trade union activists are concerned, with the vicious assault on the workers’ jobs and contracts carried out on that day. The company informed 800 workers by zoom that they were being instantly made redundant, without notice or consultation. To back this up, they employed security guards to forcibly remove workers from ferries, consciously using brutal ‘shock and awe’ methods. There are reports that some of the hired security guards had handcuffs and were wearing balaclavas. P&O had already lined up a new workforce on exploitation wages of less than £2 per hour.

The sacked workers and their unions, the RMT and Nautilus International, launched an immediate campaign of protests and demonstrations, particularly at the ferry ports of Dover, Hull, Liverpool, Larne and Cairnryan. Most of the workers had signed up to the enhanced redundancy by the March 31 deadline. Nevertheless the struggle continues, for reinstatement and more generally against the super-exploitation of seafarers so that the industry bosses are not able to benefit from P&O’s brutal tactics.

But this is also a struggle for the whole trade union movement as the economy shows signs of faltering after the initial post-Covid recovery. The first stage of the Covid pandemic saw a severe contraction which was exploited by a whole series of companies to impose worse pay, terms and conditions through vicious ‘fire and rehire’, which rapidly became the favoured weapon of choice for the bosses during the pandemic. Disgracefully, this included the New Labour council of Tower Hamlets, which triggered a dispute with Unison members. British Gas workers took 43 days of strike action in a bruising battle which ended with their annual income cut by over £10,000.

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