BROWN’S ‘bad night for Labour’ was the direct result of a self-inflicted wound – Brown’s Thatcherite policies – that cost Labour up to 300 council seats, with its share of the vote falling to 24%.
The Tories got 44 per cent of what was a miniscule 35 per cent turnout.
This debacle happened because the Prime Minister not only insisted on carrying on with the completely discredited privatising, wage cutting, deregulating policies of the former Prime Minister Blair, he actually decided to speed them up, and deepen them in the face of the developing crisis of capitalism.
Brown emphasised the essence of Blairism, that nothing can be allowed to get in the way of the interests of the bosses and the bankers.
Under Blair and Brown this had seen Britain develop into a country where the poor were on a higher rate of tax than the rich, and where big business was enriching itself out of the privatisation of the NHS and education.
Brown’s premiership coincided with the eruption of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, and its spread worldwide.
Brown’s response was to give the Northern Bank over £100 billion to prevent its collapse, and to pledge to the British banks £60 billion, to begin with, to provide them with cash reserves, with their bad mortgage and credit card debts accepted as collateral.
Under Brown the job of the government is to defend the interests of the bankers and the bosses, no matter what. The role of the working class is to hand over the cash to allow this policy to operate.
Unlimited subsidy to the banks has gone side by side with the robbery of the working class and the middle class. To keep the banks subsidised, Brown has decreed three-year wage-cutting deals for the public sector workers, offering a less than 2.5% ‘wage rise’ a year, at a time when the real cost of living, in terms of basic working class necessities, has rocketed up by about 30% in the last year.
To rub in his basic principle that the poor must sacrifice for the rich, Brown insisted in pushing through his policy of ending the lower rate of tax for the poor of 10%, and making them pay a higher rate than the rich, of 20%.
This pushed five million of the lowest paid into greater poverty. It is these policies and this approach that has seen the support for the Labour Party collapse.
This is the approach that led Brown to bring in anti Labour politicians such as Lord Jacks and military men, such as Admiral West into his government.
This is at a time when oil has reached $120 a barrel and is tipped to reach $200 a barrel, and when millions are frightened that they are about to lose their jobs, pensions and homes.
One thing is for sure, the bankers men and women that make up the Brown cabinet will not change their policies.
What is required in this case is surgery, the cutting out of the cancer, before the Brown government succeeds in bringing back a Tory government with a massive majority.
This means that the membership of the trade unions, the organisations that built and still finance the Labour Party, must insist that the trade unions act to tell Brown to go, or else they will refuse to finance the Labour Party, and will only back, finance and support local Labour parties and candidates that stand for socialist policies.
Prime Minister Brown and his policies are the biggest aid to the return of the Tories.
For the working class and the middle class to have a future, capitalism must be overthrown and socialism brought in through a socialist revolution.
The revolutionary leadership of the WRP must be rapidly built up inside the trade unions and from the millions of youth who hate capitalism and the bourgeois order.
The way forward is to make sure that the Brown government is brought down from the left, not the right.
This means mobilising the working class for a general strike to bring down the Brown government, in order to bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in socialism.
