PROTEST will hit the streets in towns and cities across Britain on Saturday as the People’s Assembly puts a spotlight on who’s causing the cost-of-living crisis.
Armies of Establishment economists promote a myth that the operations of the market are mysterious and unchallengeable.
That there is nothing we can do about soaring prices or falling wages — we just have to adjust to them, as the multimillionaire Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak advises us.
This is a lie, and the dozens of localised protests must take the message to politicians that there are alternatives and we mean to fight for them.
It is a political choice to allow energy bills to rise by nearly £700 without ending the madness by taking the sector into public hands — which would enable government to protect us from market fluctuations. The French government has limited bill increases to 4 per cent and that could be done here.
It is a political choice to hold pay down below inflation across the public sector, a kick in the teeth for workers who’ve made huge sacrifices to keep the country running during the pandemic.
It is a political choice to use attacks on benefits to counter the impact of labour shortages and an uptick in industrial militancy which raise pressure for pay rises. It is clear that the government intends living standards to fall: all its policies are designed to produce that outcome.
This is because super-profits for the few are more important to ministers than the ability of millions of ordinary people to heat their homes or feed their families.
The government — reeling from an endless stream of leaks exposing lockdown-breaching revelry at No 10 — is desperate to distract us.
Nothing else could explain the bizarre decision to send Liz Truss to Moscow this week to talk up the threat of war when she had nothing to say to the Russians and no proposals to make.
A Labour leader who connives at the pretence that Russia is about to invade Ukraine — something the Ukrainian government itself has repeatedly asked London and Washington to stop saying — is giving the Tories a free pass in order to give his predecessor and the anti-imperialist left a kicking.
His pointless trip to the Nato headquarters in Brussels, merely to pledge his allegiance to the most dangerous military alliance on the planet and apologise to the masters of war for his party’s failure to dance to their tune under Jeremy Corbyn, was a stunt as superfluous as Truss’s and exposes his priorities at this key juncture for our movement.
The Labour right knows that a wave of anger over the cost of living and a surge in protests and strikes will reignite conversations about who owns and controls Britain and spell opportunities for the left.
They are determined to counter those by ramping up the smears against left organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition and intensifying their internal war on socialists — as Peter Mandelson made clear with his warning to the Socialist Campaign Group not to promote policies Keir Starmer doesn’t support, such as public ownership.
The truth is that the reckoning we need with the rich at home is inseparable from an end to Britain’s support for US warmongering abroad.
The new cold war we support in obeisance to Washington is seeing massive rises in military spending while our pay is cut and the NHS groans under an unmanageable treatment backlog.
And Britain’s backing for an unjust and super-exploitative world order policed by the United States has its roots in the crooked financial interests that dominate the City of London, the same that distort our whole economy and ensure corporate profit always trumps human need.
Today’s demonstrations must be the start of a campaign to challenge all that. Britain needs a pay rise; nobody needs a war.
