RMT STANDS FIRM AGAINST BROWN

Gordon Brown may be good at quashing dissent within Labour ranks. One man he's never going to silence is RMT leader Bob Crow. The union has its conference this week and is solidly at the forefront of the ongoing battle to rescue Britain's railways from the privateers and go down the re-nationalisation road called for time and time again by Labour Party members. The RMT is also battling against privatisation and cuts in London, with a proposed scheme to privatise the Underground's East London Line and plans to axe 40 ticket offices. Fighting, too, to increase wages paid to cleaners on £5/£6 an hour and help bus workers who are increasingly mobilising and calling for a return to public ownership (shamefully, more than 40 per cent of bus workers work over 46 hours a week and almost half earn less than £300 a week before tax)
Earlier this year, the RMT scored a major success when the Scottish Executive ditched attempts to privatise the Caledonian MacBrayne Highlands and Islands ferry service and the union is now campaigning to prevent the new SNP executive from restarting the tendering process.
Crow, unsurprisingly, makes it clear he won't toe Brown's New New labour line and got it right on the deputy leadership too. "To be honest, all six of them supported the war and there's not a lot of difference between any of them. The reality is that whoever gets elected will distance themselves from the trade union movement straight away because Gordon Brown said: 'There's no going back.' A Brown government will be a government of more privatisation, wars and keeping trade unionists restricted."
Crow confesses to being "amazed" that most of the trade union leaders backed Brown to the hilt -"They're getting mugged, but they're paying to get mugged as well," he says with typical bluntness. I rather suspect Tony Woodley is realiisng already he's made a huge, huge mistake.