This was first posted on the DiY CULTURE Facebook page

The French unions and the people’s response to austerity, rising fuel prices, redundancies, retirement-age rises and the neo-liberalist policies of Macron and the EU. Not thousands of corporate trade union flags and plastic vuvuzelas (all made in China), not A to B marches to listen to endless speechifying by vote-begging politicians, but meaningful direct action against the state, on the streets.

In the UK, we have attack after attack on our class and upon the gains that were fought for over generations. There is a manufactured, ideologically driven housing crisis, made worse by the avarice of developers and landlords and the compliance of crooked local and national politicians.

Quality of healthcare and mortality rate is dependant upon how much money you have and where you live and education has become a full-scale business opportunity, that is driving thousands of working class students into a lifetime of debt.

Working people (such as nurses) are having to use the food-banks that are in operation in every city and town in the country and the state is failing and actually withdrawing from the lives of those that need the most support.

But where are the gravy-train riders of the TUC and our big unions? Why so quiet when our major industries are asset stripped by international capital and the EU? Why allow profiteers and share-holders to dictate what happens to the lives of working people. Where are they as thousands of service sector workers at companies like Mothercare, Debenhams, BHS, Woolworths, M & S, Maplins, House of Fraser and Toys R Us have been thrown out – the TUC could call for occupations, expropriation, worker control and strikes (maybe even a bit of boss-knapping).

Are they so deeply embedded in the pockets of bosses, overseas corporations and government and the unsustainable philosophy of ‘growth’, that they are terrified of taking any action? Just what will it take to get the fat-cat unions out on to the streets to bring down a totally rancid Tory government? It should be a weekly event as it is across the Channel.

Maybe they are worried about unleashing something that they might not be able to control…