Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Pensions: unite to defeat 'divide and rule'

Socialist Resistance no29  |  page 4-5

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Socialist Resistance spoke to George Binette, a member of the National Steering Committee for UNISON United Left and a convenor in the Camden local government branch, about the issues at stake in the battle to defend pensions SR: Given much of the rhetoric coming out of the Labour Party conference recently it appears New Labour is more determined than ever to attack pensions in the public sector as well as increasing the retirement age. What specific types of measures have they been trying to push through?

GB: What they are pushing for first and foremost is an increase in the retirement age from basic 60 to age 65. That's more or less the case across the various public sector schemes.

They also appear to be using a classic "divide and rule" tactic in the hope of undermining unity across public sector unions. In particular, they have given a licenses to the local government association to push for worse changes in the local government pension scheme than the original legislation had introduced, including increases next year and the year after in employee contribution and loss of any transiional protection for trose workers already in the scheme. SR: What are the trade unions and groups like UNISON United Left doing to attempt and stop this from happening?

GB: There have been moves by left-wing members of some union executives and key activists at a regional level in London and elsewhere to maintain and develop unity between the public sector trade unions.

The united left in UNISON had been planning a special pensions bulletin prior to the unveiling of these latest attacks on the local government scheme.

Until very recently, there was little information coming from UNISON and most of the other trade unions nationally although that has changed in the past week as it's become clear that the existing union leaderships are going to have to do something to retain any credibility, both with the employers and their memberEven in liberal papers like the Guardian, little mention is made of the

pension scheme for

MPs, or the pension

bonanza for top executives ships.

So there is a renewed possibility, in local government at least, of strike action across England and Wales if not Britain as a whole. A lot of momentum was lost when the March 23 strike was suspended.

At the same time, a lot of members recognized that the government's pre-election promise to revoke the regulations was not the end of the story. Undoubtedly, left activists have