WHEN The Daily Telegraph headlined on Saturday that ‘Reckless Hancock left care homes to fend for themselves’ the message was clear. It is that Hancock has to go, before his decision to allow untested transfers from NHS hospitals into care homes that cost the lives of over 19,286 care home residents intensifies the Tory crisis to the point where the government is brought down.
In fact the Covid-19 crisis caused over 127,000 deaths nationally as UK capitalism and its government showed that it was completely unprepared for the Covid crisis and absolutely incapable of dealing with it.
Under the May government, the Cygnus Exercise was held which showed that the UK would be incapable of dealing with any such crisis, such was the desperate state of the NHS due to savage and continuing Tory cuts.
In fact, the Tory health minister of the time, Jeremy Hunt, was so shocked by the discussion on how many casualties there would be, he correctly refused to carry on with the exercise to determine how many people would have to be sacrificed if another ‘Ebola’ took root in the UK.
The Tory government ignored the exercise and its warnings and continued as normal.
Thus when Covid struck the NHS did not have enough beds, and staff, so even when the seven giant Nightingale hospitals were built to cope with the hundreds of thousands of infections that were taking place, they had to be closed because NHS redundancies had got rid of the staff who would have manned them.
They were shut down!
There was not enough PPE available and so NHS staff were sent to their deaths bravely treating patients without any protection, while bus workers and rail workers had to take their chances with many deaths amongst them.
Now with the end of the current Covid-19 crisis in sight the government is desperate to reopen.
The bosses however are seeking to make hay while they can, and have embarked on a fierce fire and rehire campaign to slash workers wages as the price for some of them keeping their jobs.
All kinds of inner city shops and offices have been bought up by financial groups that they intend to reopen only on wage-cutting rates.
Meanwhile, inflation is developing internationally as the US administration orders the printing of a trillion new banknotes.
It is being made crystal clear to all workers and youth that the future will be grim unless the working class takes the power and establishes a socialist economy, through the nationalisation of the banks and all of the major industries.
The ruling class is also making its preparations with new anti-demonstration and surveillance laws strengthening its state apparatus of repression.
Like the 1930s the two-party system is fracturing, with even the appearance of ‘men of destiny’ such as Cummings who are challenging the current Tory leadership and demanding more right wing policies to maintain capitalism.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party is lumbered with Starmer, while George Galloway is reduced to standing against Labour in the Batley and Spen by-election, saying that if he defeats the Labour candidate then Starmer must be put out of the Labour leadership.
While we sympathise with Galloway’s intention to stand to overthrow Starmer, more is required.
That more, is that the TUC must not be allowed to stand by and watch the capitalist crisis devour millions of its members’ jobs in the days ahead.
The TUC must be forced by its millions of members to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will deal with the crisis of capitalism by expropriating the bosses and the bankers and bringing in a socialist planned economy that will provide jobs and proper NHS health care for all.
This is the only way to prevent the Tories being replaced by an even more right wing anti-working class regime.
Join the WRP and the Young Socialists today and fight for the victory of the UK socialist revolution. This is the only way forward.
