AT yesterday’s Labour Party conference Premier Brown focused on the ‘wrong choices’ that the Tories had made over policies to deal with the financial crash, contrasting his interventionist Keynesian approach with their more traditional bourgeois attitude of allowing the bankrupt bourgeois to go to the wall.
However, the choice that he made was an alternative way of saving capitalism. Brown printed money, and gave massive guarantees to the banks, to save the bankers and save capitalism.
With the budget deficit reaching £175 billion, and the national debt close to £1 trillion, the working class and the middle class now have to pay for the costs of the rescue.
Brown refused on principle to resolve the capitalist crisis through expropriating the bourgeoisie to go forward to socialism. He is a bourgeois servant of the capitalist class.
All Brown did yesterday was to try to apply some verbal sticking plaster to the gaping wounds his rescue is causing.
Brown said: ‘Every day we are facing the business choice – to support our companies from car manufacturers to the self-employed or simply let great British businesses go to the wall. And we are making our choice.’
In fact, Labour is making its choice, it is letting the GM factories in the UK go to the wall, as it let the LDV van company go to the wall, and will let one Jaguar Land Rover factory go to the wall.
He tried to depict the crisis of capitalism as a moral issue and not as an inseparable part of capitalism.
He said: ‘One day last October the executive of a major bank told us that his bank needed only overnight finance but no long-term support from the government.
‘The next day I found that this bank was going under with debts that were among the biggest of any bank, anywhere, at any time in history. Bankers had lost sight of basic British values, acting responsibly and acting fairly. The values that we, the hard working majority, live by every day.’
Brown tried to spread the nonsense that if the bankers had acted according to alleged British values the crisis would have never happened.
So, basically there is nothing wrong with capitalism that a Christian moral crusade cannot put right! This is cretinism running riot.
He added: ‘When markets falter and banks fail it’s the jobs and the homes and the security of the squeezed middle that are hit the hardest. It’s the hard pressed, hard working majority – the person with a trade, the small business owner, the self-employed. It’s the class room assistant, the worker in the shop, the builder on the site.’
So what is he going to do about these immoral bankers. Expropriate them and bring in socialism. No!
Yesterday he said ‘I say to you today; markets need morals.’ Missionary Brown is going to bring morals to Threadneedle Street!
He added: ‘we will pass a new law to intervene on bankers’ bonuses whenever they put the economy at risk.’ And ‘any director of any of our banks who is negligent will be disqualified from holding any such post.’ Humanity is condemned to carry ‘immoral’ bankers on its shoulders for ever, as a form of penance no doubt.
On the eve of the unleashing of the most savage cuts in the history of capitalism, Brown had the gall to tell the conference, ‘And so I tell you this about our aims for the rescue of the banks: the British people will not pay for the banks. No, the banks will pay back the British people.’
Nobody believes this, not even those Labourites who were hysterically clapping this tripe.
Brown rescued the banking class, and the working class and the middle class are going to be presented with a bill amounting to £200bn plus.
Brown and the Tories just constitute two wings of the bourgeoisie. This is why the working class must bring down the Brown government to go forward to a workers government that will carry out socialist policies and go forward to a socialist society.
