THE Blair government has finally run out of spin.
It is now being destroyed by its own inner contradictions, the chief one being its determination, as a Labour government, to privatise and completely destroy the NHS and the Welfare State which were brought by the 1948 Attlee Labour government.
The growing working class resistance to the Blair programme to abolish final salary pension schemes, despite all of the attempts by the trade union bureaucracy to sell them out; the open defiance and determination to fight Labour’s plans to shut down scores of NHS hospitals and privatise the NHS – as seen at the RCN Conference; plus the massive opposition to its plans to impose an education market have torn the wheels off the Labour chariot. This has revealed a gang of politicians with a weakness for sleaze and a penchant for bureaucratic dictatorship, who thought they could fool the masses for ever and could therefore rule as if by divine right.
Everything about the face of this government is a fraud, like Blair’s smile.
It was elected in 1997 by a landslide, with workers and the majority of the middle class voting solidly against Tory polices, only to get a government that was determined to carry on with Thatcherism.
It won two more elections with the turnout falling in the second, and its majority collapsing in the third after the 2003 assault on Iraq.
Nevertheless, Blair declared that in his third term he was going to make all his privatisation changes irreversible.
This was a direct challenge to the working class, and its response has collapsed the government, with no signs that it can be shored up.
All are agreed that the Labour crisis is set to worsen, and that after next Thursday’s council elections a leading group in the cabinet will be thrown overboard.
However, it is of interest that the Tories are not actually over the moon at Labour’s difficulties, and the reason is simple.
The Tory leader, Cameron, has been hailing Blair as a great leader, and saying that the Tory party has to follow his example, thus the emergence of the Cameron Chameleon, which changes colour to match every new Blairite twist.
However, Blair is coming down at a time when the Tories are conscious that they are still hated and mistrusted after the 18 years of Thatcherite attacks on the working class and middle class from 1979 to 1997.
The Tories are not confident that they will be able to take over from Blair. Thus they are saying, very reluctantly, that Clarke should resign. Heseltine said yesterday that Prescott should go for the benefit of the Labour Party! – so concerned is he about Blair’s crisis.
What has happened is that the emergence of the anger of the working class with Blair’s policies has created a crisis of bourgeois rule in Britain.
This crisis is now affecting the bureaucracy in the trade unions which is now worried that it will have grave problems in controlling the working class for the benefit of capitalism.
The issue of the hour that faces the working class is taking mass strike action in defence of wages, jobs, pensions and the NHS to bring down the Blair government to go forward to a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies to develop both the NHS and the Welfare State.
Otherwise, we are in for a series of bourgeois crisis governments which will last until the bourgeoisie is able to organise its forces to drive back the working class.
What the working class requires is a new and revolutionary leadership to replace the reformist and grovelling trade union bureaucracy which is convinced that capitalism will last for ever and that it is hopeless to fight it.
Workers and youth must join the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Young Socialists to build the revolutionary leadership to mobilise the great strength of the working class to overthrow capitalism and bring in socialism.