The General Election is a complete fraud. Six weeks of electioneering are being presented as the high point of political life in this country. In reality, it is a crude auction for the votes of the greediest, most bigoted, egotistical sections of this society: the middle class. In the 19th century before the secret ballot was introduced votes were openly bought and sold in the street. Nowadays, there is an attempt to make it look respectable. Instead of hard cash or favours, it is tax cuts or selective education. The candidates do not buy the votes directly: instead they offer IOUs and promise that in government they will maintain the privileges of middle class people. No one at this election will represent the working class. So what’s the state of play in the auction so far? Round one to New Labour. With its support for complete deregulation of the media it picked up the support of The Sun. That is how politics works. New Labour promises Rupert Murdoch a free hand to dominate the media by opposing any limits to cross-ownership of the TV and the press. Rupert Murdoch gives his support to New labour. It is that simple. What next? Well the Tories gave the middle class a top tax bracket of 40 per cent. Labour have matched the offer with knobs on: 40 per cent top tax bracket for a further five years at least. The Tories re-introduced the policy of selective education to give middle class children a better start. New Labour have matched it – grammar schools are safe in their hands! You want cuts in public spending? Labour and Tory will give them to you! You want the streets cleared of the homeless, of noisy working class children, black people? Either will oblige.
The last 18 years have seen the Tories shovel untold blessings down the eager throats of the middle class. And the middle class want this to continue: their greed has no limit. New Labour agrees: they are after all a middle class party themselves – their membership, their councillors, their MPs all have their noses in the trough. So they have no conscience about participating in the auction: their ambition for power is so overwhelming.
The fraud then is that the outcome of the election matters, that it will make a difference. It won’t. Big business will still call the shots. It wants to go into Europe, and so into Europe it will go. It wants public spending cuts and so there will be spending cuts. To keep things stable, it will make sure that as many middle class people as possible will keep riding the gravy train. It needs them as an agent of social control, to regiment and control the working class as the crisis deepens.
So the working class will continue to pay to keep the middle class happy, for this is the other side of the equation. The good fortune of the middle class has been paid for through the impoverishment of the British working class and super-exploitation of the Third World.
Working class jobs in Britain are part-time, temporary, casual and therefore without any employment rights. Workers do not have unions to represent their interests. More and more such jobs are to serve the middle class – in fast-food centres, leisure centres, super-markets and so on. One million workers are now employed directly in domestic service by the middle class. The middle class is interested in the working class only as servants. It does not want to pay for working class healthcare or education. Nor does the ruling class: in its view you don’t need to educate workers to be a servant, nor do you need to worry about their health when there are so many competing for jobs. The election is not going to change any of this. Labour or Tory, the result will be the same for the working class. It will have to pay for the privileged life of the middle class – in meaningless, low-paid drudgery, in deteriorating education and poorer health. Its children will be driven off the streets by curfews. More and more will be sent to prison.
Organisations such as the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and the Socialist Party (SP) continue to collaborate with Labour even though they are putting up candidates in some constituencies. The SLP will not stand against ‘left’ Labour MPs, whilst the SP will not stand in marginal seats; indeed it calls for a vote for Labour in these circumstances. Meanwhile the Socialist Workers Party wants the best of everything: its slogan is now Vote Socialist or Labour. All of them obscure the parasitic role of the middle class, and the fact that unless there is a fundamental break with the parties and organisations that represent middle class interests, there can be no new movement of the working class. The lesson is that we must instead follow the lead of the Liverpool dockers, the anti-roads protesters and the Hillingdon hospital workers and start to organise. There is a movement to be built, one which puts working class interests at its heart and rejects all forms of privilege – a communist movement. Voting in this election will not help this process. So let us reject the general fraud, and shout out the message loud and clear: don’t vote – organise.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 136 ELECTION SPECIAL APRIL/MAY 1997
