The saga around Jaguar Land-Rover (JLR, owned by India's Tata group) is a testament to the hypocritical policy of this government in the present crisis.

At the eleventh hour, the bailout of JLR seems to have collapsed. After months of indulging reckless bankers with hundreds of billions of pounds and no strings attached, Brown suddenly imposed conditions on JLR which he knew would not be accepted.

As plans for the future of the JLR plants had been suspended for months, pending the outcome of these negotiations, JLR's15,000 workers and probably at least twice that number working for suppliers, are now left to their own devices in order to defend their jobs.

A cynical chauvinist demagogy

Yet, compared to the astronomical bank bailouts, the sums involved were peanuts - a guarantee to cover a £340m loan from the European Investment Bank and a £500m loan from state-controlled RBS.

The government raised unprecedented demands: the right to appoint JLR's chairman and a member of its board, and to oversee decisions on investment and jobs. And this was duly portrayed by Brown as a "bold move" to protect the interests of JLR's workers and to preserve their jobs.

But has Brown ever given a damn about jobs? Did he lift a finger when JLR sacked 450 workers a few months ago? Or when car companies sacked their agency workers? No, these job cuts were all met with the same deafening silence!

In fact, this government is among the worst job slashers. In the banks it controls, it has presided over more than 10,000 job cuts among mostly low-paid workers, while its ministers are savaging many more in the Royal Mail and other public services.

And they want us to believe that their policy has anything to do with our interests or with our jobs? What a cynical farce!

In fact, in an attempt to make even more political capital out of the JLR saga, ministers said they wanted to ensure that taxpayers' money would not be used by Tata outside Britain!

But has Darling ever demanded from RBS that it did not use public funds in the US, where most of its investment business is located? Of course not! So why make this demand when it comes to the Tata group, if not for the sake of pandering to crass nationalist prejudice?

What this government is doing, is politicking with workers' jobs, when it is not cutting the jobs it is itself responsible for. Never trust the bosses' politicians! This is the lesson of the JLR saga.

Our jobs are only safe in our own hands

In fact, it is an illustration of the dead end into which our union leaders keep pushing us, when they tell us to go to the government with a begging bowl, in the hope of getting a subsidy for our employers in order to "save" our jobs.

But the bosses are not in the business of saving jobs, they are in the business of making profits, including by cutting jobs and wages, if it comes to it. If they can get away with it, they will take the money and run! And it is certainly not Brown and his ministers who will stop them. After all, isn't "commercial interest" the motto of this government? Why would the politicians who indulged the bankers on such a grandiose scale, suddenly stop the capitalists from profiteering?

The Tata group, JLR's owner, is just like any other company. It slashed JLR's workers jobs just as it is now slashing jobs at Corus, another of its British subsidiaries. Should Tata's profiteering be stopped? Yes! Should the government be trusted to do that, as our union leaders tell us? Certainly not!

The sacked Visteon workers did not fall for such fairy tales and they were proved right. They did not ask Brown for help on Visteon's behalf. On the contrary, they threatened Ford, Visteon's former owner and main customer, with mayhem. They may not have got their jobs back - because there were only 600 or so of them. But despite their small number, they won a payout far larger than anything Brown would ever have offered them.

The future of our jobs will only be safe if we, workers, use our collective strength in a general counter-offensive against the profiteers, to force the bosses to use the wealth they piled up over the years to share the work between all of us, without loss of pay. And if bosses go bust, then the state can take over their plants, without compensation for shareholders, and run them on a non-profit basis - not under the control of ministers who worship capitalist profit, but under our own collective control!