THE arrest and questioning of Lord Levy, the man who got millions in donations for Labour’s election campaigns, and the fact that the trail leads directly to his boss, the Prime Minister, who is on record as saying that the buck stops with him as far as the Labour Party’s finances are concerned, is a political attack on the government by a section of the capitalist state.
It is ironic that the police chiefs – who Blair brought into politics, when he encouraged the Met Police chief Ian Blair to campaign openly for MPs to give the police 90 days to hold a suspect without charge or trial – should now be biting the hand that has been feeding them.
It is Prime Minister Blair that has been demanding that the police should have the summary power to be judge, jury and executioner ‘in the fight against crime’ and that outmoded ideas of innocent until proven guilty should be cast aside as ‘20th century’.
Now his ‘rebalanced’ police force are about to knock on his door.
Since police chiefs do not risk their careers and pensions for nothing, there must be powerful ruling class forces behind this section of the capitalist state, urging it to deal with Blair who promised the capitalist class much but has proven to have been a false messiah. In fact he has presided over the rapid demise of British imperialism.
His government is not only up to its neck in sleaze – which has been tolerated up till now by the boys in blue. Its privatisation campaign has become bogged down in a sea of working class and trade union anger, while its military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed, leaving the army stretched, demoralised, and angry, and leaving the world economy in a state of shock, with oil and gas prices rocketing upwards in a mad inflation.
British capitalism is now so degraded that it routinely puts the interests of the US before those of the British capitalists, as the unequal extradition treaty illustrates. This situation has made sections of the bourgeoisie cringe with shame, and comment that they could never see Chirac bending the knee in this way.
Sections of the British bourgeoisie are now mumbling ‘who will rid us of this government’.
But they have a problem, they do not have a government in waiting since the Tories are not sure that they could even get a parliamentary majority, and their leader Cameron sees Blair as a source of emulation. This is why Tory MPs vote continually to keep Labour in office.
No wonder that the political policemen think that their hour is about to strike, and political army officers such as Colonel Collins suggest that the army should not put up with John Prescott as their political commander during Blair’s second summer holiday.
These forces are agreed that a new form of rule is necessary in Britain, especially since the economic situation ahead is going to be so dire that the bourgeoisie will have to eradicate the Welfare State completely or see British capitalism go under.
This is the crisis situation that is triggering all of the stirrings taking place in the capitalist state.
It is of course true that the Blair government is unreal, irrational and an example of the living dead. It remains in office however, only because every instinct of the trade union bureaucracy tells it that the working class must be prevented from bringing Labour down since such an action would lead to social revolution.
However this is the historic role of the working class, to be the gravedigger of capitalism.
The crisis of British capitalism can only be resolved by the working class taking power, by bringing down the Blair government with a general strike and going forward to a workers’ government that will preserve and develop the Welfare State by nationalising the banks and the major industries without compensation and under workers control.
This is the struggle that is immediately ahead in Britain.
Join the WRP today to build the leadership to take this struggle forward to victory.
