Brown’s Working Together means everybody paying the bill for the bankers
rab
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Brown’s Working Together means everybody paying the bill for the
bankers
GORDON BROWN’S speech yesterday, at the TUC, was a very poor effort
from a politician and a party that have no intention of defending the
interests of the working class and the trade unions.
Brown continually repeated his slogan of ‘Working Together’ to try to
convince delegates and the working class that however bitter and toxic
the pill is that is being shoved down their throats by his government,
they must not break ranks and spit it out. They must swallow it to
keep the banks solvent.
Brown said that ‘when banks collapse and markets fail, government
can’t stand aside’.
Trying to appeal to sentimentality he summoned up the ghost of Jack
Jones who ‘could not stand aside’ from the Spanish civil war.
Brown declared: ‘But today these lessons, that when people need help
you cannot walk away, are profoundly relevant, because the fears of
depression have been precisely the worries of workers, homeowners,
savers and businesses have faced in the last twelve months. . .
‘But unlike the 1930s, and having learned the lessons Jack learned
from them, we have not stood aside and left people on their own’.
Brown deliberately seeks to confuse the issue. Workers do not believe
that one can ignore or stand aside from the greatest ever crisis of
capitalism.
They believe that the intervention should be to get rid of a
capitalist system that is disintegrating in order to bring in
socialism, and a planned economy, that will see everybody working
together for the common good.
In fact, Brown intervened to save the bankers and the capitalist
system – at a huge cost to the workers.
He has given the bankers and the capitalists £1.3 trillion in gifts,
loans and guarantees. They are now re-capitalised and restoring their
regime of multi-million pound bonuses, while the working class is
being told that their part of the ‘Working Together’ scam is to pay
the bill for the entire banking crisis, with interest.
This is why millions are unemployed, why a whole generation of youth
have been turned into ‘Neets’, why the NHS is being privatised, why
the Fire Service is being smashed, and why the motor car industry
faces mass sackings and closures.
This is not working together. This is everybody being forced to make
massive sacrifices to save the bankers from their crisis.
Brown is a bankers’ man, and his government is a bankers’ government.
This is why, while it is prepared to have majority state holdings in
some banks, for a limited time, with the old gang still in charge, it
refuses point-blank, as a point of principle, to nationalise GMM Luton
and GM Ellesmere Port, to save tens of thousands of jobs and tens of
thousands of families.
Brown even tried to exhibit his ‘bleeding heart’ when he told Congress
‘for me every redundancy is a personal tragedy. Every mortgage
repossession is a hope destroyed. Every business collapse is someone’s
dream in ruins. And where we can act we will not walk by on the other
side.’
These are just the most cynical of crocodile tears!
We repeat that Brown’s policy is not working together, but a Brown
government working for the bankers and trying to blackmail the trade
union movement into supporting this treacherous policy, by helping to
cut the throats of their members.
Brown tried the blackmailing approach when he said: ‘But I tell you
that we still have a choice to make: the recovery is not automatic and
the road to recovery is still fragile. . .
‘And I say to workers and businesses across our country, don’t risk
the recovery by abandoning what we know is now working. . .’
The working class and its trade unions must boldly declare that they
will not support a single wage cut, job cut or privatisation measure.
On the contrary, the working class must now advance to put an end to
this bankrupt capitalist system with a socialist revolution to advance
to a socialist society.