IT says something about the scale of the defeat that the Tories and the bosses have suffered over the Mayoral election in London and the council elections as a whole, when the result of the Mayoral election in London and Sadiq Khan’s great victory was not even front page news in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph!
The truth is that one of the biggest witch-hunts ever seen in this country – launched by the Tory Party, and supported by Cameron in parliament that Labour under Corbyn was racist and anti-semitic, and that Corbyn and Livingstone were racists, and that Sadiq Khan was pro-terrorist – flopped in the most spectacular fashion, after it had the opposite effect to that which was intended.
Hundreds of thousands of workers turned out to vote to reject the witch-hunters and their poison. Sadiq Khan won his election with a huge 1,310,143 vote and a 300,000 plus majority. Labour also took the Bristol Mayorship and won its parliamentary by-election in Sheffield.
The dialectic of the situation is that it was Labour’s right wing that was the most enthusiastic supporter of the ‘anti-racist campaign’, and predicted enthusiastically that Labour would lose over 200 seats!
Labour’s right wing were defeatists in this election and hoped that the Tories would wipe out their party to create the conditions to do what the Tories wanted to see done, a coup to remove Corbyn and place a Blairite pro-Tory into the position of leader.
The working class would have nothing to do with these Labour ‘defeatists’ and flocked to the polls. Now the same Labour right wingers who hoped to see 200 council seats lost are now saying that if Labour is to have any chance of winning the next election it should have won at least 200 seats!!! These Labourites are true citizens of ‘Perfidious Albion’!
In fact London workers and the middle class are hostile to the Tories for very good reasons. The entire city centre has been cleared for luxury building and luxury accommodation.
Tens of thousands of ordinary workers are being decanted into the suburbs, while the centre is being turned into a paradise of the rich, a new Dubai. Workers cannot afford the extraordinary rents that landlords are charging, or the extreme transport and other costs.
In fact, this is the pattern being followed in all of the UK’s great cities – so tens of millions more workers are going to be radicalised and revolutionised as the capitalist crisis deepens, and it is deepening.
The Institute of International Finance in Washington yesterday warned about a five-fold rise in company debt to $25 trillion in emerging markets over the past decade; and record junk bond issuance in the US and Europe, along with shockingly-irresponsible levels of US borrowing to buy back shares and pay dividends.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority added: ‘As we have witnessed in advanced economies, disorderly deleveraging may weigh heavily on the economy and may even risk the financial system.’
The capitalist system is heading for a new bust. The Labour Party leadership must now start dealing with the right wing traitors that helped the Tory witch-hunt. They must be deselected. Labour must advocate and fight for the nationalisation of the banks, the building industry and the building land so as to build the tens of millions of council homes that are needed to resolve the housing crisis.
The experience of Scotland is a warning that time must not be wasted in the struggle for socialist policies. Thatcher’s policies destroyed the Tory Party in Scotland. In 1997 the Scots were in the van of the movement that put Blair-Brown into power.
The duo were however more interested in starting wars and bringing in the PFI and privatisation than in bringing in socialism. With the return of the Tories, the Scottish workers reasoned that Labour had let them down so independence and Scottish socialism could be the answer. Labour are still paying for Blair’s betrayal!
This is why the struggle for socialism must now be waged 100%, because as the crisis deepens and the Tory party breaks into irreconcilable factions they can be and will be removed – far sooner than they think!
Now is the time to build up the revolutionary leadership of the WRP and the YS to organise to carry through the British socialist revolution to put an end to capitalism by bringing in a workers’ government and socialism.
