THE Blair government suffered two body-blows yesterday. Blair’s main cabinet ally, Blunkett, was forced to resign, and the government’s 66 majority was reduced to 1, in a vote over the section of his terror bill dealing with glorifying or encouraging terrorism.
The Home Secretary, Clarke, has now given up his attempt to keep in the bill a 90 day custody period for holding people without charge.
Blair meanwhile, is intent on pressing ahead at full speed into the rocks. He intends to introduce a bourgeois market into education, and also to transform the NHS’ Primary Care Trusts, which consume 75 per cent of the NHS budget, from practitioners carrying out clinical services into purchasers of these services from the private sector. This will see the NHS Primary Care budget handed over to private medicine.
The Royal College of Nursing is seeking a judicial review of this measure on the grounds that there has been no consultation about it. In fact, not even the House of Commons has discussed this huge privatisation leap.
In addition to these extreme privatisation measures, the new Minister for Work and Pensions, Hatton, has been told that he must proceed to make savage cuts in all disability benefits, to force the disabled into work.
These measures, as well as others such as ridding the public sector of final salary pensions and raising the retirement age from 60-65, are opposed by the working class, as well as by large numbers of Labour MPs who see them as general election losers.
On the issue of foreign policy, the Defence Minister Reid has just assured the US that Britain will send as many troops to Afghanistan as Bush requires at the same time as the British troops in Iraq are to be reinforced.
All these measures are opposed by millions of workers.
This means that Blair is skating on the thinnest of thin ice, and not even the trade union leaders will be able to save him from the fury of the working class.
The Tories meanwhile, are frantically seeking to reorganise themselves to take over from the crisis ridden Blair regime. Its great virtue, as far as the Tories are concerned, was that it held the fort and even advanced the privatisation cause at a time when the Tory party was flat on its back.
Now they feel that Blair has shot his bolt, and has done as much as he can for the bosses, leaving only one more deed for him to carry out – to split the Labour Party and do a Ramsaymac – form a national government with the Tories – in the event of a general election bringing in a hung parliament.
The issue for the working class is that it must bring down the Blair government, and smash its privatisation policies, in order to go forward to a workers’ government, to carry out socialist policies, as the only way of barring the way to a return of the Tories.
There is not the slightest doubt that a massive explosion of working class anger is coming against Blair’s privatisation policies at home and his imperialist policy abroad.
The need of the hour is to build up the revolutionary leadership of the WRP in order to lead the working class forward, from bringing down the Blair government to taking the power and establishing a workers’ government that will smash the capitalist state and go forward to socialism.
The spontaneous movement of the working class, however powerfully it emerges onto the scene, cannot complete the job without having at its head a tried and tested revolutionary leadership, trained to lead the struggle for power.
The WRP is that leadership. All workers and youth who want to go forward to a workers’ government to smash capitalism must join the WRP today.
