IN A DAMNING assessment of the Tory government, The Daily Telegraph yesterday declared that: ‘The Tories under Rishi Sunak have shifted further left, and Keir Starmer’s Labour further to the right, making them almost indistinguishable.’
The article, by Allister Heath, gets close to hysteria when he writes: ‘We might as well be living under a government of national failure, a grand coalition of the committed to accelerating our decline and allergic to any kind of inspiring vision.’
The differences between Labour and the Tories, Heath complains, are small and confined to secondary matters of little importance.
He cites Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who recently ditched past Labour commitments on a wealth tax and pledged that a future Labour government would not increase the top rate of income tax – a demand close to the heart of high earners and the bosses – as an example of the ‘Rishification’ of Labour under Starmer.
As for the Tories, Heath laments: ‘The Tories’ leftwards drift continues to shock.’
It will certainly come as a shock to workers and youth who have been on the receiving end of decades of Tory austerity cuts to public services and wages, that have left millions of households struggling to survive as the cost-of-living spirals out of control, to discover that the Tories are now all ‘left wingers’ undermining capitalism from within.
Heath uses a Tory MP, as an example of this infiltration of the Tory government by ‘Marxists’, the case of housing minister Michael Gove who in an interview with the Financial Times on Saturday said he wanted to ‘find a way of extracting what we need for public services from those who operate in a rentier fashion’.
Gove quickly reassured Tory MPs that he was only referring to an additional tax on overseas property owners and not on Tory-loving property speculators in the UK but this explanation hasn’t prevented him from being damned a ‘Marxist’ revolutionary!
The mere mention of the words ‘additional taxation’ brings about apoplexy amongst the ranks of the bosses and bankers, and the thought that taxes should be used to fund services like the NHS is enough send them into a catatonic meltdown. Heath articulates this hatred when he writes: ‘The NHS was a socialist booby trap set up by Clement Attlee, and boy has it worked.’
The booby trap being that as British capitalism continues to dive into recession and inflation, the state cannot afford to fund the NHS, and what is required is not a coalition of ‘national failure’ but a coalition of National Salvation determined to do what is necessary to take on and defeat the working class, and smash all the gains of the past.
The Tories may have pushed through anti-union laws to force strike-breaking and threaten unions with being bankrupted if they don’t cooperate in forcing their members to across picket lines, but the opinion expressed in the article, and dominant amongst the ruling class, is that this Tory government is too weak to carry through the class war against a powerful and militant working class.
Meanwhile, Starmer has led the charge to dump any pretence that the Labour Party retains any socialist ideals through purges of the membership and ‘left’ MPs, along with his pronouncement that Labour is ‘now the party of business’, precisely to position Labour as a willing and enthusiastic partner in a reactionary national coalition government with Tories to rescue British capitalism.
The burning question of the day is what is the TUC and union leadership going to do about this drive to impose a class war coalition on the working class?
The TUC must not be allowed to sit back and just observe the preparation for an all-out war to dump the capitalist crisis onto the backs of workers.
At the TUC Congress next week, delegates must demand that the TUC take action to put an end to all the plots and ruling class conspiracies by calling a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government, replacing bankrupt capitalism with a socialist planned economy.
Join the mass lobby of the TUC on Monday September 11 to demand delegates carry a motion for a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to socialism.
Now is the time when the TUC must be forced to put down a general strike motion at this TUC Congress, and to set up councils of action to run the country during and after the strike with a dictatorship of the proletariat!
