THE TORY government is now presiding over huge increases in prices, the biggest increases in 40 years. A massive inflation is under way with the Bank of England admiting that it can do nothing about it! UK inflation jumped to 9% in the 12 months to April, up from 7% in March, while the last month alone saw a huge £700 a year increase in prices.
Vastly higher fuel and food prices, driven up by the US and UK sponsored intervention in the Ukraine, are putting workers on one meal a day!
Citizens Advice says: ‘The warning lights could not be flashing brighter.’ The Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, warned earlier this week that there would be ‘apocalyptic’ global food price rises and that he was ‘helpless’ to stop them as the capitalist economy was battered by the war in the Ukraine.
He emphasised that prices were rising at the fastest rate in 30 years. Bailey told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee that he was increasingly concerned about a further surge in food costs if Ukraine was unable to ship wheat and cooking oils from its warehouses because of the US-UK sponsored Ukraine war.
He said that he had spoken to Ukraine’s finance minister and added: ‘What I am going to appear rather apocalyptic about, I guess is food. Ukraine does have food in store but it can’t get it out at the moment.
‘While the Ukrainian Finance Minister was optimistic about crop planting, he said that at the moment we have no way of shipping it out as things stand and it is getting worse.
‘That is a major worry, it is not just a major worry for this country, it is a major worry for the developing world. I am by no stretch of the imagination a military strategist, but whatever can be done to help Ukraine get its food out would be a huge contribution.’
The Telegraph observes that ‘Ukraine supplies large parts of the Middle East with grain, and there is a risk that families will be unable to afford to eat unless a solution is found.’ In fact the impact is worldwide.
Asked by MPs if he felt helpless to control inflation, Bailey said ‘Yes’. He added: ‘I can tell you that it is an extremely difficult place to be.’ Bailey has inadvertently exposed the UK-US imperialist conspiracy against not just Russia, but against the working people of the world.
UK Foreign Secretary Truss has said that the Ukraine war is ‘our war’ and that we must fight it to the end. Imperialist powers recognise that unless they curb the rise of Russia and China, which have advanced because the capitalist ruling classes have been overthrown in these countries – their goose is cooked.
That’s why they can take gigantic rises in food and oil prices in their stride, as a ‘price worth paying’ for their war, to defeat the great gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, so that once again capital rules the planet unchallenged.
In fact, the Tory government has gone from standing by as food and energy prices escalate out of sight, pauperisng millions, to using the crisis to further attack workers.
The Tory government is under way to sack 91,000 civil servants. It has accused the rail unions of planning massive strikes and pledged that it will drive the rail unions back.
It is also plannng a privatisation attack on the NHS, to sack thousands of workers to allow private medicine and the market to dicate what the price of health care is to be. However working people in the UK are not going to be victims of the capitalist crisis, they are going to bury it.
With the capitalist system going down, as even the Bank of England chief is hinting at, the ruling class must go down with it.
In the UK and the other capitalist countries, the workers’ trade unions must be purged of Fabians and in their place there must be leaders who will insist that there must be a sliding scale of wages, so that wages rise at the same rate as inflation. A sliding scale of wages will defend the working class while it is mobilising to get rid of the capitalist system.
As well, the trade unions must insist that there must be no sackings and that there must be a sliding scale of hours, with hours reduced when necessary, with no reduction in wages.
Since capitalism cannot guarantee living standards, then it is capitaism that must go. Britain must quit all imperialist war alliances, and the NATO alliance must be replaced by an alliance of revolutionary peoples.
On June 18th, the TUC has called a mass march on the Houses of Parliament. Workers must insist that June 18 must be the day when the general strike is called, the government is brought down and is replaced by a workers’ government and socialism.
