The Daily Telegraph has in recent months published a number of articles that have questioned not just the continued existence of the Tory government but called into question the future of the old bourgeois political system.
The latest article by Sherelle Jacobs appeared this week under the headline ‘Britain isn’t in “managed” decline. The country is about to fall of the cliff’ and nobody seems to know how to save it.
The Telegraph is the most authoritative paper when it comes to the thinking that prevails in sections of the ruling class.
So, when it publishes articles that the existing political order in British capitalism is bankrupt and unable to come up with any solutions to prevent the country from falling off the cliff into complete economic and political collapse, it is a warning that the working class must take seriously.
Jacobs is scathing about the ‘perceived wisdom’ constantly pushed by the Tories and the Bank of England that the country is ‘in the gentle throws of managed decline’ and the complacency that rules the political and economic elite, and she rails that: ‘Nobody seems to care that the ruling class has given up on freeing the country from a doom loop of high taxes, low growth and crumbling public services’.
Her anger is directed at the complete refusal of the ‘elite’ to admit that the UK economy is a basket case and their insane belief that British capitalism can escape a reckoning by borrowing billions ‘to pay for unsustainable spending’.
The ‘unsustainable spending’ is on public sector pensions and the ‘unreformable NHS’.
The question giving Jacobs nightmares is ‘how on earth do we get out of this trap’. Some, she claims, might be tempted by the idea that what is needed is a powerful leader ‘imbued with the right mixture of patriotism and stubbornness to force-feed the country tough medicine’.
Such a ‘messianic hero’ doesn’t exist in either of the major parties, so instead Jacobs proposes a new ‘revolutionary’ solution to the political and economic crisis.
This solution is for the ruling class to ‘gather a team of brilliant, unorthodox, eccentric free-thinkers’ liberated from the petty party politics of Westminster to run the country, free from any constraints of Parliamentary democracy, and free to resolve the capitalist crisis by doing what is necessary to ensure the survival of the bosses and bankers.
Jacobs admits that her ‘solution’ may be an ‘airy dream’ but in fact it reflects accurately the plotting of a ruling class that knows this Tory government is finished and is desperately seeking a new form of rule to impose the savage cuts to wages, jobs and destroy every right won by the working class in the past.
With the ruling class deserting the Tories, Labour leader Keir Starmer has been assiduously positioning himself as a partner in any coalition government of national salvation, willing to play a role in a new party prepared to do whatever is necessary to save bankrupt capitalism from a powerful working class being driven down the road of revolution by this crisis.
While the ruling class is marshalling the forces for a new party to smash the working class, the TUC leaders are refusing to marshal the massive strength of workers to put an end to the capitalist crisis by calling a general strike to kick out the Tory government and end all the plans for a reactionary coalition by bringing in a workers government and socialism.
The TUC Congress is meeting from Sunday 10th September in Liverpool.
This Congress will be decisive in the fight to force the TUC leaders to either call an immediate general strike or be removed and replaced by a leadership prepared to call a general strike and go forward to take the power and replace bankrupt British capitalism with a socialist planned economy.
The WRP has called a lobby of Congress on Monday 11th September to fight for these demands and we urge every worker and young person to join the lobby and join the WRP and Young Socialists to organise the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
There is no time to lose.
