FRESH from sacking Suella Braverman as Home Secretary in the morning, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak turned up on Monday evening to deliver a speech on UK foreign policy to the assembled bankers and business leaders at London’s annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet.
Sunak opened by expressing his pleasure at appointing David Cameron as the new Foreign Secretary – Cameron, the public school-educated spiv who led the Tory government for six years from 2010.
He presided over six years of relentless cuts to public spending, wage freezes that caused the lowest rate of pay increases since the 19th century, and savage austerity to make the working class pay in order to rescue the banks after the capitalist financial crash in 2008.
Cameron is now sitting at the Cabinet table with the brief of driving forward imperialist war against Russia, and smashing the resistance of the Palestinians to the drive by the Israeli Zionist regime to force them from their land and secure the entire oil-rich region for capitalist domination.
Sunak’s speech was devoted entirely to reassuring the assembled bankers and leading capitalists that there would be no let-up in the Tories’ determination to keep up the war to weaken Russia, despite the fact that even the US military are now admitting that the fascist-led Ukrainian regime has failed to defeat Russian forces.
All the sanctions on Russian energy have rebounded on the UK and Europe, driving up the cost of living and forcing over four million children in Britain into acute poverty and deprivation.
None of this got a mention from Sunak, who instead crowed: ‘We’ve gone further than ever to support Ukraine’ and that 20,000 UK troops are on their way to eastern Europe to ‘support stability’ in the region.
Turning to the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza, Sunak boasted of Britain’s total support for the imperialist war aims in the Middle East, as shown by the sending of Royal Navy vessels to the region ‘to deter further escalation’.
The ‘further escalation’ being the stated intention of the Israeli regime to ‘wipe Iran off the face of the earth’ if necessary.
Sunak made the obligatory nod to recognise the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza with a pathetic call for Israel to ‘act within international law’ – but this is inconsequential compared to the imperative of imperialism to completely dominate and exploit the wealth of the Middle East.
Just as the military failure to defeat Russia and weaken the country in preparation for regime change has abjectly failed, so the military action by Hamas has shattered the myth of an all-powerful Israel.
The response of the imperialist nations, led by the US, has been to give the green light to the Israeli regime to slaughter Palestinians. The latest figure of Palestinian deaths in Gaza stands at 11,423 – including at least 4,630 children and 3,130 women.
Hospitals are surrounded by Israeli troops and have been continuously bombed for days, with babies dying in incubators as power is exhausted and the sick are unable to be evacuated. None of this has diminished Sunak’s enthusiasm for UK support.
While Sunak was pledging to the assembled capitalists limitless billions for imperialist war across the globe, he was facing civil war within the Tory Party as the various factions tear at each other’s throats.
Crucially, this weak, collapsing Tory government faces an implacable and powerful enemy in the working class.
Workers have shown that they will not tolerate being driven into poverty by a capitalist system diving into economic recession and collapse, while millions of workers and youth have demonstrated their hatred of the imperialist-backed genocidal slaughter in Gaza.
The time has come to put an end to this Tory government and the capitalist system it serves.
The TUC has called a Special Congress on December 9th to discuss the next step in fighting the Tory anti-strike laws.
This Congress must make the next step a general strike to bring down the Tories, defeat the anti-strike laws and stand with the Palestinians by going forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and give all the material support required for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
