First foot forward for 2012

Greetings are normally followed by detailed good wishes for health, wealth and happiness. Fat chance as long as the beneficiaries of obscene inherited fortunes hold sway.

Whether Tories or Liberal Democrats, they have signed up to the most systematic cuts programme against our jobs, services, benefits, pay and pensions since before World War II.

National Health Service founder Aneurin Bevan was widely criticised, even by many in his own party, when he described Tories as "lower than vermin."

The revelation in the newly released 1981 Cabinet papers that Geoffrey Howe wanted to cut Liverpool adrift in the wake of the riots there but not to mention it for political considerations speaks volumes for the vermin of the Thatcher government, to which David Cameron and George Osborne look back as to a golden age.

Being attacked by Howe, who was demeaned, overruled, ignored and generally used as a doormat for years by Margaret Thatcher, was memorably compared by Labour frontbencher Denis Healey as akin to "being savaged by a dead sheep."

However, the worm turned eventually, finding the courage to put the boot into Thatcher when she was clearly down, just as he had with Liverpool.

Predictably he no longer remembers condemning Liverpool to a lingering death, as his coalition successors today may similarly claim in 30 years when their less diplomatic utterances become public.

Not that today's ministers have been reticent in displaying contempt for those at the sharp end of their offensive to destroy in one fell swoop the gains made by working people during the postwar Labour government.

As PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka makes clear in the Morning Star today, Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander and Tory Francis Maude are united in exultation at the prospect of trade union disunity delivering them cost-free victory over the public-service pensions issue.

No trade union leader worth their salt can allow that possibility to become reality by shattering the united front so painstakingly constructed.

It was built to counter the coalition's determination to tackle government debt by imposing a targeted tax on modestly paid public servants as a means of avoiding having to ask those who can afford it to pay more.

Resistance, in the form of strike action, was legally possible since union members are directly affected by an attempt to degrade their pensions arrangements, but public-service pensions are not the only area under government attack.

Housing benefit cuts, growing homelessness, NHS privatisation, "free" schools, rising unemployment, overseas wars, a return to bankers' huge bonuses and proposed new anti-union legislation are all part of a programme designed to effect a massive transfer of wealth and power from the poor to the rich.

Westminster knockabout games will not defeat that programme. The trade unions, backed by effective community organisation, can take a lead in doing so.

Faced with the biggest squeeze on working class living standards since the 1920s and '30s, unions cannot afford to go into batten-down-the hatches mode.

The only possibility of a happy 2012 for working people will depend on the readiness of the labour movement to unite in determined resistance to the coalition and to do everything to make its existence as brief as possible.