The majority of MPs have been found guilty of fiddling their expenses. Likewise, the majority of them have claimed for trips abroad and then – without declaring their interests, in breach of their own rules – asked parliamentary questions about the countries they visited. Four ex-ministers so consumed with greed that they failed to scent Dispatches’ “sting” offered their services for money to bend legislation.
When a majority is corrupt, it’s a sign that the system is corrupt. Is it any wonder that we all despise them? But make no mistake: the individual corruption is a result of the corrupt system, not the other way around. The system is rotten, so riddled with patronage and deference to finance capitalism that it can serve no other interest.
There is much talk about a “hung parliament”, so, which of them are we going to hang first? We are told that people died so that we could vote, but the suffragettes too would be denouncing this parliament of theft.
The “left” tell us to vote for anybody but the BNP – this is to say vote for the banks, the EU, the euro, for war on the working class at home and abroad. Each party has a partial truth – the other party is indeed anti-British, anti-working class, anti-progress, pro-banks, pro-EU, pro-war.
The “left” can’t, or won’t, see that the fascist threat comes not from the street but from the state. There are more fascists in Whitehall than in Dagenham. Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, have educated more of them than Barking Abbey School and Dagenham Park Church of England School.
The ruling class shamelessly calls its armed forces a “force for good”, talks of a fairer, more peaceful world, all on the basis of lawless aggression and unbridled exploitation. At home, it talks of equality and a just distribution of wealth, which is all idealism and deception, because these are never possible under capitalism. It talks of democracy and sovereignty while giving us away to the increasingly corporatist, fascist and disintegrating EU. We need to accelerate that disintegration.
The parliamentary parties are conspiring to slash public spending, using finance capital’s crisis to present cuts on the working class as inevitable. MPs don’t represent the majority of us. They don’t want a referendum on the EU Constitution, or an end to the current excessive levels of immigration, or an end to the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, or to rebuild Britain not the banks.
The working class, the vast majority, want a referendum on the EU Constitution, an end to the current excessive levels of immigration, an end to the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, and to rebuild Britain not the banks.
Don’t vote for any parliamentary party. They all represent finance capital, not Britain. Do we want finance capital to win again? We need working class democracy, not the present travesty.