Gushing Gordon Brown began his speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet on Wednesday night, by exhibiting his fawning subservience to the audience of bankers. He said: ‘Let me start by saying what a privilege it is to address this famous and historic dinner, where business, bankers and ministers come together to celebrate London’s strengths and achievements. . .’ Brown was setting himself up to be the bankers’ premier.
His message for the working class was distinctly less welcoming. Under his ‘total globalisation’, with its ‘light regulation’ and ‘maximum flexibility’ all that the worker would get was ‘help to move into the next job’.
Saluting the City, Brown rejoiced: ‘People talk of China as the future manufacturing workshop of the world, they call India the future office of the world – I believe that London, like New York, is already the capital marketplace of the world.’
The City will rule the world alongside New York. Their parasitic bankers and speculators will be billionaire coupon clippers, while the working class, both office and industrial, is to be binned.
Brown’s message was ‘twenty first century globalisation is made for Britain’ meaning the City of London – not the millions of people who are to have their jobs shifted overseas and see their Welfare State destroyed to finance the worldwide activities of the banks.
Brown added that he would take up: ‘The challenge with world oil demand rising, of ensuring a secure energy supply compatible with a sustainable environment.’ For this he would provide ‘a stability founded on our strength to make the right long term decisions.’ ‘We’ would be ‘Strong in defence in fighting terrorism, upholding NATO, supporting our armed forces at home and abroad, and retaining our independent nuclear deterrent.’
An essential requirement for ‘total globalisation’ is a nuclear bomb and a modern delivery system, just in case the rest of the world does not want the City’s total globalisation.
Brown revealed that for British workers there were ‘difficult choices’ ahead. ‘Last month we published our white paper on pensions reform and have sought to build a long-term national consensus for pension reform.’
Brown plans that workers’ final salary pensions will be ended, as well as retirement at 60. Workers will have to work till they are 65 rising to 68, and live off a pauper’s pension, unlike the bankers and their political servants, who can retire when they wish with a huge pension pot.
He added: ‘In all these areas, over the next few years as we, the British people, equip ourselves for our global future the economic and public sector reform agenda will be stepped up and will broaden, deepen and intensify.’ Again mass privatisation and the elimination of the Welfare State, vital ‘reforms’ to allow the state to finance the total globalisation offensive of the City of London.
He concluded that Britain will not be like some economies where ‘energies are devoted to sheltering the last job, when the job is redundant. In the successful economies of the future like Britain, energies will be focussed on helping people move into the next job. . . .’
Brown however is not a 100 per cent total globaliser. The City’s total globalisation went missing when the Russian company Gazprom sought to take over a British energy company. Crude protectionism reigned at the point where the interests of the British capitalists were threatened.
Brown wants to eliminate the Welfare State and all of the gains of the British workers to finance the struggle for some New World Order for British capitalism. ‘Globalisation’ is a weapon in this struggle.
It is British capitalism, its nation state and its Labour government that are redundant, and out of date as far as the development of the productive forces are concerned.
The working class must take action at once to bring down the Blair-Brown government to bring in a workers’ government. This will nationalise the banks and major industries, under workers’ control, to go forward to socialism in Britain and throughout the world. This is the only rational form of global policy.
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