THE MELTDOWN in the Tory vote in last Thursday’s local elections has sent a massive wave of despair throughout Tory MPs and the Tory-supporting press, with The Daily Telegraph editorial yesterday headlining: ‘Local results spell disaster for Tories’ and proclaiming that the Tories ‘urgently need a new narrative to win voters’.
It went on to comment: ‘The complaint most heard from defeated councillors in the local elections was that no one knew what the Party stands for.’
In fact, millions of workers and middle class people knew exactly what the Tory party stands for, and rejected it at the ballot box.
Prior to the election, Tory ministers had tried to manage ‘expectations’ by predicting up to 1,000 lost seats in the belief that losses would be much lower and could therefore be portrayed as a victory.
In the event, they lost 1,061 seats and control of around 50 local authorities.
However, these results didn’t show any massive turnout in the Labour vote, despite all the boasting by Labour leader Keir Starmer that he was ‘on course’ for an outright victory in a general election.
The truth is that the Labour vote remained at previous levels while the Tory vote collapsed with the LibDems picking up the votes of disaffected ex-Tory voters.
Millions of workers not only knew what the Tories stand for but also what the Labour Party under Starmer stands for – namely supporting every attack by the Tories on the working class to the point of banning Labour MPs from standing on picket lines.
The only solidarity Starmer is interested in, is solidarity with the bosses and bankers, and the way Starmer intends to carry out this reactionary solidarity with capitalism is through a coalition with the LibDems.
Election experts Colin Railings and Michael Thrasher said the results indicated a seven-point lead for Labour ‘still short of a majority’ in Parliament.
The prospect of a coalition between Labour and the LibDems is now being widely reported in the media since last week’s election.
At the weekend, Labour shadow minister for health Wes Streeting refused to rule out a coalition government with the LibDems.
Streeting ducked the question while saying that the LibDems success was ‘a path to Labour victory’ but that Labour was ‘not even entertaining’ the idea of a coalition at this stage.
On the contrary, Starmer has spent all his time as Labour leader preparing the ground for a coalition to ‘save’ British capitalism.
He has devoted his energies to reassuring the capitalist class that under him Labour is now the ‘party of business’ cleansed of any remnants of the left wing.
On Saturday, he went to the length of pledging his undying loyalty to the British monarchy in a nauseating article in the Telegraph that hailed Charles III as the saviour who could lead the country to a new future.
The role of the monarchy will be to claim the loyalty of sections of the middle class while a reactionary coalition government gets on with the job of driving the working class and lower middle class into the gutter of poverty as British capitalism dives headlong into recession.
This Thursday, the Bank of England meets to determine the latest round of interest rate increases with experts predicting the rate will rise to 4.5%.
This will drive up the cost of borrowing, driving up the cost-of-living and sending repayment of loans and mortgages even higher.
Far from curbing inflation, the interest rate increases are being used by the central bank to force workers to spend less in the belief that workers spending money on food, energy and housing is the root cause of inflation.
With the hated Tories in no position to carry out this onslaught on the working class, capitalism is relying on a Labour/LibDem coalition to step in and spearhead this class war.
The working class must demand that the trade unions take immediate action to put an end to these preparations for a reactionary coalition by recalling the TUC Congress and declaring a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
This is the only way forward.
