THE News Line and Workers Revolutionary Party extend our condolences to the family of Labour MP Jo Cox who was murdered in her West Yorkshire constituency on Thursday.
The man alleged to have committed the crime has been identified in the bourgeois press as a 54-year-old with a history of mental illness with links to extreme right-wing groups. All these allegations may or may not be true but what is indisputable is that this act did not occur in isolation.
The effect of the world crisis of capitalism bearing down on a weak British economy and the massive attacks by the Tory government on the NHS and the entire welfare state has created huge, explosive tensions within society, which are now erupting.
Many working families are quite literally at the end of their tether, desperate to hold on in the face of unending austerity cuts forced on them by a Tory government determined to slash public expenditure to the bone in order to pay off the debts that the capitalist state assumed from the banks when they collapsed in 2008.
Bankers and bloated capitalists like Phillip Green loot billions from BHS; companies like Sports Direct coin billions for their owner while their workers face a work regime that would not be out of place in a 19th century cotton mill, while hospitals and mental health provisions are closed because of cuts: it is inevitable that the social pressures in society have reached a breaking point.
The inevitable consequence is that some individuals explode in anger and frustration and strike out with tragic consequences. This explosion does not take place in isolation from capitalist society; it is the product of the capitalist crisis.
The situation has been made increasingly intolerable by the whole campaign of threats issued daily by the Cameron pro-EU Tories and their supporters in the Labour Party. In order to frighten workers into voting to remain in the capitalist EU, Osborne, along with Labour’s former Chancellor Alistair Darling, this week ratcheted up the pressure by threatening extreme retribution if workers dared vote ‘Leave’.
They promised an emergency budget of cuts that would destroy welfare and the health service and overnight reduce the entire working class to levels of poverty not seen since the 19th century. They have deliberately sought to introduce a climate of fear, and terrorise people into voting ‘Remain’.
The message couldn’t be clearer, especially since the Labour leadership are preparing to enter a crisis national government with the Tories to keep Cameron in power in the event of a ‘Leave’ vote, and then help him impoverish workers and their families as a form of punishment.
The latest plan being hatched is to either ignore the result of a ‘Leave’ referendum, on the grounds that parliament is sovereign, or bring in such savage cuts, that people demand a new referendum. That such stunts would touch off an explosion of individual anger of all kinds, as well as the revolutionary anger of the working class is obvious.
British capitalism, through its enthusiastic participation in imperialist wars to smash up the Middle East and North Africa and drive millions into misery, created the conditions for the growth of terrorist organisations like IS. Now, through its class war on the Welfare State on the Home Front and its attempt to have a diktat over the EU, it has produced its first home-grown terrorist.
The News Line does not support terrorism, but does understand why Tory attacks and Labour’s refusal to fight them drives some people towards terrorism. The responsibility lies with a bankrupt, decaying ruling class and its capitalist system that can offer workers and young people no future and in its death agony has created an intolerable society where the rich flaunt their vast wealth and the majority are expected to quietly starve.
There is only one way to fight capitalism in crisis, and that is for workers to vote to ‘Leave’ in next Thursday’s referendum and then block the way to any crisis coalition agreement between the Labour Party and the Cameron Tories by bringing down the government, and bringing in a workers government and socialism. This workers government will join the workers of Europe to tear down the EU, and its bankers and bosses, and in their stead build the Socialist United States of Europe.
