Inflation, job cuts, soaring dividends: the capitalists must pay for this mess!

Imprimir
Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials
18 October 2017

The latest news is that the shambles in the Brexit negotiations has caused another fall in the pound.  This means that inflation is likely to increase way beyond its present record 3% and that the Bank of England is bound to raise interest rates.
    For the rest of us, this means that all our bills - at the pump and the supermarket, but also for housing - will go on rising further over the coming months, while our wages remain stuck with lower-than-inflation increases, if any at all.
    Ministers are busy squabbling and plotting in preparation for a future Tory leadership contest.  David Davis, the Brexit bigot in charge of the negotiations makes a point of not turning up for them, as if this was likely to impress anyone!  As to Boris Johnson, he's using his column in the Daily Torygraph like Trump uses his Twitter account!
    Meanwhile, we, the working class majority on whose labour these politicians and their capitalist masters thrive, should quietly foot the bill for their Brexit folly?  They must be joking!

Hands off our jobs!

Of course, Brexit was always going to cause chaos, by breaking up the complex maze of economic links built across Europe for almost half a century and disrupting the European division of labour in the production sphere.  And this was bound to result in rising costs - meaning rising prices - and to affect jobs.
    Even the dumbest economists knew this.  But this didn't stop the Brexiteers from upping the ante.  To boost their profiles during the fight between rival factions within the Westminster bubble, they lied, boasting that slamming the door on the EU would herald a new era of grandeur for the British economy.  And they claimed that "we" would soon thrive on the kind of "free-trade deals with Britain" that the rest of the world was supposedly queuing up for.
    Except that, now, despite the Brexiteers' grandiose promises, the rest of the world is slamming the door on them - predictably so - and workers' jobs are increasingly in the firing line.
    So at Belfast's Bombardier plant, 1,000 jobs are under threat following the decision by May's "special friend", Donald Trump, to slap a 278% duty on parts they make.  So much for the Brexiteers hailing Trump's promise that Britain would be "first in the queue" for a free-trade deal with the US!  Ironically, though, these jobs may now be saved by Airbus - an EU-based company!
    Over a thousand jobs are threatened at the Ford-Bridgend and Vauxhall-Ellesmere Port plants.  In both cases, of course, we're told that it's due to orders being cancelled.  But would this necessarily imply production cuts, if these companies could still rely on the huge EU market?  Probably not!
    And, of course, there are the 3,000 job cuts at Monarch airline, whose bankruptcy is directly linked to the fall in the pound.  

Let them pay for their politicians' mess!

Judging from the anti-Brexit stance of big business mouthpieces in the media and bodies like the CBI, the capitalists are very unhappy about their politicians' delinquent behaviour.  Ironically, though, they are nevertheless making a killing out of it!
    Because of the cheap pound and the fact that British capital makes most of its profits in euros and dollars by parasitising the rest of the world, share prices are at a record high in London and so are dividends.  This year alone, in addition to being richer due to rising share prices, British companies' shareholders will cash in a record £90bn in dividends - a 7% increase over last year and 63% more than before the crisis broke out!
    To put these figures into perspective, this year's dividend payout to a few tens of thousands of shareholders would be enough to repay half of the total credit card debt owed by around 35 million British consumers!
    Of course, it is now obvious that the best option for us, workers, would be for Brexit to be scrapped, lock, stock and barrel.  Not because we should have any illusions in an EU which is just a capitalist profit-boosting device, but because we have nothing to gain and everything to lose from Brexit, from its mess, but also from the poisonous anti-migrant (and, therefore anti-working class) atmosphere it has created.
    But short of that happening, since the capitalists have failed to control the politicians' ineptitude and irresponsibility, it is they who should foot the bill, not us!  After all it is their politicians, not ours, who made this mess - and they should sort it out!
    Of course, this will only happen if the working class forces the capitalists to pay up.  Brexit or not, this is our best and only option - and one which is well within our reach, provided we use our collective strength in full.