CABLE, the man who was threatening the ‘nuclear option’ of walking out of the Tory-led coalition, has meanwhile grovelled to his Tory betters.
This was after being seduced by the Telegraph ‘honey trap’ into speaking the ‘unthinkable’ as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned, that he, as Business Secretary, was going to make sure that Murdoch did not take over BSkyB, and that he had declared war on Murdoch, and it was a war that he would win.
Cable, the groveller, could still have walked out of the coalition after being told that the person and business interests of Murdoch were sacrosanct, but he hasn’t and he won’t.
He broke what political backbone he had when he joined the coalition and then, as Business Secretary, pushed through the massive hike in tuition fees, and refused cash aid to Forgemaster.
All that was left after this conduct was the hollow braggart and boaster, the fall guy for the political manoeuvres of the Daily Telegraph and its femme fatale journalism.
Cable is now a prisoner of war of the Tory coalition. He has grovelled and apologised and is to be tolerated as a powerless business secretary, for as long as the ruling class needs him to keep the reactionary coalition going.
He will not quit, and neither will the other LibDem ministers. They are now bound and gagged and chained to the Tory chariot.
Their interest will be to maintain the government at all costs, for as long as possible, in order to save their jobs, their seats, and their livings.
It has long been an article of faith of the Tories that the Murdoch interest is the national interest, and that he must be allowed to have his way.
It is 100 per cent certain that, barring a revolution, Murdoch will get his hands on BSkyB.
In fact Murdoch, Thatcherism, union busting and reactionary Tory politics are synonymous.
In January 1986, Murdoch took on the Fleet Street printers and locked them out. His political ally was Tory Premier Thatcher, his footsoldiers were the massed ranks of the Metropolitan police who attacked the printers’ pickets and demonstrations for an entire year, and the scabs of the EEPTU who helped to establish and run his Wapping printing plant.
His victims were the print unions and their membership and their families who fought the ruling class for a year while the general council of the TUC just looked on.
Since then, the Murdoch empire has provided the Tories with leading personnel such as Cameron’s media adviser Coulson, and has hired ex-leading Metropolitan police officers to secure his empire.
The Murdoch media empire and the capitalist state are pillars of the bourgeois order, with identical aims to support, strengthen and sustain it, and to attack the working class and the trade unions as required. In fact, where the state ends and the Murdoch empire begins, and vice versa, is blurred.
Meanwhile, Labour leader Ed Miliband continues with his number one policy to seek to break the LibDems from the coalition, while telling the working class not to rock the boat while he is engaged in this vital work by taking strike action, or indeed any action to defend their wages or their jobs.
The trade union bureaucracy has just been told by Cameron that his cuts policies are non-negotiable.
Its right wing tells the workers not to strike, its left wing tells workers that mass protest actions will get the Tories to drop their policies.
Both trade union trends are misleading the working class.
The only way forward is for the trade unions to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government that will nationalise the major industries, including News International and the banks, and bring in socialism.
