WITH just a week to go to the Budget official figures have confirmed that the National Debt has risen to more than £3 trillion in September!
The response of The Daily Telegraph to this news is to attack the ‘failure to control welfare spending’ and to launch an attack on the elderly.
It adds: ‘Some of this can be attributed to the aging demographic: As more people live longer, they stop paying taxes and draw more from the state.’
It states: ‘As a measure of the pace with which this vast mountain of borrowing has grown, it is just six years since it surpassed £2 trillion, fuelled by Covid pandemic measures.’
It continues: ‘The debt represents around 94% of GDP, less than France where social spending has pushed it to around 120 per cent, with the consequences that we have seen on the streets.’
It continues: ‘Both Tory and Labour governments became addicted to borrowing ever more to appease various interest groups. On current trends, the office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that public debt could rise to 270 per cent of GDP by the mid-2070s.’
It adds: ‘There was a time when economists said that this profligacy was nothing to worry about because borrowing costs were close to zero, but this is no longer the case.
‘Indeed, with the latest inflation figures showing a jump to 3.5%, the next move in interest rates will be up.
‘The cost for servicing this debt is already more than the combined budgets for policing, justice and defence.’
It adds: ‘It is stating the obvious to say this is unsustainable and yet Labour does not have a plan for reducing the debt.’
It continues that the: ‘Spending cuts necessary to stop the inexorable debt are not on the government’s agenda and would be thwarted by their MPs if it were.
‘This is not just a financial issue, but an ethical one. We are loading an intolerable financial burden onto our children and theirs. It is immoral to continue doing so.’
This Burnham Labour government has no solution to this crisis. It cannot improve the economy however hard it tries. It is facing the historic crisis of a system that has outworn its use.
The French government is in the same boat, along with the rest of Europe.
We are living in a period of the world crisis of capitalism. Imperialism can no longer expand by colonisation and growth.
Instead, it leaves governments desperate to survive launching more brutal wars, killing more thousands of people, in an attempt to get their economies moving again.
But the working class will not bear the brunt of the crisis of the bankers and the bosses. They have had enough attacks on their living standards and will suffer no more.
The only way forward for the working class here in the UK is to force the TUC leadership to call a general strike to bring down the current right wing Labour government and to replace it with a workers government.
This will nationalise the banks and the major industries and put them under workers’ ownership.
The workers of the world have had enough of the backward out-of-date and decrepit capitalist system.
They want to see nationalised and planned economies being built that will satisfy all of the requirements of the working class and the youth, and they are prepared to fight for it.
The alternative to a socialist future is to remain under a bankrupt capitalist system that is only interested in the super-exploitation of the working class and as a result would drive the working class back to permanent wage slavery and poverty.
Millions are fighting back. Now is the time to join the WRP and the Young Socialists to build the international revolutionary leadership, the International Committee of the Fourth International, that will be able to dump capitalism into the dustbin of history and establish the World Socialist Republic.
