WORKERS at Lindsey power station, the Royal Mail and doctors have shown their strength in rejecting and fighting attacks on their jobs, their wages and their basic rights, including the NHS.
An uprising of engineers defeated the Total attack on the trade unions for the moment and achieved the return to their jobs of 647 men.
Royal Mail postal workers have resisted the privatisation of the Royal Mail and have forced the Brown government to postpone the measure till the autumn. Now there must be strike action to defend every job, smash the wage freeze, restore the final salary pension and squash the Royal Mail privatisation plan for ever.
Doctors in the BMA have launched their national campaign to throw the market out of the NHS, and have shown, at their Annual Representative Meeting, that they intend to fight to halt NHS privatisation.
Meanwhile, the crisis of British capitalism is deepening.
In the first three months of the year, the British capitalist economy suffered its sharpest quarterly contraction in more than 50 years, by 2.4 per cent compared with the final three months of 2008, official figures showed yesterday.
GDP was 4.9 per cent lower compared with the first quarter of 2008, the worst since quarterly records began in 1948.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also spoke out in its annual survey of the British economy and told the government to slash the size of its deficit far more than it currently intends, or face a major crisis.
The OECD said that Britain’s national debt would climb to 90 per cent of economic output, some £1.2 trillion, and advised imposing huge spending cuts.
Meanwhile, the Labour guarantee of unlimited billions for the banks remains, at the same time as unemployment races upwards as the crisis of the steel and motor car industries intensifies.
The response of the Brown government to this crisis yesterday was to announce compulsory workfare from next January for every person under 25, who will get no benefits if they refuse to take part in this modern version of the 1930s labour camps.
Under this scheme hundreds of thousands more young people who are opposed to slave labour will be on the streets without a penny to their name.
As well, the Brown government is to speed up the privatisation process by selling off £16 billion more of state assets, and accelerating NHS privatisation by handing over unlimited amounts of NHS cash so that people who cannot get treatment in the NHS within 18 weeks can go to private medicine. Meanwhile, Brown prepares to close scores of District General Hospitals.
Workers must now deal with the Brown government and the very real threat that he will hand over power to the Tories who are preparing to make the most savage cuts in the history of British capitalism.
Brown will lead to a return of the Tories as sure as night follows day.
There is not the slightest chance that a Brown government will move to the left under the threat of a general election. In fact, it is moving further to the right.
The entire working class and middle class must push forward through their trade unions, from Unite to the BMA, to a general strike to bring down the Brown government, and bring in a workers government that will carry out socialist policies and put an end to capitalism by nationalising the banks and the major industries under workers control and management.
What the working class and middle class require is a socialist revolution. This is now developing. What this requires to be victorious is the rapid building up of the revolutionary leadership of the WRP.
