There’s a by-election in Uxbridge on 20 July due to Boris jumping before he was pushed. The Socialist Party will not be standing but we will be leafletting the constituency.
The first socialist leaflets were distributed door-to-door on a Wednesday in Yiewsley in the south of the constituency. This was also a chance to pick up discarded leaflets from the candidates (Labour, Tory, SDP and Rejoin the EU, but there are 13 other candidates).
After stating that “since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, real wages have fallen so far that we are now worse off by £1373 a year”, the Labour candidate Danny Beales, stated that “Labour has a plan to put money into the pockets of local people”.
Who (if you believed them) wouldn’t vote for someone who promised that? Actually, when you analyse what’s being promised, it’s not so much putting money into people’s pockets as not taking it out.
“A Labour government”, the promise reads, “would bring your energy bills down by £1400”. Which, if carried out, would just take people back to the position they were in when the Tories came to power 13 years ago.
The whole Labour campaign nationally is based on blaming the Tory government rather than capitalism. According to Labour, the fall in real wages is all down to Tory “mismanagement” as if a government is in a position to control the way the capitalist economy works.
We are being asked to believe that, if there had been a Labour government, this wouldn’t have happened. But experience shows that no government can control the way capitalism works. All they can do is react to whatever the vagaries of the capitalist economy throw at them, a reaction that is limited by the need to accept that capitalism is a profit-driven system and so to give priority to profits over everything else, including people’s standard of living.
As the leaflet we are distributing puts it, IT’S NOT THE TORIES OR LABOUR THAT’S THE PROBLEM. IT’S CAPITALISM.