Liz Truss was only installed as Prime Minister little more than 4 weeks ago but yesterday a senior Tory minister, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, was forced to tell the BBC that it would be a ‘disastrously bad idea’ to kick her out.
Millions of workers think this is a great idea, but it shouldn’t be left to Tory MPs to bring her down and organise a replacement – that is the job for the working class to carry out.
Tory MPs are desperately seeking to dump Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng following the economy crashing. This crash came after his mini budget, with its massive £45 billion tax hand outs to the bosses, funded by borrowing an extra £62 billion.
The international money markets, who Kwarteng believed would finance this debt by buying up government bonds, took one look at what he had done and then ran a mile.
They sold off UK bonds, in effect IOUs, in a fire sale driven by the recognition that UK capitalism is in such a crisis that there is no guarantee this debt and the interest on it can be repaid.
The Bank of England (BoE) was forced to step in with an emergency intervention by printing £65 billion to buy up the bonds being dumped by the financiers.
This emergency intervention ends today leaving the Tories to try and sort out preventing the pound from crashing, along with the pensions and savings of millions of workers.
No wonder, Tory MPs are plotting to remove the disastrous Truss administration. No wonder, sections of the ruling class are desperately looking at a different form of rule to take over.
A new form of government must be able to carry out the only solution for capitalism, and that is to make the working class pay the bill for the economic collapse into recession and slump, by forcing workers to accept sacrificing pay, jobs, benefits and all social spending in a massive austerity drive, backed by the power of the capitalist state.
In an indication of the thinking of the ruling class, an article in Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, drew clear comparisons with the crisis today and that which confronted British capitalism in 1931.
There was economic recession, a pound that was collapsing and the solution proposed to the then minority Labour government headed by Ramsay MacDonald was to cut unemployment benefit by 10% along with slashing the wages of all public employees.
To implement these savage cuts MacDonald joined with the Tories and Liberals to lead a National Government insisting that cutting wages and benefits was an ‘historic duty’ to the nation.
Today, Labour leader Keir Starmer, who proudly proclaimed at the Labour Party conference that he put ‘country first and party second’, has positioned himself to be a latter-day MacDonald, prepared to join with Tories in a national government to inflict epic austerity cuts on workers to ‘save’ bankrupt capitalism.
In the 1930s the TUC refused to call a general strike to fight for the working class, restricting themselves to expressions of horror and outrage while doing nothing.
This is not the 1930s,which began just four years after the defeat of the 1926 General Strike. The working class today is not a defeated class that will accept the betrayals of the TUC and labour leadership.
It is a powerful working class that is rising up against a capitalist system that offers only a future of mass unemployment and hunger – it will not be driven back to the ‘hungry thirties’ by a Tory government that is collapsing by the day or submit to a national ‘government of salvation’ for the bosses and bankers, manned by Labour traitors.
The TUC Congress begins next Tuesday, October 18th. We urge thousands of workers and youth to join the picket and lobby called by the WRP and YS to force the TUC to act, and to call an immediate general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
TUC leaders who refuse to call a general strike must be immediately removed and replaced with new leaders who will organise the general strike and are prepared to go forward to a workers’ government that will nationalise the banks and major industries and bring in a planned socialist economy for the benefit of every worker and their families.
Join the lobby of the TUC to demand a general strike now.
