Unemployment is rising and it is rising fast. After the industries directly hit by the financial crisis - construction and banking - the disease has spread to the entire economy. By now the most profitable of all companies, the pharmaceutical and oil giants, are announcing thousands of job cuts, even though their profits are still running in the tens of billions.
Even the companies that Brown invited to make profits out of the rising dole figures, are finding it impossible. There are just too many unemployed and too few job vacancies to fit them into. So these would-be parasites of the crisis are now complaining bitterly that they simply cannot make a "living" on the agreed basis of being paid in proportion to the number of jobless they manage to take off the unemployment register.
Bail out - for the rich only
Meanwhile Brown and his ministers are parading on television screens, congratulating themselves about the "success" of their bailout of the financial system. "Success"? But who has benefited from the hundreds of billions lavished on the banks?
Not their employees, contrary to the demagogic nonsense peddled by the tabloids. Of course, bank directors are still feathering their nests, using the many perks of the job. But how many bank employees have lost their jobs over the past few months? The tabloids will not say, nor do they mention low pay among bank workers.
As to mortgage holders, and more specifically the many working class households having difficulty in meeting their repayments, they have gained nothing either. Not only is mortgage interest still high, despite the five successive cuts in the Bank of England's rate, but with soaring bills on all sides and the brutal rise in unemployment, the number of those in arrears is also rising fast.
As the increasing number of repossessions shows, the banks are just as ruthless as ever towards these embattled households - and this, regardless of how much they have benefited from Darling's largesse, that is from workers' taxes.
The majority control acquired by the state in 3 of the country's largest six banks, plus a few others, did not change their behaviour towards working class households, nor their profiteering, one iota. Far from using its control over these banks to reduce hardship among the poorest, Labour went out of its way to convince big business that, under Brown, state control really means "profiteering as usual", with the reassuring support of public funds!
Resistance must be on our agenda
Brown and Darling do not even bother to try and cover up their real agenda anymore, by claiming that their ultimate aim is to help the poorest. Darling may still be making some disapproving noise about bank directors' greed - but without doing anything about it, of course!
Mandelson extends Labour's bailout to the car bosses, under the pretext of "protecting" car manufacturing jobs. But he does not even hint at the fact that it could be wrong for car companies which have been and are still cutting jobs, to benefit from state funding supposedly designed to "protect" jobs.
The reality is, of course, that Labour's agenda is neither to curb the greed of bank directors nor to stop the car companies' attacks against jobs - it is simply what suits the capitalist class!
This is why, in the middle of the worst economic crisis in many decades, this same government is still pursuing projects, such as the part-privatisation of Royal Mail. The preparatory stage for this privatisation, already underway under Labour's appointees at the head of Royal Mail, will involve further job cuts in their tens of thousands. There is a cynical madness in pursuing such a plan at a time when unemployment is soaring so fast. But never mind, since this is what the profiteers want.
Common sense would dictate that public funds be used to serve the public and, in particular, the working class majority of society. Instead they are used to salvage the gambling machine of the ultra-rich and to help the capitalists to recover their recent losses. Meanwhile the profits accumulated in the past by shareholders and companies are stashed safely away, instead of being invested where they could be useful, in the real economy.
But it does not need to be this way. Today, politicians and bosses may feel confident enough to attack the working class from all sides, but this is because they have not met much resistance so far from our ranks, at least not beyond the level of isolated reactions of self-defence. Whether this changes is entirely up to us.