CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown published a pamphlet Global Europe-Full Employment and penned a special article in the Financial Times yesterday, lecturing the leaders of European Union governments.
He told them why they must forge ahead with deregulation, privatisation and attacks on workers’ rights and welfare.
Brown could not have chosen a worse day to go public on his anti-working class agenda for Europe. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published its latest report into the state of the British capitalist economy and this makes grim reading for the Labour government.
The OECD, an organisation of 30 of the richest countries set up after World War II to rebuild capitalism, forecast that economic growth this year would be just 1.7 per cent, well below the 3-3.5 per cent predicted by the Chancellor in the spring Budget.
Unabashed by the deepening crisis of the British capitalist economy and worsening disarray in government finances, Brown is trying to set the agenda for the EU summit on Europe’s economic future at Hampton Court later this month.
Brown declared yesterday: ‘Now is the time for action. . . A make-or-break summit chaired by Britain will be held this month on European social and economic reform. . .
‘That is why I am publishing detailed proposals ahead of the summit, calling for reforms in labour and capital markets, in trade and in macro-policy to achieve faster European growth.’
He demanded ‘a new social model’ in which ‘the whole emphasis must shift to equipping people for jobs and helping people into work, removing labour market rigidities and combining new incentives with new obligations to take up jobs’.
In contrast to the spin put on the state of the British economy by the Labour government, the OECD report provides a glimpse of the grim reality.
Certainly Britain ranks near the top when it comes to scant market regulation, but it ranks 14th for GDP per capita, 15th for productivity per hour, 17th for skills, 14th for research and development and 17th for infrastructure competitiveness.
What this means is that Britain’s rail and road infrastructure is backward, workers have antiquated equipment so they produce less, there is little investment in modernising production and only one country (New Zealand) has less young people in post-16 education than Britain.
This is why the wealth created per head of the population (GDP per capita) is less than nearly all the other major capitalist states.
And this is the model that Brown wants other EU countries to follow!
It has already been rejected by workers in Britain, who do not want more Rovers and Gate Gourmets. They oppose the situation where employers can legally just sack workers as a result of removing ‘labour market rigidities’.
The working class rejects replacing skilled work on decent wages with casual, part-time jobs on the minimum wage, with no entitlement to sick pay and paid holidays.
This opposition to the raft of policies advocated by Brown was seen clearly at the recent conferences of both the TUC and Labour Party, where his whole ‘reform’ agenda was overwhelmingly voted down.
Undaunted, Brown is now putting himself forward as the leader of the pack in the EU, looking for allies amongst right-wingers like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, the French Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, who hopes to be the next German Chancellor.
His problem is that these are not hunting hounds, but rather ‘lame ducks’ after the drubbing they have received at the hands of the working class. The general strike in France 10 days ago left the Gaullist government stunned and Merkel does not even have a government at the moment.
It is clear that the British capitalist economy is heading for disaster, with other EU economies on the same track.
What is on the agenda is not Brown’s ‘new social model’ but the European Socialist Revolution.
The working class must mobilise to bring down the Labour government, Merkel in Germany and the Gaullists in France, and replace them with workers’ governments, which will open the way for a United Socialist States of Europe.
