Speaking at the Communist Party executive committee at the weekend, vice chair Liz Payne accused the Tories of representing the interests of ever fewer big business corporations.
She said they were the ‘bought and paid for creatures’ of the City of London’s financial institutions which control key enterprises and sectors of the British economy. ‘Chancellor Osborne is driving the austerity and privatisation agenda forward, announcing an extra £25bn in public spending cuts and planning to cut Corporation Tax on profits by almost a third since he took office’, Ms Payne declared.
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She contrasted last year’s 82 per cent increase in bankers’ bonuses with what the Office for National Statistics confirms to be the biggest fall in real wages for at least 50 years.
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‘In so-called boom time Britain, the gender pay gap is growing, we have 11 million households in poverty – more than half of them containing low paid workers – and food bank referrals have soared by 170 per cent in just one year’, commented Ms Payne, who is also a leading Unison activist in south west England.
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‘The Tories and their LibDem sidekicks are using the state apparatus to enforce monopoly capital’s drive for maximum profit’, she insisted, citing the so-called ‘Gagging Bill’ currently going through the Westminster parliament. She also pointed to the growing clamour in Tory and business circles for fresh restrictions on industrial action by trade unions in public transport and key public services.
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At their weekend meeting, Britain’s communists attacked the Tory-led coalition’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy which seeks to set people in work against benefit claimants and migrant workers.
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But the CP executive committee welcomed a series of events over the coming months which, it said, would help build a ‘broad alliance against state monopoly capitalism’ in Britain.
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These include one day strikes on London Underground (February 4 and 11), the Women’s Assembly against Austerity (February 22), the People’s Assembly policy conference (March 15) and protests on Budget Day (March 19), and the Unite Against Fascism national demonstration on March 22.
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Britain’s Communist Party is launching a two-month membership drive from March 1 and holding its annual trade union and political cadre school on March 8-9 at the Marx Memorial Library. The party’s 53rd congress has been set for November 15-16.
