‘WE have agreed to make a solemn engagement as heads of state and government to support banking and financial institutions faced with the crisis,’ France’s President Sarkozy said at a joint news conference following the three-hour EU summit meeting on the world capitalist crisis on Saturday.
However, German Chancellor Merkel stood out from Brown, Sarkozy and Berlusconi by insisting that ‘Each country must take its responsibilities at a national level’, indicating that there could be a national way forward of the sort that the Irish government has taken.
The politicians spoke as the move to launch a 35 billion euro ‘rescue’ of the second-largest German bank, Hypo Real Estate (HRE), collapsed.
This brought a stern warning from the German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.
He warned of the consequences of the 1929 crash for Germany and the world. ‘The consequences of that depression were Adolf Hitler and, indirectly, World War II and Auschwitz,’ he told Der Spiegel.
In Britain, the new Business Secretary Peter Mandelson issued his own warning about nationalism in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph.
He condemned the Irish government for unilaterally guaranteeing all of the deposits in Irish banks stating: ‘The danger of this crisis is that it may spark a new wave of economic nationalism, with each country looking for its own “get out of jail free” card.
‘People have to realise that selective or national approaches could lead markets to look to parts of the financial system in a distorted way.’
He is fearful that Britain occupies the German position of 1929, as ‘the sick man of Europe’, on which the full brunt of today’s crisis will be unloaded by its stronger EU partners.
This fear has seen the Brown government (after Unite trade union leaders Simpson and Woodley bailed out Labour with a donation of £6 million from union funds) trying to bring in a new form of rule, to secure the interests of the British bankers and capitalists by any and every means necessary, however draconian.
No longer content to govern through the House of Commons, it has brought in a national security council that will function on a day-to-day basis, as a ‘war cabinet’.
On Friday, Brown told the media: ‘The changes I have announced in the cabinet and in the government today start with the changing way we have to govern to meet these new times.’
He added: ‘I wanted to reconstruct the way we govern for these new challenges, challenges that did not exist in the same way in 1997. . . Therefore I have created a new Economic Council, put it on a day-to-day footing. It will meet for the first time of 11am on Monday morning.’
To do this Brown has brought into the government, through the back door of the House of Lords, Mandelson, Paul Myners hedge fund proprietor and former M&S chairman, and Lord Drayson.
The National Economic Council, the war cabinet of cabinet ministers and business representatives to resolve the capitalist crisis, is to be supported by a network of Business Ambassadors who will work overseas.
The list reads like a Who’s Who of British capitalism. It includes Marcus Agius – Chairman, Barclays,Sir Victor Blank – Chairman, Lloyds TSB, Sir John Bond – Chairman, Vodafone, Lord John Browne – President, Royal Academy of Engineering, and Paul Skinner – Chairman, Rio Tinto, etc.
There is not a trade unionist in sight for the simple reason that the trade unions will be in the sights of this war cabinet, since the only way that capitalism can be rescued is by the ruling class making war on the working class and the middle class and destroying its jobs, wages, and benefits, and privatising and destroying its NHS and Welfare State.
The National Economic Council will be leading this attack and deciding on emergency measures on a day-to-day basis.
There is only one way that the working class can reply to this open declaration of class war.
That is to bring forward a new revolutionary leadership in the trade unions, to take general strike action to bring down the Brown government to go forward to a workers’ government that will nationalise the major industries and banks and bring in a socialist planned economy.