THE leaders of Labour, ‘New’ or otherwise, chose to debate their leadership credentials yesterday over the Murdoch-owned Sky TV, the centre of the Murdoch media empire.
This came into being as a direct result of the sacking of 6,000 Fleet Street printers, in the year-long battle to break the Fleet Street printing trade unions in 1986-87, known as the Wapping struggle.
The trade union that collaborated with the union busting Murdoch, the EEPTU, was in fact expelled from the TUC for its strike-breaking, so intense was the anti-Murdoch feeling in the working class.
All of this is just water under the bridge for the five would-be LP leaders, since their party carried on from where Thatcher and Major left off, and famously pledged to privatise the entire public sector in what was termed a ‘permanent revolution’, that would continue until any return to state ownership was impossible.
In fact, Sunday’s debate was a political parade of five bankrupts from Blair’s choice for leader, David Miliband, to his brother Ed, who wrote the 2007 Labour Party general election manifesto for Gordon Brown.
Ed Balls confessed that he supported Brown against Blair. He in fact was a moving force in the Blair-Brown economic ‘programme’ to maintain the remnants of the British capitalist economy through organising the credit card boom. This collapsed along with the banks in 2008, leading directly to a return of the Tories, and their plan to have £150bn of cuts over the next five years.
Burnham was the Labour Health Secretary under Blair and Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Brown. Under Blair, he pushed forward the plans for hospital closures, and privately owned polyclinics, plus replacing the hospital system by care in the community. Under Brown he carried on the policy of robbing the poor to fatten the already rich.
Banking on people having short memories, he tried to portray himself in the ‘debate’ as a fighter against NHS privatisation.
This left the token woman and ethnic minority member candidate, Dianne Abbott, who could not be taken seriously. She opposes the privatisation of education but sends her child to a public school.
David Miliband said that the biggest threat to Labour would be a failure to defend its record in four governments. This record is five imperialist wars, the abolition of student grants and the introduction of fees, the drive to privatise the Welfare State, the pursuit of the PFI mechanism for enriching the bankers out of the public purse, and the refusal to build the millions of much-needed council homes. Labour’s toleration and encouragement of the bankers led directly to the 2008 crash.
The response of the Labour leaders to this collapse was to support bailing out the banks and loading up the working class with trillions of pounds of debt to repay!
Yesterday, not one of them unveiled a single policy that could deal with the capitalist crisis. Indeed they all agreed with Miliband junior that capitalism would last ahead of us for generations.
The real policy of Miliband junior is to allow the Tories to do their worst to the working class and the middle class over the next five years, and to hope that by some miracle Labour will be returned to office – when the crisis will force them, since they stand by capitalism, to carry out the same policies as the Tory/LibDem coalition, if not worse.
The policy of the Blairites around Miliband senior is to threaten to quit the Labour Party, and join the coalition, if they lose the leadership election, and if they win it, to act as a ‘constructive opposition’, or as part of a grand coalition with Cameron and Clegg, in the battle to force the cuts onto the working class.
Whichever way, the Labour Party’s number is up!
This is why delegates at the TUC Congress next week must decide to take action against the coalition to defend the interests of the working class.
They must put down an emergency motion for the TUC to end all talks with the Tories, and instead to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers’ government. Only the WRP fights for this policy. Join it today.
