THE House of Commons privileges committee published its report into former prime minister Boris Johnson yesterday and it turned out to be even more damning than anticipated.
It found that Johnson had repeatedly and deliberately misled Parliament – in other words he lied continually to MPs.
Even worse, for the committee, they found him guilty of deliberately misleading the privileges committee itself.
Lying to MPs and the privileges committee is clearly a capital offence for them – lying is only allowed by prime ministers when it is confined to lying to the electorate.
Even worse was his complicity in a ‘campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee’.
Johnson’s real crime, as far as the committee was concerned, was not that Johnson was a serial liar, that was already known before the Tories made him prime minister, but that he showed no contrition and offered no apologies to Parliament for his arrogant refusal to follow his own laws over lockdown and his continual denial of any evidence proving him a lawbreaker.
According to the report this is crucial because it ‘goes to the very heart of our democracy’ and that: ‘Our democracy depends on MPs being able to trust that what ministers tell them in the House of Commons is the truth.’
The report added: ‘When a minister makes an honest mistake and then corrects it, that is democracy working as it should.’
Instead of the widely anticipated sanction of ten days suspension from the House of Commons, the committee handed out an unprecedented 90-day suspension to Johnson for his ‘crimes’ against parliamentary democracy.
No wonder Johnson took one look at his advanced copy last Friday, and immediately resigned while ominously serving notice on Sunak, and all the Tories he blames for stabbing him in the back, with the promise – ‘I’ll be back’.
No sooner had he stormed out than his loyal acolytes were launching a civil war in the Tory Party to bring down Sunak and complete the wrecking of a Tory government already being torn apart by warring factions and fights over how best to dump the capitalist crisis on the backs of workers and the middle class.
Johnson himself raged against the report calling it a ‘charade’ and saying its publication represented a ‘dreadful day for MPs and for democracy.’
With Tory MPs tearing lumps out of each other and each side, declaring they are the true upholders of ‘parliamentary democracy’ this public meltdown has exposed the corruption and degeneration of the entire bourgeois order of society.
Parliamentary democracy has been exposed before the working class as nothing more than a bunch of privileged old Etonian wide-boys, along with a rabble of chancers all looking for cushy second jobs and throwing hissy fits when they don’t get promoted to the House of Lords as a reward for slavish loyalty to their leader.
While the government is collapsing by the day, it is insisting workers and the middle class must accept even more pain through further increases in the interest rates – increases that will drive up the cost-of-living even further while telling workers they must accept miserable pay increases as the price to pay for ‘saving’ British capitalism.
No gain without pain is the policy of Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, with all the pain heaped on workers and the middle classes while all the gain is for the bosses and bankers.
In his speech dismissing Parliament in 1653 the great bourgeois revolutionary Oliver Cromwell said: ‘It is time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.’
Cromwell concluded his speech telling the old feudal parliament: ‘In the name of God, go!’
Now the working class must take up Cromwell’s demand by instructing the TUC to call an immediate, indefinite general strike to bring down this rabble of a Tory government and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
If the TUC leaders refuse, then workers must force a special conference to sack those who won’t fight and replace them with a revolutionary leadership prepared to put the Tories and bankrupt capitalism out of its misery with the victory of the socialist revolution.
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