DURING PM’s Question Time in Parliament on Wednesday Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves broke down in tears as Prime Minster Keir Starmer dodged a question over whether her days in office were numbered.
Reeves has insisted that she would be an ‘Iron Chancellor’ committed to cutting public spending in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’.
She stood shoulder-to- shoulder with Starmer in the pledge that Labour would win the support of the international money markets by imposing massive cuts to the welfare state.
The sick and disabled would be forced to accept being driven into abject poverty to provide £5.5 billion of savings every year to be used to cut public spending and convince the markets that, unlike the Tories, Labour was the party to impose the crisis of British capitalism onto the backs of the working class, starting with the most vulnerable in society.
This plan exploded this week following the mass rebellion of Labour MPs who revolted under the pressure of a mass uprising of workers and youth that threatened their parliamentary careers.
While Reeves was shedding tears over the tragic loss of her career, the capitalist banks and money markets were equally in a state of panic.
Immediately, the interest rate on government borrowing increased by 0.5% to 4.61%.
As The Daily Telegraph pointed out: ‘While this may sound small, it marks one of the biggest single-day spikes since Liz Truss’s mini-Budget.’
The pound also fell on Wednesday against the dollar – no small feat considering that the dollar is plunging on the money markets out of fears about American capitalism no longer being a safe haven, under the impact of Trump’s trade wars, and massive unfunded tax cuts being made to the wealthy capitalists.
According to the Telegraph: ‘The sell-off was triggered by fears in the City about who may replace Reeves if she is indeed on the way out’ and the ‘obvious risk’ that Starmer ‘decides to choose a Chancellor who fails to understand the fraught fiscal position the UK finds itself in’.
With the UK national debt pile standing at £2.8 trillion, even small increases in the interest rate on this debt shoves British capitalism even further into the abyss of bankruptcy.
In a desperate effort to persuade the money markets that he was not going to sack Reeves to save his own political skin, Starmer yesterday made a great show of support for her, claiming that her tears were a result of ‘personal issues’ which remain a secret.
While unable to comment on ‘personal issues’, it is impossible not to note that there have been no tears shed on Starmer’s front bench over the plight of the sick and disabled who faced having their financial lifelines callously ended.
Starmer sprang, belatedly, to Reeves defence on the day he outlined a 10-year plan for the NHS, intended to shift the health service out of hospitals and into ‘community health hubs’.
Under this plan, community health centres will open just 6 days a week for 12 hours a day while hospitals will be slashed to the bone with fewer staff and fewer hospital beds.
Local GPs will be replaced by a new NHS phone app which utilises artificial intelligence to replace doctors in this vision for the future outlined by Starmer and health secretary Wes Streeting.
This is a recipe for closing down hospitals and fully privatising the NHS in the drive to slash public spending on health and the welfare state that Starmer and Reeves hold as essential to rescue British capitalism from bankruptcy and collapse.
The working class has shown it has the power to defeat Starmer’s onslaught on benefits. Now it must demand its trade union leaders take action to defend the NHS and all the gains of the past from a Labour government determined to make workers’ pay for capitalist crisis.
The TUC must be forced to call an immediate general strike to kick out Starmer’s government and replace it with a workers government that will nationalise the basic industries and banks to build a socialist planned economy.
This is the way forward.
