IT was almost exactly one year ago that the then Tory prime minister Liz Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng delivered a mini-budget that promised to turbo charge economic growth and drive crumbling British capitalism into a bright new future.
The way to achieve this miracle was simple – massive tax cuts for the rich paid for by a massive increase in public debt.
International financiers took one look at Truss’s mini-budget and promptly dumped sterling, causing the pound to collapse and forcing the Bank of England to embark on a huge round of buying up UK bonds to prevent the UK from going bust.
This disaster spelt the end for Truss and Kwarteng, and she was ousted as prime minister after only 45 days in the job.
That should have been the end of Truss politically but now she is back unapologetically defending her disastrous mini-budget in a speech delivered yesterday to the Institute for Government think tank.
Denying any blame for crashing the pound and contributing to the continuing dive into bankruptcy by British capitalism Truss was eager to put the blame on the existing political and economic ‘consensus’.
She said: ‘Some say this is a crisis of capitalism – that free markets are responsible. But that’s not borne out by the facts. Quite the opposite is true. The fact is that since the Labour government was elected in 1997 we have moved towards being a more corporatist social democracy in Britain than we were in the 1980s and 1990s.’
What Truss is calling for is a return to the days of Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, the days when all regulations that constrained the ability of the ‘free markets’ to gouge profits out of workers were abolished, and Thatcher organised the capitalist state in an attempt to smash the trade unions in the year-long miners’ strike.
Truss expresses her hatred of the welfare state with its NHS and all the other social provisions that are paid for out of taxes demanding instead that the rich be allowed to keep all their money while benefits and workers’ wages are cut.
While Truss was consigned to the political wilderness after she tanked the economy – forced out by the very same ‘free market’ finance capitalists she now wants to unleash on the working class – she is now gaining support in the Tory party and the Tory supporting press.
On the eve of her speech, the Daily Telegraph carried an editorial headed: ‘Tories must not be the party of the big state – the UK must return to a free market capitalist economy and this means tax cuts.’
Truss has launched an assault on Rishi Sunak blaming him for not being strong enough to carry out her tax cutting rescue plan.
She joins an increasingly vicious campaign within a collapsing Tory party over what ‘new’ party they believe must emerge from the ashes of the old.
They want a new party that will smash the ‘liberal’ establishment blamed for holding back the true potential of British capitalism along with all those ‘lefty’ lawyers and judges who obstruct the Tories by insisting on the rule of law.
Above all, they want a new party prepared to bring in a dictatorship over the working class, going much further than all previous anti strike laws by declaring all strikes and trade unions illegal.
While Truss and others are plotting for the ‘new party’ the capitalist class are looking towards a coalition government for salvation.
A recent survey by the Bloomberg finance company found that two thirds of investors and international money market traders believe that either a Labour-led government or, even better, a Labour-led coalition would be the most ‘market friendly outcome’ at the next general election.
With the old Tory party facing extinction and the Starmer-led Labour Party completely in the thrall of the bosses, capitalism is relying on a Labour-led coalition to step in and carry out the war on workers that the bosses and bankers are demanding.
The working class has the power to put an end to all these preparations for new parties and coalitions by forcing the TUC to declare a general strike to bring down the Tories, and bar the way to a reactionary coalition by going forward to a workers’ government and socialism. There is no other way forward.
