The closer we get to the general election, the more the political scene is turning into a pantomime.
Of course, there is the usual overbidding between the main parties and their usual promises which everyone knows will be forgotten as soon as the ballot results are announced.
But, in addition, for over a month now, we have seen Cameron playing hard-to-get and squabbling over which parties should be invited to participate in the proposed TV election debate. There has been endless bickering over the number of these debates and how they should be organised.
Of course, Cameron has quite a lot to fear from a public confrontation with his rivals. Despite all his efforts, dressing up his party's abysmal record in pretty words is unlikely to make him credible. But then Miliband also has a credibility problem. His attempts to get voters to forget Labour's own abysmal record in office, until just 5 years ago, are just not working.
This is all a game of liar's poker, in which the protagonists seem to believe that voters are complete idiots, incapable of thinking for themselves and, above all, of figuring out whose interests they have been protecting over the past 8 years of the crisis.
Workers certainly remember how the main parties have made them pay a heavy price in order to bail out the bankers who caused this crisis and to boost the profits of big business, while the wealthy were allowed to hoard their cash in tax havens!
Enough of their austerity!
At the time of writing, George Osborne is about to announce his last budget before the election. The media have been working overtime trying to guess what "giveaways" he might find, to buy votes for his party.
But if this budget does include "giveaways", they won't be for the working class. In fact, the bosses' paper, the Financial Times, has just let the cat out of the bag. According to information leaked to this paper, the Tories already have plans to cut 30,000 jobs in the Department of Works and Pensions (DWP), over the next Parliament, as part of their austerity drive. This is over one-third of the workforce - on top of the 40,000 jobs cut since 2010! And this is only one single department! The odds are, that there will be similar job cutting in some of the other departments as well.
But does it mean that Labour would be a better choice, at least from this point of view? In fact, hardly. The same paper estimates that, on the basis of Miliband's economic commitments, Labour would need to cut 20,000 jobs in the DWP over the same period!
Whichever way we look at Britain's political scene, we only see parties and politicians who, given a chance, will implement one form of austerity or another. Their only concern is to repay the public debt to a delinquent banking system which should have been nationalised once and for all, rather than bailed out at great cost in 2008. And to this end, they will make savings at the expense of public sector jobs, welfare payments, healthcare and public housing, no matter what.
No future in the ballot box
This means that, on May 7th, voting Tory, Lib-Dem or Labour, will only be endorsing the past and future anti-working class policies of these parties. The more votes they get, the more they will claim to have a popular mandate for these policies. This is not in the interest of the working class.
As to voting for the smaller parties, what can it achieve? Ukip is no more than a bigoted, ravingly anti-working class appendage of the Tory party. Voting for Ukip will just give Cameron a pretext to concede more ground to the right-wing of his party.
The Greens may seem to have a more decent position against austerity. Except that having nice-sounding proposals is one thing, imposing them on the capitalist class is another. How this will be done, the Greens do not say, because they are just as respectful of the capitalist system as the other parties. So voting Green would be like crossing one's fingers and hoping for the best...
This election won't change anything. And working class voters won't even be able to use their ballot paper to express their refusal of any kind of austerity and their determination to see the capitalist class foot the bill of this crisis out of its accumulated profits.
But no matter. Elections come and go and no election will ever, in and of itself, force the capitalists to pay up. Only the working class can do that, by using its collective strength in the class struggle. And this is what working class politics, our politics, are really about.