THE Prime Minister revealed once again on BBC Radio 2 just what his priorities are and just what he is working night, noon and day for.
He said that he had ‘assured’ the future of the capitalist system by investing tens, even hundreds of billions of pounds into bankrupt banks.
The government has spent these billions in buying large chunks of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS and nationalising Northern Rock and the Bradford and Bingley in an effort to prevent the collapse of the system.
A feature of the operation has been that the bankers still hold the power in their hands, and continue to run the banks and make all of the decisions, while the taxpayers continue to supply them with limitless funds.
Brown continued: ‘We have taken shares of the banks. We have now assured the future of the banks.’
He had little or nothing to say about the future of the working class and the middle class who he has loaded up with a doubling of the national debt and massive budge deficits, all to be re-paid from privatising the NHS, slashing the public sector, raising taxes and cutting wages and benefits.
Warming to his topic, he revealed that he saw himself as the saviour of world capitalism saying ‘We now have the makings of a proper global financial system.’
He ,however, continued to deny that his light touch regulation of the bankers and the bosses had allowed the bankers to run amok.
When pressed on the role he played in the development of the banking crisis, he could not resist a hymn of praise for the banking system and the bankers.
He said: ‘The City of London has a great future and will be renewed with proper changes in the way it is organised to accommodate itself to world conditions.’
A caller then said Brown should admit responsibility for the crisis and resign.
Brown responded: ‘I have got a job to do and the job I have got to do is take us through this difficult economic situation which, I think you would accept, is global and not just a British situation.’
For good measure he declared his adherence to Thatcherism, denying that the country was ‘badly exposed’ as a result of its dependency on banking and the destruction of industry, initiated by Thatcher and continued by Blair and himself with their globalisation policies that stressed that bosses had a responsibility to move ‘their’ industries to places where wages were lower and where they could make bigger profits.
He then made the extraordinary claim that he had foreseen the development of the capitalist crisis, with the implication that the world would not listen to him. ‘I kept saying we have got to build a proper supervision system for the global economy. I made speeches in 1997, 1998, 1999. I tried to persuade other people but after the Asian crisis people said “Well, things are back to normal.”’
In fact, he was the leader who stressed that the duty of a citizen was to spend, spend and spend so that the British economy could be kept afloat. He led the regime where people were accustomed to bank credit cards arriving unsolicited in the post.
Now, the working class is paying the price for the continuing rescue of the banks, with massive job losses, the shut-down and closure of the motor car industry, repossession of homes, mass sackings of bankworkers, and wage cuts as prices soar, with much worse to come.
There is only one way forward.
That is through the organisation of a general strike to bring down the Brown government and bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bankers and capitalists and bring in an economic plan to provide jobs and homes for all.
