THE general election campaign by both Tories and Labour kicked off on Thursday night with separate television interviews of Cameron and Miliband.
While Miliband was reduced to insisting that he really was ‘tough’ enough for the task of rescuing British capitalism, Cameron pledged more austerity.
While Cameron claimed ‘recovery’ from the economic crash of 2008 he could not explain why, despite all the vicious austerity cuts inflicted on the working class, the budget deficit had not come down in the five years of the coalition.
This deficit, the amount the government borrows to cover the gap between its income and the amount needed to pay day to day expenses, has stubbornly refused to shift.
Not only would Cameron not say why it has not been reduced to zero, as he pledged at the last election, he wouldn’t even say how much the government was in fact borrowing on a daily basis.
What he insisted was that, if elected, the Tories would introduce £70 billion of public spending cuts, with the promise that the budget would be in surplus to the tune £23 billion.
To produce this kind of surplus will take far more than cuts of £70 billion.
As to where these cuts will be made, Cameron has stated that they will come from cutting the welfare bill, specifically he is proposing cuts to welfare payments available to those in low paid employment.
The low paid, part-time workers and those on zero hours contracts are to be made to pay off the debts run up by a bankrupt British capitalist system.
Meanwhile the bankers and financial speculators, who received over a £1 trillion of state hand-outs under Quantitative Easing and bail-outs, are living high-on-the-hog enjoying their million pound salaries and bonuses.
While they wallow in all the free money, workers and youth, especially, are being driven out onto the streets and into the gutter.
Over a million young people face being forced onto cheap labour schemes paying under £3 an hour – with refusal resulting in all their benefits being stopped.
The cuts in benefits, draconian use of ‘alleged breaches’ of jobcentre rules leading to benefits being stopped for months or even years, along with the hated bedroom tax, have seen a million workers reduced to living off the charity of food banks just to survive.
British capitalism is completely at the mercy of the world economic crisis, a crisis which is seeing massive inflation in the world stock markets (fuelled by printing over £10 trillion worth of worthless paper money under QE) and the creation of huge inflationary bubbles that threaten to burst at any time.
Such an explosive crash will dwarf what happened with the banking collapse of 2008, which directly led to the massive state debt incurred bailing out the banks, and which both Cameron and Miliband are pledged to pay off at the expense of the working class.
This impending crash will drive forward open class warfare as capitalism seeks survival by dumping the crisis on the backs of the working class.
The only way out for capitalism is to end all public expenditure on the welfare state, to destroy the NHS and free education and all the other gains made by the working class since the 1940s.
For the working class and youth the demand must be to kick out the Tories on May 7.
The WRP and Young Socialists are standing candidates in the election.
Returning Labour as a government is not enough – the crisis has gone way beyond any reformist solution, there can be no compromises today with capitalism, the only answer to the crisis is to overthrow it and advancing to a workers government and socialism.
Nevertheless, where a WRP/YS candidate is not standing we call for a class vote for Labour.
We want a big Labour victory that will create the conditions where the working class will engage in revolutionary mass actions to take back from the bosses and bankers everything that has been stolen from them since 2008. We want a socialist revolution, to go forward to a workers government.
In constituencies where the WRP/YS are standing we call on every worker and young person to vote for our socialist programme and to join our party to provide the leadership to carry through the British socialist revolution which is now on the agenda!
