TORY Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, resigned his cabinet post on Wednesday, admitting that his behaviour had ‘fallen below the high standards required’ of a minister.
Speculation is now rife that Fallon was given the shove by May to head off even more damaging revelations than the ‘knee touching’ episode that he has admitted to. But Fallon is only the tip of a very big iceberg of scandal and sleaze surrounding anything from 30 to 40 Tory MPs including, it is alleged, some of May’s closest advisors.
Fallon himself was no minor figure in the Tory government but a man credited as being May’s stable rock on which she rested. What is clear is that the Tory government is being hit from all sides and is at war with itself, with the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, saying on the BBC that the ‘dam has broken’ on Westminster sleaze, and that it is time to ‘clean out the stables’.
Even the ever-faithful bourgeois press have turned on the Tories, asking how long May can survive. It is not just the latest sleaze scandal but in the past two months the Tories have been defeated in four votes in Parliament – on the question of tuition fees, nurses pay, Universal Credit roll-out and on the release of documents on the impact of Brexit.
Any one defeat should have led to an outcry from the Labour Party leadership for the government to resign, and for the stables to be cleansed of this weak, hated Tory government. However, there has been no call for the Tories to go from the leadership of the Labour Party; there has been no mass campaign to kick them out and no demand for an immediate general election.
On the contrary it is now evident that the Labour leadership, along with the general council of the TUC, have another agenda. Their priority is not kicking out the Tories but subverting and derailing Brexit by entering into a reactionary conspiracy with Tory MPs desperate to remain in the capitalist EU.
This was revealed by TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, in her lecture on Tuesday at the London School of Economics where she called for May to enter into a national government to sabotage Brexit.
O’Grady boasted in her lecture that despite differences of opinion with the Labour Party, ‘Labour has now adopted a very similar position on transition’ to the TUC general council. That position being to stay within the single market and therefore the EU at all costs and to hell with the Referendum vote to leave.
The way to achieve this was spelt out by O’Grady when she said: ‘Instead of pretending that the Conservatives are capable of uniting the UK’s interests, the Prime Minister should bring together a negotiating team that genuinely represents all of the country. Let’s call it Team UK. Cross party. Business and unions.’
O’Grady is proposing a government of national salvation to rescue a bankrupt British capitalist system.This fits in with the determination of Corbyn and the Labour Party to avoid being elected and therefore having to deal with the economic crisis facing British capitalism for which they have no answers.
Instead, they hope to hide behind a reactionary coalition type of government that will carry out the most vicious attacks on workers in order to bail-out the bankers and bosses and keep the working class in the grip of European capitalism.
Corbyn knows full well that if a Labour government on its own carries out such attacks it will lead to an explosion within the working class that will sink the Labour Party and open the door to socialist revolution.
A reactionary coalition government is seen by these reformist traitors as the only hope to avoid revolution by moving to a new form of rule where they collaborate with the capitalist class and perform the role of policing their own members.
Workers must demand that the TUC general council and O’Grady be removed and replaced by a leadership that will cleanse the stinking ‘stables’ by organising a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government that will immediately break with the EU, expropriate the bosses and bankers and advance to socialism.
