THE Royal Bank of Scotland was rescued with billions of taxpayers’ money after it made the biggest losses in the history of British banking, when the credit bubble, which it helped create, burst.
Now, the bosses of this state-maintained bank have simply pocketed the billions, and reined back on providing loans for mortgages and businesses. The same RBS now aims to hand over a billion in bonuses to its failed ‘traders’.
This is at a time when unemployment is rocketing upwards towards three million and sackings and wage cuts are taking place across the board.
Royal Mail is planning to sack 16,000 workers, the Corus steel industry is sacking thousands, the motor car industry is on short time, with Ford announcing that it is cancelling a negotiated wage rise and therefore imposing a wage cut, while also sacking 800 workers, and Vauxhall is bringing in hours cuts and wage cuts.
Yesterday, BA announced that it intends to freeze (cut) the wages of its 42,000 staff and make thousands redundant, while up and down the country thousands of job-based pensions schemes are collapsing.
The bankers are able to proceed as if their great crash never happened, while the working class and the middle classes are having their lives destroyed and their children’s futures blighted.
Chancellor Alistair Darling has told RBS, in which the state now has a 68 per cent stake, that failure should not be rewarded with huge bonuses, but has refused to ban the bonus payments.
Instead, this bankers’ government has ordered an inquiry into bank management generally.
No inquiry is necessary. Everybody knows that capitalist banking equals swindling, and that the bankers are using the vast sums of public money and guarantees handed over to them to carry on with their former ruling-class life-styles.
What is required is not inquiries into banks but action against the bosses and bankers who are behaving like Marie Antoinettes. On the eve of the French revolution she said of the masses ‘let them eat cake’.
All the banks must be nationalised and put under workers’ management with their boards sacked.
Meanwhile, the Brown government is condemning power workers for fighting for the right to work, and the economic crisis unleashed by the banking collapses is deepening.
There has been a huge rise in the number of firms going bust in England and Wales because of the crisis. The Insolvency Service said that in the last three months of 2008 there were 2,428 corporate insolvencies such as administrations and receiverships.
That was a 220% rise on the same period the year before.
In the same period, 29,444 people were made bankrupt or entered an individual voluntary arrangement (IVA), 19% more than a year ago.
Of those, 19,100 were bankruptcies while 10,344 were IVAs.
Meanwhile, in the US, non-farming unemployment has now reached 11.6 million people, with 582,000 non-farming jobs going in January. Unemployment is increasing at a rate of over 500,000 non-farm jobs every month, that is over six million jobs a year.
Nothing has been seen like this since the 1930s.
The Labour government over and over again has shown that it is only concerned with bosses and bankers.
The latest example is the way that Brown has ripped up his pledge, made to the postal workers, that the Royal Mail would not be privatised. Privatisation is now to go ahead costing tens of thousands of jobs, plus wage and pension cuts.
Action is needed to defend the interests of the working class. Sackings and wage cuts must be opposed with occupations as at Waterford Crystal and demands for the nationalisation of industries. The Brown government must be brought down by a general strike, and a workers government brought in that will get rid of bankrupt capitalism by bringing in a socialist planned economy. This is what must be done.
