THE understanding that in times of acute capitalist crisis the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way is being borne out by the acute crisis in the Tory party, a crisis that is forcing Cameron to tear up the bourgeois democratic rule book and override parliamentary authority.
This has been made abundantly clear with his pronouncement yesterday over declaring war against Syria.
Speaking from behind the safety of the ‘ring of steel’ erected around the meeting of the NATO warlords in Newport, Cameron announced that Britain could conduct airstrikes in Syria against Islamic State targets without the permission of the Syrian government.
Under international law it is expressly forbidden for one country to invade the sovereign airspace of another. To do so is an act of war.
This does not bother Cameron who stated that he needed no such permission because he – David Cameron – did not recognise the Syrian president Assad as a legitimate leader.
Turning truth on its head, he labelled Assad as ‘part of the problem’, saying: ‘We have got to understand that Assad has been part of the creation of IS, rather than part of its answer.’
It was not Assad who created IS. It was the imperialists, notably the US and Britain, who armed and trained it – first to fight in Libya and then to go on to Syria to operate as imperialist mercenaries in the war to bring down the secular Baathist regime of Assad.
The responsibility for the creation of IS lies squarely at the door of Obama and Cameron.
In leading the charge to war – a charge that he has been instructed to lead by his US masters – Cameron is quite prepared to ignore the wishes of parliament.
In August last year, parliament voted overwhelmingly against military action in Syria. After this unexpected defeat, Cameron made great play of respecting the wishes of MPs. Now one year on he is quite prepared to ignore those wishes and go to war, this time without any vote.
Dispensing with parliament is becoming the preferred option for Cameron and the Tory party.
With the possibility of Scotland voting to break up the United Kingdom in this months’ referendum vote, whole sections of the Tory party are screaming that this will cause a constitutional crisis that will require next year’s general election to be postponed for at least a year; a move that is completely unconstitutional under the five-year fixed-term parliaments introduced by the coalition when it came to office.
But Cameron and the Tories are not concerned with such niceties – confronted with a crisis of their own making they are quite prepared to ditch the facade of parliamentary democracy and move to rule by diktat.
That they are moving rapidly in the direction of dictatorial rule is not surprising.
With the Tory party split and divided from top to bottom, and Cameron seen as the lamest of ducks, this is the only way they can survive to carry out the savage attacks that this crisis is demanding they make on the working class to pay for their imperialist adventures.
This was made clear by Tory Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, who said: ‘US taxpayers won’t go on picking up the cheque if we choose to prioritise social welfare spending when the threats are on our doorstep.’
It couldn’t be clearer. The working class is to pay for the war against Syria and in the Ukraine with even more cuts to the welfare state on top of all the austerity measures that have been piled on so far.
Along with declaring war on Syria, this discredited, split and totally bankrupt Tory government is declaring war on the working class.
The only answer to this is for the working class to demand that its leaders meeting at the TUC in Liverpool call an immediate general strike to kick out the government and the bankrupt capitalist system it represents and go forward to a workers government and socialism.