YESTERDAY, the BMA revealed in a statement that thousands of doctors feared that the NHS would not be able to cope with the ‘incredible demand’ amid the surge in Covid infections and the mutation of the virus into even more deadly forms.
The BMA survey stated: ‘Whether it’s Covid or cancer, we are extremely worried that there may not be the capacity in our health service to provide care for everyone who needs it if the infection rates continue to soar.
‘Our NHS and its staff are already at the point of collapse; with many hospitals full to capacity at the very start of the busy winter period, these tougher measures are necessary to give the health service a fighting chance to cope with the incredible demand it is experiencing and will likely continue to.’
This is an indictment of the Johnson government that refused to declare war on the Covid-19 plague as did China, which completely shut down and eradicated the plague. China’s planned economy is now fully recovered, and its people are in tip-top shape. This is a massive example of the superiority of a nationalised and planned economy over ‘law of the jungle’ British capitalism.
Johnson’s approach to Covid-19 was typically bourgeois. He insisted that there must not be a full time lockdown, and that the bosses must be allowed to continue making their profits. The result is that the UK is now being hit by a virus that is mutating, and will become if anything more deadly this winter.
We are now being told that while even Vietnam, devastated by imperialism in a huge national liberation war, has been able to eradicate the virus, the UK must be prepared to let the virus rip throughout the winter.
Johnson’s bankrupt policy is to put the bosses profits first before the safety of the public. He is set to continue with this while doctors fear that the NHS is about to be destroyed by this policy.
Only big business is profiting from the Covid-19 crisis. It has been handed billions in furlough money, and encouraged to engage in fire and rehire offensives against workers, as at Heathrow.
The current situation is one where the UK working class is being pushed into a winter crisis situation where it will be forced to fight for its life against the virus and against Tory bosses’ attacks.
March 3rd is a special date – it will be Sunak’s first budget.
In The Spectator magazine last week, Tory Chancellor Sunak broke ranks with the official Tory line that British capitalism could survive by indefinitely printing billions of pounds of paper money.
He said that the point has been reached when the massive state debt will have to be paid at a time when government borrowing in October this year, at £22 billion, is the highest ever total on record. In seven months, the government borrowed £215 billion, pushing the UK public debt to over 100% of GDP.
Currently, the government pays 0.3% on the vast amount it borrows, but Sunak is warning that these interest rates could treble at any time and bring the state and its finances to the point of bankruptcy.
He said of this situation: ‘It is clearly not sustainable to borrow at these levels. I don’t think morally, economically or politically it would be right.’
There is only one way out of this crisis for the Tories and the ruling class. It is to make the working class and the youth pay the bill for the entire crisis with massive wage cuts for workers and mass unemployment for youth.
Wages of public sector workers will be frozen and cut while in the private sector fire and rehire wage-cutting will be the rule, as the hungry 1930s are reintroduced.
Ahead this winter is a ferocious class war, where the working class will have to bring down the Johnson government to defend its jobs, living standards, families and its NHS health care, including eradicating the virus.
In 1971, Britain’s leading expert in counter-revolution, General Sir Frank Kitson, wrote in his book Low Intensity Operations: ‘If a genuine and serious grievance arose, such as might result from a significant drop in the standard of living, all those who now dissipate their protest over a wide variety of causes might concentrate their efforts and produce a situation which was beyond the power of the police to handle. Fumbling at this juncture might have grave consequences even to the extent of undermining confidence in the whole system of government.’
Kitson was prepared to accept that the grievances were genuine, but insisted that at such a moment the survival of British capitalism would depend on ruthless and decisive action, rather like what the Irish workers saw on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Belfast on 30th January 1972 when British soldiers shot 26 civilians, killing 14 of them.
For workers there is not a moment to lose. They must join the WRP and the YS to build the required revolutionary leadership for the UK working class to take the power with a socialist revolution.
Only a planned socialist economy can eradicate the Covid-19 crisis by overthrowing capitalism whose contradictions have sharpened to the point where it now must be overthrown.
