Last week, The Daily Telegraph newspaper published an article that clearly set out the dangers of a revolutionary upsurge by workers and youth resulting from the catastrophic economic crisis of British capitalism.
The solution advanced by the Telegraph on behalf of the ruling class was that: ‘Mass unemployment may be the only cure to our woes.’
Mass unemployment on the scale of the depression era of the 1930s, the article maintains, would provide the shock therapy that would demoralise the working class and transform them from a revolutionary mass demanding decent pay and conditions into a starving mass begging the bosses for jobs.
On Sunday, the Telegraph expanded on this theme of demanding the Labour government go further in slashing jobs with an article headed: ‘Britain needs its own Elon Musk to avoid economic disaster.’
The article by Liam Halligan poses the question: ‘Do we need a UK version of DOGE?’
DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency set up and headed until recently by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, became notorious and hated in the US for taking a ‘chainsaw’ to federal jobs.
DOGE, which is not an official agency of the federal government, took it upon itself to send emails out to hundreds of thousands of federal workers informing them their jobs had been slashed in pursuit of US president Donald Trump’s drive to cut the massive US debt at the expense of the working class.
Halligan claims in his article that: ‘Trump has a nose for his nation’s mood – and, while vested interests losing out complain loudly, DOGE’s mission to rein in runaway public spending and regulation is broadly popular.’
If Trump’s policies were ‘broadly popular’, how does Halligan explain that in his first 100 days Trump had the lowest approval rating of any president in the past 80 years?
Trump’s latest ‘big, beautiful’ spending bill aims to hand out $5 trillion in tax relief to the wealthy, paid for by deep cuts to the Medicaid health insurance programme that covers over 70 million lower income Americans.
Trump hasn’t just lost popularity amongst US workers and youth with his brazen enrichment of the corporate billionaires through tax cuts, while at the same time slashing medical care for workers and waging a tariff war on the world that threatened to empty supermarket shelves, he has also lost any faith from the global financiers.
Last Friday, the US lost its last perfect credit rating when the influential ratings firm Moody’s raised worries about America’s ability to pay back its colossal debt of over $35 trillion on which it pays $1 trillion a year in interest. A lower credit rating means countries are more likely to default on their debt while facing higher borrowing costs.
Halligan ignores the economic catastrophe engulfing US capitalism, instead urging the Labour government to emulate Musk and Trump.
As British capitalism is also in the death grip of debt, Halligan warns that government spending is ‘escalating to an alarming extent’ and that the danger is ‘that Labour follows its ideological nose and raises both spending and tax rates even more’.
The only ideology followed by Starmer’s government is to do whatever is necessary to dump the crisis on the backs of the working class.
Last December, Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a crackdown on government ‘waste’ setting targets to slash 10,000 civil service jobs.
In April, Labour health secretary Wes Streeting announced a brutal cost-cutting regime for the NHS that it is estimated could wipe out 100,000 jobs in the health sector.
The Labour government is fully on board with the Trump/Musk chainsaw approach to workers’ jobs and rights, but clearly this is not enough for Halligan and the capitalist class he speaks for. They want a class war to the end to try and break the working class.
The powerful working class will never allow itself to be driven into mass unemployment and starvation to ‘rescue’ a capitalist system in its death agony.
Capitalism has reached the end of the road but will not leave the scene of history voluntarily – it must be overthrown by the working class bringing down their capitalist governments and bringing in workers’ governments and socialism.
This is the only way forward.
