Tax Avoidance Tactics Needed To Defend Workers' Rights

Workers should emulate the tactics of the tax avoiders to prevent further government erosion of their rights, the leader of the country's biggest union, Unite, Len McCluskey will tell Congress today.

Mr McCluskey will say: "Law is an essential thing for a civilised society. But oppressive laws designed to hold back ordinary people, pushed through a parliament of expense cheats by a cobbled-together coalition which no-one voted for must be resisted.

"If this government considers tax avoidance is lawful and can go unpunished then we should plan for anti-union law avoidance in the same spirit.

"It is time that unions took a different approach. Working people have nothing to be ashamed of - we are not performing financial conjuring tricks to swindle the nation out of its tax dues yet it is our hard-fought freedoms which are now under threat from a government with no mandate.

"Why should the working people of Britain – this country which has stood, sometimes alone in the world, for freedom and democracy - enjoy fewer rights and freedoms than our brothers and sisters in France and Germany?

"These Bullingdon Bolsheviks in government are threatening to bring in still further laws to attack free trade unionism.

"If they do we must be clear how we will respond - we will bring Wisconsin to Westminster. And we will win.

"Our rights – including the right to stand together for a better life for working people - are not the gift of ministers or judges. They are ours to assert."

Earlier this year, thousands of trade unionists occupied the state capital of Wisconsin in order to stop the administration's attack on the jobs and union membership of public servants.

(CD/GK)