Anger, Hope, Action

Roger McKenzie, Assistant General Secretary of public sector union, UNISON spoke passionately at the February members' meeting about the importance of organising. He used the motto: Anger, Hope, Action as the way in which we need to get more people involved in the Labour Party and its campaigning. The public need to get angry at what is happening, we need to give them the hope of an alternative and then we need to turn that into positive action for change.

He also marked the centenary of the first women to get the vote, and restated that whatever working class people have achieved has been done through organising and resistance.

Too many employers still treat workers as disposable objects and the collapse of Carillion is juts the latest example of this. The scandal is that the government continued to award contracts to the company even after it knew they were in financial difficulties.

There is also a need to re-energize support for public services which put people before profit, and address the fact that public sector workers haven’t seen a decent pay rise for seven years.

The Labour movement’s weakness he said is that we haven’t always been imaginative enough in tackling globalization. We need modern structures that can meet the challenges of the new world of work. For example, the automation of jobs is happening without any real public debate. We need to ask what is the socialist response?