THE TRADE union leaders and the Labour Party are currently cementing their role as the most enthusiastic would-be partners of the Tory government and the bosses. The battle cry is ‘let’s just put our differences aside in this time of crisis and work together.’
Asked yesterday about the Tories’ ‘help for self-employed people’ on the Today programme, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell gushed: ‘We have been lobbying for about four weeks.
‘But I have to say, that we need to congratulate the people who have done the real work on this which is the trade unions and the Federation of Small Businesses, so well done for them for getting this. But I am really relieved. There are gaps and we shall work with the government to overcome that …
‘I am relieved. I am relieved. Look, I am trying to work with the government. Now is not the time to be churlish or carping.’
However, this idyll received a body blow yesterday. With the news that PM Johnson is a victim of coronavirus. The Tory regime is now in a big crisis!
The old May-Cameron leadership is smashed and a new leadership struggle is set to erupt as to who is to succeed the ill Johnson, now in self-isolation and only able to put forward his position through video links.
Even before the news of the leader’s illness, the state broadcasting service, the BBC, had to stress that Dominic Raab was Johnson’s deputy, and that Home Secretary Priti Patel, who had her own column in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, had been overruled and slapped down by Dominic Raab when she urged that all flights from coronavirus ‘hot spot’ areas to Heathrow should be banned.
Home Secretary Patel believes flights from virus hotspots should not be allowed when the country is on lockdown to prevent its spread, reported The Daily Telegraph.
Patel also believed that she had the support of the majority of the cabinet for her position and was prepared to demand a vote in the cabinet on the issue before she was slapped down.
Now Johnson is in isolation, while Patel, who will have a huge role in organising and directing the state forces to carry out the new emergency laws, will have considerable power in her hands, to put the state and the state forces in charge of the country, at the expense of the working class.
Patel declared in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, ‘The role of the police is crucial, and we all need to help – starting with the government.
‘That is why we have given them new powers to enforce the emergency rules that we have put in place.’
She added: ‘They will now be able to break up prohibited gatherings, tell people to go home, and issue fixed penalty notices for those breaking the rules – with unlimited fines for those who refuse to pay.’
She added: ‘And I have asked the Security Industry Authority to explore what more they can do to encourage private security workers to support the national response.’
To repay this security assistance, Patel said: ‘In return, I will do everything in my power to protect and support them, and I am asking the British people to do the same.’
Patel, a key supporter of Israel, who has visited the hospitals where the Israeli army treats anti-Syrian terrorists on the Golan Heights, wants to treat the working class in the UK in the same way that Palestinians are treated in the occupied territories!
This is what her pledge to support the state forces, both publicly organised and and private, means.
The Johnson government is proposing to borrow trillions of pounds from the banks to try and maintain British capitalism as the capitalist system goes into a massive crisis.
Everybody knows that even if they manage it, the crunch will come when they force the working class to spend the next two decades under super-austerity to pay back the bankers the trillions they have loaned.
There is only one way forward and this is for the trade unions to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government to expropriate the bankers and bosses and go forward to socialism. Only the WRP fights for this policy. Join it today!