Rishi Sunak was appointed Tory Prime Minister yesterday after his opponent Penny Mordaunt withdrew from the race at the last minute.
Sunak was overwhelmingly rejected by Tory members in the leadership ballot last September, losing to Liz Truss who, in a chaotic seven weeks, managed to accelerate the crash of the Tory Party into near oblivion.
The mini-budget of her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng led to the pound collapsing overnight as the international money markets ruled that massive tax cuts and energy caps funded entirely out of borrowing would drive British capitalism even deeper into recession.
They dumped UK government bonds in a fire sale that drove up the cost of debt repayments, threatened to collapse the entire UK pension fund industry, and pushed inflation and the cost of living even higher.
What the money markets demanded was massive austerity cuts on a scale never seen before to bring down the national debt.
Truss and Kwarteng were broken by the money markets, forced out and humiliated as their fantasy of economic growth through tax cuts to the rich was shattered by reality.
Seven weeks on from Truss triumphantly taking office, her defeated opponent Sunak has been risen from the political grave and put in control to try to carry out the instructions of the international financial markets, namely to launch an austerity war on the working class, to cut public spending and enforce pay cutting wage deals on workers.
Sunak is charged by the capitalist class as the man to continue the job of destroying all the basic gains of the working class – gains won through struggle for over 100 years.
This is the requirement of British capitalism today as dictated by the financial markets.
Sunak is going into battle against a massive uprising of millions of workers across the entire country against having their lives shattered to keep bankrupt British capitalism from complete collapse.
He immediately faces an unprecedented wave of national strikes from BT and postal workers this week.
Today, some 115,000 CWU postal workers come out on strike in one day of industrial action following on from the national strike last Thursday, as part of a long running struggle against Royal Mail bosses who refuse to negotiate and instead threaten to sack 10,000 workers.
Half a million hospital workers in the Unison union are being balloted for strike action this week over pay – along with nurses, doctors, ambulance crews, porters and cleaners – all voting for a campaign of mass industrial action.
Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said that the Tories are treating the unions as the ‘enemy within’.
300,000 nurses belonging to the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are similarly balloting for action before Christmas while the Tories have made it absolutely clear that whatever the ballot result, nurses are going to have to live with a miserable 3% pay rise.
Yesterday, 70,000 college lecturers, members of the UCU, voted by 85% for strike action over pay, conditions and pensions. This is the scale of the mass strike action that the Tories are relying on Sunak to defeat.
He will be relying on anti-union laws, including the one bequeathed to him by Truss, the ‘Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill’, which will ban strikes and bankrupt the rail unions with massive fines for loss of profits, and which will be extended to cover every strike and every union.
But this fight to the finish against the working class is being carried out from a position of huge weakness by a Tory Party torn apart by this crisis and forced to politically resurrect the man it rejected overwhelmingly just seven weeks ago.
The only thing keeping the Tories in power and enabling them to prepare for a war on the working class is the refusal of the TUC and trade union leaders to call a general strike to kick them out.
The burning issue today is to demand the TUC immediately calls a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will nationalise the basic industries and banks and bring in a socialist planned economy.
