It's forty years since a Commonwealth team climbed Everest and the Queen came to the throne. But no wonder the Queen didn't want to celebrate. The last forty years has seen the endless collapse of what was once the world's leading capitalist power.
The country that painted the world map red now can't even run a docent railway sysWhen head teachers shower derision on a govern. ment minister something is In 1953 the trend of decline was hidden by the beginning of post-war cconomic expansion.
A bright new world seemed on offer; confidence in progress was universal, and a retum to the conditions of the 1930s seemed unthinkable. role of dominant capitalist power to the unitco stares. nonetheless Britain was one of the major world powers and visibly getting nicher.
Forty years on all that is in tatters. Two world wars destroyed the Empire, the base of Britain's economic dominance. Now Britain is in relentless decline.
The British ruling class may have had its confidence shaken but important sections are doing all right thank you. That's the tremendous paradox of the decline of British capitalism; the domestic economy is in ruins, but the ruling class is still among the richest in the world.
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There may be no Empire forced to accept British manufacturing exports, but there is massive industrial renewal. market in its place. US-scale urban uprisings. TUC and the Labour Party. thing. Realists want a revolution.
slow in coming; when it did, it took the form of Margaret Hilda Thatcher. But Thatcherism tumed out to be half a plan; attacking the unions and collapsing the welfare state couldn't substitute for Yuppies Decline was again hidden in the 1980s 'yuppie' boom, when deregulation of the City and property speculation created the inflationary boom which has now so obviously marco to nar-stump The stench of decay is everywhere in Britain. transport, low wages and long hours, mass unemployment, the war without end in Ireland, the desperate poverty of millions of the elderly, crime epidemics, moral panics, youth riget-rich-quick privatisations - even the precipitous occline of th quality of television over the last 15 years (no wonder there are so many repeats).
With the collapse of so much of the post-war oract, te sacosy or post-war Laboansm - te mixed economy and the welfare state has also collapsed, leaving half-baked notions about the What is remarkable against this background is that the ruling class have got away with so much, without having to face Italian-style terrorism or One thing is now absolutely clear: the British ruling class lacks the economic means and political will to reconstitute British capitalism - at least croch, some form or autontanan state ruic, is created - and we are many years from such possibilities. Only the working class can rebuild Britan. and only by occoming te ruing caiss.
That in tum of course require a political vision. a determination to break with all the old crap, a clear understanding that a patient with multiple injuries needs more than sticking plaster. All these things are totally foreign to the leadership of the When the world of full employment and the friendly booby has changed into that of the dole queue and the rot police only utopians think John Smith or maybe Paddy Ashdown can change any-