Historic First: Leader of Labour Party Supports a Strike!

For the first time in living memory the leader of the Labour party has spoken out in support of workers on strike.


(Video is set to start at 12 minutes 44 seconds.  Just rewind if you want to watch the full speech)

Today at the Trade Union Congress (TUC)  Jeremy Corbyn supported strikers at the National Gallery:

"Welcome to those strikers from PCS from the National Gallery for what they’ve going through at the present time.  They look after our national treasures. They do it well, they love what they do and they love what we’ve got in our National Gallery. 

Please let’s not privatise our galleries and privatise our staff. Recognise them as being a precious national asset, not something to be traded away on the market of privatisation. Well done to you for your campaign."

This blows away an unpublicised but religiously applied doctrine that a sitting leader of the Labour party will never support a strike. It was most famously demonstrated when Neil Kinnock refused to back the nurses in their 1998 strike, a strike which was widely supported by the public.

Serwotka PCS union

As Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union said today

 "Labour leaders  would look at their showlaces when you asked them to support a strike"



Congratulations but what a shame that the party founded by the TUC in 1900 has taken this long to get to this point.