HISTORICALLY, the term Star Chamber is synonymous with feudal oppression and dictatorship over the people and over parliament, specifically with the attempts of Charles 1 to rule without parliaments, by Divine Right, from 1629-1640.
The Star Chamber was made up of Privy Counsellors, and judges, and its sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no juries, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing.
King Charles I used the Court of Star Chamber to hold down his kingdom by force of arms during the eleven years of his personal rule, when he ruled without a Parliament.
He made extensive use of the Star Chamber to prosecute, execute and punish dissenters, including the rising Puritan bourgeoisie.
In 1641, the just called Long Parliament, led by John Pym and including Oliver Cromwell, abolished the Star Chamber with an Act of Parliament, the Habeas Corpus Act 1640, preparing the way for the civil war and the English revolution.
This culminated in the execution of Charles 1 in 1649, as a blood-soaked traitor, the closing down of the House of Lords, the purging of the House of Commons, and the founding of the English Republic, with Cromwell as its Lord Protector, who instituted bourgeois rule in Britain.
The announcement by the media that the Tory-led coalition is to set up a ‘Star Chamber,’ to terrorise the cabinet into carrying out an annual cull of £60bn of savage cuts, is an indication that the bourgeoisie grasps only too well that dictatorship, repression, and not democracy, are going to be required in very large doses, even to make an attempt at forcing through the massive cuts programme.
In fact, there is every indication that its effort to pauperise and drive back the working class, and impose a dictatorship to do so (the Star Chamber, and the 55 per cent rule for dissolving parliament are just a start) will be no more successful than was the attempt of Charles 1 to rule by divine right.
In fact, the revolutionary response from the working class will be immeasurably swifter than was that of the bourgeoisie in the 17th century.
Osborne’s emergency budget will be announced on June 22. Before and after this, till the axe falls, a farcical process of consultation is to be held to try to give the imposition of the most savage cuts a democratic veneer.
Trade union, professional organisations and town hall mass meetings are to be asked to suggest where the ‘unavoidable’, ‘painful’ and ‘inevitable’ cuts should take place to change ‘our whole way of life’. They will automatically suggest somewhere else.
This massive farcical, comic, and completely cynical side of the campaign will give way to the mobilisation of the state by the Cabinet core of the ‘Star Chamber’ to impose the cuts by force.
£60bn a year of cuts will entail wage cuts, pension cuts, price rises, a VAT rise to 20 per cent, and mass sackings with up to a million to be added rapidly to the army of unemployed that capitalism has developed.
Ministers will be brought before the cabinet ‘Star Chamber’ of senior state and civil service officials and told that the survival of the state is at stake and that they must do what is necessary, and by any means necessary.
Central to this survival is the shutting down of the public sector. The ‘Star Chamber’ will tell ministers to see that services are handed over to private operators and a small army of charities, with millions of workers to lose their jobs.
Ministers will be told to find ways of ‘doing more for less’.
This dictatorial approach was emphasised yesterday by a Treasury official who said that ‘Anyone who thinks the spending review is just about saving money is missing the point. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the way that government works.’ There is going to be a change in the form of rule.
A ‘Star Chamber’ is needed because out in the open state compulsion will take the place of bourgeois democracy (the mailed fist within the velvet glove). The response of the working class to these developments will be immediate and revolutionary. Osborne’s emergency budget must be met with an indefinite general strike to bring down the coalition and a socialist revolution to go forward to a workers government and socialism.
