THE decaying and gangrenous state of bourgeois democracy and its parliamentary system has been more than revealed by the expenses scandals that are racking the main bourgeois parties, whether Labour, Tory or Liberal.
Whether it is Tory grandees claiming expenses for their moats or employing their families, or the Labourites ‘flipping’ their clutch of homes, the message is loud and clear – the bourgeois democratic shell has cracked open to reveal the nest of vipers at work and play, preaching restraint and responsibility to the masses, while grabbing and devouring everything that is being made available to them by the state.
The fact that it is the Daily Telegraph that has taken the knife out and plunged it into the three major parliamentary parties is also food for thought.
Others have gone further than the Telegraph, namely the Thatcherite Norman Tebbit.
He is the politician who told the three million unemployed after 1979 to get on their bikes and look for jobs that didn’t exist.
His government also brought in the expenses regime that has led to the current scandals.
Tebbit, a former Tory chairman, yesterday called for the people to boycott the major political parties at next month’s European elections.
He says that the people must fire a shot across the bows of the big parties, but that he is not asking them to vote BNP.
It seems that he favours another extreme right-wing party, the UK Independence Party.
Lord Tebbit told Today: ‘What I am advising people is to show the major parties that it is the electors who are masters and the electors are extremely upset with their employees in the House of Commons and I said don’t vote for the major parties.’
Asked if there was a danger of damaging democracy, he said: ‘There is nothing wrong with the House of Commons. The institution is sound. It is in good order.
‘What is wrong is that the people who are currently in it are misbehaving. They need a pretty powerful shot across their bows.’
In fact, bourgeois democracy has collapsed under the weight of the contradictions of capitalism that have just produced the greatest crisis of the system, greater than the 1930s crisis.
This crisis led to fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany and the winding up of the parliamentary charade in favour of concentration camps.
In the 1930s Germany was the sick man of Europe.
There is not the slightest doubt that Britain today occupies that position amongst the major EU states.
The bourgeoisie knows that it cannot impose the drastic changes it wants to make, which amount to the destruction of the 1948 postwar compromise that produced the Welfare State, without the most determined attacks on the working class and the middle class, which will invoke a response of a like kind.
The period of class compromise is over and the period of class war is ahead. It will decide which class pays for the crisis, whether it is the working class, which will be thrust back to where it came from, or the ruling class which will be forced off the scene of history and into a museum.
Corrupt parliaments and corrupt MPs, of which there has always been a great number, from the days of the ‘rotten boroughs’, are of little use in this critical situation.
This is why the Telegraph, which is definitely not a fascist newspaper, has decided to act in a way that gives the BNP a leg up in the forthcoming Euro elections. The ruling class feels that in the period ahead it will need some stormtroopers.
For the working class the diseased state of bourgeois democracy is a warning that it must build up its revolutionary party to take the power and abolish capitalism, or else it will reap the whirlwind.
