Tories Say There Is No Money For Wages But Pump Billions Into Ukraine

The Tories say there is no money left to pay public sector workers a 6% pay rise that does not even keep pace with inflation, does not keep pace with the much higher wage rises in the no-state sector, does not address the decade of falling real wages for public sector workers, or address the huge understaffing in the state sector, made much worse by Brexit. Yet, the Tories have been at the forefront of pouring billions down the drain of NATO's war against Russia in Ukraine. Of course, like the damage done by Brexit, and by lockdowns, to the living standards of British workers, Labour, and much of the "Left" is in no position to criticise, because it has acted as cheerleaders, goading on the Tories in all of those policies too.

Jeremy Hunt has told other Cabinet Ministers that there is no money to fund the 6% pay rises to be recommended by the Pay Review bodies. They have previously said that they would not honour those recommendations. That at a time when NHS waiting lists are at astronomical levels, and the NHS is in a state of collapse, as it is short of more than a hundred thousand workers, GP appointments are as rare as hen's teeth, and the situation is getting worse. Satisfaction with the NHS, amongst the public is at rock bottom levels, last seen during the regime of Thatcher and Major's Tory governments of the 1980's, and 90's. Then, at least, Tony Blair's government pumped billions into the NHS and other public services, Starmer stands way to the Right of Blair, or even Major. Blair and Major oppose Brexit, but Starmer has embraced it, along with all the other jingoistic flag waving, of which the Ukraine War forms an integral part.

Rather than outright say they will not honour the Pay Review bodies recommendations – Review Bodies that the Tories themselves appoint, and whose terms of reference tightly constrain what they can recommend, whilst protecting the interests of capital – Hunt has now told Ministers that if they want to cough up the measly 6%, they will have cut money from service provision, to fund it. That reflects the fact that, with strikes continuing across the state sector, and with more looming as a new round of annual negotiations approach, individual departments will be under pressure to meet the recommendations to avoid losing even more workers, as they simply migrate to higher paid jobs in the non-state sector.

This is just another example of the way capital uses its state as a lever of economic muscle against workers. Everyone knows that inflation is not caused by wages, made obvious by the fact that, yet, again, for the last two years, as inflation soared, following the huge increase in liquidity pumped into the economy by states, during lockdowns, wage rises have lagged way behind. But, the state and the Tory media continue to perpetuate that myth, and their only solution to inflation is to demand workers reduce their real wages. Again, Labour can't complain, because when inflation picked up in 2008, following previous increases in liquidity, Alistair Darling pleaded with workers not to seek wage rises to compensate. And, as Starmer's Blue Labour seeks to match the Tories in its obeisance to the needs of particularly small capital that depends on low wages, and low taxes, they are also not supporting workers seeking to maintain real wages. On the contrary, they are sacking and deselecting Labour MP's for even turning up on picket lines!

This is the state using its greater power as an employer to bludgeon its workers, and so both directly benefit non-state capital, and to set an example to it. As Kautsky wrote, long ago.

“If the modern state nationalizes certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, ii can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.

The state has never carried on the nationalizing of industries further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded, nor will it ever go further than that. So long as the property-holding classes are the ruling ones, the nationalization of industries and capitalist functions will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat.

The state will not cease to be a capitalist institution until the proletariat, the working-class, has become the ruling class; not until then will it become possible to turn it into a co-operative commonwealth.”

(The Erfurt Programme)

So, the capitalist state, now uses its monopoly power, as employer of labour, and supplier of vital services (as with the Truck System), to workers, to bludgeon them in the interests of capital. It cuts the provision of those vital services, but not the "taxes" (really just a collective charge or insurance premium) it demands from workers to pay for those services; it seeks to sack workers, to save money, and to put pressure on all workers to accept lower wages, and it does this claiming that there is no money to fund it, just as former right-wing Labour Minister, Liam Byrne, left his note in 2010, saying “I'm afraid there is no money.”

Yet, these same Tories egged on by Blue Labour, and its hangers on in what is now laughingly described as “The Left”, has been at the forefront of pumping billions of Pounds into means of destruction in NATO's war against Russia in Ukraine! When it comes to spending money to blow things up, rather than build them up, to kill people rather than heal them, the bourgeois parties whether they have a Blue, Pink or rapidly fading, faintly red discolouration have no shame.

That is all the more gut-wrenching when those making those demands continue to call themselves socialists or even worse Trotskyists. Trotsky writing at the time of the Balkan Wars, and opposing such liberal interventionism, noted,

“however warmly we wish for them the best possible development of cultured existence on their own soil, there is one thing we must tell them plainly and honestly, as we must tell ourselves: We do not want, and we are unable to put our own cultural development at risk. Bismark once said that the whole Balkan Peninsula was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. We too can say today: If the leading parties of the Balkans, after all their sad experience of European intervention, can see no other way of settling the fate of the Balkans but a fresh European intervention, the results of which no one can foreordain, then their political plans are indeed not worth the bones of a single infantryman from Kursk. That may sound harsh, but it is the only way that this tragic question can be seen by any honest democratic politician who thinks not only of today but also of tomorrow.”

(Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, p 153-4)

And, the same is true in Ukraine. As Trotsky says, such situations cannot be resolved in workers' interests on the basis of intervention by other imperialist powers, in the way liberals demanded Russia intervene against Ottoman oppression in the Balkans. Only the workers of the region themselves, by their solidarity and joint action, on the basis of class struggle, and revolutionary defeatism, as part of the process of permanent revolution, can produce a progressive, rather than reactionary outcome. As Trotsky, noted, in 1939, quoting Lenin,

“If revolutionary and progressive movements beyond the boundaries of ones own country could be supported by supporting ones own imperialist bourgeoisie then the policy of social patriotism was in principle correct. There was no reason, then, for the founding of the Third International.”

(Trotsky – Lenin On Imperialism)

Yet, many of the social-imperialists of the USC, sickeningly claim to be adherents of Trotsky and Lenin. At least, one of its more prominent supporters, Paul Mason, who used to claim to be a Trotskyist, has the decency, now, to admit that he is, after all, just a social-democrat, i.e. an opportunist, content to bargain within the constraints of a continuation of capitalism/imperialism.

One of the reasons given for the US supplying Ukraine with illegal cluster bombs is that Ukraine is running out of conventional munitions, and has been using them up at a faster pace than the US and other NATO countries can produce them. That has been going on for months. The idea is that rather than using lots of conventional shells to clear minefields, or more accurately target Russian troops, cluster bombs indiscriminately clear a large swathe of territory in one go. Part of this argument was based upon the much hyped, upcoming “Spring Offensive” to be launched by the Ukrainian state. But, that offensive never materialised. When an offensive did materialise, it was a dud, a half-hearted affair, showing that Zelensky's regime had no faith in it, and rightly so, considering that the leaked US Defence Department papers showed that NATO, itself, recognised that Ukraine, no matter what conventional weapons it was given, had any chance of retaking the annexed regions of Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine.

Those papers noted,

“U.S. intelligence does not believe Ukraine can yield significant gains with their counteroffensive.”

That is despite the huge amounts of weapons, cyber warfare support and the NATO Special Forces already fighting in Ukraine, that the papers disclosed.

So, where have all these munitions gone? They have been supplied on such a scale that not even the massive western arms manufacturers can keep up, and yet, the Ukrainian state, has swallowed them up, as though they disappeared into a bottomless pit, because, for months, over the Winter, the fighting on the front was minimal, with the war being conducted at long range via missiles and drones, and, even in the Spring, the offensive did not materialise. So, huge stockpiles should have built up, even allowing for the fact that the Russian long range war strategy aimed to take out arms and fuel dumps, as well as command and control. Well, a look at US/NATO involvement elsewhere gives a clue. We could go back to the Iran-Contra Affair, or the way weapons were channelled via various routes to Osama Bin Laden, and the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, by the US, via Pakistan.

However, more recent history, might be more instructive. We could look at the WMD supplied to Saddam Hussein, by the US and its NATO allies, to fight their proxy war against Iran, in the 1980's, where those WMD, subsequently found their way to be used against the Marsh Arabs, and Kurds, inside Iraq. But, more relevant is the fact that during the 2003 Iraq War, and after, huge amounts of money and equipment was pumped into Iraq, and simply disappeared. 

The Ukrainian state is particularly corrupt, and so, it is again not unlikely that billions of pounds of the funding that has gone into the country has simply disappeared into the, now, well known offshore bank accounts of the oligarchs and their political stooges in the government, which the Guardian revealed in 2021, applied to Zelensky himself.  It noted,

"On the campaign trail, Zelenskiy pledged to clean up Ukraine’s oligarch-dominated ruling system. And he railed against politicians such as the wealthy incumbent Petro Poroshenko who hid their assets offshore...

The Pandora papers, leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with the Guardian as part of a global investigation however, suggest Zelenskiy is rather similar to his predecessors.

The leaked documents suggest he had – or has – a previously undisclosed stake in an offshore company, which he appears to have secretly transferred to a friend weeks before winning the presidential vote."

Indeed, it goes on to describe the usual nepotism and cronyism of all such corrupt regimes, after Zelensky became President.

 More extensive information was provided in The Pandora Papers.

Even more likely, is that vast amounts of munitions has been simply sold into a thriving black market for advanced weapons and munitions, with the oligarchs, and state and military bureaucrats, again, pocketing the proceeds, leaving not only Ukrainian workers to pick up the tab, but, also workers in Europe and North America to do so, as their governments send money and guns to corrupt Ukrainian officials, and raise taxes on their own workers to pay for it, as well as printing money tokens, pushing up inflation, and cutting real wages, and vital services in the process. Last Winter we saw EU governments willing to damage their own economies and interests of their own workers, as they pushed energy prices to astronomical levels, by boycotting Russian oil and gas.

Even before the war, the level of corruption in Ukraine were at exceedingly high levels, indeed, at levels that would have precluded EU or NATO membership. As with the previous criticism of the systemic anti-Semitism, of the regime, and its connections to white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, that not only the western liberal media, but even the US Congress noted, this corruption has been covered over and whitewashed, during the war by that media, and the opportunist, social-imperialist “Left”. As Sraid Marx has previously reported,

“The second index is that of ‘Transparency International’ which reports the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 180 countries/territories around the world. It scores these countries out of 100, with the lower the score the more corrupt a country is perceived to be. The 2021 publication reports that the least corrupt countries included Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, scoring 88 each. Ukraine is 123rd on the list while Russia is 139th. A better indication of the difference is that Ukraine scores 32 out of 100 while Russia scores 29, meaning that the former scores 36% of Denmark etc. while Russia scores 33%. Not a pile of difference; 3 to be exact.”

Yet, Britain continues to pump billions of pounds in money and munitions into this den of iniquity and corruption, with it somehow disappearing even with the damp squib of the so called “Spring Offensive”, and has the nerve to tell nurses and other state employees, “Sorry, there is no money”. A look at what happened with the billions of pounds of taxpayers money that disappeared to the Tories friends for useless, and mostly unnecessary supplies during COVID lockdowns, ought to be enough of a lesson to understand where the billions are going when they reach Ukraine.