ED MILIBAND, the new Labour Party leader, has made it perfectly clear that his victory does not mean that he is going to oppose the Tory-LibDem cuts and privatisation measures.
On election, he declared that he was not the unions’ man, meaning he intends to support capitalism.
He in fact supports the working class and the middle class being made to pay for the crisis of capitalism. He also supports the anti-union laws, and remains opposed to strikes.
His message to the workers is to take everything that the Tories dish out in the next five years, and then vote Labour back. The fact that five years of the coalition will see the UK turn into a third world country does not bother him.
He has only one difference with the coalition. This is that he wants the £150bn debt crisis, caused by the bankers’ and bosses’ crisis, to be cleared up over two parliamentary terms and not one.
The Labour Party opposition will be supporting Tory cuts and privatisations, including the Tory bill to privatise the Royal Mail and sack at least 30,000 Royal Mail workers.
Ed Miliband is not a socialist and yesterday agreed with the Tories that there are ‘millions of malingerers’ on incapacity and other benefits, who will have to be forced off their benefits to look for non-existent jobs.
Union leaders like Derek Simpson of Unite rushed in yesterday to defend Ed Miliband from the right wing media ‘Red Ed’ attacks. Simpson said that the union leaders did not expect the new Labour Party leader to act on behalf of seven million trade unionists. They expected it to be just another capitalist government that supports anti-union laws.
When faced with ‘Ed’s’ complete subservience to capitalism, and the extreme pacifism of union leaders such as Simpson, who are quite prepared to see their members treated like dirt for the next five years, people are entitled to ask just what is the ‘Red Ed’ fuss about.
In fact, what the bosses and their media are anxious about is that tens of millions of workers are going to be hit hard by savage cuts in the period immediately ahead.
If these workers rise up and take more control over their trade unions and oust the Simpsons, the Barbers and the Woodleys, then the Labour Party might not be able to be so passive, and then the coalition could start to seriously wobble.
Faced with this danger, they naturally would prefer to have a 100 per cent proven Blairite such as David Miliband, who followed Blair loyally to Baghdad and back at the helm of the Labour Party.
This is why they are spelling out that one wobble from the new Labour leadership over the savagery of the cuts, and the Blairite right wing will join the coalition, and split the Labour Party.
The truth of the matter is that the Labour Party has become unreal, and its original vision of moving gradually towards socialism has been shown to be a Fabian mirage. It started with Keir Hardie and ended with Tony Blair, the Iraq war and the 2008 crash. These are revolutionary times and the working class needs its revolutionary party.
In fact, the working class must now deal with its trade union leaders, the Labour Party leaders and the coalition.
The trade unions must tell Miliband that any vote for a Tory cut or privatisation measure will see trade union financing of Labour stopped. The union leaders must be removed and a general strike must be called to bring down the coalition and go forward to a workers’ government. Above all, workers and youth must join and build the WRP to lead the struggle for workers’ power and socialism.
