THE UK trade deficit with the rest of the world for 2005 was a catastrophic £65.5 billion.
The deficit on goods and services (banking and other transactions) for 2005 also hit a record of £47.6 billion, compared with a £39 billion deficit in 2004.
Britain is clearly no longer the workshop of the world.
At the same time as exports and production have plummeted, debt and massive indebtedness has reached staggering proportions.
Nearly 70,000 people became insolvent in 2005, the highest since records began, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has said.
At the same time, the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) revealed that home repossession orders also rose sharply in the final quarter of 2005. The figures show the total number of homeowners being taken to court during the final three months of 2005 by lenders pursuing mortgage debt rose 50 per cent year on year to 31,018.
Personal debt, including mortgage debt, is now running at £1.2 trillion, with savings a thing of the past.
Britain has been transformed into its opposite from the workshop of the world, and a nation of shopkeepers, into a nation of debtors.
This transformation has seen millions of manufacturing jobs disappearing.
The number of registered unemployed rose for the 10th month in a row to 909,000 for December while the number of workers out of work rose by 110,000 in the three months to November, the biggest rise in 12 years, up to 1.53 million.
In those three months 109,000 manufacturing sector jobs were lost, while the CBI predicts that another 24,000 manufacturing jobs will be lost in the next three months.
When the Bank of England monetary policy committee met this week it was paralysed by this crisis.
With the US federal reserve bank increasing US interest rates every month, it faced demands from the CBI bosses, both manufacturers and High Street retailers, along with the TUC trade unions, to cut the interest rate, so as to provide more cheap credit to slow down the bankrupting of industry, the remorseless rise in the numbers of unemployed and the numbers of homes being repossessed.
From the banks came warnings that a cut in rates would increase the mountain of debt and inflation and risk a major run on sterling, and with that would come a big increase in rates that would completely collapse the housing market.
Faced with the two wings of the ruling class and the objective contradictions of the capitalist economy, the Bank of England did nothing, and left the interest rate at 4.5 per cent.
Meanwhile, the cost of living is rising fast, due to massive increases in gas, electricity and other energy costs, as well as steep rises in rail, tube and bus fares, creating a need in the working class for a rise in wages well above the 3.4 per cent which the ONS says is the average wage rise.
Even bourgeois economists surveying the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system, with record US trade and government deficits, a collapsing dollar and rapidly rising oil and gas prices, are warning that the ruling class in this country must get ready to face an inflationary shock.
The only known bourgeois remedy for this is savage deflation, through much higher interest rates and mortgage rates, plunging millions into poverty.
Faced with this rapidly developing crisis, the issue for workers is the building of the revolutionary leadership to mobilise the working class to over- throw this bankrupt capitalist system and replace it with socialism.
