Tories Say No Money For Wages But Give £500 Million To Tata

The Tories continue to claim that there is no money to enable them to void cutting the real wages of public sector workers, as UK CPI continues to rise at 7.9%, RPI rises at 10.7%, and food prices rise at 17.3% on the year.  Yet, despite the fact that, during the same time, these falling real wages have been mirrored in rising real profits for companies, the Tories are proposing to hand over half a billion pounds to Tata Motors, as a bribe to locate a new battery producing plant in Somerset, rather than in the EU.  That is a battery plant that Tata Motors needs for its Jaguar Cars, and so would have to build one way or another.

Not only does this again, illustrate the idiocy of Brexit, with a British national government having to offer bribes of taxpayers money to rich Indian businesses to invest the capital these businesses are in business to lay out so as to make their huge profits, and pay out huge amounts of dividends to their shareholders, but it also shows the extent of the other aspect of British national policy too, in relation to its subservience to US imperialism.

The reason that Britain is offering these large bribes to rich capitalist firms, and their shareholders is not just that they have a history of stuffing the pockets of their rich friends, be they Indian, French, German or Australian, with money is that the EU has been led to do that too, and it has been led to do it, because of Biden's misnamed "Inflation reduction Act", which is not intended to reduce inflation, but to systematically bribe global corporations to invest in new production in the US, rather than any other part of the world.  It is Trump's trade war against China and the EU, seen from the other side.  Just another nationalistic measure of economic protectionism reminiscent of the 19th century, and the age of colonialism.

Where Trump's trade war involved putting tariffs on foreign produced commodities imported into the US, and so caused their US prices to rise, also enabling US producers to increase their own prices to match, Biden's policy, whilst continuing most of those Trump era trade restrictions, is placing the emphasis instead on handing out money to firms as bribes to get them to invest in the US, rather than overseas. 

Where does that money come from.  Well it could come from taxes, which would be counterproductive, because those taxes also come out of the surplus value produced by US workers, and appropriated as profits, which could have been invested in new capital.  But, Biden, with an eye on Presidential election in a year's time, does not want to be raising taxes, and so, the money again essentially comes from the printing press, from the state borrowing money.  The consequence of that is inflation, and so higher prices, not the reduction of inflation that the Act describes.  What its really about is protectionism, and protectionism means the protection of US national capital.

This is the same US, of course, that the UK claims to have a special relationship with, and for whom it acts as poodle in military conflicts across the globe, the latest one being that in Ukraine.  The Brexitories promised they would do a trade deal with this US, but instead, they have been pushed further down the list of nations the US needs to talk to, rather than simply give instructions to.  And, of course, Starmer is no alternative as far as that is concerned, because he is just an echo of every Tory policy and agenda, just with more of a monotonous drone.

Starmer also does not support workers getting wage rises that prevent real wages falling, and even sacks Labour MP's for going on the picket lines; he will not even promise to reverse the devastating austerity that the Tories have inflicted on the economy and its social fabric, including continuing with the Tories limitation of Child Benefit (which would not be so bad if it were to replace all of those individual benefits with a single benefit that enabled the average family to have an income on which they could live comfortably); nor will he commit to reversing Brexit, the fundamental measure required to create the conditions to deal with all these issues.

So, we will see Starmer wringing his hands, once again, but moral outrage does not make up for falling real wages, any more than the fatuous, weekly appeals to "the people" to come out and clap, for the NHS and its workers, followed by the rapid transformation, at the end of lockdowns of those same health workers into striking "enemies of the people".