ONCE AGAIN the Labour Party leadership of Brown and Darling have shown where their class allegiance lies – and at great cost to the working class.
On Wednesday evening they insisted that all regulatory scruples concerning branch and call centre closures, huge job losses, or the impact on competition of the formation of a huge banking monopoly, must be cast to one side, when the interests of the bankers and capitalists required a merger of the HBOS and Lloyds-TSB.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government was ‘determined’ to maintain the stability of the financial system. He pledged to ‘do everything to protect depositors in Britain, who need to have confidence in the banking system’.
Earlier, the Chancellor Alistair Darling said the government would allow the HBOS-Lloyds TSB deal, as financial stability ‘must trump’ competition fears.
Against these considerations the interests of the working class count as nothing!
We saw this phenomenon emerge at the time of the Northern Rock collapse when Brown nationalised the bank on a temporary basis, supplying it with £136 billions of credit.
Now the Labour government-run company is sacking thousands of workers and repossessing thousands of workers’ homes, all in order to strengthen the bankers and bosses’ capitalist system.
However the latest Brown approved, regulation busting banks merger transforms quantity into quality.
The bosses have already declared that they intend to put an end to duplication to save billions.
This will mean 1,000 bank branch closures – at a minimum 40,000 sackings – and the shutting down of a number of call centres.
As far as Brown and Darling are concerned, the position is crystal clear.
If this is what it takes to save the capitalist order, then so be it.
Yesterday a shocked Ged Nichols, the general secretary of the bank workers TUC-affiliated Accord trade union, said he was ‘surprised about how relaxed the government appeared to be about the speculated job losses . . . if there was the prospect of 40,000 job losses in another industry, there’d be an absolute outcry.’
He added: ‘It seems to me that bank clerks or workers are treated as second-class citizens as though their jobs don’t matter.’
it is clear that, as far as Brown and Darling are concerned, ‘their jobs don’t matter’ – capitalism comes first.
However, the truth is that no workers’ jobs matter, as far as the Labour Party leaders are concerned, if they collide with the interest of capital.
This is a lesson that the trade unions and the millions of trade unionists must learn quickly.
As the capitalist crisis worsens they will be treated in exactly the same cold-blooded and brutal fashion as the bank workers at Northern Rock were, and HBOS-Lloyds workers are about to be treated.
This is why the trade union leaders must not be allowed to do nothing to defend the bankworkers, or just make left speeches while in private they do everything they can to prop up the Brown government, while it is carrying out massive atrocities against the working class.
Millions of workers must demand of the trade union leaders that they break with Brown and Darling and their government, that fawns on the bankers and attacks the workers.
If they will not break with Brown and Darling, they must be forced to resign.
The trade unions must come to the aid of the bank workers.
There must be a general strike to bring down the Brown government on the grounds that it is a servant of the bosses and bankers and an enemy of the working class.
The trade unions must then bring in a workers government that will resolve the capitalist crisis by expropriating the bosses and the bankers to bring in a planned socialist economy, that will replace bankrupt capitalism, and put an end to its boom to bust cycle by planning production to satisfy people’s needs.