IN AN interview yesterday morning ex-Tory prime minister John Major stated that he would personally take Boris Johnson to court if he attempts to suspend Parliament before the Brexit deadline of 31 October.
In Tuesday night’s ‘debate’ between the two Tory leadership contenders, frontrunner Boris Johnson pointedly refused to rule out proroguing parliament before that date, a move designed to prevent MPs from voting down any no-deal Brexit.
This refusal by Johnson to categorically rule out closing down parliament drove Major into a frenzy saying:
‘Let’s strip away the jargon of proroguing and contemplate what this actually means. What it means is that a prime minister – Prime Minister Johnson, presumably – because he cannot persuade parliament to agree with his policy, will close down parliament so that he can bypass it until his policy comes into operation.’
Major went on ‘Now, nobody has done that since King Charles I in the 1640s and it didn’t end well for him.’
In 1629, Charles I closed down parliament when it refused to give him the money he demanded to finance his wars. He was opposed to any parliament and believed he ruled through Divine Right.
As Major notes, it didn’t end well for Charles, who was executed by the revolutionary wing of parliamentarians led by Cromwell.
The sight of a former Tory prime minister threatening the next Tory prime minister with being dragged in front of the courts because he wants to carry out the will of the people, against a parliament that won’t, is a measure of the seismic collapse of bourgeois parliamentary democracy in Britain.
Johnson and Major represent two halves of the split amongst the ruling class between those who seek salvation for a decrepit British capitalist system by remaining tied to the collapsing EU and those like Johnson who see the only future as a completely subservient vassal of the US.
The UK would be an American dominion to be plundered and ruthlessly exploited by US corporations.
The ‘resignation’ of the British ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch, drives home the fact that Trump now dictates to the Tory government not only who the next ambassador will be but, as he made clear in his derogatory tweets about Theresa May and her handling of Brexit, he would like to dictate who the next prime minister will be.
The Tories are being given their orders by Trump via tweets! Bourgeois democracy in Britain is not threatened, it is already finished. It has been abolished by a parliament that has for three years done everything possible to overturn the democratic vote to leave the EU, and now it is disintegrating completely.
The one thing that unites the ruling class in Britain is the knowledge that with parliament collapsing the only possible way out for them is to dispense with democracy completely and move to a dictatorship by the state over the working class.
The five large trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party have this week, along with the leadership of the party, aligned themselves with the Remain section of the ruling class by committing to fight to stay in the EU. These leaders have always hated the refusal of millions of workers to obey their instructions to vote to remain in 2016 and they are determined to override that decision.
Now is the time for the working class to assert its independence and use all its strength to intervene decisively to put an end to the political chaos and crisis of capitalism. A month before the 31 October, the TUC meets at its annual conference.
Workers must demand that their unions reverse their support for the EU by calling a general strike to kick out the Tory government and march on parliament and seize the power, ensuring that the working class closes parliament down, not the capitalist state, and advancing to a workers government.
A workers government will leave the EU at once and expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy.
This will provide a massive impetus for the working class of Europe and the US to follow suit and go forward to socialist revolutions in their own countries.
This is the policy of the WRP and we urge every worker and young person to join the WRP and fight for it.
