THE announcement by the acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, during an interview with the BBC on Sunday, that the Labour Party would be fully supporting the Tory attacks on benefits, has brought into sharp relief the deepening split within the ranks of reformism.
Harman told the Sunday Politics programme that a decision had been made for Labour to abstain in the forthcoming vote on the welfare bill. While lacking the guts to stand up and vote in favour of savage cuts to the welfare benefits and supporting the limiting of child tax credits for families with more than two children, by abstaining Harman and the right-wing are openly supporting the Tory plans to slash billions from the poorest workers and hand them over to the bankers and wealthy.
Harman, who is acting as interim leader until the vote on Miliband’s successor takes place, insisted that this cowardly abstentionist position had been taken following discussions with the shadow cabinet and that all four candidates for the Labour leadership had been notified in advance of her statement.
Harman insisted that Labour lost the last election to the Tories because voters did not ‘trust it on the economy and on benefits’. In other words Labour wasn’t Tory enough for Harman and the shadow cabinet.
Three of the candidates immediately voiced, to varying degrees, their ‘reservations’ about Harman’s support for the Tory onslaught on the working class, while the fourth, the arch Blairite Liz Kendall signified her wholehearted support for abstention by remaining silent.
The two right-wing candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, voiced their disagreement with this full-blown support for the Tory austerity cuts while at the same time making it clear that they supported cuts and caps to welfare but didn’t want to be too blatant about it.
The ‘left’ candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, while reacting with anger at this open support for the Tories, made it clear that he is more than willing to work alongside the treacherous right-wing. Responding to a personal attack on him by the Blairite MP, Tristram Hunt, Corbyn was at pains to insist that the Labour Party was a ‘very broad church’ able to accommodate right-wing Blairites as well as ‘lefts’ like himself.
The Labour Party today is not so much a broad church as an open sewer of class treachery. On the right, led by Harman, they are heading for a monumental split in the ranks of reformism, and heading full-tilt towards a coalition with the Tories to form some type of national government.
They are acutely aware that the draconian cuts to welfare, demanded by a bankrupt capitalist system drowning in a sea of banking debts, will drive the working class to insurrection as millions of families find that their lives have been shattered and that they and their children face a lifetime of poverty through cuts to benefits and wages.
A weak Tory government with a majority of just 12 is incapable of imposing its will on a working class that is being revolutionised by the crisis. In its crisis, the ruling class is forced to rely on the treachery of these reformist leaders to disarm and divert the working class from revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism.
As for the left-wing of reformism, they are set to follow the road of the Syriza party in Greece, espousing anti-austerity while committed to maintaining capitalism at all costs – this is the road to betrayal as the Greek working class has learnt. There is no future for workers and youth under capitalism.
The last general election demonstrated the complete bankruptcy and collapse of reformism – the deepening and irrevocable split within its ranks places before the entire working class the issue of building a new revolutionary leadership. The urgent task now is to build a new revolutionary leadership in the working class and trade unions, a leadership prepared to lead the struggle for power through the organisation of a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists are building this leadership – Join today.
