Britain

Pressures have been building up in British society. High house prices, fuel and food price increases and pay restraint and cuts particularly in the public sector are all having a huge effect on workers. It's obvious that there's going to be a change and the longer it is delayed the worse the storm is when it eventually breaks.

This article was originally published in 1971 in the Militant International Reviewunder the title Marxism and the Pilkington Strike – A lesson from history. The Pilkington glassworks had entered into dispute and had come up against the problem of the stifling control of the bureaucracy over their union, the GMWU. The Socialist Worker advised the workers to leave and set up a new union. The Marxist tendency, gathered around the Militant, advised against this and events later confirmed the correctness of this position.

British capitalism is in big trouble. The official annual inflation rate has hit 3.3%, its highest level for 16 years. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has been forced to send a letter to the Chancellor of Exchequer, Alastair Darling, to explain why the Bank has been unable to keep inflation from rising at more than 2%, which is the target set by the government for the Bank.

The political landscape in Britain is changing before our very eyes. This morning’s prominent TV news is of the tanker drivers’ strike, showing scenes of pickets with Red Flags turning away lorries at Shell refineries. The next item is the deepening government crisis, followed by a warning from Gazprom that oil prices could reach $250 a barrel. It was like a typical news bulletin of the 1970s.

In any historical period, the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class. In 1989 the world was treated to the words of Francis Fukuyama, who published an essay with the title 'The end of history?' His argument was not that historical events had literally stopped happening but that the collapse of so-called 'communism' in the Soviet union meant that western liberal democracy had successfully established itself as the ultimate and ideal form of government. Marxism lay totally discredited he declared, gloatingly.

This is a two-part article looking at the decline in the quality of life for working people in Britain today. The first article focuses on the workplace, where there has been relative decline in wages and deterioration in the conditions of employment. The second part looks at the attack on the 'social wage'. Real wages, i.e. purchasing power has been declining and the overall infrastructure of what once was an advanced welfare state, has been crumbling.

Lal Khan was speaking in Birmingham on June 1 at a meeting organised by the local PTUDC, where he outlined the developing crisis in Pakistan and highlighted the need for socialism as the only answer to the problems of the workers and peasants.

The New Labour government is on the rocks. The wreckage of Blairism, under the leadership of Gordon Brown, was dealt a further crushing blow at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. A 7,000 Labour majority was turned into a 7,000 Tory majority in a swing of 17.6%. It was the Tories' first by-election gain in 30 years.

The Crewe by-election, with an 18% swing to the Tories, confirms that they are on target for a landslide win in the next general election. Railway workers and other working class people who have voted Labour for generations have finally had enough. The betrayals and disappointments of New Labour have caused these electors to break the habit of a lifetime. Make no mistake about it. Mass working class abstentions have done for Brown and his witless crew.

Up till recently, Britain’s main high street banks had not seemed to have suffered much – they were all announcing big profits and there was little talk of large ‘writedowns’ of worthless assets. But now the Royal Bank of Scotland has announced that it lost £4bn in the last three months as a result of the world’s great credit crunch and it must write off £5bn in loans and debt securities that it had on its books as worthless. The credit crunch is going to hit Britain in a big way.

"Britain has been hit by what trade unions have called the biggest wave of work stoppages since the Labour government came to power 10 years ago, with up to 400,000 public sector employees going on strike." (Reuters: Headline and opening sentence Friday, 25 April 2008)

New Labour suffered a humiliating defeat in the recent local elections, but those left groupings who were hoping to capitalise on Labour's difficulties also found themselves in a mess. As Ted Grant explained, the working class always ignore these sectarian grouplets on the fringes of the labour movement and in times of struggle always turn towards their traditional organisations.

The Tory victories in the local elections on May 1st mean that the Conservatives will almost certainly go on to win the next general election and form the next government. Theoretically the Labour leadership could turn the situation round, but they seem incapable of changing their disastrous course. New Labour is in meltdown.

At a recent public meeting in London a couple of hecklers were attacking John McDonnell for being a member of the Labour Party. A veteran trade union activist answered them by comparing the Labour Party with a house that has been overrun by rats. The task of the working class is to clean up the house and get possession of it once again.

This British Perspectives draft document (2008) is part of a wide-ranging discussion about the likely development of events in British society. It looks at the crisis of capitalism worldwide and how this affects British capitalism and also looks at how this impacts on the trade union movement and the political situation as a whole.