AN article in Monday’s Daily Telegraph by Sherelle Jacobs bluntly states: ‘Liz Truss has just two months to save broken Britain from terminal decline.’
Jacobs asserts that Truss will have to ‘face down the leftist elite if we are to avoid becoming an emerging economy.’
In fact, it’s not some mythical ‘leftist elite’ that Truss and the ruling class will have to face down and defeat, but the tens of millions of workers, pensioners, housewives and young people who are in revolt against a capitalist system where the bosses of energy companies and their shareholders make billions in profit while they freeze.
Jacobs’ prescribed remedy for British capitalism revolves around Truss ditching the pretence of ‘levelling up’ and sticking to tax cuts for the rich while solving any labour shortages ‘by getting the millions on benefits back to work.’
It is to be tax cuts for the rich and companies, while workers are driven off benefits that don’t even pay for food, rent or energy, and back to low-paid work – or the latest equivalent of the Victorian workhouse.
If Jacobs thinks the working class will tamely submit to being driven into the gutter of destitution and seeing their children starve to rescue a bankrupt capitalist system, then she is deluded beyond belief.
In the same way, Jacobs is deluded if she thinks Truss has two months to save British capitalism – which is already diving into recession and strangled by an inflation rate that is heading above 22%.
According to reports by the economic news site Bloomberg, Truss has drawn up emergency plans to freeze energy bills for UK households. The plan is to hand over £130 billion to cover the shortfall in revenue that this freeze would cost the energy companies.
There is to be guaranteed financing by the Tories to ensure the profits of the energy company vultures, who have made untold billions out of the energy industry that was privatised by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
These loans to the energy companies to ensure no loss of profit will be ultimately recovered from the working class through a levy on customer bills in the future.
In the shorter term, the money will be conjured up by the Tories through increased borrowing on the international markets driving up the already eyewatering national debt, currently standing at over £2.4 trillion.
All this debt and the repayment on the massive interest rates charged by lenders, along with the £130 billion handed to the energy companies to compensate them for any shortfall on profit, will be paid for by the working class through cuts to wages, cuts to the NHS and every other vital service.
As for the Labour Party, including those now viewed as being on the ‘left’, their position on Truss and her new Tory government was summed up in a press release issued yesterday by the Centre for Progressive Policy.
In a joint statement, a group of 11 mayors and political leaders warned of a ‘tidal wave of need this winter’ urging Truss to take urgent action on the cost-of-living crisis, and calling for action to reverse inequalities and protect the ‘levelling up agenda’.
Prominent amongst the signatories to this heartfelt plea to the Tories was Labour’s Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who is being promoted as the main left-wing oppositionist to Keir Starmer.
While the demand for a general strike has been taken up by millions of workers, this blatant attempt to divert the anger of the working class into pleas to work together with the Tories is a conscious effort to prop up a Tory government and a capitalist system on its last legs by preparing for a coalition regime with some ‘left faces’ in it.
Truss’s plan for an energy bill freeze is a device to guarantee the profits of the companies and buy time for her new administration to bring in legislation to ban strikes, legalise fire and rehire and smash the trade unions. Perhaps having a few levelling up campaigners in the cabinet might help the deception.
However, there is only one way out for capitalism.
For the working class, the only way forward is to force the TUC leaders to call a general strike at their forthcoming September 12 conference, to kick out the Tories and bring in a Workers Government and a nationalised and planned socialist economy.
Join the WRP lobby of the TUC on Monday 12 September to demand a general strike is called to kick out the Tories and go forward to socialism.
