BROWN has survived the resignations of Hutton, Purnell, Smith, Flint, Blears, Hoon and others, and remains Prime Minister for the moment.
The next test comes after Labour’s disastrous performance in the EU elections is made public, and a new push will be made by all of the Tory media, and their Blairite agents to force him out, to create the conditions for bringing back the Tories via an early general election.
Given the worsening, desperate economic crisis such a move will split the Labour Party and see the Blairites assisting the Tories in winning the general election and forming a national government to carry forward the next stage of the class struggle.
This is to go from Brown’s propping up the bankers and the bosses to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds, to making the working class and the middle class pay the full costs of the crisis with the complete destruction of the Welfare State, and all of the gains made by the working class since 1948.
The ruling class recognises that Brown and the Labour Party have done all that they can for them, and that a new, much more ruthless and rapacious anti-working class government is necessary to defend the interests of the British imperialists both at home and abroad.
So having made use to the full of the Brown-led Labour Party they are now set to squash it.
In the last 30 days, we have seen the ruling class at work.
It was the Daily Telegraph, at the cost of a meagre £100,000, that purchased from ex-SAS Major Wick all the details concerning every MPs’ expenses.
The Tory paper made no secret of what it was campaigning for: it put forward the slogan for a ‘General Election Now’ to return the Tories to power.
The expenses scandal was unleashed with a devastating effect, punching huge holes in bourgeois parliamentary democracy, preparing the way for a purge of its personnel and the emergence of a new regime, much more able to maintain capitalism.
The Telegraph expenses campaign has been concluded, and the baton has been passed to a section of the Labour lieutenants of capitalism, the Blairite rabble, who obviously would prefer to have a Cameron-led government to a Labour government, as did their predecessors, the ‘Gang of Four’ in the early 1980s, who preferred Thatcher to Kinnock.
Meanwhile, Brown has announced that he intends to carry on with the same policies that have brought the working class to the brink of pauperism and the Labour Party to the brink of destruction.
For the workers’ movement the issue is plain. It is the working class that must bring down the Brown government, from the left.
If it is brought down from the right, a much more right-wing anti-working class government will be placed in power to make war on the working class, Thatcher style.
The Brown government must be brought down by the trade union strength of the working class, defending its basic rights, jobs and wages with a general strike to bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies to put an end to capitalism and bring in socialism.
We will oppose all attempts to bring down the Brown government from the right.
This will be done in a certain way.
When Lenin supported the socialist revolutionary traitor Kerensky against the attempt at a military coup by General Kornilov, he said that the Bolsheviks will be supporting Kerensky like a rope supports a hanging man, and that they would be carrying out the struggle against Kerensky in a different way.
We say that the job of bringing down the Brown government belongs to the working class, which will bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
