Elections have never changed anything fundamental in the situation and conditions of the working class.

This week's elections will be no exception - not even the high-profile London mayoral election, nor the regional assembly elections. Indeed, what difference will it make whether it is Sadiq Khan or Zac Goldsmith who takes over from Boris Johnson?

Neither Khan nor Goldsmith represents our social interests. Khan may boast about his childhood in a council estate and his bus-driving father. But he's turned into a successful lawyer who insists today on his determination to preside over a successful City - just like Zac Goldsmith, the millionaire!

No, these people do not belong to our world. They cannot speak for us.

The same is true of the parties standing in the regional assembly elections, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their only ambition is to run a smaller version of Westminster, but still on behalf of the same interests - those of business and the wealthy.

As to local councillors, many may well do their best to help their constituents. But what can they really do? Who ultimately decides how much money they have to build or repair social housing, or to provide social care for those who need it? Who, if not the government in London?

Puppets in the hands of big business

These politicians can't do anything for us, workers - because they belong to the class of our exploiters or because they don't dare to free themselves from the straitjacket in which they are trapped.

And this is because, in this society, politicians and their elected institutions are designed to give us the impression that we have a say while, in fact, they are just there to do the capitalists' bidding.

Over the past 9 years of crisis, for instance, every government, Labour and Tory, has been relentlessly attacking our standard of living in cahoots with the bosses, while using public funds to boost private profits. Did we elect them for that? Did they give us a chance to say who should pay for the capitalists' crisis? Of course not!

And since then, how many times have we seen these politicians bending over backwards in order to meet the desires of their masters in the City? How many financial scandals exposed the parasitism of the wealthy and their companies - from HSBC's Swiss accounts to the Panama papers - without the politicians bothering to do anything about it?

Likewise, what about the case of the 50,000 workers in the steel industry and its supply chain whose jobs are already gone or, at least, under threat? Or the case of the 12,000 workers who have just been thrown out of their jobs by the owners of retail chain BHS? In both cases, these workers are victims of companies which are running away with the profits they made.

But how many politicians did we hear declaring clearly that these rogue bosses should foot the bill and guarantee the income and pensions of all their workers? Not one! The only thing they managed to come up with, was a request for the government to "bail out" these delinquent bosses or subsidise some other asset-stripping company, as they've done at the Scunthorpe steel mill.

The working class needs its own party

Cow-boy companies, like Retail Acquisitions (the owner of BHS) or Greybull (the new owner of Scunthorpe), claim to "invest" in an industry. But their "business" is really to squeeze the assets as much as possible before throwing them away - with the workforce - once they can't get any more profits out of them.

In reality, however, the practices of these cow-boys are in no way different from those of the big respectable companies. The form is different, not the substance. How many of these big companies have been cutting thousands of jobs over the past years? All of them! But, in most cases, they did it by not replacing those who were retiring - or replacing them with a smaller number of casual workers on lower wages - while the remaining workers were made to work harder.

Either way, it is us, the working class who are supposed to foot the bill in order to help the capitalists to maintain their profits in the crisis.

But why should we? And, above all, why should we leave the political scene entirely in the hands of politicians who consider it quite "normal" that workers should pay for the rich - with our wages, jobs, conditions and benefits - while the rich get richer?

This is why we need a party of our own, a working class party - a party whose aim would not be to gain positions in the institutions of the system, but to express our social interests and to lead the fight for a real change - a society free of today's profits and profiteers!