"A future fair for all", changes "for the many not the few" - the slogans chosen by Gordon Brown to relaunch his election campaign last Saturday, in Coventry, are no surprise. If opinion polls are anything to go by, Labour urgently needs to scrape the bottom of its electoral barrel in a last attempt to limit the damage, come the general election.
Hence Brown's belated discovery that, after all, Labour does owe a large part of its votes to working class voters. Hence too his attempt to remobilise those disgruntled Labour voters who, for many years, have turned away from the ballot box in disgust at this party's policies, causing abstention to reach unprecedented levels.
"Fairness"? what fairness?
The truth, of course, is that Brown's sweet-talking is not any more credible for the workers and the unemployed who are at the receiving end of the crisis, than Cameron's posturing as the champion of the "little man" against a "predatory state".
What do the Corus workers who were marching last Friday, in Teeside, to protest against the mothballing of the Redcar steelworks, think about their future's "fairness", whether under Labour or the Tories, in an area where there are no jobs going?
And what about the 23,500 new JSA claimants who joined the dole queues in January alone, bringing the claimant number to its highest level since 1997 - and this, at a time when, politicians of all parties are chanting in unison the wonders of what they dare to call a "recovery"?
What is "fair for all" in the doubling of job cuts expected in the first quarter of this year in public services, compared to the last quarter of last year? Ask your postman, who is running past your house with his increasingly heavy bag, if the savage job cutting orchestrated by Brown-Mandelson at Royal Mail has been "fair" to them - or to postal users, for that matter! Ask him what difference privatisation under Labour or privatisation under the Tories will make to him and to postal services. None, of course - since it is about helping the private sharks to squeeze profits out of a vital service, on the backs of workers and users alike!
What is "fair" in the cut in workers' living standards over the past 2 years? Not only for those who have become long-term unemployed, but also for a large proportion of those who were "lucky" enough to keep their jobs (due to cuts in hours and/or wages) and for those who found another job after being made redundant (who took an average 28% pay cut as a result).
Where is Brown's "fairness" in all of that? The truth is that his government did absolutely nothing to stop the job and wage slashers in their tracks, nor to bail out the working class. Those who were bailed out by this government were only the bankers, the giant companies and their richest shareholders - that is, the parasites who live off our labour and were the cause of the crisis. Only these parasites have ever enjoyed the "fairness" of Labour's policies, with the tacit support of the Tories and other mainstream politicians.
We don't want "fairness", just our due!
In fact, there is no better illustration of Brown's "fairness" than Barclays' recent announcement of all-time record profits for 2009 - right during the peak of the crisis! Barclays' shareholders and traders can indeed be thankful for the politicians' idea of "fairness", as a preserve for the rich only.
After the past two years of attacks waged by the bosses against the jobs, wages and standard of living of working people, using the cover of the crisis and with the backing of all mainstream parties, the sweet-talking of the politicians should fool no-one.
The working class is entitled to a lot more than this paternalism from politicians who have proved again and again that they are in the service of the capitalists - its worst enemies.
Workers produce all wealth and provide all services in this society. Without us, not a train or bus, not a cooker or light bulb, would work. But society could do happily without the financial sharks, the big shareholders and their on-going mad speculation and, more generally, without the profiteers who live off our labour and at the expense of the whole of society.
In this period of crisis, what we want is not what the Browns and Camerons of this world call "fairness". We want what is owed to us, our due - that is a world in which our labour is used for the benefit of all instead of being squandered by a small layer of parasitic profiteers. This is where our only future lies!