THE SENSE of alarm and downright terror mixed with a sense of helplessness amongst the British ruling class saturates the bourgeois press today as the reality of the capitalist crisis forces its way onto their pages.
It can be most clearly seen in the articles in the Daily Telegraph, the paper most attuned to the Tory Party and the UK capitalist class.
Headlines of recent articles and editorials speak volumes for the disarray and collapse of the political and economic structures of a system that is truly in its death agony.
Yesterday, the paper carried an article by Ben Wright, associate editor, headed: ‘The Tories have run out of ideas to save the economy’ which agonised over the Tory leadership campaign that ‘has often felt divorced from reality or wilfully ignorant of the general population’s concerns.’
Casting around desperately seeking someone to blame for the crisis – anyone will do as long as the finger isn’t pointed at bankers, bosses and shareholders of the energy companies – the Telegraph yesterday homed in on US President Biden with an article headed: ‘Joe Biden is about to crash the world economy – again’.
The object of this tirade was the US Inflation Reduction Act which pledges to find an extra £610 billion to be spent on healthcare, reducing the massive US federal debt and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
What has got the author of this article into such a state is that this involves increasing taxes on companies and a massive increase in printing more worthless paper money to pay for it all.
Apart from the horror at the thought of increased taxes for companies, the article also, correctly, states that this will do nothing to tame inflation but, on the contrary, drive it up.
Similarly at the weekend, the Telegraph editorial placed the blame for inflation at the door of the Bank of England with the headline: ‘The Bank of England must accept it has failed to control inflation – and take the blame’.
Biden and the Bank are blamed for everything while the Tories and their leadership fiasco are written off as useless idiots living in a fantasy world of tax cuts while tens of millions of workers and their children face going hungry and cold.
What is driving this alarm and panic from the ruling class is the reality that workers are refusing to see their lives destroyed and are taking action.
Unprecedented national strike action on the railways and by members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) will be joined by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) as it ballots hundreds of thousands of its members for strike action over pay while the Unite union has announced a ballot of 100,000 of its NHS members.
The demand for a general strike has taken hold amongst workers as the only way forward. But while the working class are prepared to fight, the trade union leaders are ducking the issue of a general strike.
Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT rail union, made this clear in an interview on BBC Newsnight on Monday.
Asked if the RMT would back a general strike over the cost-of-living crisis, Lynch said: ‘The TUC can call a general strike, not me. If they call it, we’ll support it, absolutely.’
Instead, Lynch called for ‘co-ordinated’ action by individual unions doing whatever is possible within the law – laws brought in by Thatcher in the 1980s which outlaw sympathetic strikes. Even the most ‘left’ trade union leaders are not prepared to defy bourgeois laws brought in to try to destroy trade unions.
These spineless leaders are terrified of the consequences of ten of millions of workers on general strike demanding an end to the Tories and capitalism.
With workers rising up and demanding real action, the time has come to kick out these spineless leaders and replace them with a new revolutionary leadership that is prepared to mobilise the strength of the working class in a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward from the strike to a workers’ government and socialism.
Central to this, and the burning issue of the day, is the building up of the WRP and its youth section, the Young Socialists – join today, there is no time to lose.