WHEN he defected from the Tory Party to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on Wednesday, MP Robert Jenrick, former Tory shadow justice secretary, launched a savage attack on the Tories as the party that ‘broke Britain’.
He slammed the party as ‘rotten’, ‘dishonest’ and ‘no longer fit for purpose’ at a press conference on Thursday alongside Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, confirming what the British working class already knew after 14 years of Tory rule – from PM Cameron to PM Sunak – before Labour’s landslide election in 2024.
He excoriated the Tories for lacking the ‘backbone’ to make the working class pay for the country’s bankruptcy. In particular he attacked the failures of Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor, for overseeing an ‘explosion of the welfare bill’ and Priti Patel, the shadow Foreign Secretary, for enabling ‘five million migrants to come’ to Britain.
Coming just days after former Tory Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s defection to Reform UK on Monday, Jenrick’s shock departure will raise fears in Tory circles of more defections to come, and strengthen the possibility that Reform, leading in the opinion polls, is now the main political force on the right.
Ex-Tory Jenrick himself was kicked out of the Tory Party after Kemi Badenoch sacked him and kicked him out of the Conservative Party for planning to jump ship and defect.
Founded in the mid-1830s just as British imperialism was about to expand its rule over half the globe, the greatest ever world economic and political crisis is now breaking up the old forms of Tory capitalist rule in the UK and in every country.
Keir Starmer’s capitalist Labour government is also unable to resolve Britain’s debt crisis without smashing up the Welfare State and moving to a severe form of police dictatorship. Already it has cancelled local government elections, started the smashing up of the NHS – proscribing protest groups as terrorists, rolling out facial recognition cameras across the country, abolishing jury trials and destroying the welfare state.
The attack on trial by jury has now been followed by Labour cancelling local government elections due in May. This is widely thought to be a panic reaction to the disastrous losses to Reform UK in the last council elections, when Labour lost a numbers of seats to them.
Labour’s attack on democracy has not gone unnoticed, and has even brought the wrath of the Trump administration in the US where Sarah B Rogers, US state department under-secretary for public diplomacy, wrote on X that the UK government was ‘cancelling local elections, and curbing the right to a jury trial’.
An estimated four million people are set to be denied a vote in May, with the government expected to cancel at least 27 council elections – protecting hundreds of councillors from the risk of being voted out.
PM Starmer stands accused of ‘running scared’ from the electorate, at a time when polls show support for Labour has fallen.
By Thursday’s deadline, a total of 26 councils – 21 of them Labour – had decided to write to the government to ask them to cancel the elections.
The Prime Minister is using an obscure clause in the Local Government Act that gives ministers the power to postpone elections if there are exceptional circumstances.
In fact, PM Starmer’s answer to the crisis is to prepare Britain for war against Russia and China, even calling up 65-year-old reserve soldiers, while providing billions of pounds for Ukraine to continue to wage its proxy war against Russia.
There is no way that the working class will tolerate these attacks by imperialism, as its global support for Palestine and against Trump’s attack on Venezuela show.
In Britain, the working class must now mobilise its powerful trade unions against obsolete capitalism. British capitalism must be overthrown by the working class. The Workers Revolutionary Party must be rapidly built up to lead this historic struggle for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution, overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a workers’ government and a worldwide socialist planned economy.
Workers must demand the recall of the TUC Congress to organise a general strike to take the power. There is no time to lose!
