 Thanks everyone for coming to discuss this you know this question which we've already kind of started to introduce you know is Britain heading for a revolution and like Keelan said I'm Ellen Morton and I'm a member of the International Marxist Tendency and I'm on the editorial board for the Revolution Scotland paper and you know when looking at this question these are really turbulent times that we live in you know we're seeing an unprecedented amount of chaos of uncertainty we've had obviously the coronavirus pandemic we've had the economic crash globally and we've also had you know some really inspiring movements most notably the Black Lives Matter movement which you know despite all this uncertainty and you know the pandemic and things like that millions of workers you know came out and stood together against racism and you know demanding change more recently we've seen quite big movements in Haiti and Nigeria and you know a continuation of that revolutionary wave which let Latin America last summer and with Bolivia in particular had quite important events in the recent days but today we won't really be looking at all those interesting things but much more closer to home and asking the question you know is is Britain in fact headed for a revolution and I want to begin with a quote by Lenin where he describes you know one of the things that one of the things that we see in a revolutionary revolutionary situation and he says a revolutionary situation is when it's impossible for the ruling class to maintain their rule without any change when there is a crisis in one form or another among the upper classes a crisis in the policy of the ruling class leading to a fissure through which discontent and and the indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth but a revolution to take place is usually insufficient insufficient for the lower classes not to want to live in the old way it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule in the old way so he also then goes on to list other kind of characteristics of a revolutionary situation but I thought that quote was quite important because the crisis of the ruling class in Britain at the moment is really acute and we'll kind of see that through what I'm discussing and I'll discuss you know the kind of disaster very poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic state of the economy brexit and discontent in the Tory party the possibility of Scottish independence and the breakup of the United Kingdom I think you'll really see that and I would ask you to keep that in mind you know as a thread running through not just you know bad decisions crazy things happening chaos but the complete inability of the ruling class to rule in the way it did before and I think that is what's significant so yeah I just ask you to keep that in mind like as we go through kind of different events and the situation we're seeing today to kind of look at Britain and British capitalism I think we have to be clear that it has been in decline for some time you know it's been some years since Britain was this big industrial powerhouse this globally important country and and we've really seen the decline especially in the past 50 years of British industry you know after a complete lack of investment by British capitalism by British capitalists and we see you know Britain moved to become a kind of economy mostly based off kind of foreign investment kind of gambling on the stock market and a huge low paid and very casualised services sector so at the moment we're not at the moment but in Britain the GDP two-thirds of the country's GDP comes from service workers and so this is really a huge swathe of the British economy and this is a section of workers that have been particularly crushed since the 2008 financial crisis you know we've seen the spread of zero hours contracts very poor working conditions I'm really you know with the British working class and facing a very steep decline in living standards and there's also a lot of kind of underemployment and I think I'm very low paid work I think we can see that through the fact that in there's 2.3 million workers in Britain who are in work but still rely on kind of in work benefits to top up their wage because it's so girly paid or they're they're not getting enough hours so again behind a kind of fairly stable employment figures in 2019 and before even in those past years it actually hid very low living standards and a huge amount of underemployment and globally it's been clear for a while now to the kind of strategists of capital but also to us as Marxist that the conditions were brewing for another economic crisis you know the recovery from 2008 was very very weak and then COVID hits and obviously triggers that crisis and but also it makes it the crisis happen in a deeper and a more specific way because obviously it's an unprecedented wave for an economic crisis to kind of be triggered looking closer at COVID and how it was handled in the UK we can see that there was a huge amount of deaths and there's over 65,000 excess deaths in the UK and over 40,000 of those actually specifically mentioned COVID as the cause of death on the death certificate and over 700,000 people in the UK have officially tested positive for coronavirus although the likely figure for this is way way higher as there was no mass testing in the peak of the outbreak in the UK the UK has the fifth highest death rate globally for coronavirus and the highest in Europe which is quite shocking when the only countries that have had more deaths are countries with much much larger populations we've got the US, Brazil, India and Mexico so the fact that such a small country population wise could have such such a high death rate is quite shocking and despite the fact you know the mainstream media didn't really comment on it you know Britain was the epicenter of the virus and had a very very high death rate due to you know the British government being in complete chaos and unable to make even basic decisions in order to save lives we saw terrible government policies you know listening to kind of bending to the pressure of the bosses and not locking down until it was far far too late causing a huge surge in the amount of people who died and even basic things like failing to stockpile basic medical supplies in or prepare in any way you know as early as December when the government was aware of coronavirus and you know the impact it was going to have there was also the very callous policy of kind of leaving the care homes to try and survive with very very little support and forcing older people to basically die in the care homes and not sending a lot of people to hospital we also saw a lot of flip-flopping from the government you know trying to kind of please the business and being like where we're opening up everyone we've got eats out to help out had that strange campaign get back to the office everyone and then an increase in infection rates and a need to lock everything down again and this contradictory statement confusion and I think you know people will agree that the government just seems in absolute chaos we are currently now in the midst of a second wave and at the moment we're seeing over 20,000 new cases and 100 deaths a day and that's only going to get worse and the healthcare workers are under extreme pressure having already gone through you know a pandemic and being exhausted and very underpaid and actually being denied a pay increase in the past weeks and they're going to face unprecedented pressure as you know the second wave going through the winter flu season and basically we're looking at a very bleak and dangerous situation and with coronavirus in the coming you know weeks and months the virus has also had a very significant impact on the economy the UK economy is doing very badly in the first half of the year GDP collapsed by 22 and if you look even globally you know a predicted GDP for the whole year of 2020 you know the the US is that GDP will drop 4 percent the world it will drop 5 percent EU it will drop 8 percent but the UK is even worse predicted to drop at least 10 percent and again I think you know part of this is because of the reliance in the UK on the services sector as I said which which has been hit much worse you know by the virus saying that some sectors have obviously made a lot of money out of the pandemic and Amazon have had an income of over 90 billion dollars and despite this they're happy to pay their staff poverty wages and force them to work in abhorrent and unsafe conditions despite you know a few having done well off the pandemic most workers have faced a really rough few months there's currently 1.5 million people unemployed which is five percent of the working population and out of this 1.5 million 60 percent of those are under 25 so we're really seeing a massive problem with youth unemployment which is only set to rise as I said there's also you know a lot of hidden unemployment underemployment bogus self-employment for you know companies like Uber and Deliveroo to force their workers to pretend to be self-employed and so you've got those 2.7 million who are who are in need of in-work benefits and a lot of those will be unemployed or underemployed but crucially there's still also 7 million people on the furlough scheme and that is going to end in its current form on the 1st of November so you know in a few days and be replaced by a much much smaller scheme so we should really really expect in the next days a massive fallout in terms of unemployment you know out of those 7 million people a good chunk will become unemployed the furlough scheme was obviously implemented in March to stop a massive unemployment crisis or at least push it down the road and it you know worked for the government in a way that it kept kind of ratings high at the beginning of the crisis but the cost to the government they've already spent 40 billion pounds on the scheme and so they're obviously wanting to cut that back now we should be clear that that society has the money to pay for this for the furlough scheme and much much more you know the richest 10 percent of people in the UK have over seven trillion pounds of wealth hoarded in their in their accounts so it's not that we don't have the money in society to support people you know through a pandemic whose workplaces need to close for safety reasons but under capitalism you can't just take that money and you know the Tories aren't just gonna you know nationalize the commanding heights of the economy and just take that themselves you know they have no money of their own yeah the state has no money of its own under capitalism and has to rely on taxes or borrowing and so it has been borrowing money but obviously the serious four of us you don't like this high levels of borrowing high levels of government spending and you can start to see a split open between Boris on the one hand and Sunak on the other who wants to Boris wanting to kind of keep the scheme going maybe keep his ratings high and Sunak being a more kind of serious bourgeois a more you know traditional conservative wanting to like shut it down no matter what and just focus on the money for 10 minutes there's also been a big backlash from the north which we've seen in the north of England in the past kind of couple of weeks and in the 2019 election the Tories obviously won all of these seats in the north kind of red wall seats as they're called these traditional Labour stronghold areas areas which deindustrialization had hit particularly hard and these people in the north of England were kind of a lot of them were won over by these promises that the Tories would you know build a northern powerhouse they would kind of make Britain great and make the north great and and these obviously turned out to be completely lies and support for the Tories in those areas is already dissolving as this week we've seen huge confrontation between the northern leaders and people kind of rallying around the figure of Andy Burnham on the one hand and the government on the other and the kind of conflict has come up around local authorities refusing to impose stricter lockdowns without having money to back people up because they don't want to impose a lockdown and see thousands of people in those areas losing their jobs losing their incomes you know businesses going bust people unable to pay their bills and they run up to Christmas they want more money from the government to ensure that doesn't happen and they're basically demanding you know the Tories don't just you know talk to talk about supporting the north the north but actually walk the walk and and do what they said put their money where their mouth is but they don't want to and and SUNAC is tightly holding the power strings and doing all he can to stop government spending so you've seen this kind of like confrontation I think we should note that the scientific basis for local lockdowns instead of national lockdowns is fairly weak because with local lockdowns you know there's lower public compliance because there's all these different measures and just more confusion it's more difficult for people to understand what they are and aren't supposed to do and it's just less effective as people move around between different areas so I think we should be clear that the reason the government has decided to go on a strategy of local lockdowns rather than a national lockdown is political rather than medical because with a national lockdown there would be huge pressure to keep the furlough scheme as it is currently going and not bringing this kind of much weaker scheme which is coming in next month and I think they also kind of imagine that localized resistance would be much easier to deal with than a kind of nationwide lockdown and nationwide resistance and again this is just following the will of the ruling class to stop spending government money at the current rate that they're spending it but on the other hand you know pursuing this policy of local lockdowns and having this big confrontation with the northern areas has big implications because while the Tories are trying to kind of buy different leaders off and promise different amounts of money the damage has been done and you've got the idea that these lockdowns are kind of shipped up from London and dealing economic devastation across these areas and there's a lack of support of people whose livelihoods are literally crumbling before their eyes and this will not be easily repaired especially not repaired by more hot words from the government and more empty promises so we're now seeing a huge amount of discontent brewing in the north of England and this will be really important for political developments going forward over the next months and years at the Tory party itself now it has very low levels of support while approving the approval ratings in March were around 50 percent this has dropped to only around 27 percent approval ratings at the moment and it continues to fall week on week so as we can see the kind of the government managed to ride the early period of lockdown of these ideas of national unity let's all come together you know we're doing the best for people and I think above all through providing the furlough scheme putting food on people's tables you know that managed to buy them support for a while but that honeymoon period soon ended as people started to realise you know how badly the government had handled the crisis as they started to see the death rate rise and rise and rise and for some people seeing friends and family members die in care homes which were massively under resource and at the end of the day seeing I think where their real interests lie seeing this idea of national unity will all come together is is absolute rubbish and that there only is class unity there's the workers together and there's the ruling class and who are only looking out for themselves and I think that has really become clear to a lot of people over the past the past few months and a yoke of poll that came out this month looking at the percentage of people who think the government is handling the pandemic well in different countries the UK came in at the lowest with only 30% of people thinking the government is handling the pandemic well this is compared to countries like Sweden Italy and Germany where it's up at 60 to 70% so we can see there is real discontent in Britain at the moment and that's only set to get worse the Tory party itself is deeply divided and I've got a quote here from an anonymous veteran Tory MP who spoke to the Financial Times and about the party and he said there are MPs throughing at the mouth of course people understand that Boris Johnson won the last election but there is really mutinous feeling in the air a sense that he has lost control over his own party now the Tory party has been divided deeply divided for a long time you know you've got the one strand which is the kind of sensible bourgeoisie who want to just be good representatives of the ruling class they're anti-Brexit they're pro austerity you know that kind of idea the traditional conservative and on the other side you've got this kind of rabid little englanders who are very pro-Brexit very strongly anti-immigration quite racist who believe that the British empire could and should be restored and with Boris Johnson appointed as leader we saw this site kind of gain control of the party and in a way there's similarities you know and to the US where Trump is obviously the president but doesn't represent the kind of ideas of the sense the sensible bourgeoisie and is quite a kind of wild cannon for them and this is a very significant development this this division in the Tories because the ruling class really can't rely on the Tories anymore to hold the line to just push through austerity pushed and living standards kind of crush the working class and just power through and do what's good for the rich do what's good for big business just do that because you know we've seen these crises around Brexit which isn't in the interest of the rich we've seen the economy absolutely plummeting which isn't in the interest of the rich and we've just seen all this kind of chaos and as a result I think one of the things that's happened is the ruling class has started to exert more pressure on the Labour Party instead and they're obviously very happy with the appointment of Sir Keir Starmer at the moment back to the Tories the this kind of division between them has also meant there's a lot of infighting and kind of drama within the party itself and you even seen at the moment the split between those who want to kind of keep furlough going and like you know by minimise lockdowns that kind of stuff because they understand that that's key to them maybe the northern seats and there's those who are like behind Rishi Sunak and just want austerity cutback spending go go go I think you see that through the disgusting decision a few days ago to even deprive children of school meals through the holidays so to literally force small children to go hungry and just for a small amount of government money so you really see these kind of different sides and the tension between them and there's also other infighting in the party last month you had the kind of rebellion of the 40 Tory MPs who pushed a bill against the government to try and allow them to vote to get a vote before a new restrictions were kind of introduced and there's obviously a lot of tension around Brexit but speaking of Brexit we are supposed to leave the European Union on the 1st of January after a kind of week long standoff last week trade talks have started back up on Thursday but at this point a no deal looks likely you know there's key unresolved issues over fishing rights over competition laws the end of the day there's just very little time left very little time left to come to an agreement Boris Johnson has already ruled out seeking an extension again because of the tensions within his own party if he seeks an extension there'll be huge mutiny from the pro-Brexiteer kind of side of the party and he probably wouldn't be he doesn't have a strong enough grip over his party to be able to do so so it looks like a no deal is the most likely outcome this will cause a huge economic crash on top of the economic situation we're already in and I was reading that it's expected that 60 percent of trucks will be unable to go past over and they're actually currently building a huge huge lorry park just to have somewhere to like put all of these trucks which will just be stuck at the border more importantly than that I guess is the the very likely situation where there's going to be big price rises on basic food items and we need to see this in the context of mass unemployment of the context of loss of wages for a huge amount of workers and on top of that then price rises of basic basic food items and this all together will push millions of people onto the absolute brink and brexit will also be a particular issue in Scotland and because Scotland voted majority remained so 62 percent of people in Scotland wanted to remain in the European Union and so there's this feeling that Scotland is kind of being dragged into this crisis and dragged out of the EU whether it wants to or not at the same time as being undemocratically denied the right to hold another independence referendum so that is another element which is building kind of resentment in Scotland that's when next to speak a little bit more about Scotland it's another example of the ruling class losing completely losing all control over the situation you know the independence referendum in 2014 was supposed to kind of put the issue to bed and kind of leave it forever but it did the absolute opposite you know this referendum became an outpouring of class anger and once it was let out of the bottle it couldn't be put back in pulling this month shows support for independence at 58 percent which is quite significant because it's been hovering around 50 percent for the past years and it's suddenly gone over the line and I would argue that this is because a key way that the no vote kind of won in 2014 was the idea that no kind of represented stability so on the one side you had the kind of yes vote where people were you know imagining a new kind of society obviously a lot of which was you know utopian and and obviously unachievable under capitalism as as events would have shown in an independent Scotland but that was kind of one side and the other side was kind of stability the status quo people quite often say that you know the referendum was lost on pensions passports and the pound and all of those things what what stability is there for those things now we look at the current situation the only stability we have is is mass unemployment is the rising cost of living is this huge hatred of the Tory party all across Britain and is particularly acute in Scotland with a poll last week showing that 76 percent of people in Scotland are dissatisfied or strongly dissatisfied with Boris Johnson as a leader and again people are now starting to look to that kind of alternative the SNP still hold massive support in Scotland and polling is putting them on 50 to 60 percent for the hollywood election in May next year and that's under a proportional system so more than 50 percent is quite significant and there are some fault lines within the party because there's obviously tension because on the one side you've got these leaders who kind of believe in you know reformism with a kind of mix of all we need to be business friendly open to business that kind of you know idea and then on the other side you have membership who's overwhelmingly working class you galvanized around this class anger and the independence referendum a repulsion with Westminster you know wanting a different kind of system so there is kind of tension within the party but at the moment remains kind of behind the SNP I've heard some people kind of say in terms of Scotland well you know Boris is just going to keep saying no you know the SNP can ask for another referendum but Boris will just say no so that's the end of the issue and but I don't think it is really the end of the issue because the more he denies even the right to hold a referendum the more resentment is building and building and building and building and that's not just going to go away people aren't just going to go to sleep and forget about it it's building and building and I even saw this and the night after the general election in December and there was an electric demonstration in Glasgow where thousands of very angry young people marched through the street something I've not really seen that kind of atmosphere before and I think you know it can it's not going away it's going to build and build and build so you know we should really be expecting the breakup of the United Kingdom you know a country that was so stable and you know there's a high likelihood that Scotland you know will will leave and will attain independence in the next kind of few years and to kind of come back to the question of where is Britain going you know this lead off we've seen lots of incompetence by the government we've seen chaos but I think like I kind of said at the beginning we shouldn't just see this as a random coincidence we shouldn't just think oh well you know the governance is not very good that's not the case you know it's actually significant that the ruling class cannot rule as it did before and Trotsky kind of talked about this in the history of the Russian Revolution in terms of um Sar Nicholas you know quite often in the history books he's just portrayed as like a really bad ruler like really incompetent and he was just like not good enough to kind of rule but instead he says how frequently the distinguishing traits of a person are merely individual scratches made by a higher law of development I think it's similar here yes you know Boris and the Tory government have made bad decisions but he'd been thrust into that position and this is happening because we're in a situation where the conditions make it impossible for them to rule successfully and so I think you know we shouldn't just see this as incompetence a coincidence it's happening right now we should see this as a very unstable situation where the ruling class has really lost control and again I think this is reflected in other countries around the world but particularly so in Britain and I've talked quite a lot about the ruling class but there's obviously another side to this as well we're really starting to see you know resistance and growth of a mass and a militant working class movement in the past you know year or two we've seen the climate strike movement which has mobilized tens of thousands of young people we've seen the Black Lives Matter movement this summer which has been you know especially significant as people throw statues of imperialists into the river and really started to question the role of the police and the role of the state and don't just see them as oh they're just to keep us safe but actually looking at those institutions as defending the capitalist as armed bodies of men who who carry the wishes of the ruling class and so that's been very significant obviously we've also seen the Corbyn movement in the past three years sweep the Labour Party which has been very significant and we've also seen an upswing in the trade union movement so I think if we look at Britain and where is Britain going on the one side we have these kind of mental Tories harking back to the golden days of you know a British Empire literally living in the past the remnants of you know a dying and a faltering ruling class and then on the other side you have these young people you know marching together against racism against climate destruction for socialism for a new system and that is a situation we have today I think we should be clear that we are actually looking at our revolutionary situation brewing in Britain and that we need to be prepared you know because different movements will rise situations will kind of present themselves you know they'll always be kind of revolutionary movements but the question is whether they succeed or whether they fail that's what's important and that is why we are building a revolutionary organisation the international Marxist tendency so that we are prepared and so that we cannot just see a revolutionary kind of situation in Britain in the coming years which you know perhaps is ebbs that or perhaps is defeated but that we actually see a successful socialist revolution in Britain and across the world thanks