IT was Harold Macmillan back in the days of ‘You have never had it so good’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s who unveiled the ‘property owning democracy’, declaring that a nation of house owners would be an uncrossable barrier for socialism and socialists.
Margaret Thatcher carried forward this banner when she brought in the legislation that allowed the sell off of hundreds of thousands of council houses.
The first serious warning that the alleged barrier was in fact a mirage came after Black Wednesday in September 1992, when under the Major government sterling was driven off of the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
While Chancellor Norman Lamont whistled in his bath at the blow that had been delivered to sterling and the EU, interest rates were driven upwards and hundreds of thousands of mortgage holders lost their homes and were driven onto the streets. This was a truly massive shock.
Now after 10 years of the Blair-Brown government, during which the two leaders have kept the weak British capitalist economy afloat by encouraging inflation, Britain is about to be gripped by a crisis that will make that of 1993 look insignificant.
Brown was so confident that paper was indeed money and that credit could be expanded indefinitely that he sold off a good portion of the country’s real money, its gold reserves, for a pittance. The price of gold is now some 20 times greater than the price that he got.
Under Blair and Brown, personal debt has reached the astronomic figure of £1.38 trillion, and the housing shortage caused by the sell off of council housing and the ending of council house building has led to a massive inflation in house prices, and a huge inflationary house price bubble which is about to be burst by the higher interest rates, caused by the world crisis of capitalism.
The capitalist system is gripped by slump and trade war, and has seen a massive inflation in basic commodity prices, oil, gas, and all the metals including gold, as the imperialist powers have set out to reorder the Middle East and the world with the most disastrous consequences.
Wages have lagged far behind this massive inflation to the point were even bourgeois economists are reckoning that families have to borrow even more or spend any savings that they have in order to live to their normal standard.
Now the bubble of credit is set to burst with interest rates at 5.75 per cent and set to climb much further, as the bankers seek to prevent a catastrophic collapse of sterling.
Currently several million people are due to come to the end of their period of two year fixed period mortgages, and are due to pay hundreds of pounds a month more. This is besides the millions of mortgage holders who are barely holding onto their homes at the moment.
Many of these are about to lose their homes and many more will join them as rates rise!
The middle class were promised that they would flourish, then they were encouraged over the last decade to spend and spend and borrow. Now, they are about to be ruined in a situation where they know that their betters, the financial oligarchy, who are allied to the bankers, pay no taxes at all!
The middle class, the would-be property owning democracy, faces either democratic ruin or revolution.
It will turn against capitalism and its non tax paying financial oligarchy and look towards the trade unions and the working class to resolve its crisis.
It must not fail them.
the trade unions must put forward a programme to defend every job, to occupy all workplaces faced with closure, and to demand a sliding scale of wages so that wages keep pace with a trade union devised cost of living index.
Councils of Action must be established in all areas to unite the trade unions and every section of the community to make sure that the banks are not allowed to close a single factory or repossess a single home.
The trade unions must demand the expropriation of the bankers and the capitalists and the abolition of all debts to the banks.
The most vital issue in this situation is the building of the revolutionary leadership of the WRP to mobilise the working class in a socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and bankers and establish workers power and socialism.
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