TORY prime minister Boris Johnson was interviewed yesterday on ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme and announced that there will be no attempt to increase benefits, as this would just increase inflation.
When confronted by interviewer Susanna Reid about the plight of a pensioner, Elsie, who is so poor that she spends the day on buses using her freedom pass to avoid heating her home, Johnson could only whine that as Lord Mayor he was responsible for introducing the freedom pass that allowed Elsie the luxury of endless bus journeys.
In fact, as was soon pointed out, even this was a lie – Johnson was not responsible for introducing freedom passes in London.
After being skewered on the poverty effect on one pensioner, Johnson then proceeded to state his opposition to any increase in benefits for people facing poverty and hunger as a result of spiralling inflation driving the cost of living through the roof.
While he admitted that all the so-called ‘support’ to tackle the cost of living crisis through reductions in council tax bills is completely inadequate, he insisted that helping people with the cost of living crisis by increasing benefits would only increase the ‘inflationary spiral’.
The Tories had to be ‘prudent’ over increases in benefits and all social spending in order to ‘have a strong economy’ where interest rates are low. Trying to keep interest rates down is crucial for the capitalist class.
The Tories have run up a gigantic £2.3 trillion national debt bailing out British capitalism, while companies and industries throughout the country are only surviving thanks to loans on which they can barely afford repayments – thanks to near zero interest rates.
Pensioners and the working poor on benefits must suffer, while the wages of workers are held down below inflation in order to hold back bankruptcy for the bosses and this Tory government.
On the same day he announced no help for pensioners and workers, Johnson unveiled an extra £300 million in aid to the Ukrainian military.
Millions of pounds for the imperialist war for regime change in Russia are to be paid for by driving the working class into the ground at home.
If Johnson is deluded enough to think that his interview will bolster Tory chances in this week’s local elections, he has badly underestimated the contempt and hatred that the working and middle class hold him and the government in.
A survey this week has predicted that the Tories are on track to lose nearly 550 seats – including their flagship councils in Wandsworth and Westminster.
The Tories are in a state of meltdown, preparing to dump Johnson to try to save their skins by turning to a new leader who will be presented as a break from the discredited and humiliated Johnson.
A leader even further to the right than Johnson is to whip up the war frenzy, and demand from workers the most extreme sacrifices for the ‘greater good’ of British capitalism and the imperialist drive to reconquer the world.
Foreign secretary Liz Truss has been assiduously promoting herself as just a war leader that the capitalist state requires, last week declaring (without the consent of Parliament) war on Russia and threatening China.
Foreign policy is always an extension of domestic policy – Truss’s war aims cannot be realised without a war at home to make workers pay the cost.
At the May Day rally in London, TUC deputy general secretary Paul Nowak called on workers to ‘join us at our national march and rally on 18th June,’ making it clear that, as far as the TUC is concerned, this march will be about ‘influencing’ the government.
Johnson’s interview and the move towards an even more right-wing prime minister, prove that demands for the Tories to help workers are not just delusional but downright treacherous.
There is only one way to influence the Tories and that is by kicking them out. The march and rally on 18th June must be the start of a general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
Only the WRP fights for this policy – join today, there is no time to lose.
