ED MILIBAND kicked-off Labour’s election campaign yesterday with a speech full of bombast and empty promises, but which has at its core the main pledge to carry on with the Tory cuts in order to reduce the budget deficit.
Faced with a Tory party that intends to spend three times as much as Labour can afford in the general election campaign, Miliband called on party members to campaign ‘door-to-door, street-to-street’ promising 4 million conversations with voters.
If this prospect is not daunting enough he also promised that he himself would be leading the conversations.
In his rallying call to the party faithful in Salford, Miliband was careful to insist that the first priority of a Labour government would be to fight for working people, before quickly adding that this necessarily involved fighting to cut the deficit to zero over the course of the next parliament.
Miliband was guilty of a conscious subterfuge – in a keynote speech on December 11 he insisted that the reduction of the deficit was Labour’s first election pledge, saying: ‘So I can announce our first pledge of the general election campaign: We will build a strong economic foundation and balance the books.’ He added: ‘These are my clear commitments to the British people.’
No mention here of putting working people first, just an all-out attempt to revive a bankrupt British capitalism through permanent austerity.
Of course Miliband had to pay the usual lip service to protecting the NHS and other vital public services.
Extra money for them would be magically conjured up through a mansion tax (a policy nicked from the LibDems), as if anyone believes that the billions required to stop the NHS from collapse can be raised in this way.
What was strikingly missing from all the pledges about the NHS was any commitment to end all hospital closures and drive the privateers out of the health service.
Similarly, when he mentioned about the obscene profits racked up by the energy and rail companies he could offer no solution accept the vague promise to cap price increases.
The issue is not capping their increases, the only way to stop workers from being priced out of energy and travel is to completely re-nationalise these industries that were stolen in the first place by Thatcher and the Tories in the 1980s.
But re-nationalisation does not figure anywhere in the minds of the right-wing reformist leadership of the Labour Party which bends over backwards to prove itself a ‘friend’ to business.
Similarly, when dealing with the question of poverty-level wages, Miliband made it clear that his main concern was that low pay meant low income for the government through taxation and hence a rising budget deficit.
His solution to low pay is to say Labour will increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour, this is far below the £10 an hour which is estimated to be the bare minimum needed to survive.
As for zero hours contracts, he only promised to ‘deal’ with them – no pledge to abolish them.
As for the banks, whose collapse and subsequent bail-out is responsible for the huge national debt and the ever increasing budget deficit, all Miliband could say was that they would somehow have to be controlled.
His vacuous comment that there must be ‘no more broken markets’ completely ignores the fact that it is not just the financial markets that are broken, the entire world capitalist system is smashed up by its worst-ever crisis and is intent on dumping this crisis firmly on the backs of the working class.
Any future Labour government committed to carrying out Tory cuts and privatisations will have to carry out class war against the working class on behalf of the bankers and capitalist class.
The revolutionary implications are clear, the only way forward for workers will be to go far beyond any rotten reformist Labour government and advance to a workers government that will nationalise the banks and industries and place them under the control of the working class as part of a socialist planned economy.