The House of rodents has new vermin on its blood red benches

The fat old rat Sir Brendan Barber is set to join the home for rotund rodents of a bureaucratic nature, otherwise known as the House of Lords. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the arcane and deeply corrupt system under which the British working class is ruled it contain an “upper house” of our parliament which was formerly the exclusive domain of the landed aristocracy. Over the last hundred years the old aristocrats have been pushed out and replaced with new layers of “Lords” who are mostly long time servants of the ruling class who have staffed one element of the state machine or another. One such group are the trade union bureaucracy. In Britain the trade union federation is the Trades Union Congress and every single one of its General Secretary’s going back to the day’s of Sir Walter Citrine has received at least a knighthood for his or her “services”. What services are these I hear you ask? Well these leaders of the trade union federation are being rewarded with titles and lucrative expense accounts for making sure that all major class struggles are kept under control, that they are sold out and that the workers who engage in such struggles are forced into a demoralising capitulation.

That is what the leadership of the TUC are there to do and that is why they get the titles they receive from the ruling class. Their other job is to make sure that the trade unions remain shackled to the labour party and in both of these tasks Lord Barber has excelled. He was General Secretary of the TUC during the run up to the Iraq war and played his part in making sure that opposition to that war was kept strictly in the form of utterly useless pacifistic marches to nowhere. He led the trade union bureaucracy (ably assisted by the lead trot group in the anti war movement, the SWP) in making sure that any attempt to rally workers to non-cooperation with the war machine was bureaucratically smothered. Following this great service to the ruling class Lord Barber then delivered his finest service towards the end of his career at the TUC when he masterminded the calculated sell out of the 2011 public sector pensions dispute.

At a time of growing class anger over pay freeze, service cuts and attacks on pensions the TUC leadership arranged for one day of strike action across most of the public sector on November 30th 2011. Having been an active trade unionist at the time I clearly remember there was as rising tide of class anger brewing and so the TUC leaders did what they always do, they lead workers out to one days action, made a lot of noise then signed the same sell out deal that was on the table before the strike. The result of this was mass demoralisation and depoliticisation amongst workers, I witnessed this first hand. Lord Barber then swiftly retired as head of the TUC and was rewarded with a knighthood for his services in squashing this movement.

It must be said though that Lord Barber and the other scabs at the head of the TUC can only carry out these massive sell outs and calculated capitulations with the able assistance of the British Trotskyites and revisionists who are key players in the activist layer and despite endlessly screaming about sell outs routinely collaborate with the likes of Lord Barber to ensure they own positions within the trade union bureaucracy. The union leadership of the right and the left have a nice deal going where each denounces the other very loudly and then they carry on dividing the bureaucratic spoils between them.

So let this be another lesson to us all and one that we must learn well from. The leaders we are told represent us are in fact put there to placate, divide, confuse and ultimately control us. They are not leaders of the working class but the servants of British imperialism.

So all hail Brendan Barber. Scab. Sell out. Rodent. Lord. Dedicated Servant of British Imperialism.