CABINET ministers are urging fellow Conservatives to get behind Prime Minister Liz Truss, after a week of open disagreement and back-stabbing within the Tory party.
They warn the party must unite or it risks ending up in opposition. The Tory split comes after the plans to abolish the top billionaires’ tax band of 45% had to be withdrawn during the Tory Party conference to prevent the Tory party splitting there and then.
There were also rows over Truss’ plans to cut benefits when ‘Red Tories’ such as Gove, the former ‘Levelling Up Secretary’, and even Grant Shapps, insisted that Truss would lose any vote on the matter in parliament, with Gove condemning the plan to refuse matching the increases in the inflation rate with increases in benefits.
Gove is warning that the Tories will lose any vote in the House of Commons that seeks to cut benefits.
Tory MPs are now being told they must back ‘Back Liz or get Keir Starmer, hand-in-hand with Nicola Sturgeon.’
The split in the Tory Party is however only the feeblest reflection of the fact that the capitalist system is facing its greatest crisis ever.
Just a few weeks ago, the Bank of England had to step in to pump up to £65 billion into the market to stop a crash. The Daily Telegraph of Sunday 9th October states in the article ‘The race to defuse time bombs lurking in the financial sector’ that ‘Without such action, pension funds holding vast sums on behalf of retired people across the country would have collapsed.’
Jon Cunliffe, the Bank of England’s deputy governor for financial stability, said pension schemes were at risk of going bust, and this would have rippled through to other areas of the financial system.
It could have triggered an ‘excessive and sudden’ drop in lending into the real economy, akin to the credit crunch that hit after 2008. ‘In short it could have been a disaster.’
He added: ‘The pension find scheme was a near miss, but there are signs of stress elsewhere in the system.’ He warned: ‘A rush to the exit could spark a fire sale of property assets and push prices down across the sector.’
He added: ‘Some analysts are now predicting a 15% crash in prices next year.’
He continued: ‘These could be the first knockings in a much larger crisis that could ricochet across Europe and the world.’
Shadow ‘unregulated banks now account for over 50% per cent of the worlds banking sector . . .These lenders control $226.6 trillion of global financial assets out of a total of just over $468.7trillion in 2021.’
He added that ‘Non banks wrote two thirds of all US mortgages in 2020 and made almost as many loans to businesses as mainstream banks’.
Gary Greenwood, a banking analyst, commented: ‘The risk has basically moved from the banking system to the shadow banking system, so all these other deep pots of money just sitting in asset managers’ and private equity funds are carrying a lot of risk now.
‘That’s where I would expect the bombs to go off now.’
The working class cannot sit back and wait for the greatest ever crash of the capitalist system to happen. It has to consider its responsibilities to families, friends and the working class as a whole.
The fact of the matter is that the working class is the strongest class in society but is being held back by trade union and Labour Party leaders who refuse to use the huge strength of the working class, and instead rely on pressuring the bosses and bankers.
The TUC is meeting in Congress in Brighton on Tuesday October 18th.
We urge every worker and youth to join the mass lobby that has been called by the WRP and the Young Socialists to make the TUC call a general strike at the Conference to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government to expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in a planned socialist economy to satisfy workers needs.
