THIS pathetic minority Tory ‘government’ is so weak that Theresa May is forced today to make a speech begging for the Labour Party and other opposition groups to come to her aid and keep her in power.
Her speech is a sign of the acute desperation gripping May and the Tories. It is a desperation borne of the fact that they went into the general election confident that it would anoint May supreme leader with all the powers of an elected dictator – powers she was determined to use to ramp up the austerity war against workers, the disabled and the unemployed, while at the same time organising to overturn the Brexit decision through the back-door of keeping Britain tied to the crumbling capitalist EU through the single market.
The working class dealt the Tories a devastating blow by destroying her majority, forcing her to rule through a £1.5 billion bribe to the reactionary DUP whose ten votes were just enough for May to survive the Queen’s Speech vote. With the Tory party at war, with plots emerging to dump her as leader, the support of the DUP is not enough to rescue May, so she is now forced to call on Labour MPs to jump in and keep the whole rotten show on the road.
In her speech May invites Labour to ‘help her create policies’ while insisting that her ‘commitment to change Britain is undimmed’. May calls for ‘cross-party working’ and for Labour MPs to ‘come forward with your own views and ideas about how we can tackle these challenges as a country’ adding she was ‘challenging our opponents to contribute, not just criticise’.
All this talk of cross-party collaboration is no accident, for May knows that a cross-party organisation is already in existence. Led jointly by the Blairite MP Chuka Umunna and Tory MP and ardent ‘remainer’ Anna Soubry, this grouping of about 40 right-wing Labour MPs along with pro-EU Tories and the LibDems have been organising for over a year and working together in Parliament to overturn the Brexit result.
It is to these Labour traitors that May is directing her appeal for support. Labour shadow local government spokesman, Andrew Gwynne, said of May’s speech that it ‘is further evidence that this government can no longer run the country’, adding that the Tories have ‘completely run out of ideas’ and are reduced to begging for policy proposals from Labour. This misses the point.
The Tories haven’t run out of ideas, the working class has dealt a massive blow to their plans of smashing the unions and the working class and destroying all the gains of the welfare state, including the NHS. These plans haven’t gone away, but to carry them out May is relying on the treachery of those right wing Labour MPs who in the last general election got elected on the back of the Labour manifesto that committed them to leaving the EU and the single market.
Corbyn must act decisively now and purge the ranks of Labour MPs from these would-be supporters of May as part of an immediate campaign to force the Tory government out. There must be no hanging around talking about Labour being a ‘government in waiting’, the working class has waited too long already and the opportunity to get rid of the Tories must not be allowed to slip away. The time to kick out the Tories is now!
This means Labour organising to force an immediate general election and for the trade unions to launch a mass campaign to bring the Tories down. Every union must call strike action to smash the Tory policies of wage caps and the destruction of the NHS and demand an end to privatisation immediately.
Putting the Tories out of their misery means that the Labour Party must advance serious socialist policies of expropriating the bankers and bosses along with breaking immediately from the EU and advancing to a workers government that will reach out to workers in Europe in the struggle to replace the capitalist EU with the Socialist United States of Europe.
