On the 30th of June as the harried workers of the public sector prepared to step into the breach, they could at least know that they had the support of a dedicated movement steeped in a glorius history of struggle and solidarity. Naturally the Labour party played no role in this, the strikers were not burdened with the support of 'Red Ed' Miliband.
The Labour party has demonstrated that it is only interested in power for the sake of power. They will always subordinate any socialist or progressive principles to the pursuit of their own privilege. This has inevitably lead to a craven attitude to the right wing press.
At the time of Miliband's election the Murdoch press took to calling Ed Miliband 'Red Ed' an easy and lazy moniker for those tory boys, that brought them back to the glory days of the union smashing eighties. However Red Ed showed his true colours when he condemned the strikers. This was not out of any genuine conviction or ideological purpose. Miliband has been an irrelevance in the debate about the current economic policy.. His opposition appears to come from the conventional wisdom that UK general elections cannot be won without the support of 'middle England'. Conventional wisdom just also dictates that middle England is right wing,anti-union and gets all of its information from the Tory press. This has been in vogue since the 1992 election and The Sun's infamous headline 'It's The Sun wot won it'. So now that Ed appears to have miraculously grown a backbone in the last 24 hours can we expect Labour to start standing up for labour? On the basis of past events its not likely.
On the Labour party website there is no declaration of principles, aims or achievements. This will likely have something to do with the fact that there have not been any. Labour party history is one of successive betrayal of the labour movement. Since the general strike in 1926 through the miners strike of 1984 up to the current upheaval the Labour party has practiced one principle, take trade union money, betray trade union members.
