All the talk before the budget was about tax cuts. And as predicted, Jeremy Hunt cut employees' National Insurance contributions by 2p. Someone on £25,000 will now save £450, or on £30,000, £610. Apparently Sunak hopes this "rabbit out of the hat" will help boost his opinion poll ratings.

    Hunt poked fun at the Labour front bench. He reminded Starmer of advice that he should lose a few pounds and invited him to join his marathon training. And he commended Labour's Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves for her skill in acting as a Tory! Yes, just before announcing that he was "borrowing" her flagship policy and abolishing non-dom status, which allows wealthy individuals (like Mrs Sunak?) to avoid paying tax on foreign income.

    Indeed! It's been obvious for years that the so-called "clear blue water", which is meant to separate Tory policy from Labour policy has disappeared down the plughole. But in a way that's no bad thing. It just reveals the true state of affairs in this society: that the primary task of all governments is to look after the interests of the capitalist class "responsibly". And, of course, to keep the working class in its place.

    One might also ask whether there is any point at all in Hunt's budget right now, except for the fact that, if a Labour government replaces it in 2024/5, it has provided a preview of its spending plans.

    In fact this endless "will they, won't they?" commentary by talking heads over the Tory budget was pure distraction; because to use the old cliche, while Hunt has been fiddling with figures, Rome has already burnt down.

    There is an economic recession; 3 municipal councils are bankrupt and 19 are near-bankrupt; there is record poverty among working families; the NHS lacks 112,500 staff (Britain has the worst cancer survival rates in the G7); across the whole country, half a million people are homeless...

    But that's not even the worst of it. All the political parties share responsibility for fuelling the 2-year-long and still ongoing proxy war of attrition which pits Ukrainians against the Russian army. Worse still, only the SNP's voice has been raised (somewhat) against the Israeli government's collective punishment of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. After 31,140 have been killed (73,000 injured and 8,000 unaccounted for under rubble) only now do we hear (some) MPs asking for a "humanitarian cease-fire"!

    The working class also has a responsibility in the catastrophic situation that we face, not because it caused it, obviously, but because it is the only force that can put an end to it, and not by "evolution" via a ballot box, but by revolution. That's what has to be understood ASAP, and prepared for.

The 6 March is the 40th anniversary of the start of the year-long miners' strike. But up until today, the lessons of this strike have not been learnt. Or if they were, they have been forgotten.

    Today, sections of workers are going on strike one by one, on their own, repeating in an almost farcical way, the fatal mistake made by the miners and their National Union of Mineworkers leaders in 1984.

    It's little wonder that the 2022-3 strike wave which was meant to signal (according to the RMT's Mick Lynch) that "the working class was back" ended with few or no gains. In fact for postal workers, who've faced huge job cuts since, and degradation of all their previously hard-won conditions, it has been an infuriating defeat!

    Instead of co-ordinating strikes and mobilising workers together on the ground, each section of workers struck in splendid isolation with only one or two token exceptions.

    Yes, we should know better! Forty years ago, the strongest battalion of the working class took on the full might of Tory PM Margaret Thatcher's "armed bodies of men", fighting heroically for over 13 months. And lost.

    This wasn't just a defeat for the miners. It was a defeat for the whole of the working class. Afterwards there was a prolonged period of demoralisation. Many workers concluded that "if the miners could not win, the rest of us have no chance".

    This was precisely Thatcher's intention. She saw her no-holds-barred battle against the miners as a class war, aimed at the whole of the working class, with herself as the capitalists' chief of staff. Not one worker should be allowed to think it was possible to fight the bosses' industrial closure plan, involving massive job cuts and an unprecedented turn of the exploitation screw. Not only that, but the ground was to be laid for the across-the-board privatisation of (then) state-owned utilities - telecoms, gas, electricity, water, etc., without opposition from the vast public sector workforce.

    Thatcher carried out all her plans successfully. But her success was never inevitable. Had the miners seen their battle in the same way she saw hers - a class war - needing the full mobilisation all of their class brothers and sisters, there is a good chance Thatcher and the bosses could have been beaten. Of course there's no point in crying over spilt milk. But every reason not to keep repeating the same mistake.