ALL four of the declared candidates for Labour Party leader, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Mary Creagh, have been busy over the past week making clear their total support for Tory cuts to welfare benefits and their desire to support any policy that ensures the survival of British capitalism at all costs.
This was made abundantly clear by the front-runner for the job, Andy Burnham, who in a speech last Friday came out openly in support of the Tory plans to slash the welfare system to ribbons. Significantly, Burnham’s speech was made not to a trade union meeting, he is widely regarded as the favoured candidate of the TUC, but to a meeting of businessmen.
He assured these business leaders that under his leadership the Labour Party would support further welfare cuts, including government plans for a £23,000 cap on benefits, saying that he wanted to counter the perception that Labour wants to give ‘an easy ride’ to people who do not want to help themselves.
He added ‘Labour does need to win back those people who have that feeling about us,’ insisting that Labour would not be re-elected unless it showed people it was on the side of those who wanted to ‘get on’ and succeed. This is just another variation on the theme being played on by all four Blairite candidates that the role of the Labour Party is to support the ‘aspirations of everyone’.
By everyone, Burnham clearly does not include the unemployed, the youth and the low paid or the disabled – indeed the millions of working class families who already are forced to choose between feeding their children or paying exorbitant rent to private landlords.
No, the only aspirations Burnham is concerned with are the aspirations of these business leaders to screw as much profit out of the working class as possible and who see the welfare state, with all its benefits, as an unnecessary drain on capitalism – a drain that in its huge economic crisis it can no longer afford.
Liz Kendall, an openly right-wing candidate, trumped Burnham in the ‘who can win the approval of the Daily Mail’ competition when she spoke of the need to appeal to Conservative voters in the south of England.
The third main candidate, Yvette Cooper, tried over the weekend to distance herself from these naked appeals to the interests of a bankrupt capitalist system to make the working class pay for its crisis, when she warned, in a BBC interview, about the Labour Party turning ‘to the right’. She then went on to completely give a lie to this when she revealed that ‘in principle’ she supported Tory plans to cut the benefit cap to £23,000 a year, in total agreement with Burnham.
What the working class is witnessing in this leadership contest is the death throes of reformism in Britain, with every candidate – despite Cooper’s protestations – lining up to pledge their allegiance to a bankrupt capitalist system that can only survive today by smashing every gain made by the working class.
For the working class there is only one aspiration – to see the back of a capitalist system run solely for the benefit of the bankers and bosses and go forward to a socialist society where production is for need not for profit. Reformism, which believes only in reforming capitalism and is completely opposed to overthrowing it, in this period is finished and can only line itself up with the class enemy in the war against workers and youth.
The way forward for the working class is to force the leadership of the TUC to organise an immediate general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism. If the TUC still refuses to call such action, they must be thrown out and replaced by a new leadership, a revolutionary leadership prepared to take the working class to power through the socialist revolution.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists are building the leadership required to meet this historic demand – join us today.
