HUNDREDS of hauliers picketed parliament in London yesterday to demonstrate against the rising cost of fuel, and the way that it is destroying their jobs and small businesses.
They were demanding a 25p-in-the-pound tax rebate on diesel. Their verdict on the situation was that they ‘had had enough’ and that action was required to cut the price of diesel fuel if parliament wouldn’t.
The protest coincided with a debate in Parliament on the controversial increase in vehicle excise duty planned by Chancellor Alastair Darling.
The average price of diesel is now £1.32 per litre and hauliers say this leaves them with fuel bills of up to £1,000 per week. Even the conservative Road Haulage Association (RHA) supported yesterday’s action and was claiming correctly that the entire UK economy is at risk from rising fuel costs.
Meanwhile, the boss of Marks and Spencer Sir Stuart Rose issued a depression warning, that there are ‘Stormy times ahead’.
M&S shares are now down by 21 per cent.
Rose added that this was no local problem, saying: ‘I do not believe any company will be immune. It’s a UK Plc economic problem, indeed a world economic problem.’
He continued: ‘Four years ago, M&S was a weak business in a strong market. Today, we are a strong business in a weak market.’
Marx and Spencer are victims of the capitalist crisis which has pauperised millions of its customers who have been forced to tighten their belts and go without.
He concluded: ‘In order to meet these challenging market conditions, we need to increase the pace of change on a number of operating and trading initiatives.’
This means stores closings and redundancies not just in M&S but in every high street throughout the country.
Giant housebuilder Taylor Wimpey added its own moment of truth after it failed to secure £500m of extra cash from shareholders to stave off the threat of bankruptcy.
Its share price crashed by 50 per cent in a single morning of yesterday’s stockmarket trading.
Taylor Wimpey said that it would be immediately cutting 900 jobs in a situation where UK housing reservations dropped 45% in the first half of the year, and added it would close a third of its 39 regional offices.
Shares in other major housebuilders also suffered, with Barratt Developments down 28%, Persimmon 18% lower and Bellway dropping 12%.
Taylor Wimpey said that in the UK the spring selling season had been ‘severely impacted’ by the lack of mortgage availability and worsening consumer confidence.
Twenty nine per cent of orders in the first part of the year were cancelled, compared with 19% a year previously.
The total value of its order book was down 33% on a year ago, with average selling prices down 8%.
Taylor Wimpey’s US business is also struggling, with sales 13% lower than a year ago and its order book 25% smaller.
Rival housebuilder Barratt Developments is also staring at the rocks and has debts of about £1.7bn which it built up when it bought rival Wilson Bowden last year, at a time when the housing market was at its peak.
The massive inflation of oil and other commodity prices, which led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US and the crisis of the Northern Rock bank, then the crisis of the banking system as a whole has revealed that capitalism is now mired in trillions of dollars of unrepayable debt.
Capitalism knows only one way out of such a crisis and that is through a massive destruction of the productive forces through slump and war, so as to be able to start over again some time in the future.
For the working class and the middle class there is only one way out of this crisis. This is through a socialist revolution that will nationalise the banks and the major industries, to bring in a socialist planned economy to satisfy people’s needs, and consign capitalism with its law of the jungle mentality to a museum.
