Enough is Enough Rally in Newcastle - October 1, 2022 Photo: Workers' Weekly

The so-called "Mini-Budget" elaborated in the House of Commons on Friday, September 23, was nothing but a financial package to make sure that the rich get paid in the conditions of an economic crisis that is the making of the ruling elites and oligarchs, not the working class and people.

Enough is Enough Rally in Nottingham - October 1, 2022 - Photo: Westbridgford Wire

Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng's budget was an open declaration of war against working people, a declaration that the government is determined it will have no responsibility for the fate of society or care for social programmes. It was a declaration that working people and society as a whole can go to hell in a handcart as long as the financial oligarchy and the richest centile of the population can continue to make literally millions and billions in the context of the crisis. Gone is all vestige of the fraud of "levelling up", beloved of Boris Johnson. The rationale of the "mini-budget" does not even really justify the description of "trickle-down economics", itself a fraudulent concept as many even in the Conservative Party have declared, because "prosperity" and "growth" is made synonymous with safeguarding and expanding the interests of the rich by attacking the poor. As such, it is a programme to make sure that the rich can emerge from the crisis unscathed and further enriched. It is a prime example of government by police powers, of random, arbitrary dictate, that even the Conservative MPs, many of whom became marginalised under Boris Johnson and are being further marginalised under Liz Truss, are concerned about. [Stop press editorial note: It has been announced that the slashing of the tax band of 45% for earnings of above £150,000 p.a. is not to go ahead. It could simply be that the proposal was floated to ascertain reaction, which has been predictable to all but Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and their coterie. It also turns out that this measure was the Chancellor's decision alone, and had not been discussed in Cabinet.] One of the main features is to reverse the cap on bankers' bonuses, which had been introduced as one of the measures to salvage the neo-liberal economic system from its 2008 crisis. As commentator Craig Murray pointed out in his blog, "the cap on bankers' bonuses was to remove the perverse incentive whereby a banker got a bonus of ten years salary by creating 'assets' of bad loans, with no care whether those loans collapsed or not two years later, as he already had his ten years' bonus." It is further certain that there will be no cutbacks on military production and war preparations, themselves a further drain on the economy and a crucial factor in exacerbating the economic crisis.

Enough is Enough Rally in Nottingham - October 1, 2022 - Photo: Westbridgford Wire

The mini-budget announcement, with its emphasis on every person for themselves and devil take the hindmost, has itself unleashed financial anarchy and chaos, with its unpredictable consequences. There is no coherence to the announced measures. It has become clear that clashing vested financial interests are at the heart of government. One such has been the "think-tank" Policy Exchange, for example. As an opinion piece by George Monbiot explained, "Truss's politics have been shaped by organisations that call themselves think-tanks, but would be better described as lobbyists who refuse to reveal who funds them. Now she has brought them into the heart of government." He continued: "Her senior special adviser, Ruth Porter, was communications director at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an extreme neo-liberal lobby group." George Monbiot elaborated: "When she worked at the IEA, Porter called for reducing housing benefit and child benefit, charging patients to use the NHS, cutting overseas aid and scrapping green funds. She then became head of economic and social policy at Policy Exchange, which was also listed by Transparify as 'highly opaque'. Policy Exchange is the group that (after Porter left) called for a new law against Extinction Rebellion, which became, in former home secretary Priti Patel's hands, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. We later discovered it had received $30,000 from the US oil company Exxon."

In opposition, there is a programme which is taking root within the working class. One expression of this is the movement "Enough is Enough". It is an expression that the workers will not be held captive to the self-serving manoeuvres and ideology of narrow private interests, and neither will they be subservient to governments that rule by police powers. Many strands are coming together to show that this is a crucial historical juncture that the working class must take advantage of. Along with the
Enough is Enough Rally in Nottingham - October 1, 2022 - Photo: Westbridgford Wire"Enough is Enough" movement has come a situation where the old forms of governance no longer function, being brought to a head with the Truss government, and as well the old constitutional order has been brought into question with the death of the old monarch and the accession of a new one. The conclusion which the ruling elites are trying to mystify is that new forms and a new constitutional order must be brought into being, and the agency for this change must be the working class and people themselves.

Once more, the situation crucially points to the working class organising on the basis of its own independent politics. It is based on the economic fact of life that it is working people who produce the social wealth of society. Who has priority claim on this wealth is the issue. Our call is that workers continue to make their claims on this wealth and do not halt the momentum of the movement to defend these claims. That is really the essence of the declaration that Enough is Enough! Within this, workers are declaring that they will defend what belongs to them by right, and by doing so will benefit the well-being not only of workers themselves but of society as a whole, directly counter to the programme and ideology of the present government. Furthermore, it can be recognised that this is a decisive historical juncture which calls for the workers to set out and move forward on a new course, a new direction for the economy and society as a whole. The workers' opposition must not be blocked. By keeping the initiative in their own hands, organising on the basis of their independent politics and programme, workers can and are determined to turn the situation around in their favour.

Now is the time for the working class to put on the agenda for solution the necessity to set a new direction for the economy and to achieve the political power which will be indispensable to achieve this transformation and bring the productive forces under their own control.

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