TORY PM Cameron has declared, in the last few days, that he will be pushing through austerity measures until the end of the next parliamentary term in 2020 and that he cannot, in all honesty, see any end to the austerity programme of savage cuts.
At the same time, the latest UK borrowing figures show a rise in government borrowing by half a billion pounds in June 2012, compared with a year earlier, up to £14.4bn from 13.9bn in June 2011. Debt is increasing as the austerity programme proceeds.
Government expenditure is rising as the amounts paid in benefits increase, requiring a permanent war on benefits – from keeping down the numbers allowed onto the Job Seekers Allowance to slashing Housing Benefit, and privatising away the NHS and the Welfare State as a whole – as the only way to reduce the debt of UK capitalism.
The government perspective is therefore to try to balance its books by ever-more savage attacks on the youth, the workers and the unemployed. This is a developing civil war.
At the centre of this offensive is an assault on the power of the trade unions, to end national bargaining and impose huge pay and pension cuts on the public sector, in the guise of local pay, while at the same time banning strikes in the public sector, or banning strikes where more than 50 per cent of those issued with ballots do not vote for action.
Through this civil war, British capitalism aims to stagger on as a very backward, no-hope capitalist state that cannot offer a future to anybody.
This policy shows the helplessness of the UK capitalists in the face of the deepening world economic and political crisis. They are living in dread of an EU total collapse, or that the imperialist war drive in the Middle East (which British imperialism along with the US is responsible for) will lead to a crisis that can suddenly treble oil prices at a stroke. Such a crisis will make living conditions for the masses of the working class, the youth and the middle class absolutely unbearable, touching off revolutionary uprisings.
Even the IMF is now warning the UK bosses of the dangers of their permanent austerity programme.
IMF head Christine Lagarde warned about the savage cuts policy, saying: ‘If growth does not take off and unemployment fails to recede even after substantial further monetary stimulus and strong credit-easing measures have been given time to work, the policy response should include a further slowing of fiscal consolidation.’
She added: ‘In particular, fiscal adjustment for 2013-14 would need to be scaled back if growth does not build momentum by early 2013.’
She continued that the government reneging on its debt target is ‘unlikely to trigger major market turmoil’.
However, Cameron sees a regime of permanent austerity as the only hope for the UK. He is mesmerised by the prospect of the collapse of the EU and the euro bringing down all the debt-ridden British banks.
Bankrupt Britain under the rule of the bourgeoisie sees no way forward at all. It has not a shred of optimism and cannot offer even the hope of a better future.
Already we see the revolt of the farmers who justly complain that water is more expensive than their milk, and that they are being strangled by the banks and the bosses.
For the working class and the youth there is no future under the permanent austerity regime of the British bourgeoisie.
There is only one way out of this crisis. This is to build the WRP into a mass revolutionary party to organise the British socialist revolution, to put an end to bankrupt British capitalism and bring in socialism as part of the European socialist revolution.
