MAY’S ‘reshuffle’ that never was continues her recent career in which everything that could go wrong has, but such is the feebleness of the Labour opposition she and her government survive.
In the 2016 EU referendum campaign she was on the losing side, but survived to be appointed Tory PM by the Tory 1922 Committee when it feared that ‘Leaver’ Andrea Leadsom would beat her if there was a ballot.
No sooner appointed to PM, she had the brilliant notion to call a snap general election that would see her smash Labour and Corbyn and emerge as a dictator able to impose her will on the UK and on the EU.
This manoeuvre backfired spectacularly, with millions of workers and youth voting for the ‘despised’ Corbyn and socialism, and destroying her majority.
She survived this humiliation when Labour allowed her to purchase the votes of the ten DUP MPs for £1.2 billion to keep her majority. A sleazy manoeuvre that again, the Labour opposition and the TUC trade unions allowed her to get away with.
The next disaster was when Priti Patel, her Overseas Aid Minister, was found to have made a secret trip to Israel, in which she met the Israeli leadership and assured the Israeli army that the UK’s Department for International Development would fund the Israeli army hospital in the Occupied Golan Heights which is being used to treat terrorists wounded by the Syrian army! Patel acted as a free agent outside the control of the PM.
She had to go, but her mistress May soldiered on! She proceeded with EU talks, agreed to pay the EU a £39bn divorce fee, and agreed to a two-year transitional period after March 29th 2019 during which the UK would come under the heavy hand of the European Court, and also remain in the EU’s single market and customs union.
Such has been the depth of the rout, the Remain wing of the Tory Party was encouraged to think that the way was opening for a common front with the Scottish Nationalists, the Liberals and Labour’s right wing for a move at the decisive moment to overturn the referendum result and remain in the EU.
It is in this critical situation that disaster-prone May decided on her current reshuffle. This has revealed that she is a knife without a blade and an empty figurehead whom the Tory Party is tolerating for the moment.
Education Minister Justine Greening refused to move from her department and resigned, while Health Secretary Hunt refused to become Business Secretary and threatened to quit unless he was given Social Care as well as the NHS to ruin.
May capitulated to Hunt, leaving the trade union leaders, who had been egging her on to sack Hunt so as to save the NHS, with very red faces.
May has gone from being a gaffe-stricken leader, to a leader that her cabinet feels can be treated with contempt and defied. She remains leader simply because any attempt to remove her will split the deeply divided party.
Her weakness is nothing to do with her personality or any personal weakness. It is an expression of the fact that the UK, the first capitalist country with its great worldwide empire, has been caught up by history and transformed into its opposite and is struggling to survive as a minor capitalist state.
Its ruling class is split over whether to serve Brussels or Washington.
The Labour Party is being split by the same historic forces, with its majority seeking to emulate the Kinnocks and do extremely well out of the EU.
However, the working class and the middle class are boiling with anger at the way that their living standards have been slashed, as the crisis of British and world capitalism sharpens to the point of explosion, a new banking collapse and revolution.
May is decrepit and bankrupt politically, but the Labourites and the trade unions leaders refuse to remove her and her government because they are frightened of what the working class will do if she is brought down.
There is only one way forward for UK workers. This is to mobilise for a socialist revolution, beginning with a general strike to bring down the May government, to go forward to a workers government and socialism. This will echo all over the world and create the conditions for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
