The UK needs more austerity. The new Prime Minister (and the market) says so. And, after a decade-plus of austerity and five Tory Prime Ministers, apparently austerity is the proper answer for the future. Except the new Tory Chancellor adds that this time it has to be an eye-watering austerity, more awful than the previous years. Most of the UK's population are naturally worried to bits. And they have had enough. Quite rightly nobody, except the rich, really believes it will all be so much better, waiting for two years for a General Election.
The obvious first step is a General Election now. The Tories will try to carry on their 'eye-watering' for a while. But they are over. The UK's people largely want an election to get rid of the terrible, austerity-and the endless Tory government. A coming election today would also include the needs of the emerging, evolving nations in Scotland and Northern Ireland; the immense danger of the world's ecology; the war in Europe and most worrying at all, the scary future of 21st century capitalism.
For the best part of the last 20 years capitalism has called itself 'globalisation'. In essence, globalisation was the domination of international capital, where the cheapest international goods, services and labour created immense volumes of wealth, mainly held by the US banks. This was run collectively by the largest nations, with the US holding the debts (Japan, China etc). What's happening now is the contradiction of international capitalism, increasing resistance by even the largest nations against growing international distribution. Now these nations demand their own particular goods - which more and more insist on the most serious goods made in local hands.
The outcomes of the declining areas of globalisation are not only the increasing demands of national goods and services, it is also increasing (or heightening) the beginnings of conflicts and wars. And the national political results, supported by new or changed political parties, are deepening into more and more rightwing nationalist politics.
Meanwhile the conditions in the West for working class and lower middle class's peoples are dropping week by week. A radical response is emerging against governments. At the moment many people are polarising into two general directions (some combining opposite ideas.) The nationalist temptation for example deliberately promotes resistance to all immigrants, constantly spreading out in society deliberately, by the UK government. Yet again our richer government leaders are loathed by millions of people, who are unable to get their daily requirements. And a new core of the left has risen since 2016 in parts, particularly in Europe. As the increasing austerity evolves, so the left is emerging despite the deliberate contradictions put out by our leaders.
The failing of globalisation-type capitalism, a capitalism that cannot re-establish as before, is also pressing the changes of the left. The absence of any other choice except socialism or the current declining capitalism is the only direction available now in the West. For more than a century it is only socialism that has offered a genuine society and welfare alternative to capitalism. This has become critical. Today, a green-socialist direction would therefore seem the most obvious step to take. But the failures in the past of both social democratic leaderships, or of most communist dictators, remain deeply in the West's people's history. SD in its century has always turned away from real socialism in order to support capitalism under key critical conditions. Communism crashed, after the dictator Stalin and Stalinism, which completely broke any acceptance of such horror and failure in the vast majority of the West's working classes.
At the moment, from what will become a thunderous period, the unions are battling in the UK and France. The next steps need to be the overthrow of the new anti-union legislation, designed to split workers in general. Already there are common Charters that bring together all the basic radical steps that support the rights of us all. The major political parties, including the leaders of the British Labour Party, are largely stepping aside from any actual action. The focus of the Labour leaders are explicitly working to get a majority in Parliament. And it is at this stage that the active left need to pass the Labour leaders - and begin the genuine next political battle.
The next step that has to begin is the growth of dual political power in our society. The current, hated, Parliament, that is determined to carry on at all costs, is simply a barrier to any sort of progress for millions of people. The unions are rising, and now we need the people in the cities helping the food parcels, the towns supporting travel to hospitals, the refusal to accept desperate poverty, with thousands and thousands of people to march and to build our own local parliaments, the ones that will vote and act directly alongside. Supporting elected Mayors and even positive local councils can start a web of practical politics that stands against the rotten, failing Parliament. The new politics can have a hundred direct possibilities. In due course it can build up voting for real, basic, issues. Parties of the left can help, but first in practical ways. And finally our Lords, the party PMs, the huge money to get tricky votes at so called elections, the endless centuries of tradition, of domination, will fall.
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