ISRAEL’s genocidal war on Gaza, killing over 36,000 Palestinians including over 15,000 children, has had a huge impact throughout the world and has created a major crisis for imperialism.
In the US it has reduced America’s influence in the world and has created a major problem for a Biden re-election as there are a growing number of encampments in US universities that oppose the Biden administration daily.
The US student rebellion has transformed US politics demanding a complete break with Israel and that the US divests from supporting Israeli firms and stops sending arms to Israel which are being used to massacre the Palestinian people.
This student opposition has spread throughout the world and now in Britain there are growing encampments in support of Palestine throughout the universities.
The mass demonstrations in most countries are defying police attacks on them, and internationally Israel is now completely isolated from other countries with a growing movement from Ireland, Spain, Norway, China, and many other states, to recognise the state of Palestine and defeat the Israeli-US war against Palestine.
In the July 4th General Election campaign WRP candidates are demanding that Britain recognises the state of Palestine and breaks economically and politically from Israel, ending the massive selling of arms to the Israeli regime.
The impact of Israel’s war has had a huge effect on the US, UK and other capitalist economies.
It is bleeding them dry at a time when they face a developing economic crisis and crash and are involved in the Ukraine war against Russia at the same time.
The July 4 general election is taking place in a situation of a deepening world-wide crisis of capitalism, while British capitalism is in the grip of a massive and ongoing economic crisis without parallel in its history.
In the aftermath of the world banking crisis of 2008 – a crisis that threatened to bring down the entire world capitalist financial system – the Tories imposed a vicious austerity regime on workers to pay for the bankers demand to be bailed-out.
Wages in the public sector were frozen or cut while private sector wages were held below poverty levels by bosses determined to keep profits high at the expense of their workers.
NHS budgets were frozen, Fire Stations were closed down, education budgets cut to the bone, while schools buildings crumbled through neglect.
A ‘bonfire of the regulations’ was carried out by the Tories leading to the Grenfell Tower atrocity that killed over 72 workers and their families – victims of cost savings by a Tory council and building companies who placed profits before the lives of workers.
The privateers made billions out of privatisation while the working class paid the bill with their lives.
The Tory government under Boris Johnson – faced the crippling impact of all the policies adopted to save the bankers and bosses from collapsing into bankruptcy – carried out Quantitative Easing with the Bank of England printing billions of worthless paper money notes to pump into the banks, and the major companies to keep them from collapse.
This was accompanied by near zero interest rates which allowed companies and financial investors to borrow huge sums with very little interest repayments.
This wild excess by the bosses had the effect of driving inflation through the roof and with it a dramatic increase in the cost of living being borne by workers and their families whose real take home wages were way below the levels of 2010.
Meanwhile, while nurses, doctors, postal workers and workers throughout the public services were putting their lives on the line by working through the Covid pandemic, Johnson and his cronies were partying away in Downing Street.
Million pound contracts for useless protective gear were handed out to friends of Tory MPs while tens of thousands were dying from Covid.
The outrage of workers at the sight of all the corruption and scandal that engulfed the Tories forced them to dump Johnson, who was completely unable to carry out the class war on a working class that was rising up in strikes across the country.
Johnson’s successor Liz Truss proved to be a 49 day wonder.
She was determined to start an economic revival by liberating the richest people from the highest rates of tax while bringing in the ‘Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill’.
This bill sought to end the right to strike in the transport industries by imposing huge fines on rail unions.
This Bill would later be extended to cover all trade union actions to force workers to cross picket lines and break strikes under the threat of immediate sacking if they did not comply.
The Tory anti-strike laws are aimed at destroying independent trade unions and turning them into instruments to control over their members on behalf of the bosses .
But Truss didn’t get to implement her promised war to the finish.
She made the fatal mistake in her 2022 mini budget of declaring massive, but unfunded, tax cuts for the rich which would come from borrowing the money from the international financial markets, and driving up the national debt to astronomical levels.
The international financiers realised quickly that Truss would bankrupt an economy already diving headlong into recession.
They rapidly started to dump British debt leaving the country on the very edge of state bankruptcy with the ruling class having no option but to boot Truss out after 49 days replacing her with Rishi Sunak.
Sunak, the ex-merchant banker and multi-millionaire, was tasked with the impossible job of stabilising British capitalism and taking on a rebellious working class that had had enough of austerity, enough of the brutal exploitation and sacrifices demanded by a bloated capitalist class.
Every measure designed to avert collapse, from money printing and zero interest rates, has driven up inflation and created thousands of ‘zombie’ companies existing solely through massive debt.
Every attempt by the Bank of England to try and bring down inflation by increasing the interest rates to new highs has led to a wave of bankruptcies and sharpened the economic crisis.
Capitalism is being gripped by a doom loop with no economic way out.
This crisis and the weakness of the Sunak government in waging a war to the finish against a powerful and enraged working class has brought about the meltdown of the Tories forcing Sunak to call a snap general election.
The working class is fighting for wage increases in order to live, have a roof over their heads and bring an end to poverty.
Refugees fleeing from imperialist wars and poverty are being driven into slave camps or dumped into Rwanda.
The unemployed and the thousands unable to work are damned as workshy scroungers sucking money from the state in benefits.
They are being driven into low paid work or they lose all their benefits.
Such a government will starve them as the crisis deepens!
The NHS itself, along with the entire Welfare State is being destroyed because bankrupt British capitalism can no longer afford the working class to have ‘such luxuries’.
Instead the ruling class want to bring in expensive private healthcare and huge cuts in social care.
In the latest furious attack on its enemies this increasingly demented and desperate ruling class has identified Russia and China as mortal foes that pose an ‘existential’ threat to Britain.
Such is the threat, that even when drowning in debt and diving over the cliff of economic recession the Tories are committed to increasing military spending and pledging £3 billion a year to the fascist supported Ukrainian regime to enable them to continue the war instigated by the imperialist powers to weaken Russia and open its vast land and resources for capitalist exploitation.
The Russian working class will deal with these bourgeois adventurers in the same way that the Russian workers dealt with the threat of fascism in the 1930’s and 40’s.
The enemy of the UK working class is not Russia or China, or Hamas in Palestine – the enemy is at home.
When the Tories made this commitment to the Ukraine, it was immediately matched by the Labour Party, with Labour’s shadow defence secretary John Healey saying that a future Labour government is ready to spend at least £15 billion a year on military support until the end of the decade.
This is while over 4.4 million children in Britain live in poverty, regularly going without food as their parents struggle with escalating prices, Labour is falling over themselves to pledge £15 billion to an imperialist war that the Ukrainian regime is losing. The absolute poverty of millions of children has been increased dramatically by the Tory two-child limit on benefits.
Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves recently ruled out a Labour government repealing this limit on the grounds that Labour would only spend what the country can afford.
Starmer is fashioning a right-wing regime to take over from the Tories and do the dirty work for British capitalism by making the working class pay for the economic crisis.
He has systematically driven out, sacked and expelled any Labour MP or member suspected of having socialist principles or support for striking workers, to fashion a party ready to defend British capitalism. He has set out to win the support of the capitalist class by presenting Labour as the ‘friend of business’.
This was followed by a speech given by Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves to an audience of bosses and ‘business leaders’ where she insisted ‘that this changed Labour Party is today the natural party of British business’.
With the Tory Party clearly in a state of complete collapse, the capitalist class are turning to Starmer’s Labour Party to rescue British capitalism by carrying on a war to the finish against workers and their trade unions.
We are living in the period of the death agony of capitalism worldwide, where the only solution is for the working class to force the TUC to organise a general strike in support of Palestine and against the Tories’ anti-working class policies, and bring down either a Tory or Labour government if elected, to go forward to a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
In this election only the WRP is standing on a revolutionary socialist programme that meets up to this historic crisis.
A workers government will defend the right to strike while organising to take over all the empty buildings and luxury apartments being held by the speculators as financial assets to give the homeless and those facing eviction somewhere to live.
It will allow all asylum seekers and refugees to enter, live and work in the UK, and be properly housed without restrictions.
The trade unions must campaign for a general strike to bring down the government and to bring in a workers government.
They will insist:
- There must be a sliding scale of wages with wages increased automatically in line with inflation to make up for the savage cuts imposed under austerity.
- All benefit cuts must be halted and reversed.
- The TUC leaders, if they still remain silent and refuse to organise a general strike, must be replaced by a new leadership prepared to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the government and bring in a workers government.
A workers government will immediately nationalise the banks and major industries without compensation, placing them under the management and control of the working class.
It will massively fund the NHS and drive out all privateers from healthcare.
A nationalised economy will finance the massive expansion of council house building to ensure every family has a decent home.
A workers government will bring in a socialist planned economy whose guiding principle is ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their needs’.
Internationally the workers government will give its fullest support to the revolutionary struggle of the Palestinians, sending finance and arms, to defeat Zionism and imperialism and establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists are fighting for this revolutionary programme to establish a workers government that will put an end to bankrupt British capitalism, organise to bring an end to all imperialist wars abroad and the class war at home.
Britain will stop arming Israel and start arming the Palestinians!
Forward to a Workers Government and Socialism!
Join the WRP and Young Socialist to build up the revolutionary leadership required to go forward to the victory of the British Socialist Revolution!
Vote WRP on July 4!
