THE creator of the Universal Credit onslaught against the working class and the poor, Iain Duncan Smith has launched an attack on China in The Mail on Sunday newspaper.
China has won the admiration of working people all over the planet for the way that it tackled and defeated the coronavirus plague with decisive measures, of total lockdowns that could only be carried out because of the trust that the Chinese government enjoys amongst the mass of the people in the Chinese People’s Republic.
This victory has Duncan Smith frothing at the mouth. He writes: ‘Covid-19 has swept across the world like a medieval plague from China and in its wake it has created one of the greatest health scares in modern history.’ He adds: ‘The moment anyone mentions China, people shift uncomfortably in their seats and shake their heads. Yet I believe it is vital that we start to discuss how dependent we have become on this totalitarian state.
‘For this is a country which ignores human rights in the pursuit of its ruthless internal and external strategic objectives. However, such facts seem to have been swept aside in our rush to do business with China.’
He adds: ‘Thanks to Project Kow-Tow, the UK’s annual trade deficit with China is £22.1billion. But we are not alone in being in hock to Beijing. For China has racked up a global trade surplus of £339billion. Distressingly, the West has watched as many key areas of production have moved to China.’
He continues to assert: ‘As a result of Beijing’s cover-up and delay, global health experts are convinced the rest of the world had insufficient time to prepare for the pandemic, which means the effect of the outbreak has most likely been worse … But once we get clear of this terrible pandemic, it is imperative that we all rethink that relationship and put it on a much more balanced and honest basis.’
Duncan Smith is seeking to find a foreign enemy that the British people can be hoodwinked into opposing and blaming for all of the UK’s considerable problems, all due to the fact that Britain is a completely bankrupt capitalist country that desperately needs a socialist revolution. In fact, the British government was aware of the dangers of a pandemic years before the current plague, but chose to hide the truth from the British people.
The Sunday Telegraph pointed out that Exercise Cygnus ‘a three-day dry run for a pandemic carried out in October 2016, tested how NHS hospitals and other services would cope in the event of a major flu outbreak with a similar mortality rate to Covid-19.
Whitehall officials deemed Cygnus’s findings too sensitive to be published, but The Daily Telegraph ‘has established that it revealed that the NHS lacked adequate surge capacity, and that the government would need to “switch off” large parts of the health service, and medics would need to adopt a “battlefield” mentality with patients prioritised according to their survival chances … Despite these failings, the government never changed its strategic roadmap for a pandemic with the last update carried out in 2014’.
The Tory government did nothing. The findings of the Cygnus Exercise were treated as too alarming to be made public. Instead, in 2016 the government was busy hammering the junior doctors in a struggle that almost destroyed the NHS! Smashing the junior doctors and the NHS trade unions was much more important than preparing for a pandemic!
The Tory government carried on starving the NHS of cash, so that today doctors are making out their wills before they treat victims of the Covid-19 epidemic. Now the Tories, to be able to carry on ruling have made a deal with the TUC to borrow trillions to deal with the massive job shocks and the systemic crisis that has emerged out of their lack of preparation for coronavirus. Meanwhile, the banks, propped up by massive Quantitative Easing cash, are allowing massive unemployment to build up with 477,000 Universal Credit claims being made last week.
Today, we have a government with a sick PM, ruling with emergency powers in its hands, in a situation where a full parliament will not be meeting for some time, because of coronavirus. It will shortly have to use its draconian emergency powers. This is why Tory leaders such as Duncan Smith are seeking a Chinese enemy, to try and unite the British people against.
However, millions of UK workers know that the enemy is at home. It is not in Beijing! The enemy is the bosses and the bankers, and the capitalist dictatorship through which the Tory party is ruling and which it will shortly be using.
The working class in the UK needs a new and revolutionary leadership to mobilise the working class to smash the British capitalist state and impose a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a planned socialist economy.
This is the struggle that it now immediately ahead. Join the WRP and the Young Socialists today. There is not a moment to lose.
