ON Wednesday, King, the governor of the Bank of England, said of the developing crisis in the eurozone that his Monetary Policy Committee believes ‘there is no meaningful way to quantify the most extreme possible outcomes and they are therefore excluded from the plan charts’.
He implied that the best thing was not to think about the crisis and instead to hope for the best.
The best that he could offer was that the ‘Eurozone is tearing itself apart’ and the UK would not be ‘unscathed’.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Cameron was forced to repeat his earlier warning and ring the alarm bells stating: ‘The Eurozone is at a crossroads. It either has to make-up or it is looking at a potential break-up.’
He added: ‘We are living in perilous economic times…Greece on the brink; the survival of the Euro in question. Faced with this, I have a clear task: to keep Britain safe. Not to take the easy course – but the right course.’
He continued: ‘Either Europe has a committed, stable, successful eurozone with an effective firewall, well-capitalised and regulated banks, a system of fiscal burden sharing, and supportive monetary policy across the Eurozone or we are in uncharted territory which carries huge risks for everybody.’
Since Europe and crisis-ridden capitalism is incapable of providing the former, it is the latter ‘which carries huge risks for everybody’, meaning that the ruling class is running the biggest risk of all, that the devastating economic and political crisis will be crowned by revolutions that will put an end to capitalism and the ruling classes of Europe.
He continued that keeping capitalist Britain safe was an international question. The tasks were to ‘recover from a long and deep recession at home’, deal with the ‘turbulence coming from the Eurozone’ and end the ‘uncertainty over whether the world is on the right economic path…’
He concluded: ‘We need to find the right answer to all three,’ indicating his intention to step up the class war at home, give help to prop up the European Union, and engage in more Libyan-style military interventions to rob nations of their valuable mineral assets.
He warned: ‘Britain cannot cut itself off from what happens elsewhere. As our biggest trading partner, the problems in the Eurozone are affecting Britain too. As we prepare for the potential storms we should be both resolute and confident. Resolute because we will do what it takes to shelter the UK from the worst of the storms.’
Cameron concluded: ‘I cannot predict how this crisis will end for others. And I cannot pretend that Britain will be immune from the consequences either. But this I can promise: that we know what needs to be done and we are doing it.
‘As Prime Minister, I will do whatever it takes to keep Britain safe from the storm.’
What this means is that, in a situation where a run on the banks is under way in Greece and the Spanish government cannot sell its debt, a financial collapse is coming throughout Europe which will close the British banks that are knee-deep in EU debt.
The Prime Minister has declared that he intends to take any and all measures that are necessary to defend British capitalism. These include, no doubt, raising the bank rate, losing hundreds of thousands of people their homes, imposing new and even more savage welfare cuts, and/or spending another trillion on recapitalising the bankrupt banking system.
However, the plain fact is that workers will not accept more savage cuts, or bank bail-outs. They will not stand by and watch their families suffer to keep the bankers and bosses going.
Workers will answer Cameron’s resolution to save British capitalism at any cost to the working class, by organising to overthrow it with a socialist revolution.
