THE UK’s industrial output fell 0.7% in October, its fastest fall for six months. It is now 1.7% lower than the same month in 2010, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
Manufacturing output also fell 0.7% in October, the biggest monthly drop since April, while electricity and gas output dropped by 4.9% in October, its biggest fall since April.
The next stop is clearly into slump for the last three months for the financial year.
Shoppers are also keeping a ‘tight rein’ on their spending in the run up to Christmas, because they have run out of cash.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) found that retail sales only grew 0.7% in November, which was the weakest growth since May.
The last hope, says the BRC, is that customers who’ve managed their finances carefully in recent months will still treat themselves and their families in December, unhampered by the severe weather which disrupted shopping 12 months ago.’
In fact food sales growth was unchanged from October’s five-month low, while sales of toiletries and cosmetics fell for the first time for two years.
The reality of life in crisis-ridden Britain is that millions of people are finding that they cannot live on their pay, or sustain their families, and they are being forced to turn to legal loan sharks in what is called the ‘pay-day loan’ industry.
This is now a £2bn-a-year business, growing fat out of misery, charging several hundred per cent interest rates to workers who cannot survive on their wages.
This business is expected to boom in the next three months as workers face the prospect of buying Xmas presents for their children and paying for the Xmas holiday.
A survey has found that 45% of those questioned struggled to survive to pay day. This figure rose to 62% for 24-44 year olds.
In fact, one in six are called ‘zombie debtors,’ who are only able to service the interest on their debts.
When these loans, some charging interest rates of more than 4,000% – are rolled over, debts can quickly escalate.
Last month the Citizens Advice Bureau warned the number of people running into debt through ‘payday loans’ has quadrupled in two years.
Fuelling the pay-day loans scandal are not just wage cuts caused by runaway inflation, but also the growing tendency of bosses to arbitrarily cut wages, relying on the fact that there are no vacant jobs to go to, to force workers into accepting what has been done.
One such example of this is the Caparo Merchant Bar steel plant in North Lincolnshire where the employer has forced through 50% pay cuts.
More than 150 workers at the steel plant in Scunthorpe have also had an extended holiday over the Christmas and New Year period imposed on them, at half their wage.
However bad the current crisis is for the working class, the bankers and the bosses are preparing for it to become much worse and require much more savage cutbacks on the jobs and wages of the working class and the poor.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, recently let the public know that he was already making preparations for the collapse of the euro and warned that the eurozone crisis was the biggest threat to the UK’s banking system, which could completely collapse once again.
He urged banks to build up their financial buffers to withstand that.
He has no survival plan for the working class or the poor, because he knows that the Tory-led coalition and the bankers have only one option, and that is to make the workers and the poor pay the full bill for the crisis of capitalism, to keep the bankers and bosses and their system going.
In fact, there is only one way forward for the working class. That is to recognise the capitalism is finished and is seeking to drag the working class down with it, and to put an end to the capitalist system with a socialist revolution.
