YESTERDAY’S speech to the Charity Commission by Tory prime minister, Theresa May, attracted much comment on her proposals on raising the profile of mental health problems in Britain and tackling the ‘stigma of mental health’.
The fact that May pledged to deal with the problem of mental health while at the same time avoiding pledging any new money to the NHS mental health service – a service that has seen the number of dedicated mental health nurses cut by over 6,000 in the past six years or £60 million cuts to local mental health budgets – has led some to dismiss May’s speech as being ‘vacuous platitudes’.
This is absolutely correct but May’s speech was much more than that. In it was expressed forcibly the very real fear of the Tories and the ruling class of revolution. Her speech was the first of a whole series May intends to deliver across the country extolling her new ‘vision’ for society after the Brexit vote.
All through her speech May talked of the ‘burning injustices’ being felt by workers and young people. She spoke of the ‘everyday injustices’ ordinary working class families experienced especially those ‘just getting by’.
Workers just surviving a hand to mouth existence and feeling ‘locked out of the political process’ as she put it. May highlighted last year’s Brexit vote saying that this body blow to British capitalism by workers was the consequence of the growing number of workers feeling ‘excluded’ not only from the politics of Westminster and Brussels but also excluded from the prosperity of the bankers and bosses.
‘Resentment grows’ May complained when workers see the capitalist free market and globalisation working against them while ‘bankers are playing the system’. May went on to say that following the Brexit vote Britain was entering a period of ‘great national change’ which meant stepping back to ask what is the future for the country.
It is this future that the Tories and the ruling class are terrified of with May saying that the ‘mainstream centre’ political parties have failed to address the rising tide of anger in the working class, a tide that is in essence revolutionary. She warned that if the bourgeois parties failed to act then the working class would ‘embrace the fringe’.
May made it clear what this fringe was when she referred to the rise of ‘hard left’ political parties, anti-austerity parties that have swept through Europe and caused the downfall of the Italian president and threaten the very existence of the EU. The ‘hard-left’ she insisted ‘stand on the shoulders of politicians who have ‘abandoned the centre ground and promoted a system that profited a few.’
To counter this May is proposing a new Tory vision of the ‘shared society’ in which the unemployed and those on welfare will be dumped and left on benefits that are being cut to below poverty levels while the ‘just managing’ will be showered with speeches saying how much May shares their pain while insisting that there is no actual money to help them.
May’s vision is about trying to win the working class back by verbally attacking ‘the cult of individualism’ and promoting the concept of a fair society run by a Tory government that supports free market capitalism but that will ‘stop the excesses of the minority.’
Her speech is a clear sign of the fear that is stalking the capitalist class of a revolutionised working class that will no longer accept poverty and starvation as the price for keeping bankrupt British capitalism afloat.
She is expressing the desperation of a ruling class that is seeing its traditional parties destroyed by this mass movement of workers and young people, who are daily reaching the conclusion that the only solution is to bring down the Tories through the organisation of a general strike and going forward to a workers government that will end the excesses of the bosses and bankers and end inequality by expropriating the capitalists under a planned socialist economy.
This demands the building of the WRP as the party to lead the developing socialist revolution that May is so scared of – join today!
