IF TORY Chancellor Rishi Sunak harboured any hope that Wednesday’s spending review would reassure anyone that British capitalism could be rescued from complete ruin then he was deluding himself.
Even the Tory Party’s most loyal supporters in the press are now openly acknowledging that the UK is bankrupt, drowning in debt and has no way out except to pile on even more debt.
The Daily Telegraph spelt it out bluntly yesterday in an article by Alistair Heath headed: ‘Britain is facing ruin, but deluded Tories are still refusing to accept it.’
Britain, Heath writes, is ‘permanently poorer’, its state is ‘weaker’, the economy has collapsed and is only kept going by a ‘gargantuan debt binge’ that is now also collapsing.
In a blistering attack on the policies of Sunak and the Johnson government, Heath damns them for being fully aware of the depth of the economic collapse while embracing ‘a destructive economic illiteracy’.
The economic illiteracy referred to is that while Sunak on Wednesday acknowledged the UK was in an economic emergency far greater than anything ever seen before, the only response was to keep on printing money.
With the national debt soaring to over 100% of GDP, British capitalism is bankrupt, only surviving through debt.
At the present time due to near zero interest rates, paying the interest on the national debt, currently standing at a massive £2.2 trillion, appears to be affordable but what happens when interest rates go up as they certainly will?
As Heath points out, any disturbance in the world economy such as another banking crisis or a military crisis will send interest rates shooting up making the government debt unsustainable.
What is driving Heath and all the other writers in the right-wing press mad is that Sunak isn’t facing up to the real requirements of a bankrupt capitalist
system.
On Wednesday, Sunak declared war on workers when he announced a pay cut for public service workers under the guise of a ‘pause’ in agreed pay increases next year. But this isn’t enough for a growing section of the capitalist class. They are demanding not just pay freezes for groups of workers but all-out austerity war on wages, benefits and services.
All the pledges by Sunak of pumping money into the economy through his ‘levelling up’ programme and talk of state investment in infrastructure are attacked as being ‘proto-socialist’.
The Tories must ‘get real’ and drop all this nonsense about helping workers and small businesses and go for broke by unleashing unprecedented austerity cuts that will drive the working class into the gutter of mass unemployment and poverty.
All this money printing must be stopped and the crisis allowed to let rip through British capitalism in the hope that the banks and large industries and companies will survive while the rest go to the wall.
The ruling class are acutely aware that this will not be accomplished peacefully. The working class and the impoverished middle class will not sit back passively and accept being crushed by the capitalist crisis.
The Tories alone are too weak to carry through the war to drive the working class into the gutter. They require the treacherous right wing of the Labour Party and TUC to try and force workers to accept having the crisis of capitalism dumped on their backs to ‘save’ the bosses’ and bankers’ profits.
The ruling class are preparing for the reckoning immediately ahead when they intend to make the working class pay for their crisis.
The only answer to this is for the working class to make its own preparations to deal with this crisis by mobilising the full strength of the trade unions in a general strike to kick out the Tories, seize the power and go forward to a workers’ government and
socialism.
All those union leaders who refuse to organise to bring down the Tories must be removed and replaced with the revolutionary leadership of the WRP.
Now is the time for workers and young people to join the WRP to build the revolutionary party to lead the British socialist revolution to victory.
There is not a moment to lose.