WITH the North Shropshire by-election looming on Thursday, just two days after the vote in Parliament on Boris Johnson’s Plan B to try and restrain the fast-moving and fast-developing Omicron Covid-19 variant, both the Tory Party and the Labour opposition are in their biggest crisis since the Second World War.
Leading scientists are warning that a failure to impose tougher restrictions will see tens of thousands of deaths.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine are predicting that a failure to act could lead to a further 25,000 to 75,000 deaths in the next five months.
Their worst case scenario is that there could be up to 492,000 hospital admissions and 24,700 deaths by the end of April.
On Tuesday, PM Johnson is to put his plan B to a House of Commons vote, and will be relying on Labour to vote for his plan and see it through.
To date, 65 Tory MPs who think that business has already been over-interfered with, are going to vote against the government, so PM Johnson will be relying on the Starmer-led Labour Party to see him through, and defeat the Tory ultras.
Two days later on Thursday, there is the North Shropshire by-election.
A large number of Tory MPs are now hoping that the Lib Dems will defeat their own Tory Party candidate, after which they will be sending a letter to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, for a no confidence vote in PM Johnson to force his resignation and a new Tory leadership election.
Labour’s attitude to Johnson was made clear on Friday when Starmer was asked by the BBC: ‘Respectfully the question is: “Do you personally think that he should resign?” Starmer replied: ‘Look, I don’t think that he is fit for office, do I think that Boris Johnson will resign?
‘No I don’t think so, because I don’t think that he is fit for office, therefore I think his party has to ask some questions here. But look, we have got lie after lie, dishonesty after dishonesty, we have got a Prime Minister who says there wasn’t a party, now he is investigating a party he said didn’t exist.
‘We have got the Cabinet Secretary investigating whether a party happened in the Prime Minister’s own building.
‘He could end that investigation now by admitting that it happened and get the Cabinet Secretary back to doing the work of the government.’
Starmer says: ‘Johnson is not fit for office,’ but refuses to lead a national campaign to get him out.
In fact, he would rather allow the Tories to change horses in mid-stream, to continue the current effort to resolve the crisis at the expense of working people.
It has been clear from the start of the Covid-19 crisis that the Tories were much more interested in keeping business profitable than defending the NHS or the interests of the working class.
Starmer would rather that Johnson be replaced by someone like Truss, who he would join in a National Government to make the working class pay for the crisis rather than take action to bring the Tories down. He is helping the Tories by refusing to mobilise the working class to get rid of Johnson and the Tory government.
However, as the scientists are telling us, hundreds of thousands of lives are now in the balance. All the bosses and Starmer are concerned with is the capitalist system making billions in profits for the bankers and the monopolists.
The trade unions must now step forward to wage the struggle that former State Prosecutor Starmer refuses to wage.
The trade unions, with their millions of members must move forward to prosecute the struggle. They must tell Johnson that they will not allow up to 100,000 more deaths to keep capitalism going.
There must be an emergency recall of the TUC Congress to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government. This will nationalise the banks and the major industries, to create the conditions for stamping out Covid-19 as they have done in China, and then go forward to socialism.
