YESTERDAY the main trade union leaders were full of praise for Miliband’s conference speech. This was no doubt an expression of relief that he did not repeat his condemnation of the decision of the public sector trade unions to ballot for strike action in defence of their pensions, now under the most vicious Tory attack.
However, the relief of the trade union leaders will be extremely short lived. Miliband made it perfectly clear that he was an out and out bourgeois politician as he pledged to carry through the austerity programme to save British capitalism if the Tories failed to do so.
He will be among the first to condemn the pensions strikes when it becomes clear that the trade union bureaucracy is unable to call them off because of the rabid attitude of the Tories and the LibDems.
Miliband warned his conference that: ‘We won’t be able to reverse many of the cuts this Government is making.’ He added for good measure: ‘And let me tell you, if this government fails to deal with the deficit in this Parliament, we are determined to do so.’
To make things crystal clear he declared that Labour in the 1980s was wrong to oppose Thatcher’s anti-union attacks and her attempts to destroy council housing.
He said: ‘Some of what happened in the 1980s was right. It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 per cent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots. These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time.’
His condemnation of the miners and printers strikes in the 1980s and his support for anti-union laws will be music to the ears of the coalition, which is considering new emergency legislation that will allow it to break the projected mass pensions strike on November 30, and the actions that will follow it.
On immigration he continued with the Blue Labour line of surrendering to the propaganda of the English Defence League, when he declared on the policies of the Brown-Blair governments: ‘And we have seen an immigration policy which didn’t work for the people whose jobs, living standards and communities were affected.’
Miliband did however try to cover over his political bankruptcy by taking a fake moral tone when he declared that there were good capitalists and bad capitalists.
He replaced the laws of capitalism and its crisis with a very feeble brand of hypocrisy.
To remain bosses, even the most gallant and generous have to act according to the laws of the capitalist crisis. They have to cut wages, sack millions, lengthen the working day, and get their government to cut pensions and increase the retirement age etc etc. This is in the same way that even the most gallant RAF pilot, who would not hurt a fly, in order to do his duty in the Libyan war has to bomb and kill large numbers of civilians. He has no alternative if he wants to keep his rank.
Miliband has the same fake moral stand on the huge reserve army of labour that capitalism has created. With hundreds applying for every vacancy, he declares: ‘If it’s too easy not to work. And there are people taking something for nothing. We need a new bargain. So we need a new bargain at the top of society, and in our benefits system too. . . When we have a housing shortage, choices have to be made. Do we treat the person who contributes to their community the same as the person who doesn’t? My answer is no.’ This means kick the unemployed out of their council homes!
By the way he does not advocate nationalising the homes, cars and other luxuries of the ‘immoral’ bad bankers.
Miliband is a reformist hypocrite ready to do anything to save capitalism.
What the working class requires is the building up of the revolutionary leadership that grasps the laws of the capitalist crisis and understands that capitalism must be buried and replaced by a socialist, higher order of society, and that there is no other way forward, out of the crisis, for humanity.