THE separate questioning by SKY’s Faisal Islam, Jeremy Paxman and a small audience, of Labour leader Corbyn and PM May showed just how disorientated the Tories and their bourgeois backers have become.
Their tactic, originally hailed as a master stroke, of calling a snap election deemed to be certain of securing a huge majority and a personal dictatorship for PM May so that she could dictate her terms to the EU and, more importantly, to the working class at home, has collapsed around their ears, and it showed at Monday night’s alternative to a proper leadership debate.
The disorientation was so extreme that the once feared Paxman (known as ‘the interrogator’) instead of going for Corbyn as the potential leader of a government that – as the Daily Telegraph would have it will destroy Britain in a sea of chaos – asked him just why the Manifesto did not contain Corbyn’s favourite policies – the nationalisation of the banks, the scrapping of Trident, and the ending of the monarchy.
This allowed Corbyn to explain to Paxman that since he, Corbyn, was a democrat, the election was being fought on the policies that the Labour Party had decided on, and not the favourite policies of the leader.
Paxman had no answer to this approach, and was outfought and out-manoeuvred by Corbyn on all of the issues that the ruling class wanted to ram down Corbyn’s throat – his principled position on advocating a dialogue and a political settlement with the IRA, his opposition to the bloody Falklands war and his general lack of enthusiasm for destroying the planet by initiating a nuclear strike – a sentiment that the vast majority of the UK population shares!
Corbyn came out of this substitute for a leadership debate stronger. May emerged out of it weaker having been subjected to the unheard of, as far as an ‘Iron Lady’ is concerned, heckling, jeering and mocking laughter! She behaved as an Iron Lady who has lost her way and, even after tearing up her uncosted Manifesto pledges, expected the audience to do their patriotic duty and support her come what may.
May saw nothing wrong with an uncosted Manifesto, now ripped up over the ‘dementia tax’, with continuing to cut local police numbers, and the continuing cutting and privatisation of the NHS, plus the cutting of schools and social care budgets. She acted, once again, as if it was the duty of the nation to support her, and that she was about to embark on some version of Charles 1’s ‘rule by divine right’.
With just over a week to go to the election the Tories and the bosses will now be organising the most vicious witchhunt of Corbyn possible, to try to avoid the situation where what May called the ‘quiet revolution’ on June 23 2016 – when the UK voted to leave the EU – with another revolution, not so quiet this time, on June 8th if she and her government are defeated and removed.
Since she initiated the election and demanded that the electorate return her with a massive majority, if she wins the election but fails to increase her majority in the way that she demands of the masses, the ranks of Tory MPs will rise up and remove her, creating the situation where there could be another even more crisis-ridden election.
We urge all workers and the middle class to turn out, in millions, in greater numbers than the referendum, to put the Tories out and return a Labour government. Labour’s victory will encourage the millions of the oppressed to push forward and open up the struggle for a socialist Britain as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.
Such a turn will require the nationalisation of the banks, the scrapping of Trident, and the abolition of the monarchy along with the House of Commons and the Lords, and a move to a workers republic. In this situation the issue of a revolutionary leadership will be decisive. This is why we urge all workers to vote Labour on June 8th, and vote WRP in the five constituencies where we are standing.
Don’t just vote WRP! Workers in all constituencies must join the WRP to build the revolutionary leadership that can take the working class from the victory of a Labour government to the historic triumph of the taking of power by the working class.
