Roger Protz Archive | ETOL Main Page
From Socialist Worker, No. 121, 8 May 1969, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
‘I AM GOING ON – the government is going on’, bold, brave Harold Wilson declared on Sunday. He meant they were going on attacking the workers, the old, the sick and the poor, forcing them to pay for the crisis of the capitalist system that Wilson and co are so anxious to protect.
Hard on the heels of the plans to hang a ball and chain on every militant trade unionist in the country comes the cynical decision to increase by 25 per cent the cost of National Health false teeth and spectacles.
The hypocrisy of the government is almost too much to stomach.
They were elected on a platform to reform welfare and restore the principle of a free health service – yet in five bitter years they have done more to gerrymander the NHS and force an aver increasing financial burden working-class [families] than the Tories managed to do in their long tenure in office.
The attacks on welfare are forced on Labour by their paymasters, the rich and reactionary international bankers who bale out the pound with massive loans on the understanding that the government will make the workers sweat to save the creaking system.
Alongside wage freeze, incomes policy, anti-union laws, productivity deals and pruning of welfare we get huge hand-outs to the employers, financial encouragement for monopolies like AEI- GEC-EE to ‘rationalise’ by closing plants and making thousands redundant.
Does anyone still think this government has any connection with socialism? Will anyone, save some tired Transport House hack, stand up and declare that a government that is deliberately impoverishing the lives of millions is acting in the interests of the workers?
Just look at their record on welfare, education and housing alone.
The Labour Party election manifesto of 1966 promised to build 500,000 new homes by 1969–70 with ‘higher levels still’ in the following years.
That pledge was quietly dropped last year, with public housing cut back by 15,000 a year in England and Wales and 1,500 in Scotland.
Rents have rocketed – and so have the interest rates demanded by the moneylenders who finance council building.
And there is more to come. Insurance contributions are going up soon.
You have got to be soaked again so that your boss can get a lavish loan to shut down your factory and take it off to Northern Ireland, all expenses paid. That’s known as ‘planning’.
Of course, the government badly needs the money. They need tens of thousands to crown a pampered parasite in Wales and to pay for RAF jets taking part in absurd races across the Atlantic to boost the sagging sales of an arch-Tory newspaper.
There could be no clearer example in Labour’s record of how a ‘reformist’ party that attempts to tinker with capitalism ends up the prisoner of the bosses and the bankers.
It is a lesson to every trade unionist and his family fighting to keep their heads above water as the bills mount and the prices soar.
You can’t ‘share’ power with the capitalists because the shares aren’t equal. You can only take it from them.
Out of this present mess must come a growing determination by the workers to cast the Labour renegades onto the refuse heap and to organise for real power – workers’ power.
Roger Protz Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 16 January 2020