Former Labour chancellor and prime minister Gordon Brown has stepped forward to offer himself up as the saviour of bankrupt British capitalism.
Brown made his intervention over the weekend with the demand that the two Tory leadership candidates, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, along with the lame duck PM Boris Johnson, should reach an agreement on an immediate emergency budget this week that would solve the ‘financial timebomb’ of skyrocketing energy bills.
Brown wrote in Sunday’s Observer newspaper: ‘A financial timebomb will explode for families as a second round of fuel prices in six months sends shockwaves through every household and pushes millions over the edge.’
Brown added: ‘Boris Johnson, Sunak and Truss must this week agree an emergency budget. If they do not, Parliament should be recalled and force them to do so.’
Brown repeated this call for the Tories to bring in an emergency budget yesterday with the added offer of a return to British politics to support the right-wing Labour leadership of Keir Starmer.
Brown praised Starmer on Sky News saying: ‘He’s made the right decisions to rejuvenate the Labour Party.’
Starmer’s rejuvenation of the Labour Party has consisted of driving out any member suspected of harbouring socialist beliefs, and sacking one of his shadow cabinet members for the crime of being on a picket line and supporting the fight for wage increases above inflation.
This anti-working class devotion to capitalism clearly endears Starmer to Brown, and he is offering to emerge from obscurity to join Starmer in saving the day for the capitalist class.
Brown’s record in government, first as chancellor under Tony Blair and then as prime minister, proves his undying loyalty to capitalism.
It was Brown who arrogantly proclaimed that he had single handedly ended the capitalist cycle of boom and bust. He was the economic genius who sold half the country’s gold reserves for a knockdown price.
As chancellor, Brown championed the massive extension of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) that saddled hospitals with massive debts owed to hedge funds, thus contributing to bankrupting the NHS.
It was Brown who was so convinced of the superiority of the capitalist banking industry that he led the way in deregulating the banks which led to the unrestricted gambling by bankers that directly led to the banking crash of 2008.
As prime minister, when the banks crashed in 2008 he rushed to bail them out, leaving the working class to pick up the trillions of pounds of debt needed to keep them from crashing, and paving the way for over a decade of Tory austerity.
With UK banks threatened with closure, and the prospect of millions of people denied access to their money, Brown actively considered putting troops on the streets to prevent an uprising against the bankers.
With credentials like this Brown clearly believes his time has come to issue forth and ‘save the day’ for capitalism by giving his support, as a proven loyal defender of the ruling class, to the Starmer campaign for the Labour Party to be admitted into a government of national emergency.
The Tories are in a state of collapse with the government paralysed, and the only emergency measures they are looking at are making strikes illegal and enforcing pay cuts on workers.
Increasingly, the ruling class are looking to a national government as the only way to hold back the rising tide of revolution sweeping the working class.
Who better to be included in a such a reactionary national government than Brown with his credentials of being prepared to use the army to crush the working class.
With the working class facing a financial timebomb in the coming weeks, the only way forward is to demand the unions immediately break from the reactionary Labour Party and force the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bankers and bosses and bring in a socialist planned economy.
This demands a new leadership in the unions that is prepared to take the working class forward to seizing power and putting an end to bankrupt capitalism.
Only the WRP and YS fight for this policy and perspective – join today.