HEWITT and Hoon, are two of the Labour Party’s leading Blairites.
Hoon was heavily involved in Blair’s criminal Iraq war, and in the pursuit of the whistleblower Doctor Kelly, while Hewitt was booed at NHS trade union conferences because of her role in privatising the NHS, and turning it into a business.
They yesterday stabbed the Labour government in the back, and did their best to bring the Tory party back into office.
The two ex-cabinet ministers called for a parliamentary secret ballot on the leadership of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seeking to remove him from the right, with the support of other right wingers such as Frank Field and Norfolk’s Charles Clarke.
The reason for this treachery against the Labour Party is obvious.
The Tories and their backers have given up on the notion that a grateful working class is about to vote the Tory Party back into office so that it can slash billions off of every service, and put millions more on the dole.
They are now thinking more along the lines of a hung parliament.
Therefore every vote matters and anything that weakens the Labour party is good and to be welcomed.
The infamous Gang of Four played a similar role in 1981. Jenkins, Rogers, Owen and Williams led a breakaway out of the Labour Party at a time when there were 3 million unemployed after two years of the Thatcher government, and Thatcher was known as the ‘milk snatcher’ and was very very unpopular.
They weakened Labour for the benefit of the ruling Thatcherites.
Hewitt and Hoon are now weakening the Labour party to help the Tories gain office, since the right-wing Blairites are much closer to the Tories than they are to Brown.
Their open mutiny follows on from Tessa Jowell’s public misgivings that Brown might be set to fight a class war with Tory leader Cameron, and Mandelson’s well leaked opposition to any attacks on the rich and the bankers.
Their mutiny also reflects the desperate state and deepening crisis of British capitalism.
Pimco, the US investment group, has just declared that it will be selling UK government bonds next year instead of being one of the main purchasers of the hundreds of billions of UK debt.
If this trend widens, Britain will be bankrupted and the pound collapsed in no time.
At the moment, UK inflation and the cost of living is rising as a result of soaring oil prices and the restoration of the 17.5 per cent rate of VAT. The banks and big business say that along with a permanent wage freeze, and a speed up of the privatisation of the public sector, there will have to be an increase in the bank rate, despite the impact that this will have on mortgage interest rates and the repossession of homes.
They are also saying that if massive borrowing becomes impossible, then there will have to be a programme of savage cuts, similar to those in Ireland where there has been a 50 per cent cut in the jobseekers allowance for youth, and ten to fifteen per cent cuts in wages and pensions.
The Hoons, Hewitts, Fields and Clarkes inside the Labour party are putting themselves in a position to be part of a national government alongside the Tories and the Liberal Democrats to push home the savage cuts that the bourgeosie insists are becoming more and more necessary if British capitalism is to survive.
The would-be coupists inside the Labour party must be deselected as MPs and not allowed to stand at the next election, and be thrown out of the Labour party.
The trade unions must fight against the Brown government for socialist policies to defend the jobs wages and basic rights of workers.
In fact, they must fight to remove the Brown government from the left, in order to bring in a workers government that will carry out socialist policies and put an end to crisis-ridden capitalism.
