WRITING in the Guardian yesterday, David Cameron announced that, following his meeting with world leaders at the G20 conference in Brisbane, he has suddenly come to realise that: ‘Six years on from the financial crash that brought the world to its knees, red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy.’
After citing all the reasons why he is petrified about the prospects for world capitalism – the Eurozone ‘teetering on the brink of a possible third recession’, mass unemployment across the world, falling growth and the wars and conflicts stoked by imperialism in the Middle Mast and Ukraine – Cameron got down to praising the supposed strength of British capitalism.
He wrote that unlike the rest of the world (with the exception of the US who he dare not criticise) ‘The British economy, by contrast, is growing’, with a record number of businesses being created, and the largest ever annual fall in unemployment.
All, according to Cameron, thanks to the ‘difficult decisions’ taken by the coalition. In fact the decline in the unemployment figures is due to the massive increase in part-time or zero-hours contract jobs, replacing full-time employment – according to TUC research only one in forty of these jobs are full-time.
Alongside the rise in low paid, unreliable jobs has been the equally massive increase in the number of workers becoming ‘self-employed’, with low income levels.
None of these provide pay rates that can sustain any kind of living for millions of workers and their families.
According to the Living Wage Commission, at least 13 million people are living in poverty in Britain and over half of these are in work that pays so little they are forced to rely on welfare benefits and food banks to survive.
Cameron warned that this great ‘recovery’ is now being threatened by global ‘instability’ and ‘uncertainty’ particularly in Europe where the slump is threatening British exports and manufacturing.
Manufacturing in the UK was systematically destroyed by Thatcher and the Tories back in the 1980s – it now accounts for less than 10% of Britain’s GDP – on the grounds that you don’t need manufacturing industry any more, the future, they asserted, lay in banking and the financial sector.
When the banks and financial services speculators crashed into bankruptcy in 2008, it was the working class who were forced to pick up the bill through austerity regimes.
The banks were kept alive by having trillions of pounds worth of ‘free’ money handed to them in Britain, Europe and the US, through Quantitative Easing and near zero interest rates.
Cameron’s recovery is nothing more than an inflationary explosion of speculation by these bankers into risky assets and inflated share prices across the globe, creating a huge bubble that is set to explode and bring down the banks even more spectacularly than six years ago.
The real purpose behind Cameron’s warning about red lights was summed up when he wrote: ‘The G20 meeting in Brisbane made it clearer than ever to me that we in Britain must stick to our long-term economic plan.’
In other words, a state of permanent and increasingly more vicious cuts to bail out a bankrupt capitalist system.
This is the future Cameron and the bankers hold out for the working class.
An out of control, head on collision is upon us, as capitalism in its historic crisis is faced with a banking collapse far exceeding that of 2008 – a crash that will not just bring capitalism to its knees but will pose point blank before the working class internationally the necessity to smash this bankrupt system and take society forward to socialism.
In Britain, the burning issue facing the working class is the demand that the leadership of the trade unions stop sitting back and doing nothing but gets up off its knees and fights, by calling a general strike to kick this government out and bring in a workers government that will advance to a socialist society.
Those leaders who refuse to fight must be thrown out and replaced by a new revolutionary leadership prepared to take on this historic struggle.