TORY Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Blackpool yesterday to deliver what was billed as his great ‘reset speech’, to shore up his leadership after Monday’s no confidence vote.
Following this vote, where 41% of his own MPs voted to dump him, Johnson has embarked on a series of speeches designed to re-launch his leadership of the Tory party.
The central policy proclaimed by Johnson as a real game changer to win the hearts and minds of the Tory party, was in fact to resurrect the old policy of ‘boosting home ownership’ by granting the right-to-buy to housing association tenants.
Johnson is simply resurrecting a policy from the 2015 Tory manifesto, which sunk without a trace, not least because housing associations threatened legal action at being forced to sell properties, they, not the government, owned.
Apart from that, the idea that housing association tenants, many of them relying on Universal Credit benefits to live, will be able to take on mortgages at a time when the banks are demanding much higher deposits to safeguard their loans from default is ludicrous.
Now, Johnson is proposing that they use benefits to pay for mortgages that the banks will never risk handing out.
This is a mark of the bankruptcy that is tearing Johnson and the Tory government apart and their total meltdown, in the face of an economic crisis that is plunging British capitalism into the worst recession in its history.
At a time when the cost of living is spiralling out of control, when energy prices are soaring with no end in sight, and on the day that petrol prices at the pump in Britain reached a record high of £2 a litre, all Johnson could say was: ‘We have the tools we need to get on top of rising prices. The global headwinds are strong. But our engines are stronger.’
Johnson is completely deluded if he thinks that a bankrupt British capitalist system has any strength to survive a devastating crash, or that the working class will be bought with empty boasts about getting on top of inflation that is driving them into poverty.
The question most uppermost in the minds of the ruling class is: Are the Tories too weak to take on and defeat a working class, that is demonstrating its strength and determination not to accept poverty as the price to keep capitalism from dying?
This has come to a head over the national strike called by the RMT union on the national rail network due to commence on Tuesday June 21 with further stoppages on Thursday June 23 and Saturday June 25.
The entire rail network will be closed in a strike that will bring the country to a standstill, demonstrating that the working class is the strongest class in society – much more powerful than the bankers and bosses.
An editorial in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph spelt out the need for the unions to be smashed but at the same time revealing the fear that the weak and divided Tories are not up to the job of waging a class war and winning.
The editorial concludes that unions using their strength to fight for pay and conditions ‘cannot be allowed to continue’, before going on: ‘The strike is the government’s opportunity to stop it. Will it take it?’
That the Telegraph doubts whether the Tories will take on the RMT, and doesn’t answer its own question says everything about the demoralised state of the ruling class!
Clearly the Telegraph and the ruling class are consumed with doubt over the calibre of the Johnson leadership, and its capacity to take on and defeat the RMT, in a class war that would quickly escalate into an all-out war with the entire trade union movement.
This is now clearly the time for the working class to take on and defeat the bankrupted ruling class. On June 15th the leadership of the trade unions are meeting in Blackpool to discuss proposals for the massive national demonstration called by the TUC in London on Saturday June 18.
At this conference these leaders must decide that June 18th must be the date for a general strike.
There has never been a better time for the trade unions to exercise the power of the working class in a general strike to kick out the Tory government, and put an end to bankrupt capitalism by going forward to a workers government and socialism.