IN HIS first election speech, Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, expressed his anger and indignation over the policies of austerity ruthlessly carried out by the Tories, policies that have brought misery and poverty to millions of working people and youth throughout the country.
He damned the Tories as ‘the party of privilege and the richest’ while pledging that the Labour Party ‘is standing up for working people to improve the lives of all’, adding that in this election: ‘It is the establishment versus the people and it is our historic duty to make sure that the people prevail.’
Corbyn promised that both he and the party would not ‘play by their rules. And if a Labour government is elected on 8 June, then we won’t play by their rules either.’ It would be a Labour government ‘that isn’t scared to take on the cosy cartels that are hoarding this country’s wealth for themselves. It needs a government that will use that wealth to invest in people’s lives in every community to build a better future for every person who lives here.’
Corbyn attacked the Tories, whom he accused of being ‘too morally bankrupt’ to take on the multinational corporations and the elite who hide their wealth in offshore tax havens and pledged to make sure everyone pays their taxes to fund public services.
He expressed his anger at the Tories’ ‘wealthy friends in the City who crashed our economy’ saying: ‘How dare they ruin the economy with their reckless greed and then punish those who had nothing to do with it? It was not pensioners, nurses, the low- or average-paid worker or carers who crashed the economy.’
There can be no doubt that Corbyn is sincere in his anger at the brutal attacks on workers’ pay, on the NHS and the entire system of welfare that is supposed to protect the most vulnerable. He clearly has a sense of moral outrage about the way that ordinary working people and their families have been driven into the ground while the bankers and giant corporations who, as he said, caused the financial crash in the first place have reaped huge profits paid for out of austerity.
But it has to be said loud and clear that anger and moral indignation are not enough. Millions of workers and young people every day of their lives experience at first hand the suffering inflicted upon them by a Tory government intent on making the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism.
They certainly don’t need to be told about it and they don’t need just empathy from Corbyn.
Missing from Corbyn’s speech was any mention of capitalism and its world economic crisis and no mention of socialist policies required to deal with this crisis.
Instead, he held out the vision of reforming a bankrupt capitalist system; as if taxing the multinationals alone would save the NHS and distribute wealth more equally in what would still be a capitalist system of private ownership dominated by a bankrupt banking system.
Corbyn presented a classic reformist solution to the crisis and all the misery that this crisis inflicts on the working class, a solution that completely avoids the issue of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism.
Workers do not need a party that sympathises with their plight – they are looking for a party prepared to resolve these problems. In the forthcoming election, the WRP will be standing candidates on a clear platform of socialist policies to deal with the capitalist crisis.
In areas where we are not standing a candidate we call on workers to vote Labour to kick out the Tories.
In those constituencies where we are standing we call on every worker and young person to vote WRP and our socialist policies of bringing down the Tories and advancing to a workers government.
A workers government will not try to ‘reform’ the bankers and bosses but will expropriate them without compensation and place industry and banks under the control and management of the working class under a planned socialist economy. We call on every worker and youth to join us in this campaign.
