Union leader says Home Secretary is to use British troops as strikebreakers!

 

British Troops in the 1926 General Strike

Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the PCS union, says that the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is intending to use members of the British army as  militarised scabs to break any strike by his members in Border Force who have voted massively for "sustained industrial action." 

Historically, all British governments whether Labour, Liberal or Conservative, have used British troops as strike breakers at one time or another. Sometimes, it ends tragically, with people being shot dead. While countries like Spain, Italy, and France, use armed paramilitary police, who live in barracks, there is no such thing in Britain. The police are civilians in uniform who do not carry firearms unless they are part of a designated armed unit. 

In 1893, two miners were shot dead by British troops during a miners strike in Featherstone in Yorkshire. An inquest returned a verdict of "justifiable homicide " 

In 1910, the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, used troops from the 18th Hussars and Lancashire Fusiliers to break  a miners strike in Tonypandy in South Wales. Many miners were injured in clashes with the police and one miner was killed following a blow on the head, probably by a police truncheon. 

In 1911, during the Liverpool general transport strike, 3,500 troops were stationed in the city. Soldiers from the 18th Hussars opened fire on a crowd on Vauxhall Road, injuring fifteen and killing two. A subsequent inquest returned a verdict of "justifiable homicide " Troops were also used during the 1926 General Strike. 

During the Attlee Labour Government of 1945-51, British troops, as many as 20,000, were sent many times to picket lines to take over strikers' jobs and trade unionists were sent to prison and spied on and intimidated by the security service. 

In 1984, the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, secretly planned to use the military to break the miners' strike that resulted in six deaths and 11,000 arrests. In the end she relied on MI5, the capitalist press, the police, and the scab union called the Union of Democratic Miners (UDM), led by the miner Roy Lynk, to crush the striking miners. 

One thing we can be sure of, is that we're not likely to see Labour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner, or Labour leader, Sir Kier Starmer (KC) supporting striking workers on a trade union picket line. Both of them are more at home leading a gay pride parade.