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UK Parliament: Phone Hack Report Published / Welfare Reform Bill: So far
2 January 2012 — UK Parliament
From the UK government’s Website and worthwhile visiting or subscribe to their RSS feed. Here are a few of the latest:
MPs publish report on unauthorised tapping or hacking of mobile communications 23/12/2011 at 09:59
The Welfare reform bill is currently in report stage. Two days of further scrutiny by the Lords has been completed.
Lords to hear evidence from The Journalism Foundation
MPs publish report on unauthorised tapping or hacking of mobile communications 20/12/2011 at Noon
Lords Communications Committee continue their inquiry into the future of investigative journalism”
NO LONGER JUST CREEPING
In referring to the present attacks on our much reduced welfare state by the political leaders of the capitalist class, you write, “unlike the 1930’s, there is no groundswell of support for a socialist alternative to try and stem the tide. Instead, we have a deliberate process of what can only be called the ‘creeping fascism’ of our societies, . . . . . ”
By the opening of the great capitalist depression of 1929, the British Labour Party was staking its claim to electorally represent the working class of the UK, with Labour MP’s acting as a minority in the Commons until the Labour Party finally managed to oust the Liberals to win a majority of seats in the post war election of 1945. Of most significance however, following more than three decades of electoral intervention by Labour, it was an election that also produced the new Conservative/Labour governmental coalition for the imperialist United Kingdom, which has persisted right up to the present day.
Certainly, throughout the 30’s and, for that matter, even into the post-war, welfare state period of UK imperialism, the term ‘socialism‘ as a generality was being used across the labour movement, both inside and outside the Labour Party. So the 1930‘s groundswell of support for a ‘socialist‘ alternative, must surely bear comparison with that of today inasmuch as it also includes both the national reformists and the international revolutionaries of social democracy.
It may well be true that the groundswell for an alternative was stronger in the 30’s than that of today – Labour’s support for the inter-imperialist war of 1914-18 was seen as an aberration rather than being inherent to its ideology and the Soviet Union was still regarded by many on the left as being socialist in practice – whereas, today, the big question is what kind of socialism do we need.
On the question of fascism, the five colonising states accounting for over half the world’s expenditure on arms, the US, the UK, Germany, France and Italy, now constitute the hard core of the aggressive, US-NATO-EU neoliberal coalition. With their alliances of state and big business, they have always been corporate states but in the first instance as imperialist states, they took their fascism abroad, to back up their exploitation of the working class and people of other lands, deploying their fascist jackboot as and when their bourgeois, government-opposition democracy and ‘civilising’ mission had a need for it.
Of course, it all went pear shaped when their colonial competition could no longer be contained and blew up in their faces into their First World War. A late entry into that war, the United States, came out of it quite well and the United Kingdom, although weakened, was still one of the victors but, Germany was made to suffer the consequences of being the main loser in the war with dire results for all the working classes of Europe, and beyond.
Germany paid the price for being a defeated imperialist state. Unable to overcome its economic depression through the structures of bourgeois democracy, it established a one party, corporate state under the governmental leadership of the chauvinist, national socialist, German Workers Party while the chauvinist, national socialist, British Labour Party was able to continue participating in the bourgeois democracy of a victorious United Kingdom and from 1945 to become one arm of the Conservative/Labour governmental coalition that for the past thirty years has been helping to build the neoliberal, world order of the global corporate state.
Without a united revolutionary movement in sight to form a leadership for socialism beyond capitalism at home, our corporate fascism faces little opposition. It is no longer just creeping.