Back to the Future

Everybody expects the Conservatives to get trounced at the local elections next month. Few doubt the outcome with Labour still at least 18 points ahead in the opinion polls and the Tories undermined by growing support for the new Faragist Reform Party. But nothing can be taken for granted these days, least of all where Labour is concerned.
Starmer says “our mission-driven government will restore pride and purpose in our country. Let’s make this a reality, together”. Meaningless platitudes that will not get the vote out.
No one knows what Labour stands for these days beyond slavish support for the United States and Israel and an economic programme that differs little from the Sunak plan that Starmer claims to oppose. Starmer may have won the blessing of the City of London and the Murdoch media empire but he’s lost hundreds of thousands of party members in the process.
These are the people Labour relied on to get their vote out. Some 200,000 have dropped out of the party under Starmer’s watch. Some were supporters of the Palestinian cause hounded out on trumped up charges of “anti-Semitism”. Others were Corbynistas who’ve simply dropped out of the party whose leader has abandoned all of Labour’s core beliefs.
Some, not many, have turned to George Galloway’s latest political slate or the alternative platforms of the assorted left that try and repeatedly fail to build an alternative “workers’ party” to replace Labour. They’ve always failed – even Arthur Scargill’s valiant attempt came to nothing – because no alternative social-democratic party can get off the ground without the support of the trade unions. And the unions, for good or bad, are still largely in the sway of Labour’s bureaucrats.
George Galloway has proved, once again, capable of tapping the protest vote amongst the Muslim community to get back into parliament. But that’s as far as it goes and that’s as far as it will ever go. Without mass support from the labour movement Galloway’s “Workers Party” will fizzle out – like Respect which died the death in 2016.
Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott are a different matter. They certainly have mass support amongst the Corbynistas that rebuilt Labour’s strength in London during the Corbyn era. That may be enough to hold their parliamentary seats at the next general election. But on its own it won’t be enough to force Starmer to let them back into the Parliamentary Labour Party let alone build a new left social-democratic platform to challenge Starmer and the old Blairite gang.
As always the battle remains on the union front. Though the Labour Party is dominated by the right wing in the parliamentary party the possibility of their defeat exists as long as Labour retains its organisational links with the trade unions that fund it.
A genuine rank-and-file movement has to be built to sweep out the opportunists and bureaucrats who have reduced the unions that once represented millions of working people into hollowed out avenues for career advancement.
The fight for a democratic Labour Party is linked to the fight for a democratic trade union movement. In the unions we must struggle to elect genuine working class leaderships, who are prepared to represent and fight for the membership against the employers and against the right wing within the movement and to campaign for the removal of all anti‑trade union legislation.

Look to Socialism

 As the Johnson Government introduces the new three-tier system to deal with the second wave of the coronavirus plague that is sweeping throughout Scotland and across swathes of northern England, Labour is calling for a “circuit breaker” national lockdown to bring the rising rate of COVID-19 infections under control.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for a short lockdown or "circuit-breaker" in England of two to three weeks to bring the rising rate of coronavirus under control. He says the current measures are not working and that a further two- to three-week sharp lock-down is needed to prevent a “sleepwalk into… a bleak winter”.

Dismissing Johnson as “an opportunist all his life”, Starmer told Parliament that the Government wasn’t doing enough to tackle the problem. What is needed is a short “circuit-break” like the draconian first lock-down that ran from late March to the beginning of August this year. This time schools and colleges would remain open, but “all pubs, bars and restaurants would 

be closed” and compensated “so that no business loses out because of the sacrifices we all need to make”.

“The government has not got a credible plan to slow infections. It has lost control of the virus and it's no longer following scientific advice,” Sir Keir said, adding that it could fix some problems by handing over track and trace responsibilities to the local authorities.

Labour’s demands are popular on the street, particularly with the older and vulnerable sections of the community who suffered the most from the first wave of the coronavirus plague this year. Starmer now needs to step up the pressure on the Johnson government to maintain the same level of support to furloughed workers and extend the coverage of the job retention scheme when it is replaced at the end of the month.

Any new scheme should mirror the original job retention scheme and reimburse employers for 80 per cent of the wages of their workers. We need an enhanced local Job Support scheme for businesses in local lockdown areas that are affected by low demand but not required to close. There should be no requirement to work a minimum number of hours. And the government should cover 60 per cent of wages for non-working time, with the employer covering 20 per cent, in line with the existing furlough scheme.

Self-employed workers also need support, and this could be done by increasing the payments rate of the self-employment income support scheme from 20 per cent to 60 per cent of taxable monthly profits, for those affected by additional local restrictions.

The only alternative to lockdowns at the moment is the fascist mis-representation of the theory of “herd immunity”, whereby they want to let the plague run its course regardless of the countless deaths of the old and infirmed that would inevitably follow. We’ve seen it happen in Brazil and Donald Trump’s America. We don’t want to see it here.

In fact, until we get a COVID-19 vaccine, lock-downs are the only way to deal with the crisis and we need to take even firmer measures to safeguard the health of the people. We only have to look at the stringent methods of the people’s democracies to see that they work. Not one case of COVID-19 has been reported in Democratic Korea, life has returned to normal in People’s China and Vietnam, Laos and Cuba have all effectively contained the coronavirus plague. This, once again, demonstrates the superiority of the socialist system.

And did those feet…

Boris Johnson was once the darling of Tory Party conference. He was the conference star who could pack halls with cheering delegates who believed that peppering his speech with school-boy Latin quotes put him in the same league as Cicero or Cato the Younger. Now Boris stands in front of a camera drivelling on about building a “New Jerusalem” with opportunities for all whilst his government staggers into another coronavirus crisis that could have been avoided if the lockdown had been maintained.
    COVID-19 is now spreading like the plague in all our universities that were prematurely re-opened last month. It is also returning with a vengeance across Scotland and large parts of northern England. The updated test, track and trace system is faltering, and there is confusion on how to use the NHS smart phone app that’s supposed to warn you of risk of infection.
    Whilst the Government has taken some steps such as the belated order to make face masks mandatory in public spaces that clearly are helpful, there is confusion over the local lockdowns as well as outright opposition from the publicans and the rest of the ‘hospitality’ trade over the 10pm curfews which, they say, will destroy their industry.
    The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has yet to unveil his post-furlough plan to subsidise jobs over the coming coronavirus winter. But it’s clear that Sunak’s second phase will be a much more limited exercise and that millions of workers could lose their jobs in the coming months.
    “I can't pretend that everyone can do exactly the same job that they were doing at the beginning of this crisis. That's why we've put a lot of resource into trying to create new opportunities,” he says. He says that whilst the Government is “trying to do everything we can to protect as many jobs as possible”, unemployment is “likely to increase”.
    What exactly are these “new opportunities”? Well, Johnson talks about developing offshore wind power that would power every home in the country within 10 years, along with some mortgage reform designed to lure people back into the property market and some waffle about fixing “the injustice of care home funding” by “bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions”.
    And there is the “New Jerusalem”, the “bright future”, which Boris says will follow the end of the coronavirus crisis. We’ll see. The Puritans fought a civil war to build a new Jerusalem in 17th Century England. Things didn’t turn out quite the way they planned. Although they did get rid of a king their utopia lasted little beyond the death of their leader, Oliver Cromwell.
    Boris Johnson is no Cromwell and all his talk about a “world-beating” future to come is just more guff from a man who has clearly failed, even by the dismal standards of the Conservative & Unionist Party, to deal with the deadly crisis we are all in.
    Johnson’s vacuous promises barely inspired his own followers. He talked in front of a camera to a nation that was not listening. No one cheered. No one cared.

Bye Bye Theresa May

None of us will shed a tear for the departure of Mrs May, who fell on her sword last week after failing for the umpteenth time to get support for her half-baked Brexit plan from her own Tory ranks. No-one will miss her.

When Mrs May took over from David Cameron in 2016 her followers claimed she would become another “Mrs Thatcher”. That didn’t happen. Now she has joined the ranks of past Tory politicians forced into early retirement over internal divisions within the Conservative Party over the European Union (EU).

Her withdrawal plan, which would have kept Britain in the EU in all but name, was doomed from the start as it outraged the die-hard Brexiteers in her own camp whilst failing to appease Remainers who don’t want us to leave the EU at all.

Whoever the Tories pick to succeed Theresa May as leader is a matter of complete indifference to working people. None of us will have any input into the selection process nor need we care who they choose to take her place. What we have must do is step up the demand for a general election now to ensure that whoever follows in her footsteps has only a limited time to do more harm to the working class.