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Vol. 79/No. 20      June 1, 2015

 
(front page)
Conservatives keep power in weaker,
less united United Kingdom


BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN  
LONDON — The Conservative Party victory in the May 7 general election, returning the Tories to power with a small parliamentary majority, reflects neither a shift to the right by working people nor a mandate for deeper assaults on workers’ living standards and rights.

What the results do reflect is a less united and weaker “United Kingdom.” They also point to a further strengthening of the two-party system in the U.K.

The Liberal Democrats, whose bloc with Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives was the backbone of the previous government, lost 49 Members of Parliament, ending up with eight. The Labour Party suffered a net loss of 26 MPs. In Scotland the Scottish National Party won 56 of the 59 seats, including taking 40 from Labour.

Despite these losses, across the U.K. both the Conservative and Labour parties increased their percentage share of the total vote.

The Communist League ran a vigorous working-class campaign in London and Manchester, joining in strike picket lines and workers’ demonstrations, demanding cops be held accountable for beatings and murders, and organizing protests demanding the U.K. open its borders to refugees fleeing war and destruction from Syria to Libya.

CL candidates explained workers face growing attacks from the bosses and their government as the crisis of the capitalist system deepens. They said that the labor movement must unite the working class, champion the struggles of farmers and other allies, and point to the need to break from the capitalist political parties and chart a course toward the fight for a workers and farmers government.

The Conservative Party today is a free-market bourgeois party that makes a populist appeal to workers as the party of job creation. Following on the victory, Chancellor George Osborne announced that he will present a budget for “working people” in July.

The Labour Party, founded in 1900 based on the Trades Union Congress, has been transformed over the last four decades in the midst of a continuing decline of the labor movement. While keeping the Labour Party name, today it is an ideological party where the unions have much less influence, similar to the Democratic Party in the U.S.

“I’ve voted Labour in the past, I’m from a family that voted Labour before,” Jody Hall told the Financial Times, “but I was worried that they left this country with no money.” Hall voted in Nuneaton, in the center of England, where a slim Conservative majority nearly doubled. Her father, a former miner, “was worried about how the economy would be under Labour,” she said.

“On balance, the Tories are stronger in a politically unstable world,” said Robert Fox, a local soccer coach in Dagenham, East London.

The party to register the most substantial gains in England was the U.K. Independence Party. It got nearly 4 million votes, though it won just one seat in Parliament.

Across northern England, once considered Labour’s heartland, many workers disaffected by years of Labour Party anti-working-class policies turned to UKIP.

“Workers voted UKIP for different reasons,” said Cheryl Farnum, an administrative worker in London. “The main one was that UKIP wasn’t either Labour or Tory and claimed to speak for working people.”

While the Scottish National Party and UKIP gained votes, the Conservative and Labour parties maintained their positions as the cornerstone of two-party rule in the U.K.

Following the election UKIP has been gripped by a crisis over who should lead the party. Prominent figures have called for the resignation of incumbent Nigel Farage for focusing too much on restricting immigration and not preparing a broad coalition to campaign against U.K. membership in the European Union.

EU membership is a key question in bourgeois politics in the U.K. Its importance is heightened as the EU increasingly comes apart. Greece’s imminent exit — or “Grexit,” as many say — appears inevitable. What this means for Portugal, Spain and even Italy — with soaring debts and battered economies — remains an open question.

At the same time, the U.K. has less weight in world politics. The Feb. 6 Financial Times highlighted a report by a parliamentary committee that “lambasted the UK for its ‘strikingly modest’ contribution to the US-led coalition against the Islamic State.” The same week, the article said, Richard Shirreff, former top NATO commander in Europe, called Cameron a “foreign policy irrelevance” on Ukraine.

Behind the accelerated decline lies the continuing crisis of profit rates, government debt and a budget deficit that have been coupled with reductions in the U.K.’s military capability.

“This is not a momentary blip, but a trend,” Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told the New York Times April 27. “A country that for decades punched well above its weight is not at its weight, or even below it.”

For London, the “special relationship” to the U.S. will be the decisive question for its place in the world, not its relations to the EU.

The Conservative government says it will hold a referendum on whether to remain in the EU by 2017, after negotiations to secure repatriation of additional powers from Brussels.

Capitalist crisis wracks UK

Government representatives have made much of figures that supposedly point to U.K. economic growth. But per capita gross domestic product remains well below its pre-recession peak and the manufacturing picture is bleak. U.K. labor productivity lags behind that of its major competitors. Investment in capacity-expanding plant and equipment has been in the doldrums for decades.

The corporate bond market and property prices have soared, encouraged by the Bank of England’s “quantitative easing,” and the stock market is booming. What’s stoking so-called growth is speculation — exactly what led to the crash of 2008.

For working people the economic upturn has been a mirage. The drop in official unemployment is accounted for almost entirely by a rise in self-employment and part-time work. There are now 1.8 million “zero-hour contract” jobs, where workers average 25 hours a week. Two-fifths of these workers earn less than £111 per week ($170).

Also before the government is how to proceed in the face of the landslide by the Scottish National Party. While SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said accurately that it was not a vote for independence, her party’s rhetorical claims to protect Scotland from London’s austerity measures led to gains at Labour’s expense.

In a meeting May 15, Cameron told Sturgeon that the government will implement in full the recommendations of the Smith commission on “devolution,” which proposed extending greater powers to the Scottish Parliament, including the power to set income tax rates, keep a proportion of value-added tax raised there and some control over social benefits.

As the “devolved” powers of Scotland and Wales have grown, some political figures, especially from the Conservative Party, have called for English-only parliament votes on laws that affect England, a proposal included in the Conservative Party election manifesto. London Mayor Boris Johnson has proposed a federal setup for the U.K., more like the U.S. and Canada, a proposal likely to succeed.  
 
 
 
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