THE UK economy is heading for a recession and a slump as the latest official figures show. It shrank between July and September by 0.2% during the three months, as soaring prices hit businesses and households.
The Bank of England has forecast a ‘very challenging’ two-year slump, as prices rocket upwards with food, fuel and energy commodities leading the way – as the US and the UK provide the Ukraine with billions of dollars and pounds worth of the latest military equipment without any limits.
The main imperialist powers the USA and the UK are determined to weaken Russia, the degenerated workers state, even if that means no limits to food price increases at home, and their populations at home freezing and starving in the coming winter.
It is also an equation that leads inexorably to working class strikes, revolts and revolution!
For the ruling class, all this is a price worth paying provided Russia can be weakened to the point of regime-change, and the world position of the imperialist powers maintained, even if it means cracking more than a few heads at home.
Already the Guardian has revealed a state plan for state intervention during the winter, if the working class rises to the historic occasion and decide that they will change the regime at home themselves, even if it means a socialist overthrowal of capitalism.
Currently, as the crisis situation develops, the NHS – , one of the great historic gains of the UK working class – is coming under the direct threat of privatisation, to slash the health bill that was forced on the ruling class since the adoption of the NHS in 1948.
They want to turn back health care to be a question of whether you can afford it or not.
Directly on the agenda of the UK ruling class is this year driving back the trade unions and illegalising the right to strike, so they can cut wages as they like, and smash the NHS so that health care will once again depend on your bank balance and not on your social needs.
The UK ruling class is planning to take society back to pre-Welfare State days, where the poor starved and had no benefits from their cradle to the grave.
The working class in the UK now faces three great battles, that are at the centre of the developing class war between the working class and the ruling class.
The working class must defend its right to strike. It must defend its right to a universal, comprehensive publicly-funded, publicly-provided National Health Service.
It must defend the gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions and drive forward the struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
The ruling class is now boasting that it is rapidly moving forward the point where it will not need train drivers, or even to tolerate trade unions and trade unionism, as the whole system will be automated.
They intend to destroy workers trade unions and rule through police state measures and practices. Their intention is to smash the Welfare State and reimpose the full brutal power of imperialism throughout the planet.
There is only one way to answer this plan.
That is to build up rapidly the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Young Socialists in the struggle to force the TUC to call an all-out general strike, to defend the the NHS and to replace the Tories with a Workers Government that will nationalise the banks and the major industries under workers’ management and go forward to a socialist planned economy.
Internationally the struggle must be waged to build up the Fourth International – to organise the victory of the world socialist revolution and to restore rule through workers soviets in the degenerated and deformed workers states of Russia and China.
This is the only way to reply to the drive of the ruling classes to restore the conditions of the 1930s over the whole planet.
This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
Make sure that you join the WRP and the Young Socialists and attend our News Line Anniversary rally on Sunday October 19.
Join the WRP and the YS today to organise the victory of the British and World Socialist Revolutions.
