Last year the Trade Union Congress took the important decision to adopt the People’s Charter for Change as TUC policy. Movements like the Peoples Charter spell out the alternative to cuts and crisis, uniting people in action. The cuts will only be defeated by the unity of popular community action like the opposition to the Poll Tax, with the breadth of the anti-war movement with strong trade union organisation at its core. The Charter’s positive alternative to cuts, for a route to security and prosperity, can help bring that together.

A few months ago the banks brought our whole system close to collapse. Now it is all of us who are being told we have to pay. The banks, the great companies, the wealthy are not ‘in it with us.’ The government want another historic shift of wealth and resources from ordinary families to the rich.

The government wants you to pay for the bankers’ economic crisis. It wants to make you pay by millions unemployed, increasing taxes on ordinary people, taking away welfare support, cutting public services and handing them over to big business, giving tax breaks to big business and spending billions wasting the lives of our young people in its wars for oil.

They tell us ‘we’re all in it together’, but while millions grow poorer and face real hardship, the wealthiest 1,000 people grown £77 billion richer in the last year, bringing their total wealth up to £333 billion, more than twice the size of the £156bn deficit.

The Peoples Charter Commission was set up to build a mass movement against Bankers’ cuts and for a peoples’ Britain. Non-sectarian Charter groups are now springing up around the country.

The government spent an estimated £1000 billion bailing out the banks. All the main parties in the last election supported the bail-out to the banks and accepted that there had to be massive cuts to clear away the government debts of £168 billion. All the main parties say the British people have to pay for the bankers’ crisis.

 15 million votes were cast against the Tories. 10 million voted in favour. No party got a majority of MPs in parliament. People did what they could in the election to prevent the onslaught to come. They wanted no part of a savage government. There was no mandate for cuts. There was no mandate for the destruction of the unions.

Trade Unionists from across the country gather to discuss crisis response

Mike Kirby made a powerful and thought provoking opening speech to Saturday's People's Charter Convention. Read the speech in full.

By Sean O'Grady, Economics Editor
Monday, 16 March 2009
The worst economic slowdown in three-quarters of a century has wiped £40,000 from the wealth of every adult in the United Kingdom, a national total of almost £2 trillion; that is £2,000bn, or £2,000,000,000,000.

The Trades Union Congress has voted at this year's conference to support the People's Charter, but only after the country's biggest union, Unite, had successfully moved an amendment to stress that it was seen as a platform of policies for the Labour Party.

The Charter was launched back in March as an appeal that could unite all those looking for an alternative to New Labour policies.

by John Hendy QC,

(Joint Chair of the Peoples’ Charter Commission and Standing Counsel to a number of unions)

Last time Congress met at Liverpool was in September 1906. The first item on the agenda was the Bill which the TUC promoted and which became, 3 months later, the Trade Disputes Act 1906. It protected the right to strike. This milestone was achieved with a total TUC membership of 1,555,000 and no more than 30 “Labour” (no Labour Party then) MPs – all of whom attended Congress.

How different today. Faced with Tory restrictions on trade union rights Congress (with 6,400,000 members) has not been able to persuade a Labour Government with hundreds of Labour MPs to even debate the TUC’s “mild, modest and moderate” Trade Union Rights and Freedoms Bill let alone establishthe fundamental trade union rights guaranteed by international law.