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The Social Contract has been the cornerstone of Labour policy. Curb wage demands we were told: inflation will stop, unemployment will be kept down, social spending will go up.
But inflation still rages at 20% clear evidence that inflation is not caused by wage increases. And the argument that wage curbs would stop unemployment is a really sick joke today.
The Social Contract was intended from the outset to make working people pay for the economic crisis. The Tories could not hold wages down, so Labour and the Trade Union leaders were to do the job. Money was to be diverted from our wage packets and the public sector into financing industrial investment.
The reality is that the Social Contract has been a social con-trick. It was brought in because the economy is in crisis. And this crisis is a crisis of the capitalist system of production for profit rather than need on which it is based.
We say that the capitalist bosses, not the workers, must pay. We stand for a planned socialist economy under the democratic control of working people.