BORIS JOHNSON is being dumped as prime minister, as Tory MPs held a vote of no-confidence in his leadership last night.
Yesterday morning, the chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, Graham Brady, announced that he had over 54 letters calling for Johnson’s removal submitted by Tory MPs, the threshold for triggering the ballot.
Whatever the result of last night’s vote, the reality is that Johnson is finished.
Even if he has managed to secure a majority, he will go the same way as past Tory PMs like Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
Both survived the initial vote of no-confidence but, as ‘damaged goods’ in the eyes of the ruling class, their days were numbered.
A briefing note circulated to Tory MPs on Sunday night set out the immediate concerns that Johnson was now an electoral liability, emphasising that ‘no social group polled’ trusts the proven liar and that the ‘entire purpose of the government now appears to be the sustenance of Boris Johnson as prime minister.’
The entire purpose of a Tory government is to take action against the working class and Johnson is not the man to lead the class war that capitalism requires to make workers and the middle classes pay for the capitalist crisis and the imperialists’ war on Russia.
The ruling class is conscious that they are sitting on a powder keg. With British capitalism plunging into recession and inflation driving the cost-of-living to unprecedented levels, the working class is taking action to defend itself from the mass poverty and hunger that is all capitalism has to offer.
Johnson is not up to the job of waging a war on workers and the unions that is required to force the working class to submit to having their lives destroyed.
But the huge problem for the Tories and the ruling class is who to replace Johnson with?
Foreign secretary Liz Truss has been promoting herself as a suitable candidate, despite her protestations of support for Johnson.
She has put herself forward as a great ‘war leader’ declaring that the war against Russia being waged by imperialism in the Ukraine is ‘our war’ and that workers and their families must be made to pay the price of sanctions that drive up energy prices and threaten food poverty and starvation across the world.
The ludicrous posturing of Truss, however, will not impress a ruling class seeking a more substantial leader of a government capable of taking on and defeating a powerful working class that is rising up in mass strike action.
With the Tories ditching Johnson, and no obvious successor, Labour leader Keir Starmer has been relentlessly positioning himself and the Labour Party as willing accomplices with the Tories in a government of national emergency.
Starmer stressed yesterday that Tory MPs should act in the ‘national interest’ and vote no-confidence in Johnson and ‘show some leadership’ adding: ‘We’ve got a cost-of-living crisis and people are saying where’s the plan, where’s the government we need to lead?’
In other words, Starmer is happy for a handful of Tory MPs to choose a new prime minister and government and is willing to serve anyone they pick in the ‘national interest’ of the bosses and bankers.
The working class will not sit back passively while the Tories attempt to sort out the massive political crisis that is tearing them apart.
There has never been a better time for the powerful working class to assert its strength by taking action to put the Tories out of their misery by dumping not just Johnson but the entire Tory government.
With masses of workers and young people organising to descend on London for the TUC march and demonstration on June 18 this must be the start of a general strike to close down the country to force the Tories out and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will end the cost of living crisis by seizing the profits of the bankers and bosses as part of building a socialist planned economy.
Only the WRP fights for this policy as the only way forward for the working class and youth – join today.
