PM Keir Starmer’s Labour government, still reeling from its major retreats over the welfare cuts to incapacity PIP benefits and the winter fuel payments, inflicted by the rebellion of scores of backbench Labour MPs, is now engulfed by major economic and political crises on all sides.
Despite all the means of cutting government borrowing and ‘growing the economy’, the soaring inflation figures of 3.5 per cent of GDP and 4.5 per cent for food, released on Wednesday, confirm that the UK economy is sinking out of control after two months of falling production alongside the deepening cost of living crisis in the UK.
The spike in unemployment, up to 4.7per cent, (according to the Office for National Statistics), is driving the Chancellor’s plans for imposing major tax increases on the working class in the Autumn Budget. It is however too little, too late.
Stung by his MPs’ rebellion, Starmer has lashed out and sacked 6 MPs from the Parliamentary Labour Party as punishment for defying his authority, and for good measure sacked left-winger Diane Abbott on Thursday for her comments on racism.
The spectre of another disastrous defeat at the local and general elections to Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party, has spooked the Labourites to rapidly lower the voting age to 16, under the illusion that 1.5 million 16-18s will vote for Starmer. All the evidence is that millions of British youth, marching on the pro-Palestine and anti-genocide mass demonstrations, will vent their hatred of Starmer for arming and supporting the terrorist state of Israel.
As a result of falling car sales to the US, the Jaguar-Land Rover car manufacturers have announced 500 redundancies this week due to US President Trump’s import tariffs, despite Starmer’s boast of ‘a special relationship’ trade deal after recent talks with Trump.
Now Starmer’s pivot to a bankrupt European Union block to create trade relations with the EU has enraged and split sections of the ruling class against subjecting a bankrupt Britain to a bankrupt EU and its laws, especially the EU Human Rights Court.
Meanwhile, the working class is not sitting back accepting deepening poverty and unemployment, and is moving for mass action against the Labour fire-and- rehire cuts of £8,000 for the Birmingham bin men. The strike vote of junior hospital doctors and their ‘non-negotiable’ demand for a 29 per cent rise, forced Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to desperately offer to abolish the student loan debts of up to £100,000 each to call off their planned strike.
But with a public deficit or £2.7 trillion pounds, no amount of piecemeal savings, of freezing tax thresholds, limiting benefits eligibility, piecemeal tax increases here, rationing there, will not even dent the UK’s debt mountain.
What is required for the ruling class is to smash the strength of the trade unions and impose destitution and slave labour on the working class – which the bourgeois parliament has failed to do.
This failure has forced the capitalist state’s government services to step forward. These include the civil service and military, the judiciary and the spy agencies including MI6 and MI5.
What the Tories have effectively done is to run a secret programme to transfer 34,000 Afghans, mostly soldiers and spies who fought with the invading former British colonial power against the Afghani people, to Britain without any parliamentary knowledge or oversight. While arguments raged in the top echelons of the state bureaucracy about the cost and threats to state security, it was kept secret with court injunctions for over two years, at a cost of £800 million.
In fact, the British state has sought to establish a ready-made powerful strike-breaking force to use against the working class in the revolutionary class struggles that will take place in the immediate future.
The trade unions must force their leaders to mobilise for a General Strike to bring down this treacherous Starmer government and set up their own workers government to establish socialism with a nationalised economy, including banks, utilities like bankrupt Thames Water, and industry to provide the working class with the necessities of life.
This government will disband the standing army and its mercenary agents and replace it with a workers militia.
Now is the time to join the WRP and the Young Socialists to organise the British and world socialist revolutions!
