The new government's first budget will finally be revealed by Rachel Reeves next week, on 30 October. Ever since Labour's election 4 months ago, there's been non-stop speculation over what she'll cut and who she will or won't tax.
The "surprise" black hole she found in public finances has already doubled to £40bn. She says her priority is to plug it, for the sake of "economic stability"! And of course the bigger the hole, the bigger the justification for cuts and for "things only to get worse".
So, while the public is faced with a broken NHS, a broken social care system, a broken justice system, a broken education system, unaffordable housing, rising bills from racketeering private water and energy companies with their laughing shareholders - the list is endless - the working class is told it will have to swallow Labour austerity: "tough choices" for the many, not the few...
The quid pro quo was meant to be the Employment Rights Act - but in fact there's hardly anything which is guaranteed for workers. Implementation is going to depend on consultation with the bosses who get the final say - which doesn't stop them from crying foul, of course!
In the meantime Reeves repeats ad nauseam that it's not her fault that she must inflict austerity, but the fault of 14 years of Tory governments which left everything in a mess. Funnily enough, Starmer didn't tell the 300 "international" CEOs who attended his Investment Summit last week, that the country was in terrible shape, when asking them to help him "grow" the economy!
The context of a world in crisis
Anyway, there's only one obvious difference between Tory and Labour when it comes to the bosses: Labour has to suck up to them, while the Tories are them - or their blood sisters and brothers.
And looming behind the self-confessed(!) impotence of governments to fix anything - whether red, blue, pink or green and not just in Britain, but also in the USA, France, Germany, or Moldova - is a world economy still in recession and unable, as always, under this capitalist system, to even come close to satisfying the needs of the world's population. And during this end-stage of rotting imperialist-capitalism it's actually quite true "that things can only get worse".
But while in rich countries, public infrastructure might be falling apart and relative poverty rising, in the poor countries there is absolute poverty, civil war and devastating famine. It's fuelling an unprecedented, permanent, refugee crisis. Which climate change aggravates by changing the geography of whole countries... in a context where keeping the earth cool is a non-starter since it digs into the profits of the rich.
The working class has the answer
There is a solution, however. Those who have nothing to lose and everything to gain - the poor and working classes - can fight, including across borders, to get rid of the profit system, in order to implement rational and environment-saving, planned worldwide production, based solely on need. That's called "socialism"! But unsurprisingly, this solution is labelled as left "extremism" and equated symmetrically with the pro- capitalist, anti-socialist extremism of the far-right!
There is method in ruling politicians' madness, as they themselves look further and further rightwards. They actually have no real problem with right-wing ideas, or even fascism, since these ideas never threaten capitalism itself and indeed in the 1920s and 1930s, were resorted to, in order to save it, literally, by smashing the working class and turning it into cannon fodder.
So much for the government's stance on "extremism". Indeed, what can be more extreme than its support - along with Biden and the rest - for the horrific slaughter in Gaza - and now Lebanon - perpetrated by their proxy Israeli ultra-Zionists whose state terrorism gets unbearably worse, every single day?
As for extremism at home, at the time of writing, there's a " stop-press" which illustrates it well: the final verdict in the Chris Kaba case. It turns out that it was OK to shoot dead this unarmed black man while he sat in his car with his hands up. Yup, since his car itself, totally hemmed in by police vehicles, according to the cops, constituted a "lethal weapon"...
So here it is: public execution by armed cops (all volunteer shooters) is de facto legitimised and not for the first time either. A backdoor re-introduction of the death penalty, where police are judge, jury and executioner...
In the name of keeping the dying capitalist system alive as long as possible, the ruling class is already by- passing its own "democracy". Next week workers will be asked by the Chancellor to make sacrifices to keep the system going. But there's another choice: to discard their system altogether and build a new one, based on socialism and working class rule. A lot would have to be done to prepare for this and there would be much to learn in the process. But can this task be put off any longer?