THE HUMILIATING hiding that the UK ruling class has taken from the Taliban in Afghanistan, where the US and the UK have squandered tens of billions of pounds and dollars to end up with a historic defeat, leaves only one way out of this crisis, and that is to make the UK working class pay the full price for their historic crisis.
Chancellor Sunak is now on collision course with the NHS over its demand for billions of pounds more in NHS funding. Sunak has been told that if there is to be no more cash for the NHS it will have to savagely scale back cancer treatment and mental health care, and that the NHS is heading for a 13 million waiting list.
Sunak is already at war with health workers and their trade unions over his derisory and insulting 3% pay offer, which NHS staff have rejected and instead are demanding a 15% rise, after their heroic performance during the continuing Covid-19 crisis, where they have already saved hundreds of thousands of lives by risking theirs.
In fact, the capitalist system is knee-deep in unrepayable bad debt. So behind Sunak stands Jerome Powell, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve. He has told an international bankers’ summit that the quantitative easing debt buying will be curtailed in the coming months.
Currently the Federal Reserve Bank is buying back £87bn ($120bn) of government debt a month in order to inject more cash into the faltering financial system. Powell’s comments were made after a measure of US inflation showed that it is rising at its fastest pace for three decades.
Powell warned: ‘The federal Open Market Committee would certainly respond and use our tools to assure that inflation runs at levels that are consistent with our goal.’
As Powell was issuing his warning Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph was warning of the dangers ahead and putting forward his solution. He wrote: ‘Since the pandemic began the government has launched scheme after scheme to keep companies afloat. Can’t afford to meet the wage bill? Don’t worry we will pick up the tab through the furlough scheme.
‘Can’t pay the business rates? Never mind they will be deferred. A little low on cash for that tax payment? Heck, we can kick it into next year, or the one after that.
‘A cheap loan? Just sign here. Some more capital? We have a fund for that which will match anything you can raise. The list goes on and on.’
Lynn adds: ‘The UK has become very good at the ‘‘creative” bit of innovative capitalism. It has forgotten abut the ‘‘destruction’’ part of the formula.
‘It may be painful but we need that back – and the only way is to return to a normal level of insolvencies, even if it means a deluge of collapses over the next year.’ Matthew Lynn writes under the banner headline ‘Recovery depends on killing off more Zombie companies’.
The reality is that the Tory government has no alternative, as it moves to end furloughing next month, to put whole sections of the UK economy to the sword to see ‘a normal level of insolvencies.’
Sunak is also getting ready to make a savage cut to Universal Credit, to end the pensions ‘triple lock’ to pauperise pensioners, to create an environment where the ‘Zombie companies’ go to the wall, and where the privateers are encouraged to carve up the NHS, while unemployment rushes forward.
Overall, a climate of fear is to be created where ‘fire and rehire’ union-busting becomes the law of the land, where unemployment rockets and where there are certainly no jobs for youth. This is the future that the end of furloughing will open up. The massive financial crisis caused by the end of furloughing and quantitative easing will create the basis for a national government to make the working class pay for the crisis.
No doubt Starmer and Co are more than ready to assume their ‘National Responsibilities’.
The working class must now move into action, to organise a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy. This is the only way forward. Only the WRP fights for this policy. Join it today!
