LIZ Truss appeared outside 10 Downing Street at 1.30pm yesterday to announce that she was resigning following a meeting with the Chairman of the 1922 backbench committee, Graham Brady.
Truss announced that they had agreed there will be a leadership election within the next week and she would remain as Prime Minister until a successor is chosen.
This marks an unprecedented political crisis with Truss admitting she couldn’t carry on as the Tory government descended into open warfare on Wednesday night over a ‘no-confidence’ vote that saw 40 Tory MPs abstaining despite threats of having the whip withdrawn.
The chaotic end of Truss as Prime Minister after just 45 days leaves open the issue of what comes next as Tory MPs fight amongst themselves over how to salvage something – anything – from the wreckage of their government and the deepening crisis of the capitalist system.
They have one week in which to come up with a new leadership capable of taking on and defeating a powerful working class that is already rising up against an inflationary cost of living crisis that is driving millions of workers and their children into extreme food and energy poverty.
Truss was not up to this job and now the race is on to find a successor to head an even more ultra-right Tory government. She had the will but the capitalist class and its state apparatus was not quite ready for the kind of repressions of the working class that will be necessary to rescue British capitalism from its death agony.
This must act as a most serious warning to the TUC and trade union leaders.
If they think that they can sit back and observe the Tory Party tearing itself apart and that this will provide the solution to all their problems, then they had better think again.
The ruling class are in no position to permit any let up in the war against workers and their trade unions.
Truss may have gone but she left behind the Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill that makes trade unions liable to huge fines for loss of profits caused by transport strikes and makes any worker instructed by the bosses to work during a strike liable to immediate dismissal if he or she refuses.
The Tories may have dumped Truss but they are not going to dump this bill. Instead, they are frantically searching for a new leader, and a more ruthless state apparatus to head and police a national government of emergency to carry through this war to make strikes and unions illegal.
Now is not the time for the TUC to merely observe the breakdown of the Tories in the hope that this means an end to the greatest, most vicious austerity onslaught on the working class by a capitalist system that has crashed into recession and is determined to make workers foot the bill.
The TUC must act and not allow the Tories even one week to reorganise for a class war to the finish.
At the annual congress of the TUC this week trade union leaders have spent their time desperately trying to avoid the issue of a general strike, trying at all costs to divert workers with talk of co-ordinated strikes that stay within Tory anti-union laws.
Now under the new Tory bill all strikes will be illegal and every striker will be sacked on the spot while every union will be fined for loss of profits and bankrupted out of existence.
The cowardly retreat from calling a general strike must be stopped immediately.
Workers must demand that since Truss has gone there has never been a better time to kick out the entire Tory government and go forward to a workers government that will nationalise the basic industries and banks placing them under the management of the working class for the building of a socialist planned economy.
Those trade union leaders who refuse to lead the fight for a general strike must be removed and replaced with a new leadership that is prepared to mobilise the massive power of the working class to put an end to the Tories and bankrupt British capitalism.
Only the WRP and its youth section the Young Socialists are building the revolutionary leadership necessary for the working class to take power and consign the Tories and capitalism into the dustbin of history where they belong. Join the WRP and YS today.
