Is this a sign of weakness on the government's part or are they giving themselves time to prepare new anti-trade union legislation to weaken our response? Ministers are looking at raising the threshold in a strike ballot so that a strike would only be lawful if more than 50% of those entitled to vote backed a strike.
We cannot be lulled into a force sense of security, if the government backs down it will signal a complete departure from their austerity programme they will be weakened, so we cannot count on them making a U-turn. Instead we must up our game, we must take the opportunity to build unity across all of the public sector trade unions, we must recruit and organise the millions of workers in the public sector who will be prepared to defend their pension savings.
We must all understand that this proposal is nothing more than the theft of our money, the money we are saving for our retirement, every public sector worker and trade union member must now understand we are really in this together, all together in a battle that will define the history of our movement and our people.
History tells us we cannot afford to lose, the plans to impose the costs of saving the banks on us must be torn up and the power to do that is in our hands.