HUW PILL, the chief economist at the Bank of England, has made the official position of the bankers crystal clear when he insisted that British families must ‘accept that they’re worse off’ as inflation spirals and that they must accept this and most certainly not demand increased pay.
Pill, an ex-merchant banker economist, on a podcast by Columbia Law School in New York, said people in Britain were ‘reluctant’ to accept that they are doomed to get poorer and ‘need to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether through higher wages or passing the energy costs through onto customers.’
He went on: ‘What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off and we all have to take our share.’
Pill went on to repeat the insistence of Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey that increased wages are responsible for inflation.
Inflation is currently at the headline rate of over 10% while the cost of food in the shops has soared 20% and even more for some staples.
The imperialist war against Russia being waged in the Ukraine has driven food and energy costs through the roof. Before this and before the Covid pandemic, blamed for all the ruptures in supply chains, the most immediate cause of inflation is the trillions of valueless paper money printed by the central banks to bail out the banks after the banking crash of 2008.
The one thing that is not responsible for inflation is workers’ pay which has been held down by the Tories and bosses to way below inflation, causing poverty for millions of workers.
Figures released yesterday by the Trussell Trust food bank charity revealed that three million emergency food parcels have been handed out at food banks in the year to March.
This is the most parcels food banks have ever delivered in a single year.
Tens of millions of workers and their children are already suffering the pain of not being able to afford to put food on the table, pay the rent or heat their homes, and Pill is demanding they accept this willingly as a price to pay for keeping capitalism from crashing into inflation and recession, and ensure the profits of the bankers and bosses.
While demanding the working class willingly sacrifice their lives, Pill was careful not to mention the super profits being made by the hedge fund speculators out of driving up world food prices, or the record-profits made by the giant oil and gas companies.
There was no demand for them to make any sacrifices.
The response of the TUC general secretary Paul Nowak to Pill’s statement of intent was just to say that people don’t ‘need lectures’ over pay, and to call for a plan to ‘make sure workers get their fair share.’
Lance Turner from the GMB union called Pill’s intervention ‘staggeringly crass for one of the best-paid public officials to tell working people they should accept poverty wages.’
In fact, Pill’s statement was a blunt declaration of a war to the finish against the working class and unions to impose the full burden of poverty on their backs to preserve the profits of the capitalist class.
This is their only plan, and for Nowak to talk of some alternative plan to give workers a ‘fair share’ is a treacherous diversion and refusal to call any action by the TUC to defend the working class from being driven back to conditions last seen in the 19th century.
There will never be fair shares for the working class under capitalism, which puts profit before the lives of workers.
The working class is more powerful than all the bankers and bosses. What is required is to remove those leaders in the TUC who refuse to mobilise that power and replace them with a leadership that is prepared to use it, by calling a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government that will nationalise the banks and major industries, placing them under the management, and for the benefit, of the working class under a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward.
