YESTERDAY Labour leader Ed Miliband delivered his keynote speech to the party conference in which he firmly aligned himself with every reactionary anti-working class policy of the Cameron government.
The entire speech revolved around just one theme – that we are all in it together and we all need to pull together to ‘grow’ Britain out of the crisis.
The highly personalised account of his own schooling, at an ordinary comprehensive, was clearly an attempt to prove how different he is from David Cameron and the public school-educated majority of the coalition cabinet.
When it comes to the question of who will pay for the crisis of capitalism, however, there is no such divide between Cameron and Miliband – both are agreed it will be the working class that pays.
This was made plain on the first day of the conference in the speech by Ed Balls the shadow chancellor of the exchequer.
The speech was devoted to proving to the capitalist class that Labour remains a ‘safe pair of hands’, that the spending cuts and wage freeze introduced by the coalition would remain under any future Labour government, and promising a ‘zero-based’ spending review in the first year of any Labour government.
A zero-based review of spending means keeping every single cut to jobs and wages in order to bail out the bankrupt British capitalist system.
After insisting that recovery would be achieved through ‘cross party consensus’, Balls invoked the spirit of the 1945 Labour government of Clement Attlee – the government that brought in the Welfare State.
After lauding the Summer Olympics as the greatest thing since sliced bread he told conference: ‘Let me remind you of an even greater summer still – the summer of 1945’, he went on: ‘our task is to recapture the spirit and values and national purpose of that time.’
In attempting to compare today’s Labour Party with that of 1945, Balls is twisting history to suit his own reactionary ends.
The fact of the matter is that the Attlee government was swept into power at the end of the Second World War by a working class that, having lived through the poverty of the 1930s and the subsequent horrors of war, was absolutely determined not to return to those days.
Far from being achieved through any ‘consensus’ the Welfare State and the NHS were achieved in the teeth of ferocious opposition from the ruling class by a Labour government that was completely the opposite in character to the Labour Party of today.
Far from defending, let alone extending, the NHS it was the Blair government, with Brown and Balls in charge of the treasury, that enthusiastically took on the policy of privatisation of the NHS in the form of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
PFI today has bankrupted hospitals all over the country – this is the Labour Party’s legacy to the NHS.
If the Attlee government represented the highest point of reformism then the present Labour leadership must surely represent its all-time reactionary low.
No speeches from Miliband or Balls about how they would be ‘fairer’ than Cameron and Osborne can disguise the fact that they are hell-bent on pursuing the same policies of savage cuts and privatisation in order to keep this bankrupt capitalist system limping along.
Reformism today cannot defend the gains that it was once able to secure for the working class.
The international economic crisis allows no room for capitalism to survive in any way other than through driving the working class into the ground and beyond.
For the working class there is no other way forward than to demand that the unions break with the Labour Party, remove this coalition through the weapon of the general strike and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
