WORKERS and young people will be forgiven if they believe that they are living in some parallel universe that has absolutely no connection with that inhabited by the Tory-led coalition government and its propagandists in the bourgeois media.
This week the official drop in the number of people out of work by 4,000, over three months, is being hailed as the latest sign of recovery.
This has been coupled with news of an increase in house prices as irrefutable evidence that the crisis is over.
Just to clinch matters even further came the news that in July there was a slight fall in the rate of inflation, down from 2.9% to 2.8%.
The Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, even went so far as to claim last month that household incomes had risen faster than prices, so we were all better off!
All this nonsense and use of rigged statistics will cut no ice with the millions of families who in 21st century Britain are forced to rely on food banks to feed their families.
Or the 15,000 youth aged between 16 and 24 who have just joined the ranks of the unemployed, pushing the official figure for youth unemployment up to nearly one million.
These figures don’t take into account the one million workers forced to work ‘zero-hours’ contracts under which they have absolutely no rights and are completely at the mercy of the employer. The grim reality for the working class is that the average family household is at least £1,350 a year worse off since the coalition came to power.
As for benefits, they have been slashed to the bone through universal capping and the introduction of other cost-cutting measures like the bedroom tax which is forcing hundreds of thousands out of their homes and delivering them into the grasping hands of the private landlords.
The much-vaunted rise in house prices contains within it not signs of any recovery but the development of a brand new housing bubble that will trigger an even deeper crash of the economy.
This increase in house prices has been achieved through government fuelling an inflationary boom under their Help to Buy scheme.
Buyers of new build properties are being asked for a deposit of just 5% with the government providing an interest free loan of 20% to bridge the gap and enable them to purchase.
The entirely predictable result will be that workers desperate to provide a home for their families will be coerced into taking on mortgages that they will find impossible to repay – exactly what happened in the sub-prime mortgage scandal that exploded in 2008 and heralded the world banking crisis that is not just still with us but is deepening by the day.
Despite the rosy propaganda picture being drawn by the government, the reality is that British capitalism is on the rocks, while the working class is getting angrier and angrier, an anger that will explode at a certain stage in its development onto a social revolution.
The working class is refusing to be driven back to conditions last seen in the 19th century, of workhouses, poor laws and no welfare state or trade union movement. As Thomas Carlyle said of the French revolution ‘“Well-speed-ye,” are at work, sowing the wind. And yet, as God lives, they shall reap the whirlwind.’ Those who sow the wind with their austerity programmes must be prepared to reap the whirlwind of revolution.
This situation demands that the leadership of the trade unions stop wringing its hands and impotently begging the Tories to change their plans.
The unions must mobilise the huge strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down this government and replace it with a workers’ government that will expropriate the banks and the capitalist class and advance to socialism.
Those leaders who refuse to lead this fight must be removed and replaced by a revolutionary leadership prepared to lead the struggle for working class power. Only the WRP is building this leadership and we call on every worker and youth who is incensed by the capitalist propaganda lies about ‘recovery’ to join the WRP today.
