IN an interview given to the Daily Telegraph, the Tory prime minister, David Cameron, declared that ‘austerity’ will be forever as far as he is concerned.
When the Tories cobbled together a coalition with the LibDems in 2010, the stated aim was to enforce spending cuts for five years. This, Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne assured everyone, would be sufficient to bail out the crisis-ridden banking system and put British capitalism back on the road to recovery.
Now Cameron is stating that austerity will last the entire decade up to 2020; in fact, he said: ‘I don’t see a time when difficult spending choices are going to go away.’
The £1.5 trillion injected by successive governments into the banking system since the crisis broke out in 2008 has simply disappeared into the financial black hole while every single measure to rescue the bankrupt capitalist system has failed spectacularly.
What is now being prepared for by the ruling class is a situation similar to that which existed in the 1930s where the working class was effectively divided in two.
One section, those fortunate enough to be in work, were subjected to poverty level wages, with no ‘safety net’ of the Welfare State to fall back on.
The threat of unemployment and the workhouse was constantly held over their heads and used to discipline them. As for the millions of unemployed – well, they were just left to starve or do forced labour.
This is the future that the bourgeoisie is actively planning for today with their plans to destroy the entire Welfare State. However, they are acutely aware that the present coalition is simply not up to the job of imposing such a crushing defeat on the working class, hence the moves to abandon the Tory-LibDem coalition in favour of a much more reactionary coalition, between the Tories and the right wing of the Labour Party, that will be ready to go all the way against the working class.
This is the meaning of the sudden re-emergence of the war criminal Tony Blair on the domestic political scene. Blair has been conducting a series of private meetings with Ed Miliband to discuss Labour Party ‘presentation’ – a euphemism for pushing Labour further to the right, to a splitting point.
Blair has always been an advocate of coalition, he fought the entire general election in 1997 on the premise that Labour would have to enter into a coalition government with the LibDems and he was bitterly disappointed that Labour won with an overwhelming majority, and the projected coalition became inoperable.
Now he feels that his time has come again to follow in the footsteps of the arch Labour traitor, Ramsay MacDonald. It was MacDonald who, as Labour Prime Minister in 1931, crossed the floor of the House of Commons and formed a National Government with a handful of Labour MPs and the entire Tory Party.
It was this reactionary coalition that forced through cutting the dole for the unemployed and drove the working class into the horrors of the ‘hungry thirties’. On their own the Tories could never have imposed the starvation policies on the working class; they and capitalism relied on the treachery of MacDonald and the Labour leadership, and today they are relying on Miliband and Blair to repeat the same treachery.
But today is not the 1930s, when the working class had already suffered a major defeat in the 1926 general strike.
In 2012 the working class is not defeated nor on its knees; on the contrary, the crisis is producing a revolutionary movement within workers, especially within the youth who are bearing the brunt of the crisis, and which hates capitalism, bosses and bankers.
The urgent requirement today is to build a revolutionary leadership within the working class and youth that can lead the mass movement that is rising up against austerity to the socialist revolution to smash capitalism. Only the WRP is building this leadership, join us today.