Billy Hayes has led a last ditch attempt to defend the Labour link, submitting a CWU motion to Labour’s September conference for the government to take “immediate steps to take responsibility for” the Royal Mail pension deficit, possibly as high as £20 billion thanks to the government’s 13 year pension holiday in the 1990′s and the fact it was all invested on the stock market!

The resolution was unanimously supported, while Brown in an earlier speech gave (pretty vague) support to the idea of a Post Office People’s Bank.

While Billy and the other Labourites in the party are toasting each other over this great victory for our union, there is a problem. The unions have for a few years now put resolutions to Labour Party conference on worthwhile working class issues – privatisation, council housing and last year what would have been a popular windfall tax on utilities. Labour ministers are then wheeled out to inform journalists that the government will ignore the vote and continue with its current policies!

This reached a low point when the 2008 Labour Party conference passed a statement that it supported “a vision of a wholly publicly-owned, integrated Royal Mail Group”. Only four months later Brown and Mandy were gunning for privatisation before the ink was even dry on the Hooper report! It’s clear that Labour promises are not worth the paper they are printed on.

The government is unlikely to take on the huge pension deficit, when it is trying to outcompete the Tories in cuts. But hard-hitting industrial action that defeats Royal Mail would directly threaten the government with such a crisis that it could be forced to follow through on the pension “commitment”. Founding a new anti-capitalist party could pile on the pressure too – then Labour couldn’t take the workers’ vote for granted!