ONLY 15 Labour MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn, were prepared last Tuesday to vote against the Tories to bring the Johnson government down!
The vote on new measures to replace the national lockdown was crucial for Boris Johnson’s government, and ‘Labour leader’ Starmer refused to vote to bring the Johnson government down.
Johnson faced a massive revolt amongst Tory MPs with 55 of them voting against his coronavirus regulations and a further 16 abstaining. If Labour MPs had voted against Johnson’s proposals he would have been defeated and this would have opened the way for the entire Tory government to crumble and disintegrate.
The Tories were only kept alive by the treacherous refusal of Labour leader Keir Starmer and the right-wing leadership of the Labour Party to bring him down.
Starmer covered his treachery up with token opposition to Johnson’s proposals saying he was ‘far from convinced by what the prime minister has said today’ before going on to insist that despite reservations ‘We will not stand in the way of these regulations.’
Starmer announced his decision to order Labour MPs to abstain insisting: ‘We will always act in the national interest’ – the national interest being to keep the Tories in power and free to carry on their brutal attacks on the working class. Labour will ‘sit on its hands’ while the Tories inflict pay cuts and mass unemployment on workers and the middle class for the ‘national interest’.
There is no ‘national interest’ – capitalism is split into two main classes, the ruling capitalist class who make their vast profits out of the exploitation of the labour of workers and the working class.
These two classes stand in complete opposition to one another, especially today when the crisis of capitalism demands that the ruling class attempt to survive by making the working class pay.
When Starmer talks of the ‘national interest’ he is defending the interests of the exploiting class against the interests of workers.
The cowardly appeal to drop all opposition in the name of the ‘national interest’ has been used throughout history to justify selling out the working class and subordinating it to the interests of the ruling class.
In Russia in 1917 the fake ‘left’ reformists who dominated the Provisional government used this as an excuse for ‘reluctantly’ supporting Russia’s involvement in the imperialist world war.
They denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for calling for an immediate end to the war as being ‘unpatriotic’. Lenin rejected this with contempt, insisting that there was and never can be a unity of interest between workers and the capitalist class – that the interests of the two classes are in complete and irreconcilable opposition.
This unwavering and intransigent insistence on fighting for the interests of the working class and to hell with the ‘national interest’ won the Bolsheviks the support of the masses and was decisive in the victory of the Russian Revolution in October 1917.
Corbyn and those Labour MPs who defied Starmer are to be saluted for making this stand. Corbyn must now go on the offensive by mobilising the hundreds of thousands of rank and file Labour members who hate Starmer to rise up and kick him and the right wing rabble out of the party.
The Labour Party is not their personal property, it was founded by the trade unions to defend the rights of workers in parliament, not as a prop for the Tories and to act as a passive accomplice to the Tory war on the working class. Immediately the trade unions that finance the party must end all funding until Starmer and the right-wing are driven out.
Kicking away the Labour prop that the Tories rely on will create a massive political crisis for the ruling class and put an end to their plans to bring Labour onboard in a national government to impose savage austerity on workers in the interest of a bankrupt capitalist system.
As in Russia in 1917, this crisis can only be resolved by the working class taking power and establishing a workers government and socialism.
For this, the building of the revolutionary party to take this struggle to victory is decisive. Only the WRP is building the leadership required – join today to organise the British socialist revolution.
