Crisis? What Crisis?

Empty shelves in the supermarkets, soaring energy prices while motorists fume in queues for fuel at petrol stations struggling to remain open as supplies run out due to a shortage of drivers in the haulage industry. In other times this would be an open goal for Labour to hammer the Tories. Now the utterly useless leader of the Labour Party can barely turn away from his relentless purge of the Corbynistas to utter the usual platitudes that nobody listens to these days.

    No wonder the Tories are basking in complacency at their annual conference in Manchester. Boris Johnson struts the stage drivelling on about his “mission” to decrease geographical inequalities and defending “our history” from “cancel culture iconoclasm” in a rambling speech that made no mention of the rising cost of living or the supply chain crisis.
    But you’d think this was a second Cicero judging from the applause of his followers who laugh at his sixth-form jibes at Starmer – the “Captain Hindsight” who resembles a “seriously rattled bus conductor” and eagerly lap up talk about unleashing the potential of all Britons in the spirit of Olympians or the England football team.
    When Tory leaders talk about "Britons" and "our one-nation" they want to foster the idea that we are a united people with a common national interest. But nothing could be further from the truth. We are, in fact, a class divided society in which the interests of the exploited class – the majority of the people – are in direct conflict with the interests of the exploiters.
    In the past Labour leaders recognised class divisions and during the Attlee and Wilson eras their economists talked about “democratic socialist” solutions to end exploitation and poverty. Now that’s been reduced to Angela Rayner calling the Tories “scum” while talk of nationalising the railways or the utilities is frowned on by Starmer & Co.
    Though state intervention is essential in Keynesian economics the form it takes reflects the needs of the ruling class at the time. Keynesian reforms are designed to uphold the existing order and stave off social unrest and they are the kernel of left social democratic thinking in the capitalist world.
    But they were also embraced by Benito Mussolini, whose fascist Italy had a public sector second only to that of the Soviet Union before the Second World War. Franklin D Roosevelt tried revive the American economy after the massive slump in 1929 with a Keynesian “New Deal and Adolf Hitler did the same when the Nazis took over in Germany.
    The neo-liberal unrestricted market economy of the imperialist heartlands is clearly unable to cope with the post-Covid world and so the ruling circles in the United States are returning to the old Keynesian models. The Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion economic plan is going down the same road as FDR’s New Deal and the “Great Society” of the 1960s.
    While new bourgeois consensus has seen the old social-democratic parties return to the centre of government in Western Europe.
    But whatever form it takes capitalism will always be brutal and oppressive because that is the only way it can ensure that the rich can continue to live the lives of Roman emperors off the backs of workers and peasants. The capitalists fear and loathe organised labour because it knows that the entire wealth of the world comes from workers in the factories and peasants in the fields.

The capitalists know that eventually their insatiable greed will provoke a political reaction among those they rob and cheat. And, even though they deny it and refuse to speak about it, we know that just as inevitable as capitalist crises is the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism.

Theresa in wonderland

They say that Theresa May left Birmingham slightly happier than when she arrived for the Conservatives’ conference that her supporters feared would close with a fatal challenge to her lack-lustre leadership. Prancing around to the tune of Dancing Queen drew predictable cheers from the faithful, there to hear the usual platitudes that they hope will steer them through to victory at the next election.

Whether Mrs May will still lead them is another matter altogether. But whilst a number of Tory grandees covet her job none of them, not even the immensely vain Boris Johnson, were prepared to trigger a leadership challenge that could seal her fate or destroy their own political careers in the offing.

This isn’t really a good time to be Tory leader, let alone Prime Minister, with the party deeply divided over Brexit – which should, in theory at least, take place on 29^th March 2019. All of this is a matter of indifference to working people however, who can expect no favours from Tory governments of whatever persuasion and, in any case, have no say in the matter.

Divisions within the Tory ranks over the European Union mean that parliament could vote down the final withdrawal bill in 2019 whatever the outcome of the talks in Brussels. This will strengthen the hand of the Remainers clamouring for a second referendum, which they believe can reverse the original Brexit vote.

For us the issue is clear. We want another election to get Labour in and the Tories out. We want Labour to stand by the people’s vote to leave the European Union without any ifs or buts. And the surest guarantee of Brexit is a massive majority for Labour at the next election.

The never-ending saga

Meanwhile, the May government is milking the Skripal affair for all its worth to demonise Russia and justify further NATO expansion in the Middle East. Last week the {Telegraph} told us that a third Russian intelligence officer had been identified as an accomplice by counter-terrorism police and the security services in the alleged Novichok attack on the Russian defector and his daughter in Salisbury in March.

There are several possibilities behind the poisoning of the retired spy, who had been released by the Russian government in a spy swap with Britain. It is unlikely they would release him if they wanted to kill him. Why can’t these unnamed intelligence sources give us a credible reason for Russian involvement in the Skripal affair?

Perhaps the answer to this riddle lies in Syria, where the Assad government and the Russians have long accused the NATO powers of using the bogus ‘White Helmets’ to fabricate false-flag poison gas attacks on civilians to provide the pretext for NATO attacks on Syrian government targets.

The White Helmets are a NATO-backed front that was set up by a British intelligence officer in 2014. They posed as an independent search and rescue service dedicated to helping civilians caught up in the Syrian civil war. They were founded by James Le Mesurier, a former British army intelligence officer, who has taken part in various British and NATO deployments in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Lebanon.

The Kremlin is calling for inspections by the Organisation of the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to investigate Russian and Syrian claims. These efforts are being blocked by US imperialism and its other NATO allies whilst Britain has launched another diversion, warning Russia that it will pay a “high price” if it continues to use chemical weapons following the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

That is why some observers believe that the real motive behind the Skripal affair is simply to provide a reason for excluding Russia from any future international investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria.