THE leadership scuffling that is taking place in the Labour Party is underlining one major fact – its crisis is terminal.
This is a party that was established by the trade unions to defend their interests in parliament and to legislate the way to socialism. The reality was that, while the working class wrested the Welfare State from the bosses after the Second World War, this was already too much for the Labour reformists.
They immediately began to undermine these gains with the 1950 introduction of prescription charges, and as the post war capitalist crisis developed, embraced the view that the Welfare State was unaffordable.
This came out into the open after the Poll Tax movement brought down Thatcher, and the crisis-ridden Major regime saw out the last few years of Tory rule.
Today, when Blair’s poorly selling book leads the battle of Labour’s Blairites against the Brownites, with the Blairites already shouting ‘forward’ to join the coalition, and while the Brownites cry ‘New Labour is out of date,’ it is useful to remember that Brown and Blair were full of admiration for the policies of Thatcher, and established ‘New Labour’ during the Major years.
They both worshipped globalisation. They both supported privatisation of the Welfare State and the Private Finance Intitiative, and they both said that the next Labour government would be a businessmen’s government that would hand power over interest rates to the Bank of England and privatise the public sector.
Their allies were the treacherous trade union leaders, who used the power of the trade union bloc vote to delete socialism from the party’s constitution along with Clause Four. They were all in it together.
Brown supported Blair’s five imperialist wars, which the trade union leaders allowed to take place without any opposition.
They jointly presided over a country where the rich got much richer, and the poor became much poorer, while they carried out a permanent revolution against the public sector and the Welfare State by selling it off.
Blair got out in 2007 before he was driven out by public hatred, leaving behind the Brown government to face the music. This it did, when the banks crashed in 2008, with the UK already in £1.2 trillion of credit card debt, and with the cost of bailing out the banks adding a further £1.2 trillion of debt to the mountain of hidden government debt, while immediately doubling the national debt.
The Brown government was brought down by the resistance of the working class to its single policy of making it, and not the bosses, pay for the capitalist crisis.
Now we have the Tory led coalition preparing to carry out massive cuts and closures, while bringing in dictatorial measures such as five year parliamentary terms. These mean that the only way to be rid of them is through revolution.
The reaction of the Brown-Blair Labour Party to this crisis is to split. The Blairites are already joining the national government and a further deepening of the crisis will see more Blairite Labour MPs joining it.
The Brownites accept that there must be savage cuts against the working class and the middle class, but over a longer period. They intend to keep the working class quiet until the next election. They remain completely opposed to socialism.
The TUC is meanwhile already betraying the working class with its secret talks with the Tory coalition, trying to make a dirty deal with the ruling class. Not a single trade union leader has been prepared to condemn these talks. Meanwhile, union leaders accept wage cuts, and job cuts and pensions cuts, while the working class and the youth become more furious with the situation, and more revolutionary.
The Labour Party is as dead as the dodo, while the trade union leadership is riddled with the syphilis of reformism and looking to make deals with the Tories.
Now is the time to build the revolutionary leadership of the WRP to organise the working class and the youth for a general strike and a socialist revolution.
The News Line urges all workers and youth to join the mass lobby of the TUC Congress on September 13th.
We urge you to demand an end to TUC-Tory talks, and that the TUC is made to call a general strike to bring down the coalition, to go forward to a workers government.
We urge you all to join and build the WRP to lead the British socialist revolution, the perfect answer to the disintegration of the Labour Party.