IN Tuesday night’s vote in the House of Commons on the Blair government’s Education Bill, 67 Labour MPs voted against, wiping out the government’s majority.
The government however did not fall over the edge of the abyss. It was saved because the Tory opposition party voted with the government.
This vote confirmed that there is an alliance between the Blair wing of the Labour Party and the Tory party against the Labour left, and against the working class.
It is now Tory policy to keep the Blair government in office since the Tories are frightened that they will not be able to win an early election, since the working class’ long memory has no difficulty recollecting the 18 years of Thatcher and Major.
All the huffing and puffing at yesterday’s parliamentary questions by Tory leader Cameron, that he held Blair personally responsible for the chaos in the Home Office etc, is just empty posturing, since on the night before, the opposition could have brought Blair and the government down, if it had voted against a Bill that it rejects as being too timid and weak-kneed.
This did not stop them from voting for the Blair government.
That Blair is now looking to have his government maintained in the period ahead by the Tory party can be seen by the admission of a 10 Downing Street spokesman, that he was not aware of any ‘particular efforts’ on the part of Blair to persuade potential rebels to back the government.
What we have here is a national government in practice, where the majority of Labour MP’s and the Tories join hands to ensure that right wing privatising policies are pushed through the House of Commons.
This means that the most advanced sections of the working class will have no alternative but to kiss goodbye to any remaining illusions that anything can be accomplished through parliament, and take to the French road of extra-parliamentary struggle, to smash anti-union laws and halt the attacks that is now being mounted to destroy the Welfare State, as well as their wages and jobs.
This is illustrated by the resolutions that were carried by the CWU conference this week, pledging that if Labour allows the issuing of Royal Mail shares the union will stop financing the Labour Party, and that the union will take national strike action if the management seeks to impose wage rises and changes in conditions, in effect derecognising the union.
It is this sharpening of the class struggle, allied to a sudden deepening of the world capitalist crisis, that will bring the political crisis to a head, split the Labour Party and send the Blairites tumbling into an official alliance with the Tories.
The break that the working class is making with parliamentary illusions, however does not mean that it should turn its back on politics and just embrace syndicalism.
When the class struggle reaches a certain point – the mobilisation of the masses for a general strike, for instance, the working class will be posed with taking power, bringing down the capitalist government of the day and overthrowing the bourgeois order.
Already the working class is posed with preventing the alliance between Cameron and Blair turning into an open National Government that will seek to impose the whole burden of the capitalist crisis onto the working class.
There is only one way that this can be done. That is by the working class moving into action to bring down the Blair government, to go forward to a workers government that will carry out socialist policies.
This is the way forward. However to take the working class forward along this revolutionary road the building up of the revolutionary leadership of the British working class, the WRP, is very much required.
The working class is the heart, but it needs a revolutionary head to go forward to the taking of power and socialism.
Now is the time for all militant workers and youth to join and build the WRP and its youth movement the Young Socialists.
