IN the middle of the Labour Party’s general election campaign, a section of the Labour cabinet led by Mandelson, Jowell and others is breaking ranks to show solidarity with the Tories.
Cabinet minister Tessa Jowell has said that the general election campaign must not be turned into a ‘hideous’ class war with Tory leader, ex-Bullingdon Club member, and old Etonian David Cameron.
The Jowell intervention follows on from reports of a row between PM Brown and Mandelson who has warned the Prime Minister that he is against bashing the bankers.
He is on record as saying, ‘I know some people think that the banks have brought this on themselves and that we just ought to teach them a lesson. That’s not the frame of mind that we are in.’
He has also said that he was ‘seriously relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.
Jowell and Mandelson are just humbugs.
They know that the history of capitalism is a history of hideous ruling class war on the working class, to squeeze out of the working class the maximum possible surplus value and profit.
In the 19th century, working men were transported to Australia for forming trade unions. It took almost a century of struggle after the Chartist movement was formed until one of its major demands for universal suffrage was forced out of the grip of the ruling class.
The Labour Party itself emerged out of the attacks on the rail unions at Taff Vale in 1901, and grew rapidly after 1906 to fight the class war, on behalf of the working class, to obtain a decent life and socialism through parliament.
One of the leaders of the 1948 Labour government Aneuran Bevan, declared in the House of Commons, after the Labour landslide, ‘We are the masters now’ as he brought in the National Health Service and the Welfare State.
Marx and Engels were absolutely correct when they declared in the Communist Manifesto that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’
In the 1980’s, Thatcher carried the class struggle forward against the miners and the printers to the point of open civil war, and for this liberating act, as far as profits were concerned, won the support of many, including future Labour leaders such as Brown, Blair, Jowell and Mandelson.
After Thatcherism was driven back in the struggle over the Poll Tax, the Blair/Brown gang had Clause Four and even the aim of socialism removed from the Labour Party constitution, and declared well in advance of the May 1997 general election, that theirs was to be a ‘businessman’s government’, and that they intended to put the Bank of England in charge of interest rates, as well as continuing Thatcher’s privatisation of the public sector.
They became Thatcherites, and took up the worship of the ‘filthy rich’.
Now we have a capitalist crisis, and Labour’s policy – which put £1.2 trillion in gifts, loans and guarantees at the disposal of the banks – means that the working class is going to be pauperised to pay off the debts of the ruling class.
This policy is setting the class struggle into operation in the sharpest way!
Jowell, Mandelson and the other servants of the bosses in the Labour leadership are now fearful, and don’t want the class struggle mentioned at all! Brown’s adoption of a little demagogy about the Tories and their ill-gotten gains, such as private education, fills them with fear about the revolutionary role of the working class.
It is this fear of revolution that drives the Jowells and the Mandelsons to insist that Brown must shut up.
In fact, the working class understands very well that there is a class struggle taking place, and that the Cameron/Osborne Tory leadership intends to deal with them far more brutally than does even the Labour gang.
Workers are already demanding the nationalisation of the steel, motorcar and air transport industries. The new year will see great, historic class struggles in the UK. No cabal of Labour leaders can prevent them. The task of the hour is to build up the WRP so that it will be able to organise the working class to take the power.