‘A SPEECH to calm the party and the country’ was how the Tory-supporting Daily Mail greeted the speech by newly installed prime minister Rishi Sunak.
The speed with which the right-wing Tory press like the Mail and Telegraph have rushed to express their undying enthusiasm for Sunak is truly amazing.
They threw their full support behind Liz Truss, hailing her boast she would bring growth through tax cuts to the rich funded through massive borrowing.
That fantasy was shattered by the international financial capitalists who dumped UK bonds, used to finance government spending, sending the pound crashing against the dollar and threatening to bankrupt the UK. Truss was kicked out and ex-merchant banker and multi-millionaire Rishi Sunak was crowned as the Tory leader who would obey the instructions from the banks.
Sunak’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had already promised ‘eye-watering’ austerity cuts to bring down the massive government debt and was due to make public how these cuts in public services would be achieved in a fiscal statement next Monday.
However, on Wednesday Hunt announced that this fiscal statement would be delayed by over two weeks and would be made on 17 November.
Hunt excused this delay saying it was planned so the statement ‘is based on the most accurate economic forecast of public finances’. The Tories know full well that the public finances are crashing and solely reliant on the international money markets carrying on financing them through more debt.
What these bankers want to know is how the Tories are going to implement the massive cuts to dump this debt on the backs of the working class, while at the same time pumping billions to arm the fascist-backed Ukrainian regime in the imperialist war to weaken Russia.
Hunt will spend this period of grace drawing up a plan of action that goes far enough to please the real masters of British capitalism the international bankers.
Sunak signalled that the Tories are preparing for an all-out war on workers and their trade unions when he brought back Suella Braverman as Home Secretary.
Braverman was forced to resign by Truss as she ‘broke the ministerial code’ by passing confidential information to unauthorised persons via her private e-mail.
Braverman, who boasted she goes to sleep at night obsessively dreaming of deporting hundreds of thousands of refugees and immigrants to Rwanda, has been reinstated as the extreme right-winger to enforce all the anti-union laws contained in the Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill along with all the legislation in the Public Order Bill going through Parliament this week.
Under the Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill unions face fines of up to £1 million if they take effective strike action with workers facing immediate dismissal without appeal for disobeying an instruction to work.
The Public Order Bill, ostensibly aimed at environmentalist demonstrators, in fact makes every demonstration, every strike that disrupts the smooth running of capitalism and the profit of the bankers and bosses, illegal.
Anyone breaking these draconian laws face fines and imprisonment. All these laws will be enforced by a police state composed of a police force condemned even by official inquiries as institutionally racist, institutionally misogynist and stuffed full of officers with criminal convictions.
This is the ideal force for Braverman and Sunak to turn loose on workers and youth rising up against being driven back to the wage slavery of the 19th century.
The coming days are the calm before the storm as the Tories wait for their masters to give the green light for an austerity war to the finish against the working class.
Far from ‘uniting the country’, Sunak is uniting a counter-revolutionary force to take on and defeat the mass movement of workers in a national strike action to defend themselves from the poverty that is all the bosses and bankers can offer today.
The ruling class has started the class war, now the working class must finish it by forcing the trade unions to call a general strike to bring down the Sunak government and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will expropriate the capitalist class, nationalise the banks and major industries bringing in a planned socialist economy.
Carrying out a socialist revolution is the only way forward today.
