LABOUR Prime Minister Brown is the choice of the capitalist state should there be a hung parliament on May 7, even if the Tories have the biggest party in the new parliament, it emerged yesterday.
This is a continuation of the situation in the first of 1974’s two general elections when Heath remained in 10 Downing Street, with the encouragement of the civil service, and the ruling class, as he attempted to form a minority government.
He gave up after three days, and Wilson became Premier, before calling a second election, which increased his majority later on that year.
One can understand the preference for the arch-Tory Heath, since the ruling class knew that with Labour in office, and with the working class in revolt led by the miners, there was no way that the Tory anti-union laws could survive.
It was a very nasty experience for the Tories as Heath’s anti-union laws, with their industrial courts, were swept into the dustbin by the working class, as it showed its power.
The Tories made their comeback in 1979, with Thatcher, who immediately began to make the economic and political preparations for taking on the working class, in particular the National Union of Mineworkers, using the millions in North Sea oil money that was flowing into the treasury to do so.
In 1974 the Tory party and the ruling class had time to prepare.
The essence of the current situation is that the Tory Party and the ruling class not only have no time, they have no economy either, and they have a plunging currency which will collapse at the first sign of an absence of a government.
The first requirement of this situation for the ruling class, at a time when a strike movement is developing in BA, and on the rail network, is that there be a hand on the tiller.
A protracted government crisis, with the new Tory leadership taking office, and having to go to the country a few months later, would propel the pound sterling over the edge of the precipice.
In this situation, Brown has to his credit that he is a devoted servant of the bosses and the bankers, who rescued the banks, when the Tories were in favour of them being allowed to go to the wall.
The ruling class knows what it has got.
He is now their man. In the event of a hung parliament he will form the government, and then bring the Liberal and Tory party leaders into it, as a government to save the nation.
They will then be in a position to deal with the working class as strike actions grow, by declaring a state of emergency to ban all strike action ‘temporarily’ for the duration of the crisis, as central to the defence of the pound sterling.
The full weight of the state will be used by the government to deal with workers who insist that they will not pay for the capitalist crisis.
The job of such a government will be to have it out with the working class, pre-empting a general strike and driving the working class back to save the bourgeois order.
This is what lies ahead in the event of a hung parliament, when the fate of sterling and British capitalism will be in the balance.
What the working class requires in this situation is a revolutionary leadership, to replace the bankrupt reformists who are currently seeking to paralyse it on behalf of the ruling class.
The working class must throw off the old decrepit reformist leaders and rapidly build up the revolutionary leadership of the WRP.
A general strike must be organised to resolve the crisis of a hung parliament, by bringing down the unelected minority regime that remains in Downing Street, and by going forward to a workers government, that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy, to go forward to socialism.
