LABOUR PRIME MINISTER Keir Starmer has almost immediately betrayed the massive working class electorate that voted him into office as Prime Minister.
His first action has been not to disown his new Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s verdict on the NHS that it was ‘broken’ and had no future.
He has kept quiet on the issue confirming that he agrees with Streeting, that the NHS must be dumped and privatised as soon as possible!
However, the UK working class is on the march to defend its jobs, wages and conditions and, above all, to rescue its NHS and to further develop it.
This was the message that has emerged from Labour’s huge victory in the general election where they won 412 seats, thanks to the massive working class vote, with the Tories shattered on 121 seats.
The working class will defend and develop the NHS. It will not allow the NHS to be dumped!
In fact, the 1945 Labour landslide, which transformed the UK, had a majority of 145, against the current overall Labour majority of 181 – a figure which speaks volumes for the intensity of the current struggle of the British working class, the huge power that it wields, and its intention to defend the NHS and even further develop it.
PM Starmer yesterday delivered another blow at the working class in the UK.
He called on all NATO countries to increase their defence spending and to support the Ukraine, whipping up a war drive against Russia. He is now under pressure to confirm that the UK will boost its defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.
There is now a war fever at work in Westminster. The Labour peer and former first Sea Lord, Alan West insisted yesterday that ‘I think that we ought to say when we are going to get to 2.5%.’
Beating the war drums, he added: ‘When the situation allows’ is not really good enough – Putin will not wait for our situation to be good enough before he attacks.’
Labour PM Starmer is now set to use the Ukraine summit to emphasise the UK’s ‘unshakable’ commitment to the Ukraine, and arming it to the teeth.
The UK ruling class is preparing for another imperialist war! It currently spends 2.32% of GDP on defence, the equivalent of £64.6bn a year, which would have to steadily increase to £87.1bn a year to reach the 2.5% target.
It is a sign of the times that a record 23 NATO countries are expected to hit the Alliance minimum target of 2% this year, meaning that the European NATO allies as a whole will collectively spend 2% of their combined GDP, worth £300bn – on defence for the first time.
In April, former PM Rishi Sunak said Britain would spend 2.5% of national output on defence by the end of the decade with the sum steadily increasing to £87bn a year by 2030.
Sunak also committed to giving at least £3bn a year to Ukraine for ‘as long as required’. Labour has now promised to hit the 2.5% figure!
The truth of the matter is that the imperialist powers see a new world war as the only way out of the crisis of capitalism. They consider that their capitalist system can no longer compete with the Russian and Chinese nationalised economies, and that it no longer has the support of the working class at home!
Capitalism and the capitalists have, in fact, had their day but they are determined to take the masses of the working people of the world into the abyss along with them.
The capitalist crisis is now reaching its point of transformation with the world crisis deepening and becoming more threatening every minute. Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International world-wide to lead the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the struggle to replace backward out-of-date capitalism with socialism, through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Now is the time to build a mass Young Socialists movement in the UK and a massive section of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Now is the time to fight for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
