LABOUR’S last Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has urged the Tories to set about printing or borrowing even more money to finance growth.
It must be remembered that Darling, Brown and Blair were the leaders who sold off 60% of the country’s gold reserves (400 tonnes between 1999 and 2002) at a massive multi-billion pound loss. The precious metal was exchanged for billions of paper euros and dollars. These are more and more being revealed as being relatively worthless pieces of paper. The euro even faces extinction. The trio however proclaimed that gold was an obsolete metal and that only paper money had real value. They were completely wrong.
At the time that this infamous exchange was made none of the opposition parties, the Tories or the Liberals, objected. in fact, had they been the government they would have done the same.
Now Darling, in the middle of the capitalist slump, with the banks still trillions in debt, has accused the Tory Chancellor, Osborne, and the Bank of England governor, King, of giving up on growth, and wants to resort to the printing press.
Osborne must change course on the economy now or cause ‘immeasurable damage’, Darling is warning.
He has demanded the printing, or borrowing, of more money to spend on homes, the railways and a third Heathrow runway.
Darling’s message is ‘Your policies since 2010 simply haven’t worked, you need another plan – call it plan B, call it whatever you like. . . But unless you do something now it will be years before we recover.’
Darling ends his letter by quoting advice from economist Maynard Keynes that ‘when the facts change, you change your mind. . . The facts have changed, George. And you must change your mind.’
Only appearances have changed. The basic essential fact of the greatest crisis ever of the capitalist system, including its greatest ever financial crisis, remains.
In return for a change of policy, Darling offers Labour’s support. He is sure that ‘Labour is keen to work with you on social care issues and welfare reform’. Labour will support all the savage Tory welfare and benefit cuts if Osborne moves to inflate the UK economy and print more money.
This is at a time when the eurozone is knee-deep in debt and its economy is contracting and on the brink of a slump, with its major powers looking outside the eurozone. Even the EU’s trade surplus of 400m euros was the product of increased exports to ‘emerging markets’ including Russia, Japan, Brazil and South Korea.
‘Companies have to look for foreign buyers,’ said Berenberg Bank analyst Christian Schulz.
Earlier this week, Eurostat said the eurozone economy had shrunk by 0.2% in the April-to-June period, with Capital Economics warning: ‘With global growth slowing, we don’t expect the resilience of the core’s exports to last much longer. We still see both Germany and France slipping into recession in 2013.’
The crisis has reached the point where Finland is debating ‘The Euro or Not?’, with its leading news magazine, Suomen Kuvalehti, declaring: ‘Finland’s return to the markka is not impossible. . . It is not for the Finnish tax payer to pay for the mistakes of the fat cats of the banks and politicians from the south.’ At the same time Greece is to be dumped.
The EU is heading into a slump, its break-up is imminent, with the consequent banking and industrial catastrophe EU-wide.
Labour’s plan to adopt a new wave of money printing (while continuing with the pauperisation of the poor austerity policy) will lead to a Weimar-type inflation – hardly a solution to the crisis that benefits workers. It will definitely not provide jobs, homes, services and pensions for workers and youth!
There is only one way for the working class to deal with the capitalist crisis and that is to get rid of its cause, capitalism, and replace it with a socialist planned economy organised to satisfy people’s needs, not provide super profits for the capitalists.
