JUST days after the failure of the Hoon-Hewitt attempt to remove Gordon Brown as premier, one of Labour’s leading right-wingers, Frank Field, yesterday joined the would-be Tory Prime Minister Cameron, at a Tory election event, to signal his support for the Tory leader, with a general election just months away!
The leadership of the parliamentary Labour Party is now displaying just what a demoralised rabble it is, with its almost daily displays of calculated treachery to the working class and the trade unions.
Its problem is, that having refused to resolve the capitalist crisis by getting rid of capitalism and bringing in socialism, it is going to have to force the working class to pay the full bill for the rescue of the banks.
Gordon Brown and Chancellor Darling have bailed out the bankers to the tune of £1.2 trillion of gifts, loans and guarantees.
With the the crisis of British capitalism worsening, Brown is planning to go a further £179bn into debt in 2010-11, bringing the national debt to over £1trillion, before he spends the following two years making up to £100bn in cuts.
Meanwhile, British capitalism is sinking fast, with its credit rating on the brink of collapse, meaning that it will no longer be able to sell its debt, and will go broke.
The Tory cry is that the savage cuts will have to begin at once, and Cameron has said that he will have an emergency budget within 50 days if he is elected, and that he will cut much more than Labour.
He has already said that he will bring in new anti-union laws making public sector strike actions for higher wages illegal – at a time of big price rises when the government will be imposing a wage freeze.
This means that for up to six million workers the right to strike is to be abolished.
Cameron has already said that there will have to be tax rises. He has also set out to appease the racists by saying that he will decide, on an annual basis, how many immigrants will be allowed into the UK.
His health adviser, Julia Manning, director of the 2020Health.org think-tank is claiming that ending free treatment for minor or ‘lifestyle’ illnesses could save £20 billion a year — about a fifth of the annual NHS budget.
She adds that that free prescriptions should end for painkillers and cold remedies, and that alcoholics and drug addicts who repeatedly turn up to A&E should be fined. They should crawl away somewhere and die.
Behind the propaganda facade that Cameron loves the NHS he is planning to abolish it!
This is what Field, Hoon, Hewitt and the rest are lining up with, and helping into office.
With no possibility of any reforms, the demoralised Labourites are getting ready to join with the Tories to force savage cuts onto the working class as well as ending the right to strike in the public sector.
Cabinet members such as Mandelson, Jowell, Miliband etc are confident that there will be a place for them in the government, no matter who wins the next election, since the main battle will then have to be joined, to force the working class to pay for the capitalist crisis.
Labourite reformism has disintegrated, and the party that got rid of Clause Four, nationalisation and socialism from its constitution before 1997, now contains a majority wing in its cabinet that is prepared to form a national government with the Tories.
The working class now has the great battle directly ahead, to defend the Welfare State, the NHS and all of the gains made since 1948.
A new leadership must be built inside the trade unions and all attempts to make savage cuts, and bring in anti-union laws met with a general strike to bring down the capitalist government of the day and go forward to a workers government, via a socialist revolution.