The emperors have lost their clothes

Nick Clegg’s statement that "the pillars of the British establishment are tumbling one after the other," should be taken seriously. The question is why now? What is driving the break-up of the institutions that rule Britain? And what follows?

The deputy prime minister has no intention of seriously upsetting the apple cart of British politics, but he has put his finger on an important insight. But the News of the World scandal is part of a wider, systemic crisis.

For prime minister Cameron, his connections with disgraced former News of the World editor Andy Coulson and through him to Rupert Murdoch, have rocked his already unstable government. Peter Oborne’s account of Cameron was drawn into Murdoch’s embrace – after some initial reluctance – is worth reading because it shows how fragile the political establishment is.

Whilst there are separate and independent reasons for flashpoints in the “parts” – the media, financial system, the police and parliament – together they constitute a “whole” which is also known as the capitalist system in Britain (and its relationships globally).

The unravelling of the unsavoury networks which constitute the power structures sheds a powerful light on this interconnectedness. And, crucially, the ruling class’s ability to rule relies on these connections remaining as secret as possible.

Trust - not only in the news media but in politicians and the venal connivance of the police (who had their own fingers deep in Murdoch’s pie) - is sinking at an unprecedented rate.

Murdoch’s chief executive Rebeka Brooks, who now faces questioning by the police, was not only a neighbour and family friend of the Camerons, but she is a crucial link in the spider’s web that embraces the Royal Family, the Blairs, and major corporations like the De Beers diamond dynasty and, of course, the media empire that is News Corp.

In the first years of the last decade, while the credit boom was in full swing, the phone hacking was put on the back burner by the police and the New Labour government. It must have seemed secondary to the mountains of “wealth” generated by the financial sector.

The crash of 2008 not only devastated the economy but it also shattered ordinary people’s faith in the market economy. This in turn led to a loss of confidence in ruling circles. The system was shaken and the skeletons fell out of the cupboard at the News of the World in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, bankers’ bail-outs and bonuses and the resulting stalemate election of 2010.

And while many in ruling political and media circles are working feverishly to restore a modicum of confidence in the British state, the global economy and its financial system is heading for another meltdown.

Still reeling from the near default of Greece, the Eurozone is now staring into a new abyss: the spreading of “fiscal contagion” to Italy, the world’s seventh biggest economy. As one economics writer says: “It’s just too big to bail out. While the Eurozone could perhaps survive a Greek default, an Italian debt failure would mean all bets are off”. In the United States, a $4 trillion cuts package is seen as the only way to avoid a dollar default.

Separating out the political crisis in Britain from the continuing and worsening global debt crisis would be to ignore the reinforcing interactions which characterise the deep crisis of an entire system. That’s why stuffing the ugly genie that the News of the World scandal has revealed back into the bottle could be impossible.

The least we can do is to understand how fragile – ideologically speaking – the arrogant façade that the ruling classes deploy to intimidate those below them actually is. Each side of the crisis – political, economic, ecological – are parts of a rapidly changing whole reacting upon each other to create something quite new.

The rapidly-developing political crisis at the top cannot be patched up, not least because the economy is staggering from bad to worse. Down in society itself, a massive social upheaval, driven by a lack of confidence in the ruling classes, is brewing for which there is no obvious outlet. A heady mix indeed.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

When marching is not enough

The contrast couldn’t be clearer. In Egypt, they gather in hundreds of thousands and strike with the aim of bringing down the Mubarak regime. In Britain, the leadership of the trade unions wants workers to walk through London at the end of March – and then go home.

By March 26, the date of the march called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), up to 200,000 public sector workers will have lost their jobs, as councils – many of them Labour controlled – implement government cuts, wrecking local services.

By then, those keeping their jobs will have suffered a massive erosion in their standard of living as food and fuel inflation takes off.

By then, university and college lecturers will be staring at closures and redundancies.

By then, the astronomical increase in university tuition fees will be a reality facing the next generation.

By then, the Coalition government would have forced through further marketisation of the National Health Service, building on the work of New Labour.

In other words, by then Cameron and Clegg will be halfway to imposing the burden of the capitalist crisis on the backs of ordinary working people.

Last week, the TUC called member unions together to discuss its response to the effects of the spending cuts announced last October. Talked up by the media as a planning meeting for a wave co-ordinated strikes against the cuts, it was nothing of the kind.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber stood on the steps of Congress House and ran up the white flag. Frightened by the existing anti-union laws – and alarmed by the threat of further legislation – Barber and the right-wing led major unions ruled out a confrontation with the government.

All Barber would say was that there could be action around “specific disputes” but none were planned. What are scheduled, however, are talks with the government over planned changes to public sector pensions.



A World to Win supports the TUC demonstration but not simply to register a protest against the government’s policies which are directly driven by the deepening capitalist economic and financial crisis.

We will campaign on the march for a way forward beyond March 26 that is not dependent on the manoeuvres of the TUC leadership. AWTW will urge:

 Leaders of trade unions opposed to the TUC right wing to call their own conference to plan joint action against the Coalition
 Occupations of town halls, universities and colleges to block job losses and the destruction of services
 The removal of discredited local councillors and their replacement by trade union and community representatives
 The creation of a network of People’s Assemblies to build a sustained challenge to the government’s authority.

As the resolution adopted at the weekend National Assembly of Education said, People’s Assemblies can:
 unite students, education workers, trade unionists, community groups and all those resisting austerity and ConDem cuts, as well as climate change activists, campaigners for human rights, migrant support networks and anti-racist groups.
 develop an alternative democratic voice and long-term presence to effectively challenge corporate/financial power and its grip on the existing political system.

A key role for Assemblies would be the development of alternative economic models to the failed profit system. We have to take the opportunity presented by the crisis to set out what we are for as well as what we are against, and to create strategy to put that into practice.

The revolutionary upsurge in North Africa, prompted by worsening economic and political conditions, will make its appearance in Britain. With the TUC on its knees, preparation for that eventuality is everything.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Prepare General Strike to bring down Coalition

Tory Chancellor Osborne’s collection of savage spending cuts and dramatic tax changes is intended to engineer a massive transfer of wealth to shareholders, whilst condemning millions to a life of grinding poverty on reduced benefits or on the dole. Claiming that “we are all in this together” is simply a lie.

It follows the £6 billion cuts announced in the days following the election. It comes in the wake of the scrapping of 12 major capital investment projects approved by New Labour in the dying days of its period of rule. And on top of cuts made by the outgoing New Labour government in higher education.

Much worse is to come. In the public sector, reducing the budget deficit will leave most departments – apart from health and international aid – facing a 25% reduction and the certainty of huge job losses. No advanced economy has ever made such drastic spending cuts in state budgets.

Pay for public sector workers will be frozen, initially for two years. As entire services are threatened with the axe, Cameron and Co. will be ratcheting up their caring, sharing approach. They will cynically encourage redundant workers to form co-operatives of volunteers to take them on with a pittance of a contract to cover expenses.

But for the private sector, the plan is quite different. Here the overarching idea is to make Britain an attractive place to do business, boosting profits by reducing corporation tax. Each year for four years the tax rate companies pay on the profits they fail to hide abroad will be reduced by 1%, bringing the headline rate down to 24% - amongst the lowest of all the developed countries.

With some of its measures, the Coalition is trying to disarm some of its potential critics with the appearance of concern for the poorest. As part-payment for the Liberal Democrats’ participation, the income tax allowance lower limit will be raised, exempting 880,000 of the lowest earners from paying tax. But this will be more than offset by the increase to 20% in VAT from next January. With housing benefit capped and child benefit frozen, it will hit the poorest hardest.

Further assaults on living standards are already planned. In a calculated move towards a national government the Con-Lib coalition is to be extended to include New Labour’s former work and pensions secretary John Hutton who will prepare the ground for an assault on state and public sector pensions. And then, in October, Osborne will announce his review of public spending which will detail the cuts to be made, department by department.

The Coalition has embarked on a high risk, “kill or cure” programme based on figures for growth that are already under challenge and that are not possible in the context of the global crisis of capitalism. Eurozone economies are diving deeper into recession, while many German and French banks are reckoned to have solvency problems. They hold piles of Greek and Spanish government debt now worth far less than it was bought for.

This is not a government of strength but one thrown together in an emergency and which has no mandate for the unparalleled cuts it is making. The general election was a fraud because none of the major parties would come clean on what was being planned. So the electorate has every right to fight the Coalition.

Protest campaigns are already underway around the country. Trade unionists, pensioners and community groups are meeting to plan their actions to protect jobs and services. They should begin to create People’s Assemblies to co-ordinate their struggles and to plan for political and economic alternatives to a capitalist system now in profound economic and political crisis.

Unions who are opposed to the cuts will have to step up to the plate in the absence of any resistance from the Trades Union Congress. Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, could only say the budget was “economically dangerous and socially divisive”. He offered no challenge to the Coalition or its unacceptable budget whatsoever.

Bob Crow, general secretary of the rail union RMT, was more forthright, declaring: “There is no question that there will be widespread industrial and community resistance to the cuts agenda and RMT will be in the front line wherever people are making a stand.” This is good as far as it goes.

The RMT is part of an alliance called the Trade Union Coordinating Group, along with firefighters, civil servants, university and college teachers and other sections. The TUCG should start a campaign within the TUC to make preparations for an indefinite General Strike against the Coalition government, which is assuming the role of a dictatorship over the working population.

Resistance is not enough. The aim must be to bring down the Coalition and create a revolutionary government in its place. This is the road we have to take to prevent a social catastrophe far worse than that of the 1930s.

A World to Win
23 June 2010

Tory right guns for Lib-Dems

When David Laws was forced to resign last month, we asked if the Tory right wing was trying to destabilise the Lib-Con coalition. With the announcement that Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary Chris Huhne is leaving his wife in the wake of gutter press exposure of his relationship with economic advisor Carina Trimingham, the cracks are widening.

Like the former Treasury Chief Secretary, Huhne is a heavyweight inside the Liberal Democrats. Already there is speculation about whether Cameron should ask for his resignation which would seriously weaken the government just as the Budget is due to be announced. The campaign against Huhne, must therefore be seen in a bigger picture.

Apart from the cardinal sin of being a Liberal Democrat in the first place, Huhne has opposed expanding nuclear power and is in favour of carbon capture technology. Last week the Coalition announced that the £80 million loan needed to make the castings for nuclear reactors was to be cut, which has enraged the pro-nuclear lobby.

As with Laws, the allegations of sexual or marital “impropriety” are simply a smokescreen for far more serious and sinister matters.

The real issue is: what forces are guiding the snooping hacks of the News of the World, whose stories were immediately picked up by the Daily Mail and the Sunday Telegraph? Who tipped them off to tail Trimingham to Huhne’s constituency home in Eastleigh and follow the couple on the train all the way back to Waterloo, tracking their movements and phone calls? Last year Huhne demanded an inquiry into the News of the World phone-hacking saying: "It strikes at the heart of the privacy any individual can expect in a civilised society."

Is it payback time, or is it possible that they are being helped by operatives in one of the intelligence agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ? Richard Aldrich, the author of a new book about the GCHQ spy centre in Cheltenham, which absorbs the largest chunk of the £2.4bn budget, says that GCHQ holds “enormous surveillance powers”. The frightening truth, he says, is "no one is in control" of these powers.

As Cameron’s coalition comes under strain, he is singing the praises of the military. The Prime Minister wrote yesterday that it was the whole nation’s “social responsibility to put servicemen and women “at the front and centre of our national life”, adding “I want to see an explosion of red, white and blue all over the country”.

As the 300th soldier is killed and when the majority of citizens are opposed to the hopeless war in Afghanistan, the pressure is on to re-legitimise the armed forces. The ruling class need to put down a marker in the wake of the Saville Report which proved beyond question that British troops deliberately fired on innocent civilians. This explains why even General Sir Richard Dannatt has backed Cameron in saying that the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry 38 years ago were “unjustified and unjustifiable”. That event must be firmly put in the past so that the troops can now be seen as self-less heroes who need “our” unstinting moral and financial support.

On the eve of what will is likely to be the most ferocious budget in history there are serious fears of civil unrest as the whirlwind of cuts hits jobs, services, pensions and pay.

No wonder that the media drums are beating to get support for the Armed Forces Day this Saturday. It’s time to join the campaign to build People’s Assemblies as the democratic alternative to these increasingly authoritarian state forces.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

End of 'old politics' is our chance

For all its outward appearance of partnership and harmony, the Lib-Con coalition government is an inherently unstable regime. Patched together solely to impose the burden of the economic and financial crisis on the backs of ordinary people, the coalition is a high-risk operation.

Far from ushering in a “new politics”, the coalition only operates by rejecting politics altogether, setting aside not just party differences but their parties as well. As we noted last week, we are witnessing a very British coup by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, which is already producing internal resistance.

Yesterday Cameron won his bid to allow government ministers and whips to have full membership of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, but only by 168 votes to 118. Now plans are already afoot to create a new committee made up entirely of backbenchers. One backbencher said Cameron’s move was “very dangerous”. He added: “We are not lemmings like most Labour MPs – we don’t just do as we are told. It’s as if power has gone to David Cameron’s head.”

Many backbenchers are not enamoured with the joint programme of the coalition published yesterday, which ditches several cherished Tory policies on inheritance tax, stamp duty and abolition of the Human Rights Act. Similar simmering political tensions exist inside the Liberal Democrats too.

The coalition will shortly be involved in conflict on another front – with ordinary people.

The Lib-Con merged programme insists that the need to cut the deficit “takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement”. The £170 billion annual deficit results from a combination of bailing out the banks and the recession that followed the meltdown of the financial system in 2008.

Starting next week, the coalition will start to cut the deficit, which presently funds public services and jobs. Teachers and civil servants were placed in the immediate firing line yesterday, along with postal workers through the privatisation of the Royal Mail promoted by the Lib Dem’s Vince Cable. VAT is certain to rise along with other taxes to reduce living standards.

The insecure nature of the coalition makes it heavily dependent on the capitalist state bureaucracy for its survival. Leading officials applauded after Cameron went through the agreement with the Lib Dems in a public show of support senior civil servants are not normally given to. They, of course, facilitated the creation of the coalition in the first place. There is a distinct Bonapartist air about the two youngish public schoolboys now running the government, balancing between bureaucrats and sections of the electorate, while sidelining their parties.

Things can only get worse for them as the debt crisis which brought down the banks finds its way into governments, particularly in southern Europe. Panic measures have done nothing to stabilise the euro and the continent is on the brink of a major slump. Financial markets are demanding their pound of flesh and governments are no match for the beast they helped create in the first place.

We have to think about what is coming up the line. Serious conflict between public sector workers and the government is certain. Emergency measures against strikes cannot be ruled out. Yet opposing the dictatorship of the markets and the coalition has to have an objective beyond resistance itself.

Halting the cuts is only possible if the financial system and the basis of economic activity is reorganised to replace profit as its foundation with a socially-useful approach to meet society’s needs. Politically, the aim cannot be to replace Cameron/Clegg with a new generation of Blair/Brown type New Labour leaders. That would be just a change of management.

The crisis since the general election, with voters displaying a distinct lack of trust in any party or the Parliamentary system itself, must lead to a truly “new politics”, founded on a revolutionary, democratic transformation of capitalist society. The opportunities for building a people’s coalition against an unsustainable capitalist system are opening up before our eyes.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

A very British coup

The political marriage between David Cameron and Nick Clegg in a ceremony in the garden at the back of Downing Street yesterday is not simply the result of a general election that failed to produce a party with an overall majority. Britain’s first coalition government for 70 years also shows that the process that produced New Labour is still at work.

In 1995, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown persuaded their party to ditch Clause IV of its constitution, which aspired to common ownership of the means of production and popular administration of the economy. Adopted in 1918, the clause was anathema to the “modernisers” who were busily creating “New” Labour.

The Blairites were adapting to a new world order summed up in the term “globalisation”. Where the Tories were divided on the issue, revealed in the splits over Europe, New Labour would embrace the free movement of capital, deregulation, public-private partnerships, the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and promote an “enterprise economy”.

Even before New Labour’s loss of nearly 100 seats last week, voters were turning their back on a government that had created vast inequality, put an end to social mobility and encouraged a casino economy. When a globalisation driven by the banks and corporations finally crashed in 2008, the die was cast and the raison d'être for New Labour was terminated.

With the Tory Party deeply divided between a right-wing that believes that anything not purely Anglo-Saxon is suspicious and “modernisers” who understand the world has changed, the electorate understandably failed to give them a mandate to govern alone when they went to the polls on May 8.

Cameron is astute enough to recognise that the old-style bourgeois party politics – based on some worked-out framework and an ideology related to things purely British – is dying. No single party seems likely to win an overall majority again. The election deadlock propelled this understanding into a swift and dramatic realignment with the Lib Dems. This is, in effect, Cameron’s Clause IV moment.

He and Clegg have in practice staged an audacious joint coup against their own parties, ignoring dissent and rumblings from rank-and-file members who only last week were at each other’s throats as they fought for votes. In some respects, the logic of their alliance might even signal the end of their parties in the shape that we know them now.

Both the prime minister and his deputy, for example, say they have put party politics to one side to govern in the “national interest”. In other words, they have taken the politics out of politics, a process that began with Blair and Brown who reduced government to a grinding form of managerialism.

The spurious “national interest”, as we know, is a not-so-clever mask for the interests that really count. These have everything to do with what the financial markets are demanding and nothing to do with those on the dole and the millions who will join them as Lib-Tory cuts and tax rises get going. New Labour saddled all households with £135,000 in debts. Cameron-Clegg's role is to make sure we make the payments.

As we pointed out yesterday, the global financial meltdown is visiting one country after another. In Spain, the Socialist Party government yesterday rushed through a ruthless cuts package to appease the money markets. Greece’s government – also claiming to be “socialist” – did so last week. Given half a chance, New Labour would have done the same.

In Britain, we now face what amounts to a “government of national emergency”. How will long will it before we are told that all opposition to the cuts is anti-patriotic behaviour? The new boys in Downing Street are a ruthless duo yet their bonhomie cannot disguise their relative weakness and isolation from their own parties. That is what lies behind the rapid march away from what is left of parliamentary democracy with a five-year, fixed term for the government and raising the bar for a no-confidence vote to 55%.

We certainly need a “new politics” and that’s the subject of our May 22 conference, Taking the Revolutionary Road.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Coalition will provoke extra-parliamentary struggles

The collapse of the Tories and Liberal Democrats into each other’s arms to form the first coalition government in modern times does not so much signify a “new politics” but the suspension of old-style politics in the face of a calamitous financial crisis.

New Labour was prepared to go down the same road. Its failure to woo the Lib Dems – Britain’s oldest capitalist party – led to Gordon Brown’s late evening resignation and his replacement by David Cameron. Most of the New Labour cabinet – members of Britain’s newest capitalist party – were relieved to be out of office and not having to make the savage cuts that the money markets are demanding.

On entering Downing Street, Cameron accepted responsibility for implementing the demands imposed by an unprecedented financial and economic crisis. Hours earlier the International Monetary Fund (IMF), eurozone authorities and European Central Bank (ECB) came together with the US Federal Reserve in a desperate King Canute-style 750 billion euros/1 trillion US dollars global alliance:

• On Monday the ECB reversed its policy and began to echo the British government in “quantitative easing”, buying up eurozone government bonds and accepting junk debt to prevent a string of state bankruptcies

• 27 European countries created an emergency loan facility of 60 billion euros aimed at stopping the Greek crisis spreading to Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

• The 16 eurozone countries together with Sweden and Poland have put together a 440 billion euros “special purpose vehicle”, a fund to defend themselves against foreign currency speculation.

• The IMF offered 250 billion euros in loans to stricken countries.

• The US Federal Reserve renewed the emergency measures it used during the global meltdown of autumn 2008 allowing foreign banks to borrow dollars.

All of these actions, promises and offers are conditional on governments old and new ratcheting up the brutal austerity programme that has already precipitated general strikes and street battles in Greece and Spain.

The new coalition replaces an administration which had spent 13 years cultivating the relationship with the financial masters of the universe. New Labour helped create the conditions which resulted in a system crash that began in 2008 and that is still unravelling.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition’s announcement that it will start to reduce the budget deficit by cutting public spending immediately with a £6 billion programme of “efficiency savings” is aimed at reassuring the hedge fund managers and other market traders whose gambling with bonds determines government action throughout the world. Liberal Democratic manifesto intentions to postpone the cuts to avoid a deflationary spiral have been ditched.

The coming assault on services, jobs, wages, pensions and benefits is certain to trigger an avalanche of conflict with millions of workers in education, health, social services as well as in the civil service who together make up the majority of the workforce.

Some say the New Labour project failed and is over. On the contrary, it served its purpose. It held the reins and reorganised the state while the Tories were in crisis. There is no going back to an earlier form of Labour as a reformist party because globalisation and the merger of the state with financial and corporate interests does not allow for this. To think otherwise is to perpetuate illusions about electoral politics when new forms of struggle beckon.

There are no electoral or parliamentary “solutions” to this crisis. If New Labour had won the election, savage cuts would still have been top of the agenda. The struggles immediately ahead will be extra-parliamentary in shape and form, beginning with the British Airways cabin crew strikes planned for next week.

Giving these struggles a political shape and objective means going beyond a parliamentary politics that is in any case in deep freeze. A perspective around the building of a network of People’s Assemblies to challenge the state’s right to make the cuts is the best way to respond the anti-people coalition now in Downing Street. register for our May 22 conference to discuss how we can mobilise to take the revolutionary road with the aim of bringing the Cameron-Clegg regime down sooner rather than later.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The uncertainty principle in politics

The break-up of parliamentary politics is happening right before our eyes, most dramatically shown in the resignation under pressure of Gordon Brown and the frantic moves to cobble together some sort of coalition before the money markets decide Britain is another basket case.

All the major parties are bitterly divided about who to get into bed with. David Blunkett’s accusation that the Lib Dems were behaving “like every harlot in history” is hardly a term of endearment for a would-be partner in a coalition of the losers. A stable government looks a remote possibility. Political stalemate combined with an attack on the pound could yet produce an all-party “government of national emergency”.

Brown, of course, was the architect with Tony Blair of New Labour, which transformed the old party from a social democratic organisation into full-blown cheer-leaders for globalised capitalism, particularly in the financial sector. Brown’s first act was to create the Financial Services Authority as a hands-off “regulator” which would allow the City to do what it wanted.

Brown once famously declared he had put an end to Tory “boom and bust”. Well, he got that spectacularly wrong. Happy to rake in tax revenue from bank profits, New Labour ignored warnings that a boom based on unsustainable levels of credit would end in crash. Brown’s announcement that he is resigning as party leader reflects the impact of a crisis that has taken the British state towards bankruptcy.

The outcome of 29.6 million people casting their votes (under two thirds of the electorate, but 2 million more than last time) has produced an unprecedented political vacuum. This was not necessarily anyone’s intention. But the result is nonetheless the outcome of millions of individual decisions as voters rejected 13 years of New Labour rule, but refused to endorse other parties in an overwhelming way.

Around the world, scrambles by politicians to form one kind of unholy multi-party alliance or another have been par for the course in politics for a long time, but not in Britain. A vacuum in politics, as in nature, cannot persist for long. As we remarked the day after the election, the top priority for those overseeing the capitalist state at this time of extreme financial crisis is the need for stability:

Just read this account of yesterday evening in the City:

17:41 "A Lib-Lab coalition would be a big negative for sterling," Ian Stannard at BNP Paribas says. "The Government will be unstable and not have the ability to drive through the cuts required."

17:30 Pound is now at $1.4866 against the dollar, compared to $1.5056 earlier in the afternoon. Still falling too.

17:23 Euro has risen by more than half a cent against the pound following Brown's statement. Markets really spooked by prospect of more uncertainty.

17:14 Reaction to Brown's statement and subsequent fall in pound from Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First:

“It’s pretty clear that the market wants certainty and that the news that Clegg is dilly-dallying between Labour and the Conservatives have not gone down well. I’m surprised that the markets haven’t hit sterling hard today, the EU plan has taken a bullet for us. As soon as that become old news however sterling is once again in the firing line”.

Due to the effects of globalisation on politics, the electoral base of both Tory and New Labour parties has changed in Britain, while the rise of the Liberal Democrats has destabilised the two-party system at the national level. These complex realities mark the end of an historical era and the opening up of a new political landscape in which the only certainty has become uncertainty.

Despite their differences, Cameron, Clegg, Mandelson and Balls will seek to impose the rule of the corporations and the markets. Forget all this rubbish about a “progressive alliance”. More like an anti-people alliance. We should seize this moment of no government to advocate strategies to achieve a real democracy in place of the Westminster charade.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

It's all about power

The political crisis that has erupted in Britain following the general election provides a window of opportunity to bring the most basic of questions – who rules the country and in whose interests – right to the top of the agenda.

That is the focus of our ‘Taking the Revolutionary Road’ conference on May 22, which couldn’t be happening at a more opportune moment.

It is all too easy to be sucked into the drama around the frantic efforts being made to put together a coalition government of one variety or another. But behind the to-and-fro in Westminster, as the major capitalist parties jockey for power, is a profound political and economic crisis.

The political system is broken in a deeply significant way. A new system of weighing and distributing votes in the shape of proportional representation wouldn’t even begin to address the heart of the matter.

Many voted reluctantly last week. And a large proportion of those who dragged themselves to a polling station last week have no faith or trust in the parliamentary system. And for sound reasons that go way beyond the expenses scandal of the last parliament or the inadequacies of the first-past-the-post voting system.

As our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions points out: “Full-on globalisation has resulted in an unholy alliance between the state, political parties, corporate and financial power in all the major capitalist countries. From London to Washington, from Berlin to Rome, from Tokyo to Seoul, the reality is essentially the same.

“Democracy is reduced to a sham, a façade behind which real decisions are made and power exercised over ordinary people. The right to vote counts for little and the aspirations of ordinary people are denied by state systems that primarily function in the interests of big business.”

This analysis is borne out by the events since it became clear that the election had produced deadlock. The tell-tale phrase is how all parties at Westminster have pledged to rule in the “national interest”. What this means is all to clear once the patriotic rhetoric is stripped away.

The “interest” in question here is not that of ordinary working people struggling in their daily lives to make ends meet. What Brown, Cameron, Clegg and others are prattling on about is something quite different. The “interest” they will protect at all costs is vested in the financial markets and corporate boardrooms.

So irrespective of the make-up of the next government, it will come down on the interests of ordinary people like a ton of bricks, imposing savage cuts in living standards and services to satisfy the money markets who fund the British state’s massive deficit. The answer to the question about who rules Britain and in whose interests suddenly is made clearer as a result.

The financial and economic crisis can only worsen. At the weekend, the eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund pledged €750 billion in rescue plans to try and reassure the markets that debts will be honoured. It merely serves to postpone the inevitable.

Whatever government emerges in Britain is certain to provoke large-scale resistance by trade unionists and communities as the full horror of the cuts becomes apparent. One of the immediate lessons from Greece, however, is that strikes and protests have not prevented the government from voting the cuts through the country’s parliament.

To fight to win means actually defeating and removing the government of the day, and in the process creating alternative structures to those of the capitalist state such as People’s Assemblies. In this way, ordinary people would get to rule in their own interests, replacing those of the money markets and boardrooms. By registering for the May 22 conference you would give this strategy a real boost.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Election deepens political crisis

The death at the weekend of writer Alan Sillitoe and the looming possibility of a hung Parliament have no direct connection. And yet looking back at Sillitoe’s writings, and reflecting on the latest twists in the election campaign, you can detect a profound shift taking place in British history.

Sillitoe’s brilliant story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner appeared as a film in 1960. The story of a borstal boy symbolised the rebelliousness of an entire generation of young people – and the gritty realities of working class life in post-war Britain.

That world has passed. Communities of factory workers like those depicted in Sillitoe’s writings disappeared under globalisation and the policies of Thatcher and New Labour. New class relations have emerged. Workers are more dispersed and less unionised. Large sections of the community no longer work and live in impoverished conditions in, for example, former mining areas.

The old party loyalties have gone as a result. That, at the political level, can help to explain the sudden rise of the Liberal Democrats and an historic break-up of the two-party system. The choice between first the Tories and the Whigs and later Tories and Labour has dominated British politics for 200 years. Formal coalitions have been reserved for war time only.

That is why the threat of a Parliament without an overall majority for any party signals a moment of instability in which the “known knowns” are – at least temporarily – shattered, and has forced a realignment between those who represent capitalism.

The connection between this political transformation is inseparable from the economic processes of the last 40 years, in which the British welfare state has changed into a “market state” – entirely subservient to the rule of global capital. This process, explained in A World to Win’s book Unmasking the State, has led to a “hollowing out” of the state itself.

As the state’s role has altered, more and more people have lost interest in politics, realising that exercising your right to vote does not lead to any influence over those elected. Clegg’s sudden stardom following the first TV debate was not so much due to his personal charisma as the desire to pin on him the widespread disaffection with New Labour and the Tories.

After all, Clegg is even more ruling class than Cameron, and the Lib Dems are even more pro-banker than Brown and Cameron put together, if that’s possible. Don’t forget that Clegg’s deputy leader, ex-banker Vince Cable was the oil corporation Shell’s chief economist.

As Clegg knows only too well, Both Brown and Cameron’s “love bombing” is just hot air and he is walking a political tightrope. Many Lib Dem voters would see entering into an agreement with Cameron, as a "pact with the devil” and those who want to get shot of New Labour will feel betrayed if Clegg joins with Brown.

Achieving a stable form of government under these conditions could be well-nigh impossible. Some will see the political crisis as simply shadow-dancing while the real power-brokers remain hidden from view in the corridors of Whitehall and the global corporations. In some respects they are right.

But at the same time, to view politics separately form the deep currents underneath is also to miss the real moment of opportunity. The political crisis means that the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way at a time of a serious financial emergency. The strength of those in power is precisely that they are aware of this weakness and will do all in their power to address it.

Our strength must be to see it as an opportunity for those excluded from power to exercise their power in a meaningful way. That is why our strategy of forming People’s Assemblies is a thousand times more realistic than believing we can influence any parliament that will result from the election.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

TV debate masks fraud of an election

With the general election now firmly in the realms of a TV game show, the degeneration of mainstream politics is clear for all who care to take note. Another ninety minutes of well rehearsed assertions could not disguise the fact that in essence, there is nothing between the major parties.

Fundamentally, there are no disagreements between the three parties when it comes to the economy, immigration, defence, Afghanistan, climate change etc. Even on Iraq, where the Lib Dems opposed the war, the subject hardly got a look in, with the questions from the audience reduced to anodyne levels (e.g. should the Pope be allowed into Britain?!).

Forget all the knockabout stuff – that’s routine in the House of Commons every week at prime minister’s questions. It’s all for show, to try and sell the electorate the idea that politics is exciting and that New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems are brimming with different ideas.

Any differences between them are about emphasis, not content. They are about ways of doing things – not changing the things themselves. The electorate is being asked to change management rather than elect a new government. None of the three leaders, for example, questions the assumption that massive cuts in public spending are needed to reduce the mounting budget deficit.

As the Financial Times reported hours before the televised debate, the government borrowed £163.4bn in the past financial year, the worst level of in Britain’s peacetime history. Public sector net debt rose to 53.8% of national income in 2009-10, up from 44% the previous year. The bankers’ paper noted: “The level of borrowing – at more than 11% of national income – highlights the need for the next government to enforce stringent public spending cuts and tax increases as the economy recovers, something all the parties agree on (emphasis added).”

The only reason the cuts are deemed necessary, however, is to appease international lenders who finance the deficit with loans and global foreign exchange traders buying and selling the pound. Yet the deficit itself is the result of the recession caused by the collapse of the very same financial system which has benefited from state bail-outs on a massive scale.

The alternative to making massive cuts in spending would require a total reorganisation of the economy and financial system. It would mean defying capitalist markets and relaunching the economy on the basis of gearing production to social need. None of this is going to happen at Westminster. After May 6, some sort of coalition will be cobbled together to clobber the electorate. Make no mistake about it.

So our twin policy of hanging on to your vote while campaigning to launch a network of People’s Assemblies may appear utopian but is actually a practical alternative. If you wouldn’t buy a used car off of Brown, Cameron or Clegg, why lend them your vote? If the present parliamentary system is undemocratic and unrepresentative, one where your vote counts for little, why participate in the fraud that is the 2010 general election?

If we want a real democracy in a society not beholden to bankers and corporations, we are going to have to take the initiative ourselves. A struggle for power against the political and economic elites is a tough road to go down. A World to Win is launching as an international organisation next month, committed to providing leadership for such a strategy. You are warmly invited to take part in the May 22 conference.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Political pop idol comes to Britain

Such is the decline in traditional political allegiance in Britain that one appealing TV appearance can thrust an average performer to apparent super stardom as the general election comes to resemble a TV talent show rather than a political campaign.

The political version of Britain’s Got Talent or Pop Idol has propelled Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg from an also-ran to the one to beat, according to the pollsters. Clegg’s rise to fame certainly makes a hung parliament more likely than not.

There is no other way to explain the violent swing in the opinion polls since Clegg’s triumph over Gordon Brown and David Cameron during their TV debate last week. Faced with the prospect of either a New Labour or Tory government, voters have understandably taken fright.

Whatever Clegg is, he is not Brown or Cameron! Never mind what he stands for – he is young, appealing and pours scorn on the two parties that for almost 70 years have taken turns in running the country in a Tweedledee-Tweedledum act.

Disgust with New Labour runs deep for a variety of reasons. Watching Lords Mandelson and Adonis outside Downing Street, explaining why the volcano eruption in Iceland is bad news, is enough to put you off on its own. Both are courting the Lib Dems because essentially that is their natural home.

Mandelson came within a whisker of defecting to the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, while Adonis was a member of the outfit that broke away from Labour and subsequently joined with the Liberals (Britain’s oldest capitalist party, going back to the mid-19th century) to form the Lib Dems.

New Labour – with the support of the Tories – enabled Britain to become an offshore haven for global financiers and left the economy to stagger and eventually collapse under unparalled debt burdens. Add in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the undermining of human rights and creating markets for public services, you can see why many people find it hard to stomach voting New Labour.

As for inequality, City bankers have experienced near-unprecedented income growth over the past decade, with the highest-paid workers taking home nearly a third of the UK’s total wage bill, new research from the London School of Economics shows. The report reveals that the top 10 per cent of workers seeing their share of wages rise from 27 per cent to 30 per cent between 1998 and 2008. Big bonuses paid to bankers and traders accounted for most of those gains, with financial services professionals taking home an extra £12bn per year by the end of the decade.

The extreme electoral volatility shown in the polls does not herald, however, a new political dawn so much as the break-up of the old arrangements under the impact of globalisation and its offspring, the world economic and financial crisis.

The fact that Clegg himself represents constituents in Sheffield – once an engineering and steel-making town – speaks volumes for the decline of New Labour in what were once its heartlands. The city council is also Lib Dem controlled, as is Newcastle, York and other northern towns and cities.

If the Lib Dems do end up joining a coalition to keep New Labour in power it would mark the full turn of the circle and the completion of the Blairite project to unite both parties. Labour was formed in 1900 to end Liberal influence over the trade unions and win reforms from capitalism. A coalition would be a step along the road to a merger that would signal the formal and historic end of that venture.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Revealed: the secret debate rules

There were apparently about 80 rules agreed between the major parties about how last night’s TV debate should be conducted. We can reveal some of the rules for the first time – and they go a long to explaining why those viewers who didn’t switch channels had to endure what they did.

1. All the leaders will be pompous white males in shiny suits with ludicrous ties that relate to their party’s colours.
2. All the questions will be so anodyne that they wouldn’t frighten a pussycat.
3. The Big Three will decline to inform viewers about the scale of the cuts in public spending they would make if in government.
4. All three leaders will pledge to protect front-line services, while knowing that the budget deficit makes this impossible.
5. Each leader will have a go at immigration levels, trying to steal votes from those thinking about voting for the neo-fascist BNP.
6. No one will mention the word capitalism or criticise the system in any way that links it to the economic and financial crisis.
7. No one will acknowledge that that the British state’s debts are larger in proportion to gross domestic product than Greece’s.
8. Tory leader David (call me Dave) Cameron will talk about creating a “Bigger Society” when he actually wanted to say a “Big Society”.
9. He will bang on about “efficiency savings” when he means cuts.
10. New Labour leader Gordon Brown will speak like a programmed robot and wear a stupid grin from time to time.
11. He will hector Cameron and viewers whenever he gets the chance.
12. Brown will accept no responsibility for anything New Labour has done in 13 years in office.
13. Cameron will sometimes look bewildered, wondering what he was doing in Manchester for the debate and thinking about the playing fields of Eton.
14. Cameron will talk about “change” in such a vague way that he could be talking about what you get back after going to the local shop.
15. Nick Clegg will boast that his party is different from the two “old parties” because it is new.
16. Clegg will omit to say that the Lib Dems come out of the Liberal Party, which was one of the two major British parties from the mid-19^th century until the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s.
17. He will also refer to the number of admirals there are relative to each warship (as if anyone cared) and the cost of a new police car.
18. From time to time, the three leaders will agree with each other totally to show that when it comes down to it, there’s not much between them on policies.
19. None will give a hint that behind the scenes they are secretly negotiating the terms of a coalition/national government that could well prove necessary after May 6.
20. At the end of the 90 minutes (thank goodness there’s no rule about playing extra time), all three will shake hands.
21. Cameron and Clegg will wander off the platform together, while Brown approaches frightened members of the audience.

For the masochists amongst you, there are two more of these events to come before polling day. Now you can see that our policy of hanging on to your votes is the only one guaranteed to keep you sane.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Clegg sounds the alarm bells

Media pundits made fun of the Liberal Democrats’ new leader, Nick Clegg, when he split his party over the European Union treaty referendum vote. But over the weekend, he defied predictions of disaster by winning over spring conference delegates with a sweeping condemnation of “establishment politics” in a bid to position himself for the outcome of the next general election.

Clegg attacked class divisions in Britain, where “some people are still more free than others” saying that Labour had “sold its soul and became the second Conservative party”. He pointed out that children born into poor neighbourhoods might have a life expectancy far shorter than the rich. Clegg tapped into the growing disaffection with existing political structures, especially the two-party system that has dominated British politics for so long.

Casting himself and his party as rebels against the political establishment, he said, “a new type of government” was needed - “a new system, that empowers people not parties”. He called for a 100-strong citizens’ jury to join forces with parties, churches and other groups in a Constitutional Convention to “redesign the way Britain is governed”. He noted how there is a “vast and growing army of people who want something different than the main political parties” who rejected the two main parties. Clegg also called for a mass movement of millions of people to take action to protect the planet and tackle climate change.

The Lib Dem leader spoke of liberty taken and abused by government officials and “a faceless state”. He referred to Brown’s “obsession” with building bigger and bigger database systems. He denounced New Labour’s pride “that Britain is leading the world in fingerprinting children at school” and “that the identity card database will be the biggest and most complex that the world has ever seen”. He warned of the impact of a US recession on Britain, saying: “We’ve been building castles in the sand. And the tide is coming in.”

All of these things are undoubtedly true. But behind Clegg's bold words and “high-risk strategy”, he is in fact positioning his party for a possible coalition in the event of a hung parliament. When he refers to “the rotten old system”, he actually means the two-party system, NOT the profit-driven, debt-based system of production, which is now spiralling out of control. He is aware that increasing numbers of people know and feel the existing political structures are neither democratic nor representative. But the bottom line is that Clegg is seeking a way of shoring up faith in the present political system, by offering the pipe dream of capitalism with a democratic face. He is sounding alarm bells about the political system with an eye to backing a Tory or Labour minority administration in the event of a hung parliament.

Many observers, especially those far to the right of Clegg, have noted the sea change in Britain over the last few decades, particularly since New Labour came to power. There is a vast alienation from what is seen as “politics” – in other words the existing undemocratic and somewhat corrupt parliamentary system of rule. The Liberal Democrats’ re-positioning is not just speechifying but a desperate attempt to balance an extra-parliamentary movement with one still chained to the old system. It should be seen as a clarion call to develop a truly alternative economic and political vision to bourgeois democracy and corporate power. A World to Win’s next discussion on April 3 will be another step in this direction.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary