Britain

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.

Alan Woods was invited to speak at Eton, the most prestigious private school in Britain (known as a "public" school in English), by the school's Orwell Society. Alan gave a very clear explanation of why society needs to be changed and why the only direction it can go in is socialism. We believe the points raised and the answers given provide a very good outline of what Marxism stands for today.

A debate in the British Parliament on the nationalisation of Northern Rock, involving John McDonnell MP, has revealed that billions of pounds are to be diverted away from the intended purpose of preventing a banking collapse, into the pockets of the Rock's management. It seems the directors of Northern Rock had set up a financial institution called Granite, the real purpose of which was to carry out tax evasion!

"The London police on strike. After that, anything can happen", said Sylvia Pankhurst in 1918. The ground is certainly shifting in Britain. There has been a continual build up of public anger at the government's attempt to impose a 2% limit on public sector pay. The Police are getting a paltry 1.9% rise, in effect a pay cut. They were furious and making all kinds of threats against the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown.

New Labour fears that if Northern Rock collapses large sectors of the financial system could follow. And that would reverberate throughout the economy. Recession is on its way. A financial collapse could be the trigger. The right thing to do is nationalise Northern Rock, and with it take over the whole banking system.

Since 1979 UK child poverty has doubled. In 2006, 3.8 million children were living in poverty in homes on less than 60% of average income. Although this is a fall of about 600,000 since 1998, this still leaves 500,000 children above the Government's own target. This is not the whole picture either - poverty in the whole population is increasing.

Towards the end of last year we witnessed the collapse of another attempt to create a party to the left of Labour. The RESPECT party, which was founded in 2004, was the latest effort to establish an electoral alternative to Labour. It succeeded in winning an MP, George Galloway, as well as a few dozen councillors up and down the country. However, the whole project soon went pear-shaped.

Tommy Sheridan is facing yet another fight in his colourful career as Scotland's best known socialist. He has been arrested on suspicion of perjury arising from his widely publicised defamation case against the News of the World for which he was awarded £200,000 damages.

It is fashionable today among some on the left to refer to some golden age of "old labour". They use this to argue that in the past it was a workers' party but now it is no longer. The Blairites on the other hand claim that the party was too "left-wing" to be elected. But there has never been such a golden age. If you look at the record of Labour governments, they have all been responsible for cutting living standards and carrying out an imperialist foreign policy.

Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007.  He was 64 years old.  A fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford since 1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.