AS is his way, the Prime Minister addressed the CBI bosses organisation yesterday, just hours before his Chancellor was due to declare to the House of Commons the emergency fiscal stimulus in his pre-Budget report, whose contents had been leaked to the entire media during the previous 24 hours.
Brown made his name as Chancellor by keeping to the Tory spending limits established by Thatcher, Lawson, and Clarke. He was the personification of Prudence. He, however, to show his zealous support for capitalism, even slashed government expenditure in relation to GDP well below Thatcher’s level of 44 per cent, down to 37 per cent, boasting that selling off state owned industries to reduce government debt was well worth it.
This was Prudence at work, puffed up with ‘golden rules’, one of which was that any government borrowing would have to be paid back by the end of the particular economic cycle.
He also declared that gold had no real value. He duly disposed of almost half of Britain’s gold reserves, just before the price of gold began to rocket to unheard of heights, because it is a real store of value.
However, there was no escaping from the British dilemma over what to do to maintain employment, in a situation where the manufacturing industries had been made redundant by Thatcher, who ruled that the UK would be able to live well out of banking, with the wealth of the bankers trickling down to service industries.
Brown quickly found out that the only way to keep the deformed British economy going was through Prudence turning the other cheek, encouraging a massive credit card debt (£1.4 trillion), matching the intoxication of the banks at the paper profits they were making.
This conception, that credit was money, inflated the housing bubble, and with it domestic debt that was bigger than the country’s GDP.
Then came the reckoning when this modern South Sea Bubble collapsed, and Brown recast himself as the hero who was willing to do everything and anything to save the banks and save capitalism.
The politician who forced welfare to work onto workers, and is forcing single parents into work, opened up the treasury to the bankers, giving them billions and a guarantee that they would not be allowed to fail.
Now he has discovered that rampant inflation is better than a capitalist collapse. However, he is not doubling the wages of workers to increase their spending power. He continues to force 2.1 per cent wage cutting deals onto workers in the public sector. He is for every form of inflation except wage inflation!
To save the bankers he is risking a total collapse of the pound and a really massive inflation!
He told the CBI bosses that the borrowing needed to fund tax cuts would be paid back through further efficiency savings and sale of government assets – this means the mass sacking of public sector workers, and the sell off of the Royal Mail and other state-owned industries.
The working class and the middle class are to be bled white to save the bankers and the bosses. The cash for the massive bail-outs is to come from the jobs, wages and tax rises of workers, as unemployment hurtles towards three million, and 160,000 homeowners, who are in arrears, are fearful that they will be evicted from their homes.
Meanwhile, the trade union leaders continue to support Brown and cancel every strike that workers have balloted for in unions such as the PCS and the NUT.
However, the anger of the working class and the middle class is rising rapidly as tens and hundreds of thousands of workers, from motor car workers to bank workers, stare unemployment in the face.
The trade unions must be made to take action to bring down the Brown government to bring in a workers government to defend jobs, wages, and workers’ homes.
There is only one way to defeat the threat of mass unemployment, and that is through the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries.
Capitalism is collapsing. It is a broken system. It must be put into its grave at once.