HEWITT AND HOON STAB LABOUR IN THE BACK
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HEWITT AND HOON STAB LABOUR IN THE BACK
HEWITT and Hoon, are two of the Labour Party’s leading Blairites.
Hoon was heavily involved in Blair’s criminal Iraq war, and in the
pursuit of the whistleblower Doctor Kelly, while Hewitt was booed at
NHS trade union conferences because of her role in privatising the
NHS, and turning it into a business.
They yesterday stabbed the Labour government in the back, and did
their best to bring the Tory party back into office.
The two ex-cabinet ministers called for a parliamentary secret ballot
on the leadership of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seeking to
remove him from the right, with the support of other right wingers
such as Frank Field and Norfolk’s Charles Clarke.
The reason for this treachery against the Labour Party is obvious.
The Tories and their backers have given up on the notion that a
grateful working class is about to vote the Tory Party back into
office so that it can slash billions off of every service, and put
millions more on the dole.
They are now thinking more along the lines of a hung parliament.
Therefore every vote matters and anything that weakens the Labour
party is good and to be welcomed.
The infamous Gang of Four played a similar role in 1981. Jenkins,
Rogers, Owen and Williams led a breakaway out of the Labour Party at a
time when there were 3 million unemployed after two years of the
Thatcher government, and Thatcher was known as the ‘milk snatcher’ and
was very very unpopular.
They weakened Labour for the benefit of the ruling Thatcherites.
Hewitt and Hoon are now weakening the Labour party to help the Tories
gain office, since the right-wing Blairites are much closer to the
Tories than they are to Brown.
Their open mutiny follows on from Tessa Jowell’s public misgivings
that Brown might be set to fight a class war with Tory leader Cameron,
and Mandelson’s well leaked opposition to any attacks on the rich and
the bankers.
Their mutiny also reflects the desperate state and deepening crisis of
British capitalism.
Pimco, the US investment group, has just declared that it will be
selling UK government bonds next year instead of being one of the main
purchasers of the hundreds of billions of UK debt.
If this trend widens, Britain will be bankrupted and the pound
collapsed in no time.
At the moment, UK inflation and the cost of living is rising as a
result of soaring oil prices and the restoration of the 17.5 per cent
rate of VAT. The banks and big business say that along with a
permanent wage freeze, and a speed up of the privatisation of the
public sector, there will have to be an increase in the bank rate,
despite the impact that this will have on mortgage interest rates and
the repossession of homes.
They are also saying that if massive borrowing becomes impossible,
then there will have to be a programme of savage cuts, similar to
those in Ireland where there has been a 50 per cent cut in the
jobseekers allowance for youth, and ten to fifteen per cent cuts in
wages and pensions.
The Hoons, Hewitts, Fields and Clarkes inside the Labour party are
putting themselves in a position to be part of a national government
alongside the Tories and the Liberal Democrats to push home the savage
cuts that the bourgeosie insists are becoming more and more necessary
if British capitalism is to survive.
The would-be coupists inside the Labour party must be deselected as
MPs and not allowed to stand at the next election, and be thrown out
of the Labour party.
The trade unions must fight against the Brown government for socialist
policies to defend the jobs wages and basic rights of workers.
In fact, they must fight to remove the Brown government from the left,
in order to bring in a workers government that will carry out
socialist policies and put an end to crisis-ridden capitalism.