WORKERS’ wages will be slashed even more as inflation hits a peak of 3.4% this year, according to an analysis by the National Institute of Economic & Social Research.
With public sector wages, including NHS staff, capped by the Tories at 1% and wage increases for other workers generously estimated to rise by 2.7%, this rate of inflation represents a massive cut in the disposable income of every worker in the country.
These figures of course do not take into account the millions who will not receive any pay rise at all – the so-called ‘self employed’ and those on zero-hours contracts. With the privatised energy companies driving up bills by about 10%, councils imposing massive increases in council tax in a desperate effort to make up for the cuts imposed upon them by the Tories, along with dramatic increases in the price of essentials, household budgets will be stretched to breaking point.
Already low-paid workers like nurses are being forced to rely on the charity of food banks because their wages simply won’t cover living and food costs. A future of mass poverty and quite literally starvation is all that capitalism holds for the working class, as the bankers insist that pay-cutting caps on wages, along with the destruction of spending on the welfare state, are absolutely necessary to bring down the massive state debt run up by government sponsored bail outs of the bankrupt banks following the economic crash of 2008.
This makes a complete mockery of the claims by Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, that the only problem with capitalism is that it is ‘rigged’ by the Tories in favour of the rich and that a Labour government could somehow un-rig the system.
The entire capitalist system is run for the benefit of the capitalist class and no other class. The only future for the working class is in the overthrow of capitalism and advancing to a socialist society.
This is a step that Corbyn is not prepared to make. His speech this week opening Labour’s election campaign deliberately omitted any reference to socialism and instead simply called for capitalism to be made fairer.
Corbyn’s desire not to alienate the right-wing of the Labour Party with talk of socialism was evident again during an interview with the BBC when he refused six times to give a straight answer to the question whether a Labour government would definitely obey the overwhelming vote by workers to leave the EU.
Instead, he prevaricated wildly, saying: ‘Look there’s a clear vote in the referendum a year ago. But there is now the negotiations which have already begun.’ Corbyn’s prevarication is aimed at appeasing the Labour Party right-wing who are determined at all costs to keep British capitalism tied to the wreckage of the bosses’ and bankers’ EU, despite the EU referendum result.
This same right-wing cannot be appeased, and made its own intervention in the election yesterday by leaking to the Daily Telegraph that 100 Labour MPs are preparing to resign if Labour loses the election, split the party and form a new ‘progressive’ party. If they cannot run the Labour Party they prefer to destroy it.
They want to form an anti-working class coalition with the Tories and Liberals to organise to smash all of the gains of the working class to save bankrupt British capitalism. Ever since his election, Corbyn has done everything possible to appease the Labour right-wing and every retreat by him has only led to them increasing their demands for a ditching of even a verbal commitment to socialism. Now the crunch has come.
Only by fighting on an openly socialist programme of expropriating the bosses and bankers to make them pay for the crisis of their system can the Labour Party win this election. Pathetic calls for fairness while workers face seeing their lives being destroyed by capitalism will only turn workers away in disgust.
Only the WRP is standing in this election on a clear programme of fighting for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism through the expropriation of the bosses and bankers and going forward to socialism. We call on workers and youth to vote Labour on June 8th to kick out the Tories and in the five constituencies where we are standing to vote WRP and for socialist revolution in the UK, and throughout Europe and the USA!
