RAPIDLY rising food, gas, electricity and petrol prices pushed up the cost of living in January, even according to the government’s rigged inflation rate figures.
Last month’s Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation figure rose to 2.2 per cent, up from 2.1 per cent in December. The Retail Price Index (RPI), which includes mortgage interest payments, rose to 4.1 per cent from 4 per cent in December.
However, gas and electricity charges have gone up by up to 20 per cent. Prices have inflated to the point where even Tory newspapers are estimating that the cost of living for a typical family has gone up by between £1,300 and £1,700 a year.
The Brown government is seeking to slash wages through imposing three-year wage deals, at well below the 2.2 per cent figure. Such a tactic is calculated to allow the state to disperse secretly, billions of pounds more to Britain’s bankrupt bankers!
Faced with this situation where the government and the ruling class are coming for their members, the trade union leaders are shivering in their shoes.
They are even unable to state that in a period of rampant inflation they are opposed to three-year pay deals in principle, and that they will urge their members to take strike action to win living wage increases, to sustain themselves and their families.
With the banks no longer wanting to lend, production is falling, at the same time as the Middle Eastern wars are driving oil prices through the roof.
Oil prices have been driven up to near $100 a barrel, and petrol is now at more than £5 a gallon.
With wages being slashed and the banks cutting out all cheap credit the number of new mortgages granted to home buyers slumped to just 62,000 in December 2007, 35 per cent lower than at the same point a year ago. At the same time the number of house repossessions is rising rapidly.
A housing crash is on the way.
Price inflation of goods leaving UK factories has reached its highest rate in 16 years. Annual output price inflation reached 5.7 per cent in January, up from 5 per cent the previous month, while prices paid by factories for their raw materials surged by 18.7 per cent in the 12 months to the end of January making the commodities much more difficult to sell.
The capitalist crisis is driving production down and inflation up.
What the working class requires, in this situation of a developing economic catastrophe, is a new and revolutionary leadership, and a programme of action to defend wages, jobs and basic rights, and to resolve the capitalist crisis.
The trade unions must call immediate strike action to win wage increases corresponding to the real inflation rate.
The unions must also draw up their own cost of living index and insist on rises every three months to keep up with the rises in the real inflation rate.
Factories that the bosses declare must close must be occupied and a national campaign organised to nationalise them.
Not a single home must be repossessed by the banks. The trade unions must fight for the nationalisation of the banks and the abolition of mortgage debt.
There must be a programme of public works to build a million new council homes to solve the housing crisis and also to employ large numbers of youth who can learn real skills and receive trade union rates of pay.
In this period of capitalist crisis the WRP must be built into the leadership of the masses of workers and youth in the process of the organisation of the British socialist revolution.
This is the only way to resolve the crisis of capitalism by bringing in a planned socialist economy that will allow the working class to take society forward to socialism.
