29.06.1995

Labour prepares to step into Tory shoes

This week the proverbial Tory boil burst. The Tories cannot save themselves by lancing the Europhobe boils, as they would have us believe. The party is disintegrating from top to bottom and is increasingly a blight on workers’ lives. Who knows what will happen to their disastrous leader. The real question is what will happen after the Tory collapse

MAJOR’S desperate attempt to dig himself out of a political hole has only sunk him further down into the slime of Tory internal squabbles. The Tory Party is for the time being undoubtedly a defunct party.

Conservative MPs know they cannot win the next election and are destroying each other in their desperate individual bids to hold onto their seats. Running capitalism has been firmly and surely replaced by saving their own skins.

Fortunately for the Tories the European Summit was conveniently overshadowed by Major’s ‘domestic problems’. But the squabble over Europe within the Tories is indicative of not only their vicious and chauvinistic attacks on the working class, but their inability to cohere any long-term programme for British capitalism.

But before we revel in too much smug glee at the imminent demise of Major and his cronies, we should be very wary of what is lurking in the wings.

The Labour Party’s promises to be tough, - tough, that is, on the working class in the interests of the bosses - have continued relentless since Blair moved the party centre stage. Only this Wednesday Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor, launched his ‘get tough on spending’ economic policy document. He promises a crackdown on waste and inefficiency - workers’ wages and services no doubt being the biggest waste for this thoroughly loyal opposition.

Last week Jack Straw’s pet crackdown was on ‘problem tenants’, who apparently pose the latest threat to civilisation. Keen to play the ‘law and order’ card, he suggests that “disruptive tenants” (in council accommodation) should be subjected to apartheid-style bans and threatened with jail sentences of up to seven years.

Many on the left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, bemoan the fact that it is not waging all-out war on the capitalist system, as it ‘should’ be doing, and is instead declaring war on the working class.

Condemned to swing from the coat tails of Labour, they will be totally unprepared for the Labour attacks that would follow the Tories’ final demise in a general election.

The Communist Party, on the other hand, does not see itself as the ‘left’ conscience of bourgeois society. The job of communists is not to give advice to the Labour Party or more powers to the capitalist state - whoever is in charge, it is our enemy.

We must fight ourselves for improved housing conditions and organise ourselves to defend our neighbourhoods against those who harass and attack others. Above all we will have to organise ourselves against the likelihood of a new and viciously anti-working class Labour government.