BRITAIN is now being run by a weakened and discredited Blair government, which is however determined to speed up its right wing course and intensify its attacks on an already angry working class.
Its offensive is going to target both the public and private sectors of the capitalist economy.
The government intends to sack hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, and is going all out to destroy the final salary pensions of 1.5 million public sector workers.
State owned industries such as the Royal Mail are to be privatised, regardless of the pledge in the 2005 Labour party election manifesto that the Royal Mail will remain under state ownership. A breach of this manifesto promise will threaten at least 100,000 postal workers’ jobs!
The newly created Lord Adonis has been brought into the government to speed up the privatisation of the education system, while Blair is pledged to hand over more and more of the NHS budget to the private sector.
Finally, Blair is determined to completely deregulate the private sector, and to encourage the growth of millions of non-union contract workers.
That this drive will split the Labour Party, and see the major trade unions fighting and being forced to break with the Labour government there is no doubt.
Already the RMT and the FBU firefighters have broken with the Labour Party, and the rest are being driven along the same road.
What is going to speed up this process and give it a much more explosive revolutionary content is the way that the world crisis of the capitalist system is rapidly deepening.
The decision of the NAB Australian bank to close down at least 100 branches of its subsidiaries, the Yorkshire and Clydesdale banks, is just a prelude to a generalised blood letting in the financial, retail and manufacturing sectors, as a direct response to the deepening of the world crisis.
Big business estimates that over 500,000 manufacturing and 100,000 retail jobs are to go in the next five years.
Such a crisis will mean the government carrying out huge cuts in expenditure on social welfare, health and education, as well as increasing taxes.
The dumping of the whole of this crisis onto the backs of the working class will bring a general strike, and a revolutionary situation to Britain.
In 1931 two years after the Wall Street crash, the Labour Premier Macdonald crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the Tories and lead a national government, that carried out huge attacks on the working class.
It is not too difficult to see an embattled Blair, answering the call of big business, and splitting the Labour Party to take his place as the natural leader of a Tory anti-working class coalition to do the same dirty job as Macdonald.
In fact the ruling class, in a situation where the Tory party has proven unable to take over from the crisis ridden Blair government, is conscious that Blair is the best Tory that they have got, and still has some use value for them.
The greatest danger that the working class faces in this situation comes from the fact that it has a leadership that is completely reformist, completely treacherous, completely passive, and in full support of capitalism.
The way that the leaders of the TGWU and Amicus, two of the biggest and most powerful trade unions in the country, allowed and helped the Blair government to shut down MG Rover proves the point.
Such a leadership may be forced into a general strike by the massive anger of the working class, but it will utterly betray the working class at the first opportunity, as did the TUC in 1926.
The working class requires a revolutionary leadership, that will tell it the truth about the situation and organise it to use its enormous power to win the struggle, and to go forward to a workers’ government through a socialist revolution. Only the WRP is building this revolutionary leadership. All workers and youth who want to get rid of capitalism must join it at once.
