PRIME Minister Blair held a meeting of his Cabinet yesterday morning and, true to form, the Cabinet, filled with his lackeys, found that he was entirely right to push the vote on the 90 days custody issue on behalf of the Metropolitan Police.
Blair even remarked that there was a ‘worrying gap between parts of Parliament and the reality of the terrorist threat and public opinion’.
In his subjective scenario, he represents the people. Parliament is cast as a body giving encouragement to terrorism through its neglect of the security of the British people, or as Blair’s tabloid ally the Sun would have it, as ‘traitors’.
Asked if the Prime Minister was ready to change his plans on other policies, such as the privatisation of health and education, the spokesman replied: ‘The Cabinet believe their manifesto commitments.’
So the crisis is to be intensified until the Labour Party blows apart and the Tories are able to return to office.
Also yesterday, Blair had a meeting with his real constituency, the Chief of the Metropolitan Police and other police chiefs. At it, they reported to him on the security situation, and he reported to them on the way the House of Commons had ‘put the nation in danger’ by refusing to give them the right to hold people for 90 days without charge.
As befits such a meeting, after such a vote in the House of Commons, the Met police chief arrived and left via the back door of 10 Downing Street.
In fact, on Wednesday they had been brought right into parliament to hector Labour MPs as to why they had to give the police what they wanted.
Yesterday they were told that Parliament had let them down, and let the British people down. The implications could not have been lost on the police chiefs – that the situation called for a purge of the House of Commons so that the ‘traitors’ can be overcome.
The political temperature is going to rise in the days ahead as Blair seeks to push through the complete privatisation of the NHS and education, when much larger numbers of Labour MPs will revolt. In this situation police chiefs may jump to the conclusion that all would be well if they ruled the country in a British regime of colonels.
What is causing the emergence of this position in Britain, the home of bourgeois democracy, is the desperate economic crisis of the British capitalist system, and the fact there is a huge resistance to Blair’s privatisation policies, right at the point when as far as Blair and others are concerned, the future of British capitalism depends on smashing the Welfare state and privatising everything.
Blair is basing himself on the state and is seeking to rise above the contending classes, as the saviour of society, and by having one foot on both classes, as a Bonaparte, to strike heavy blows at the working class, and at bourgeois democracy where necessary, to drive the working class back and save British capitalism.
The Blairite eagle has been brought down to earth by the vote in the House of Commons, but it is not dead, since Labour MPs and the trade union leaders refuse to finish it off by bringing the Blair government down and going forward to a workers’ government that will stop the war in Iraq and dump the privatisation programme.
So this bird, although wounded, will limp into the air again, into the next crisis and into the massive opposition of the working class to its policies.
The question remains therefore in which direction will it fall? Will it be brought down by the working class from the left and be replaced by a workers’ government that will expropriate the capitalists to go forward to socialism, or be brought down from the right, and see the return of an extreme right wing Tory government that will seek to take on the working class and destroy the welfare state, with Blair as one of its figure- heads?
This question must be answered through the building up rapidly of the WRP and the Young Socialists to provide the revolutionary leadership that the working class requires to bring the Blair government down and go forward to socialism.