TORY leader Cameron was allowed to bluff his way through yesterday’s debate, on his special statement on the Murdoch-Coulson scandal, held after it caused the resignation of two police chiefs, and a major crisis in the government and the state.
He was able to do this after Labour leader Miliband limited his demands to one of Cameron making an apology, so that both of them could tackle the problem of all powerful press barons and alleged bent policemen. He refused to call for the Prime Minister to resign.
Cameron had been forced to fly back from Africa after the issue exploded in his absence, threatening his premiership. He had to extend parliament by an extra day so that the issue could be debated.
Relying on the pathetic weakness of the reformist Labour Party leaders he bluffed and hollered his way forward, showing a real contempt for parliament.
He refused to apologise for hiring the ex-News of the World editor Coulson, who was involved in phone hacking at the News of the World.
He refused to deny that he had ever discussed BSkyB with the Murdochs or their representatives at one of their many meetings, just stating that ‘I never had any inappropriate conversations’.
He added that he was unaware that the now arrested ex-News International editor Wallis, who after being hired by the police acted as an adviser to the other ex-News International editor, Coulson, who has also been arrested, but was then running the government’s media department.
He continued to refuse to deal with the number of warnings that had been made to him by Ashdown, Clegg and other bourgeois politicians against hiring Coulson. and refused to answer.
However, the chamber of the House of Commons is not the country.
Outside the House of Commons millions of working class and middle class people and their children are suffering because of the banking crash, caused by Cameron’s friends, the bankers, and his policy that the bankers’ debts have to be paid by working people, through wage cuts, mass unemployment, £9000 tuition fees, pension cuts and cuts and closures in the NHS.
In the eyes of the masses of the people, who refused to vote his party in at the last general election as the government, he and his party are now doubly notorious as the politicians who refused to separate themselves from Rebekah Brooks, Coulson and Murdoch, despite all of their actions, and had to be almost physically forced to even mildly dissassociate themselves from them.
Tens of millions who had little respect for Cameron and his coalition government now see them as henchmen of News International, and are doubly determined not to sacrifice their jobs, wages, children’s education and pensions to pay off this gang’s debts.
They also have little regard for Miliband, a parliamentary faker, who just wants to reduce Murdoch’s power not end it, and who has his own cuts policy.
What the Coulson scandal, and the tendency of Cameron to stick to the News International adventurers like glue shows, is that the emergence of a regime of bankers, press barons, police chiefs and government, who are all in each other’s pockets, and for whom there is no law, except the law of the jungle, is not an accident. It is how the modern ruling class in the era of the death agony of capitalism rules.
To break up this ruling class power and this corrupt state apparatus will require more than a few debates, in a powerless parliament.
It will require the mobilisation of the working class, by the revolutionary leadership, to organise the socialist revolution to smash the capitalist state, expropriate the bankers, and bosses, and break up the media monopolies and hand their resources over to workers and youth, to bring in a socialist planned economy and socialism.
