This year's TUC conference finally produced a commitment to organise a response to the Con-Dems' attacks, in the form of a "national day of action" on Wednesday November 30th, involving "co-ordinated strikes and protest marches". Unite, Unison, GMB and FBU have announced strike ballots and 10 other unions are due to follow suit.

The GMB's Brian Strutton even added: "We're not talking about a day out and a bit of a protest. We're talking about something that's long and hard and dirty as well, because this is going to require days of action running through the winter, through into next year,... right into the summer".

This was going much further than the TUC leaders were willing to go. Nevertheless, Strutton's rhetorical outburst had a point: nothing short of a real threat to the bosses' profits will begin to tilt the balance of forces in the working class' favour!

But, with the union leaders' long record of forgetting about the fiery speeches they make at conference time, the onus will be on us, workers, to put the necessary fightback onto the agenda.

Mobilising our collective strength

Just as it did last year, however, the TUC plans to confine any fightback to public sector pensions.

This plan is a bad joke, even from the point of view of public sector workers themselves.

First, because just over the 3 months up to last June, they have lost 100,000 jobs. And, according to Con-Dem plans, job cuts are set to carry on at least at the same rate over the coming years. What good can it do for public sector workers to fight over pensions only, when they're not even sure to remain in their present jobs?

And second, because this means that, according to TUC leaders' plans, public sector workers will be left to fight on their own, while the 75% of the working class employed by the private sector will be told to look on. It's hard to conceive of a worse use of our collective strength!

But this plan is even more of a farce for the privately employed majority of the working class, when companies are using the crisis as a pretext to ride roughshod over conditions and wages, while the cost of living is going through the roof.

The recent deaths of coal miners revealed how 500 of these miners are risking their lives due to the shoddy conditions imposed by private and cow-boy operators across the Welsh valleys.

Job cuts, wage cuts and the rise of casualisation have already reduced the average household's purchasing power by 9% over the past three years. For the large number of low-paid households, the already tenuous protection of the benefit system has began to shrink and will shrink much further if the Con-Dems can get away with it. As to private pensions, they are ridiculously inadequate.

It does not take to be on the TUC general council to see that both the 17m private sector workers and the 6m public sector workers have a vital interest in joining ranks for a common fightback!

Taking the money from where it is

Miliband was duly heckled by the TUC delegates when he told them that strike action would be a "mistake". But what else could be expected from Labour which supports both the bailing out of the banks and the Con-Dems' "deficit reduction"?

That taking collective action is a matter of urgency, is born out by our own experience. But it is reinforced by new calculations showing that Osborne's "deficit" stands to be £12bn larger than expected by the end of the year. And what new "sacrifices" will the Con-Dems' demand from the working class? The same calculations show that plugging this new hole would require, for instance, raising VAT to 22.5%. We know what to expect!

Yes, it is high time we pre-empted new attacks and began to reclaim the ground lost, by getting the banks and shareholders to foot their own bills.

And they can afford it. Last week, the arrest of a 31-year old London-based trader for Swiss giant UBS showed that this bank had not even noticed the £1.5bn losses he had caused - which says something about the size of the bank's assets!

Yet, these are the banks which hold governments to ransom through their public debt while continuing to be bailed out on public funds. Last Thursday they even received a new injection of cash from central banks (including the bank of England) to boost their nose-diving share prices!

The nationalisation of the whole banking system without indemnity to shareholders and its merger into one single bank, placed under the control of the population, to serve the interests of all, is the only effective answer to the present spiral of debt and speculation - and it will have to be at the forefront of any future fightback.