Strike together
Tories out
- No trust in Starmer’s Labour
- Build a new mass workers’ party
Duncan Moore, Devon Socialist Party
Seven million people on NHS waiting lists. Nurses working 12-hour shifts and relying on food banks to feed their families.
90% of schools face running out of money due to skyrocketing energy costs. Poverty pensions and benefits. Everywhere you look, our pay, our working conditions, our public services and our communities are being hammered. What’s left to cut?
Exactly how they intend to make us pay for the crisis of their making will be detailed by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in his autumn statement on 17 November.
The Tories will say that they are acting in the ‘national interest’. This is a lie. There is no such thing as the national interest; they act in their own interest, and that of the super-rich and parasitical capitalist class they represent.
A week after Hunt announced an early end to the energy support scheme, leaving households with annual bills of up to £4,500 from April, Shell announced it has paid no windfall tax on the £30 billion profit it made this year. The CEO of BP said his company has “more cash than we know what to do with”, as it posted record-breaking profits in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis.
Well, we’ve got some suggestions: pay more tax for a start!
A significant portion of the budget hole Hunt is trying to fill could be filled by modest tax increases on the super-rich. But that is only a start. The super-rich will always look for ways to avoid paying tax – including exploiting loopholes like the non-dom tax status used by Rishi Sunak’s super-rich family. To get ownership of all the hoarded wealth, and to have democratic control over how it is used, we need nationalisation under democratic workers’ control.
Of course we don’t expect anything better from the Tories; Sunak and Hunt are multimillionaires themselves. But look to Labour for a fightback against austerity, and you’ll be dismayed.
Party leader Keir Starmer says that even under a Labour government, “things will be really tough”. Labour “would not take any risks with the public finances”. Translated, this is Starmer saying to the markets and the bosses: ‘You can count on me’.
There is an alternative. The strikes by workers in transport, communications and education have shown the power of the organised working class. By striking together, and resisting attacks on all working-class people, the strike wave has the potential power to not only win better pay and conditions but bring down this rotten Conservative government.
Imagine if there was a mass workers’ party, backed up by the trade unions, which was prepared to resist austerity and make the super-rich pay instead. That is what the Socialist Party is determined to help develop, as a big step forward in the struggle for socialism.
