Unity still is strength

The meaning of the two statements is not open to interpretation. Their import is clear.

Big business will be handed a £75 billion bonanza to take on the responsibility of helping people from benefits to work, taking the job away from DWP staff who have been trained in this field and handing it to businessmen who understand one thing only, corporate profit.

This illustrates that, even within new Labour, there are degrees of commitment to the neoliberal agenda.

Peter Hain, who had to stand down as Work and Pensions Secretary because of his bizarre fundraising activities in his vain campaign to become Labour Party deputy leader, was not impressed by banker David Freud's inquiry into welfare to work.

Mr Hain suggested, before his resignation, that he would support only a 25 per cent increase in the £800 million worth of contracts handed to the private sector.

Not so his smarmy insensitive successor James Purnell, whose only previous appearance in the newspaper headlines before replacing Mr Hain had been when he was sued for libel by socialist lawyer Liz Davies for falsely alleging that she had incited violence at an Islington council meeting when they were both Labour councillors in that borough.

Such uncomradely behaviour was not an impediment to his ministerial promotion. It was probably a plus.

And what a name he has made for himself in his brief time in his new job.

First, he kicked 2,000 disabled workers in the teeth by pressing on with the plan originally unveiled by Mr Hain to close 28 Remploy factories which provide well-paid, skilled jobs and to push the workers onto the labour market to sink or swim.

And he has followed that up with sacking 12,000 civil servants and undermining their colleagues' employment security by throwing money at the private sector to do their jobs.

But this is not an isolated whim by an outlandish, extremist minister. Mr Purnell's priorities are those of Gordon Brown and the whole government.

This is not an aberration. It represents the preferred direction of new Labour, away from workers' rights and socialist policies to a dog-eat-dog capitalist society where private profit is society's key motivator.

Is that the direction in which trade unionists, who remain the base of electoral and financial support for the Labour Party, wish to go?

It is likely that the civil servants, members of PCS, will find it necessary to take action to protest over government policy, just as their comrades in Remploy have done.

Other trade unions have fallen out with the government over its anti-working-class priorities, but they have struggled on their own and have had to back down in the face of government intransigence, backed up by the power of the bourgeois state.

Trade unionists should look again at their historical banners, many of which bear the watchword Unity is Strength, and realise that changing the direction of this government is a task for a united movement not one that is divided and indecisive.