IN HIS speech outside Downing Street on Monday PM Johnson made it crystal clear that the Tory Party, presiding over the greatest ever crisis of British capitalism, is well aware that it is skating on the thinnest of thin ice, and that, despite its 80-plus majority, it and British capitalism will not be able to survive without the support of the Labour and trade union leaders.
After his speech, a Downing Street spokesman confirmed that Johnson is due to speak to Labour Party leader Starmer about policies to relax and end the ‘lockdown’.
Yesterday morning, the Guardian newspaper confirmed that Tory ministers have already held meetings with trade union leaders about ending the lockdown and the working class returning to work.
The truth is that British capitalism will be returning to work completely bankrupted. The state and the government have already expended over £400bn keeping the bankrupt ruling capitalist class afloat, with air transport giants completely collapsed, and with the steel and other industries demanding ever more subsidies.
The ruling capitalist class has been shattered and cannot exist without massive multi-billions in state aid, while the millions of the middle class have been wiped out, losing everything.
A return to work organised by Johnson with the collaboration of the Labour Party – which is now seriously considering joining a national government with Johnson and the Tories – will see the working class being screwed for all it is worth with wages, hours and conditions being ‘renegotiated’ as the bosses drive to get out of the crisis by returning the working class to the 1930s.
With capitalism seeing the biggest share crashes in its history and oil prices falling below one dollar a barrel, the trade unions leaders will be asked to get the working class back to work with a promise that after a decade or so of austerity, normal life can be restored. Of course, in the national interest strikes will be ‘out of the question’. It is not even going to be jam tomorrow.
The working class must spell it out to the trade union bureaucracy that Labour joining a national government and doing a Ramsay McDonald will see the trade unions breaking with it and transferring their support to a party that is prepared to battle for the basic rights of workers, to bring down the Tories and go forward to socialism.
The WRP is the only such party in the UK!
Trade union leaders that support a national government and returning to work under conditions where basic gains, such as the right to strike, are wiped out and working conditions worsened must be replaced by revolutionary leaders ready to use the power of the working class and the revolutionary youth to get rid of capitalism and go forward to socialism.
In Monday’s Business Section of the Daily Telegraph John O’Connell, the chief executive of the TaxPayers Alliance, lifted the ruling class veil on what it has to do and what it is planning.
He wrote of the national debt: ‘The 18th century saw British debt grow to unprecedented levels. It was driven by the wars of the Spanish and Austrian Succession and by the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 national debt eclipsed annual GDP for the first time at 103 per cent.’
He warns that there were revolutionary consequences of that debt. ‘By 1764 the British government had no choice but to address it with taxes in North America, teeing up the War of Independence in 1775.’
He lauds Margaret Thatcher as ‘getting close to low debt levels’. She is remembered as the ‘milk snatcher’ and for her war against the miners, the seafarers, the Fleet Street printers, and the Poll Tax. The debt crisis was taken out of the hide of the working class!
O’Connell concludes that if the UK is to reduce debt at the post-1939-45 war pace, this would need to fall by 5.3% annually for eight years, and adds: ‘Whether the government can do that will decide the next chapter of our history.’
The working class must not allow the trade union and labour bureaucracy to sell out to the ruling class.
The revolutionary leadership of the WRP and the YS must be built in the working class and amongst the youth to mobilise the working class to carry out the British socialist revolution. This is the only way forward! There is no other!
