The Situation in Britain

The government has made a ‘U-turn’, as the media calls it, on reform of the NHS. For Socialist Worker (18.6.11) changes proposed to the NHS are a “retreat”, a “humiliating climbdown” for a government intent on privatising. For the Guardian (14.6.11) it is “a compromise that might just heal the coalition”. But in all the words written about the changes the government has accepted from the Future Forum and the so-called ‘listening exercise’ there is often no mention of the driving force behind the reform – the £20bn efficiency savings demanded of the NHS.

On the evening of 2 June there was an explosion at the Chevron refinery in Pembrokeshire in which 4 workers were killed and one seriously injured. Sky News quoted an unnamed person as saying that this was a "tragic industrial accident". It went on to say that the blast was not "thought to pose any ongoing threat" (from contaminants). They have apparently been safely blown away.

The police are playing an increasingly prominent role in the NHS and social services. As health services are more and more stretched there is a greater emphasis on maintaining public order.

The revelations in The Guardian during January that exposed four undercover agents of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), and the outraged response to them from the ‘democratic’ media and politicians, are nevertheless worthy of attention. Concerns about the first agent – PC Mark Stone (aka Mark Kennedy) – were first made public in October 2010 on Indymedia, but it was the collapse of the trial in early January of 6 activists accused of conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station that grabbed the headlines. Apparently Stone, wracked with remorse, had threatened to ‘go native’ and give evidence for the defence.

"Student militants have joined forces with French communists to picket England’s secondary schools urging pupils as young as 15 to stage a walkout over university tuition fees. Supporters of using ‘legitimate force’ to try to stop the rise in fees have been joined by members of the International Communist Current (ICC) to mobilise school children."-Daily Mail Online

The ruling class is gearing up for its election. This time the big issue is not who will win, not even how many people will bother to vote, but how to reduce the deficit over the next few years - how to make the working class pay by cutting jobs, pay and services.

At every big election the media tell us how important it is that everyone exercises their democratic rights and votes. There are supposed to be clear choices between very different parties.

People go into bourgeois politics for diverse reasons, but few are able to resist the opportunity to use their membership of parliament or government as a way of lining their own pockets.

The relentless deepening of the crisis and the vast burden of debt weighing on the British economy mean that the ruling class - whichever of its factions are in government in the coming year - will have no choice but to make savage cuts in working class living standards.

All this turmoil in the world of official politics is the expression of a deeper malaise. Capitalist society is rotting on its feet and offers no perspective for the future. The ruling bourgeoisie increasingly resembles a bunch of petty gangsters out for number one.

The revelations about MPs expenses have confirmed what a lot of people suspected. Whether our representatives are cheating or just bending the rules it certainly looks like the Westminster porkers have their snouts in the trough.

In the lead up to the local and European elections, great play has been made of the threat posed by the British National Party. It is true that the BNP represent a particularly odious form of racism. When it comes to campaigning in the EU elections on the basis of out and out nationalism, the left is not be outdone by the right. No2EU, a coalition initiated by the RMT union, supported by various leftist groups, serves up its own brand of nationalist policies.

The ruling class is well aware that the perspective of a deepening economic crisis opens up the possibility of growing social unrest and rising levels of class struggle. Accordingly it is  preparing its repressive apparatus: the police, surveillance, intelligence and the legal system.

We find ourselves analysing the British situation today after a year of the developing credit crunch and at the very beginning of a recession that even the chancellor predicts will be long and deep. This poses difficult questions for the bourgeoisie as it tries to keep the banking system afloat with unprecedented rescue packages and stabilise the economy. At the same time it is totally bogged down in failing military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside the USA which continue to drain resources. In spite of a policy of trying to spend its way out of the crisis, with money it has to borrow, the working class will be made to pay for the crisis.

As Tony Blair reached his tenth anniversary as Prime Minister and prepared to announce his resignation, attention turned to his legacy. Blair himself is quite clear: “I am convinced that the initial insight that brought us to power has stood the test of time…The idea was that there was no need to choose between social justice on the one hand and economic prosperity on the other ... Ten years on, this is the governing idea of British politics.” (Guardian, 27/04/07). Many commentators agree that politics in Britain has changed...

Blair or Brown? Brown or Cameron? Or should we look to more ‘radical alternatives’, like Respect or the BNP, who claim to be different from the usual gang of politicians?

The strengthening of the state is a characteristic of all decadent societies and this is particularly true of decomposing capitalism. What Tony Blair calls the new situation of ‘modernity’ is in fact senility and decay.

All the forces of the bourgeoisie, the left, the right, the far right and the extreme left, not to mention the trades unions, all came together in the grand electoral orchestra, whether in France and Holland for the referendums on the European constitution, for the parliamentary elections in Britain, or the Länder elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most heavily-populated region).

Since the spring, the world economy has been the victim of a series of financial tremors: whole states, and some of the developed world's biggest companies, have gone bankrupt, the stock exchanges have rarely been so unstable and fragile. The bourgeoisie's clever economists have trotted out a whole list of explanations for this avalanche of problems: they have 'denounced' the disastrous policies of the IMF, pouring oil on the fire as it came to the 'rescue' of countries in difficulty, the scandal of stock-options encouraging stock market fiddling on a grand scale, the headlong flight into financial speculation and debt by companies, etc.

Once the dry ice of the election spectacle has cleared, the new government can get on with its job: defending capitalism at the expense of the working class.

After every election it’s the same, regardless of which party gets in. The indications are that, this time round, the ruling class prefers Labour to provide the best team for looking after its interests.

The economic crisis

1. From the Far East to the heartlands of capitalism the brutal contradictions of the global crisis of overproduction have unfolded as the world economy has sunk into open recession since the summer of 1997. "The full extent of the financial crisis which began over a year ago in South-East Asia is beginning to emerge. It took a new plunge during the summer with the collapse of the Russian economy, and the unprecedented convulsione unprecedented convulsions of the 'emerging countries' of Latin America. But today, it is the developed countries of Europe and North America that are in the firing line, with the continual slide on their stock exchanges and the constant downward adjustments of their forecast growth. We have come a long way from the bourgeoisie's euphoria of a few months back expressed in the dizzy rise in western markets during the first half of 1998. Today, the same 'specialists' who had congratulated themselves on the 'good health' of the Anglo-Saxon countries, and who forecast a recovery for all the European countries, are the first to talk of recession, or even 'depression'. And they are right to be pessimistic. The clouds gathering over the most powerful economies are pregnant, not with some passing squall, but with a veritable tempest, an expression of the dead-end into which the capitalist economy has plunged" (IR 95, 'Economic disaster reaches capitalism's heart')