IN MONDAY’S Daily Telegraph, Roger Bootle spells out the ‘fallacy’ in its business section that economic growth is the key to Britain’s survival as a major industrial power.
He writes that Labour PM Starmer has to get a grip on ‘runaway public spending’ and that ‘Growth alone cannot save us: Government needs to take the axe to welfare, pensions and the NHS.’
He points out that: ‘Last week’s figures for public borrowing for August followed a worryingly familiar pattern. The government borrowed £18bn over the month, well above what private forecasters and the Office For Budget Responsibility had expected.’
He added: ‘Over some years now we have struggled to secure any productive growth at all.
‘This is the root cause of the stagnation in living standards that has blighted so many people’s lives.’ He adds that the ‘Labour Force Survey shows that the number of HR department workers has increased from 284,000 in 2010 to 476,000 workers in 2024.’
Bootle continues: ‘The overriding challenge for our political leaders is to come up with a solution to our twin problems of a bloated state and weak economic growth.
‘Unfortunately, the signs are that they don’t get it or that they cannot muster the political will to back the truly radical action needed.’ He adds: ‘We have to get a grip on runaway political spending.’
The article quotes Jean Claude Juncker, the President of the European Union Commission, as saying in 2007: ‘We all know what to do but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it,’ – referring to the dirty work that will be needed against the working class, and the need for a dictatorship to carry it out.
Bootle quotes Mrs Thatcher as the solution to the problem of the type of leader ‘prepared to take really bold measures which were initially unpopular and yet securing her re-election.’
However, as the world capitalism’s crisis deepens, stronger and stronger measures will be required to make the working class pay for the crisis and endure the necessary shortages and privations that will be required to keep capitalism going.
In fact, as the crisis intensifies the working class will resist and rise up to defend its jobs, wages and living standards, that will all be fair game as far as the bosses are concerned.
What is required in this developing worldwide revolutionary situation is the rapid building of the revolutionary leadership for the working class.
This will mobilise the masses to defend their jobs and their basic rights with socialist revolutionary measures, to overthrow the capitalist order and bring in workers states worldwide.
These will develop the means of production to satisfy human needs, not make bigger and better profits for the bosses.
There is no doubt that capitalism is in its death agony but will still strike out viciously at the working class and the millions of youth that will not accept mass unemployment and mass poverty.
The issue that faces the working class is the building of the revolutionary leadership that will lead the world socialist revolution that is emerging rapidly to its victory, and replace backward out-of-date capitalism with a socialist society on a world scale.
This will put the working class in power to build a socialist society that will develop the productive forces on the basis ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’
Now is the time to build up the Workers Revolutionary Party and a mass Young Socialists in the UK, allied to sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country.
Capitalism is bankrupt and has reached the end of its road, and must be replaced by the building of revolutionary parties in every country to complete the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This is the only way forward!
