JUST five months after being elected with a landslide majority, a life or death political and economic crisis has engulfed British capitalism.
Labour PM Sir Keir Starmer has effectively admitted the utter failure of his government’s policies, declaring that all Labour’s promises, pledges, predictions and missions have been scrapped and are to be replaced with new targets that the working class will have to achieve to keep British capitalism going.
His principal policy of ‘growing the economy’ to provide more profits and taxes to fund the NHS and social services with a massive job creation, is in tatters amid the huge escalation of the world economic and debt crisis which is plunging the UK into recession.
The EU is imploding, with France’s government falling apart over welfare cuts, while the German government is collapsing over a growing industrial recession and the loss of thousands of auto worker jobs.
Meanwhile, the US President-elect Trump is signalling that he will impose massive trade tariffs across the world to make the rest of the world pay for the US crisis.
This has left PM Starmer desperate in an attempt to trade with both the US and the EU, despite the massive trade tariffs that the US is set to impose.
In a plea to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet House this week he said: ‘The idea that we must choose between our allies, that somehow we’re with either America or Europe, is plain wrong. I reject it utterly.’
In Starmer’s fictional world, the UK stands above such vulgar manifestations as a violent and vicious trade war with all of its consequences.
Some are arguing that the UK should focus on seeking closer trade ties with the EU, and to hell with the USA.
Britain’s total imports and exports with the EU 27-nation bloc stood at more than £800bn last year – or 46 per cent of total trade – dwarfing the amount with the US.
Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, told a recent CBI event to double down on a warning that Brexit had damaged the economy, less than a fortnight after he told an audience of top bankers that the UK’s departure from the EU had ‘consequences’ for growth.
Sir Peter Westmacott, who served as British ambassador to the US from 2012 to 2016, said: ‘If you look at the last 50 to 60 years, it has suited the UK to talk up the special relationship, and the Americans echo it to make us feel good’.
Any talk of a ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK has now fallen apart over the Anglo-US loan deal, agreed after World War II in December 1945, when a desperate and bankrupt Britain agreed a $3.5 billion loan from the IMF in return for an agreement on free and multilateral trade.
This opened up the British colonial empire to the US, thus sealing global US trade dominance and led to the abolition of sterling trade areas.
Trump is going to seek to smash the EU including the UK, as the trade war intensifies. The UK will also find it hard to make any inroads on opening up the US defence market.
‘The US defence sector is not at all open to foreign trade. We buy a lot of military equipment from America – they buy nothing from British manufacturers,’ Westmacott says.
‘They don’t do us many favours. Look at BP for example. I spent a lot of time trying to manage the way in which the US government treated BP after the Gulf of Mexico disaster in 2010’, he added.
This is nothing compared to what Trump has in store for the EU-UK once he is president, as he intends to make the rest of the capitalist world pay for deeming to even challenge the USA.
Meanwhile the TUC has been silent on the UK economic catastrophe that is developing for British capitalism.
There is now no way out for the British economy. There is only one way forward and that is for the UK, US and EU workers to unite to get rid of the rotting capitalist system and replace it with a worldwide socialist planned economy whose motto will be ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’.
This is the only way forward!
