Building back better?
Fight for a socialist recovery
Theo Sharieff, Socialist Party youth organiser
As society slowly emerges from lockdown, Boris Johnson and the Tories are busy preaching that they plan to ‘build back better’.
The Tories claim this means upping investment in Northern towns and cities, ‘levelling them up’, and laying the basis for a ‘green industrial revolution’. Labour, in true Starmerite fashion, has launched its ‘Stronger Together’ campaign, once again tailending the Tories.
But, far from the fairy tale picture of a healthy and vibrant capitalist system capable of delivering these things, the reality is much grimmer. Britain is predicted to emerge from the pandemic with the worst economic scarring of the G7 countries, with productivity and wages at historic lows. Capitalism in Britain is in a deep and intractable crisis.
This means that a fight is on. The bosses once again want to make us, the majority, pay for the crisis with our jobs, our services, and our futures. Already this process has begun with the 25-plus employers who have engaged in the ‘fire and rehire’ of their workers – firing them only to rehire them on worse pay and conditions.
In anticipation of workers’ and youth resistance, the Tories are bringing in the new anti-protest bill to give more repressive legal powers to the police. It’s crucial the trade unions, with over six million members in workplaces across the country, prepare now for the fight of our lives against the coming bosses’ offensive. Not only to repel the attacks, but to fight for an economic recovery in the interests of working-class and young people – not one which just lines the pockets of the rich like the so-called recovery post-2008.
To achieve this will mean the development of a new mass party for workers and youth, that brings together the trade unions, community campaigns and young protesters, and is armed with a bold socialist political programme. One which includes: decent wages, socially useful job creation, council house building, and an end to all cuts – all linked to the need for public ownership in order to make the rich pay for it.
These demands go together with a vision of an alternative kind of society, one that exists outside of the straightjacket of capitalism, which can provide all of these things on a lasting basis – a socialist society. Join us in the fight for a socialist recovery.