THE TORIES set out their plans to get the collapsing British capitalist economy ‘back on track’ in yesterday’s Queen’s Speech marking the opening of Parliament.
The speech unveiled 38 parliamentary bills – none of which offered help in any shape or form to the millions of workers being driven into the gutter by spiralling inflation driving the cost of living through the roof.
Instead, it was a list of the legislation the Tories intend to introduce, involving cutting all public spending to try to bring down the massive national debt which stands at over £2.3 trillion.
Rejecting all the begging from the Labour Party and TUC for the Tories to ‘help out’ impoverished workers and pensioners, the proposed legislation offered nothing except the insistence that British capitalism cannot ‘spend its way out of trouble’, and workers and the middle class must accept poverty and destitution while the Tories ‘grow the economy’.
No ‘support’ for those having to go without as inflation spirals up to 10%, even higher for those essentials like food and energy bills, and with no end in sight.
Instead, the Tories just made the promise that it would ‘support more people back to work’.
Just how jobs are going to be created in an economy that is collapsing with entire industries and companies cutting back under the impact of energy costs, was left out of the speech.
The only policy the Tories have for helping people back to work is to cut Universal Credit in the hope acute poverty will drive workers and young people into accepting a life of insecure, poverty-level wages in the gig economy.
Several matters were highlighted as the Tories’ top priority in the speech, including the pledge to play a ‘leading role in defending democracy’ in the world by spending billions on weapons for the Ukrainian fascist military.
Limitless amounts of money for imperialist war against Russia, tax cuts for the capitalist class, public spending to be slashed through a massive extension of privatisation of the NHS and every public service, all to be enforced by new police laws – this was the way out of the crisis for the Tories.
The speech announced a new wave of powers for the police – the Public Order Bill – which the Tories claim is aimed primarily at climate change protesters.
In fact, it goes far beyond these groups, making ‘interfering with key national infrastructure’ an offence carrying a maximum sentence of 12 months and an unlimited fine.
Strikes and picketing by rail, tube, and bus workers along with action by printworkers, airport staff or any of the public services, including the civil service and NHS, will become illegal.
This new proposed bill increases the powers of the police to arrest and disperse demonstrations even more than those contained in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill that became law in April and re-establishes the draconian parts of that bill that even the House of Lords rejected as an attack on civil liberties.
The bill will give the police new powers of stop and search even when no criminal activity is suspected.
The Tories are acutely aware that dumping the full crisis of capitalism, including the billions being handed out to the fascist-supported government in Ukraine, is galvanising the working class into revolt.
With absolutely no way to ‘grow’ British capitalism out of crashing into recession, the only way out for the ruling class is to abandon the pretence of bourgeois democracy and bring in a police military state where strikes, pickets and demonstrations are banned, and workers forced to accept having the capitalist crisis dumped squarely on their backs.
Workers will not sit back and accept going without food and heating in order to keep the bosses and bankers in profit and financing a war to restore capitalism to Russia.
The national demonstration called by the TUC on June 18 must be the start of a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and go forward to a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward for the working class.
