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Crow: I’ll boycott King speech

Crow: I’ll boycott King speech

Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail and Maritime Transport union (RMT), comments to the Andrew Marr show on the appearance of the head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, at the TUC conference on Wednesday:

“I would like to see a single unemployed person write a two-page document about how it’s hard to survive on £67 a week, not the governor of the Bank of England tell us why we have got to pull our belt in.

“Their first line of attack, this government, is not to go to the bankers who caused the crisis, but go to the people in society like nurses, school dinner ladies, railway workers, transport workers and workers in the public sector, and build a campaign up now by saying that basically public sector workers are lazy, there’s no need for them, they’re on gold-plated pensions, and these are the people, the frontline staff that provide services for people.

“If there is a concerted effort by this new government to attack workers in all different parts of society, then my belief is that if one group of workers are taking action on one day, another group of workers are taking action on another day, that we should coordinate that resistance to defend working men and working women.

“The fact is at the moment people don’t think that the cuts are going to affect them because they’re someone else’s cuts. Once those cuts affect the individuals concerned, there will be a reaction.”