| The head of Britain's trade union movement tomorrow declares the "phoney war over", promising a barrage of protest against the government's cuts, ranging from industrial strikes and "peaceful civil disobedience" to petitions by Tory voters in the shires. Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, setting out plans for the first national demonstration against the cuts on 26 March, said the days of protests being solely about unions going on strike are over. Unions were now part of a broad church of opposition spanning a range of supporters from student activists to middle-class protesters who defeated the coalition's forestry plans, to families feeling the effect of the welfare reforms to direct activists who have occupied banks, he said. He suggested there was a role for "peaceful civil disobedience" as the campaign to force the government to change course intensifies over the coming months. "I think the coalition needs to reflect on where is their plan B, which is about reconsidering the first judgment that they made," said Barber. "They take a major political risk if they seem to be indifferent to this kind of genuine democratic reaction to what they are doing." Barber said unions have been delaying action, anticipating that by the end of this month the wave of cuts announced across local authorities in the last few weeks – including tens of thousands of redundancies – and the reality of the changes to the welfare system, along with last week's publication of the Hutton review of public sector pensions, would create the moment when the cuts become a reality. "It was important for the cuts to be real, for there to be a much wider appreciation of what the reality was going to be. "Back in the autumn last year this was a largely theoretical debate. Now, the phoney war is over," he said. Barber's comments come as the fight against the government's plans appears to be escalating. Some 578 buses have been booked by TUC-related groups to transport people to the capital for the 26 March event, and trains have been chartered across the country. The Guardian has learned: • Unions have gathered a £35m war chest to fund a mass campaign against the cuts, which could be used to cover wages if strikes become entrenched. • Direct action groups are to stage occupations, sit-down protests and unauthorised feeder marches to coincide with the TUC demonstration on 26 March, when up to 200,000 people are expected to take to the streets of London. • Online, other groups are calling for more widespread direct action. An organisation calling itself Resist 26 is calling for a 24-hour occupation of Hyde Park. • The government will this week meet public sector unions to negotiate their pensions in the wake of the publication of the Hutton review. Shortly after, unless concessions are made, the TUC will reconvene to set out a programme of action. Barber said that as the anti-cuts campaign was stepped up, it was critical that the unions had wide public support. Last week, the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, warned unions not to stage a 1980s-style confrontation. Balls claimed that David Cameron was counting on the unions to unleash a wave of strikes so he could say the labour movement wanted to take Britain back to the 80s. Barber said: "We have been conscious all the way through that some of our opponents and some in the government would like nothing better than to be able to simply dismiss our campaign as self-interest, unions on autopilot, automatically partisan and hostile to a Conservative-led government. We have been working very hard to give a lie to all of those propositions. "We are part of a much broader coalition, right across the community … you cannot pick us out and say it is just the unions." He said that the most powerful pressure on the government had come when coalition MPs faced hostility from their own constituents, highlighting the letter-writing campaign in the shires that prevented the privatisation of the forests. "I think democratic protests can influence political thinking in a serious way," he said. Referring to the direct action of protest groups such as UK Uncut, who have occupied high-street banks and retailers to highlight alleged tax avoidance, Barber said: "I think that kind of peaceful protest can play its part. I think that has helped highlight an issue that we were right at the forefront of putting on the agenda, I would say. Certainly I don't want anything that gives rise to violence of any sort … But I think there can be a role for peaceful civil disobedience." The campaign will focus on the cuts, but increasingly on the government's wider public sector agenda, Barber said. "The cuts will be at the heart of the demo on 26 March, but I think increasingly we'll be trying to shine the spotlight in a major way on quite what the implications are of this on other aspects of what's going on in public services, which is this wholesale change in the basis on which they are going to operate: massive privatisation threatened." |