THE KNIVES are out for Tory prime minister Boris Johnson after his disastrous performance over sleaze, U-turns over social care and now his bizarre speech to bosses’ organisation the CBI on Monday.
Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph reported that Tory MPs, including a government whip, had told the paper that letters of no confidence in Johnson had already been submitted to the influential Tory backbench 1922 Committee. If 15% of the party’s MPs send in no confidence letters, then it automatically triggers a leadership contest.
The increasing move to dump Johnson is a reflection of panic engulfing the UK’s leading bosses and industrialists towards him.
They wanted to hear Johnson pledging on Monday to cut taxes to industry and companies to drive up profits, and paying for this by cutting back government spending on public services, the NHS, social care and benefits – with City tycoon Michael Spencer spelling it out that ‘economic growth’ can’t be achieved ‘with a high tax, high spend economy’.
What the bosses are demanding is a savage austerity war against the working class, not Johnson telling them he wanted to live in Peppa Pig World.
The capitalist class is fast losing any faith in Johnson’s government being up to the job of dumping the historic crisis of British capitalism on the backs of the working class. The depth of this crisis was underlined in the financial pages of the bourgeois press yesterday.
An article in the Telegraph by Jeremy Warner, leading financial economics and business commentator, revealed the fears stalking the world capitalist financial markets, where stock markets across the globe are soaring to their highest levels at a time when the economies of the US, Britain and Europe are crashing into recession.
Warner quotes David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs (the US multinational investment bank), saying that amongst investors ‘greed is outpacing fear’ in the world financial markets and that such periods of exuberance are usually ‘not long-lived’– while Bill Gross, another international player on the world stock markets, accused investors of living in a ‘dreamland’ caused by central banks’ never ending money printing.
These masters of the capitalist financial world are recognising that the trillions of dollars, pounds and euros of worthless paper money pumped out by central banks, under their Quantitative Easing (QE) programmes, continuously since 2009 to try and prop up a bankrupt capitalist system, has created a huge and unsustainable inflationary bubble on the stock markets.
Capitalism is caught in a deadly trap – if the central banks attempt to rein in QE or push up interest rates, all the countries, banks, and companies that have survived through cheap debt will collapse overnight.
This fear was expressed in a speech on Monday by Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England who first introduced QE as a ‘temporary’ measure in 2009. King said that any further central bank money printing had become ‘unsustainable’ but the outcome of cutting off QE ‘at a time of large budget deficits is self-evident.’
What is self-evident is that if interest rates go up and the Bank is forced to end money printing British capitalism will become bankrupt, unable to pay even the interest of its massive national debt and unable to finance any government spending.
It is this crisis that is tearing British capitalism apart politically and economically.
With no way out, a crash is coming and the burning issue for the ruling class is that this Tory government is too weak to inflict this crisis on the backs of a powerful working class that is rising up over inflation and wage cutting, refusing to be driven into poverty to protect the profits of the bosses and bankers.
For the working class, the only way forward is to put an end to this bankrupt capitalist system by demanding that the trade unions use their great strength to take action to defend workers from the catastrophic effects of capitalist crisis by calling a general strike to kick out this weak Tory government and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
Only the WRP fights for this policy – join today, there is not a moment to lose.