THE British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) quarterly report has just discovered a situation that every worker and every shopper has been acquainted with for months.
This is the situation where prices of the most basic commodities are rising savagely, where banks, the service industries and what is left of manufacturing industry are reeling from huge share collapses and heading for a slump, and where more and more people are facing the prospect of negative equity and their homes being repossessed.
The stockmarket and the FTSE-100 index fell more than 20% below its 2007 high point of 6,732, to below 5,385 points in early Tuesday trading, a full 20% fall and a £300 billion collapse in share prices.
Housebuilder Persimmon has cut 1,100 jobs, stating that completions of house sales in the first six months of the year were down 30%, following the example of Taylor Wimpey.
Meanwhile the Bradford and Bingley bank, which private equity predator Texas Pacific was going to invest £179 million into, at 55 pence a share, has now been declared worthless by the city after shares fell by 38 per cent on Monday and early Tuesday. Stockbroker Pali International has cut its target price for that bank to zero.
The housing market then suffered a further blow when the Bank of England said mortgage approvals had plunged by 28% in May and were 64% lower than a year ago.
Workers also have a good idea who is expected to pay for this crisis, since Brown has declared his doctrine that the banks must be propped up however many billions it costs, while the wages of the working class must be savaged by three-year sub-inflation wage cutting deals. These deals are said to be vital to keep inflation at bay.
Meanwhile, over £150bn has been handed over to the banks as gifts from the capitalist state, since the banks have not provided any viable collateral, only bad debts. This practice is held to be ‘non-inflationary’!
The doctrine that the working class must pay has now been further extended by the prime minister’s latest declaration that working class families are wasting £8 a week by throwing away food, and that this must stop since he holds that the practice is partly responsible for the vast increases in food prices.
The super markets are being urged to increase their food prices and to halt ‘two for one’ bargains so as to conserve food supplies.
Meanwhile, the government plans to use more agricultural land for the production of biofuels, following the disastrous failure of their war in Iraq. At the same time bourgeois authorities are predicting that the slump will add 300,000 to the growing army of the unemployed in the coming year.
This emerging crisis means that the working class must use its trade union and political strength to defend itself and its families from pauperisation, from job losses, and from becoming homeless due to repossessions.
Workers must defend their interests just as determinedly as the bosses and the bankers are using the Brown government to defend theirs.
This means that there must be indefinite strike actions to smash the three-year wage-cutting deals, and that the trade unions must base their pay claims on their own cost of living index and insist that the payments be revised upwards to keep up with monthly inflationary leaps.
There must be no sackings. Workers must insist that there be work sharing with no loss of pay.
Workers must be secure in their homes and the banks must be told that repossessions of workers’ homes must stop, or they will face nationalisation.
The fantastic inflation of oil prices must be halted. The government must be made to slash fuel duties and the oil and gas companies must be nationalised so that inflation can be tackled and the oil funds used to finance a programme of public works, for the building of millions of new council houses.
These measures can defend the working class. However, to resolve the crisis, the working class must bring down the Brown government and go forward to a workers government that will end capitalism in Britain by expropriating the major industries and the banks.
