WITH his announcement on Monday that he had personally authorised the killing by drone of two young British citizens in Syria, Cameron revealed himself to be both the assassin of people and the assassin of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.
Two years ago, Cameron suffered the humiliating defeat of his motion to ‘strike Syria’ and pledged that he would not join in any air strikes or military involvement without the authorisation of parliament. This solemn pledge was broken earlier this year with the revelation that RAF pilots ‘embedded’ with Canadian and US air forces had taken part in bombing raids in Syria.
Now Cameron has ridden roughshod over parliament to carry out acts of murder and assassination without recourse to parliament and in complete defiance of every known law on the statute book. Cameron excused this act of extra-judicial murder by claiming to have secret intelligence information about a plot to assassinate the royal family – a plot that could only be thwarted by sending an unmanned drone thousands of miles into Syria to kill three men in a car.
The last time secret information was used like this was in the days of Blair and his ‘dodgy dossier’ to justify the illegal war against Iraq. Cameron was unrepentant in the House of Commons claiming for himself the right to assassinate and murder anyone who he designates a threat to British imperialism.
While denying that he has a ‘kill list’ it is quite clear that the Tories have amassed a whole number of names who fit that bill, doubtless including the Syrian leadership of President Assad who Cameron has already called a ‘terrorist’ and bracketed with IS as the real enemy.
The use of illegal assassination without any attempt to gain parliamentary approval is a sharp demonstration that the capitalist state is pushing forward to dispense with the facade of parliamentary democracy completely.
In its war to smash up the secular states of the Middle East and recapture these countries for imperialist exploitation, the ruling class is preparing to ditch the old form of rule and move towards an outright dictatorship where the capitalist state decides who lives and who dies and to hell with parliament.
The working class must draw an urgent lesson from this – the rush to smash up bourgeois democracy is aimed full-square not only against the people of the Middle East but at workers and their unions at home, as we have seen in the Tory proposals this week to make strikes and picketing illegal.
To carry out the push by the capitalist state to dispense with bourgeois democracy Cameron has made it clear that the Tories are relying on the support of the Labour Party right-wing. What was clear from Monday’s debate on the assassinations was that Cameron has little to fear from the ‘left’ wing of the party, represented by Jeremy Corbyn.
In his first opportunity to confront Cameron on the contempt for parliament, Corbyn completely ducked the issue. Instead, he challenged Cameron to sign up to a ‘European-wide response to assist refugees’ before going on to praise the government for ‘engaging’ with Iran. No denunciation of the assassination, no condemnation of the move to dispense with parliamentary democracy, just praise for the ‘conciliatory’ stance of the Tories and a plea for consensus between the parties.
Corbyn the ‘left-winger’ has turned into Corbyn the conciliator when confronted with challenging the power of the capitalist state. There can be no conciliation with capitalism; to survive, this bankrupt system must wage a war on two fronts and that war has already started.
Reformism cannot answer this attack, the class war can only be won by the working class taking power and smashing the capitalist state and going forward to socialism. This means forcing the TUC to call an all-out general strike to bring down the government and bring in a workers government.
The Young Socialists lobby of the TUC on Sunday will be central to this struggle to make the TUC leadership fight or be kicked out and replaced with a new leadership that is prepared to lead the working class to victory.
