IN A COMPLETELY unprecedented act of defiance Boris Johnson’s special advisor Dominic Cummings gave a press conference yesterday defending his conduct in breaking the lockdown rules and dismissing calls for him to resign.
In showing contempt for both the rules over lockdown and the parliamentary Code of Conduct for Special Advisors this has demonstrated the complete shredding by the Tories of even the facade of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.
In place of rule by elected MPs Johnson has brought in the rule by unelected, unaccountable special advisors, too powerful to sack even when scores of his own backbenchers are lining up to demand his dismissal.
On Sunday night, Johnson appeared on TV to give his complete support to Cummings, despite a massive wave of revulsion and hatred for the man who is now seen as the one running the country not the elected prime minister.
Johnson can’t sack Cummings; they are joined at the hip, not through any personal loyalty but through the requirements of the ruling class to ditch bourgeois democracy and the rule of an elected parliament and move to rule by unelected, all-powerful ‘advisors’ to the capitalist state.
This junking of bourgeois democracy in favour of an open dictatorship by the capitalist class is being driven by the need to wage all-out war against the working class.
Such is the weakness of British capitalism and its political representatives that even a Tory government, with a massive majority of 80 in parliament, is not considered strong enough to carry through the class struggle that is posing the issue of socialist revolution immediately before the working class.
The scale of the crisis was revealed by James Reed, chair of Britain’s biggest on-line recruitment agency, who has predicted a ‘tsunami of job losses’ when the furlough scheme ends, adding that the labour market is heading for a ‘day of reckoning’ when the government stops paying companies 80% of the wages of furloughed workers.
The Jobs Retention Scheme is propping up so-called ‘zombie jobs’ that these companies are keeping on their books only for as long as they get the state subsidy – and once it goes so will the jobs.
Zombie jobs, zombie companies and a zombie British capitalist system is preparing to impose mass unemployment on millions of workers, while those that still have a job after a forced return to work will face enormous wage cuts – if the bosses have their way.
British Airways is preparing to slash 12,000 jobs despite its owner handing out £3.6 billion to shareholders in five years. As well as the brutal job cuts to more than a quarter of BA’s workforce, the company is also proposing huge changes to contracts for those that remain, with cabin crew staff reporting that some face up to a 55% wage cut.
This will be the only future – not just for the airlines but for all of industry and business – necessitating the attempt to drive workers back to the conditions of the 19th century.
This will require the capitalist state to abandon parliamentary rule and rely on its main prop – its police and armed forces – to impose a naked dictatorship over a powerful working class that will be in no mood to surrender its rights to a government that has torn up the ‘rule of law’ that they demand all workers must obey.
Cummings is not the issue, and by restricting themselves to merely calling for his removal or an inquiry, as the Labour Party has done, is an attempt to disarm the working class.
The issue today is not just the removal of Cummings but kicking out the Tory government and advancing to socialism.
The day of reckoning for capitalism is fast approaching and the urgent issue is building a new revolutionary leadership in the working class that will mobilise the strength of the unions in a general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the capitalist class and replace the capitalist state with a workers state.
Only the WRP is building the leadership demanded by this revolutionary situation – join today.
