THE HARTLEPOOL by-election result and the council by-election results mean that Starmer and Labour’s right wing must be dumped by the trade unions at once.
Starmer has spent the best part of a year agreeing with PM Johnson, offering time and time again to work with the Tories during the pandemic, voting with them, or abstaining to allow Tory policy through.
Johnson’s government has presided over 151,533 coronavirus deaths, massive scandals over Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) contracts, cronyism and sleaze. The Tories did not prepare for a pandemic crisis despite the Cygnus warning before the pandemic. They were taken by surprise.
There was no PPE, infected patients were transferred to care homes, where thousands of the elderly were allowed needlessly to die, and when, in a show of action, seven super Nightingale Hospitals were built, they were shut down and never used since all the NHS staff that would have worked in them had been sacked. All that money was wasted.
The impact of Covid-19 was to obliterate the bourgeois economy and the working-class was plunged into abject poverty. ‘Fire and rehire’ has become rife – bosses are given the green light to force the workforce onto inferior contracts or face the sack.
Foodbanks, starving children, millions of unemployed, mass debt, evictions and homelessness are now the norm.
The bankrupt Starmer’s reponse to this crisis has been to launch a national campaign that Johnson did not pay for the wallpaper in his Downing Street flat – not a burning issue for the working class!
His refusal to champion the millions of people that were destroyed by the crisis and to take Johnson to task for the massive debt that the Tories dumped onto the people has led directly to the Hartlepool disaster for Labour.
Conservative candidate Jill Mortimer won the seat by almost 7,000 votes and a swing from Labour of 16%. Shadow Labour minister Steve Reed said the result is ‘absolutely shattering’. These results must be used to shatter Labour’s right wing.
To rub salt into the wound, the Tories have also won control of councils in Northumberland, Harlow, Redditch, Dudley and Nuneaton & Bedworth.
On the eve of the election, Starmer said he will take ‘full responsibility’ for Labour’s results. The Labour Party is now heading towards a split. His campaign to stay in the EU, and to dump Corbyn in favour of tailending Johnson, has led Labour to the brink of extinction.
Starmer however does have support in the TUC! A just-released Unite statement shows that the trade union leaders are now appealing to PM Johnson to end the fire and rehire policy. In fact, the TUC must be forced to end it by calling a general strike!
It is now time for the over six million trade unionists in the UK to move into action to demand and force through the trade unions that Starmer be sacked, that the unions nominate a new leader for the Labour Party who must stand up and support a general strike to smash the fire and rehire policy. There must be a workers government that will resolve the crisis of capitalism by expropriating the bosses and bring in a nationalised and planned socialist economy to provide jobs and a future for every worker, young and old.
In fact, a new leadership must be rapidly built up to mobilise the working class to put an end to bankrupt UK capitalism with a socialist revolution.
This means building up the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Young Socialists into mass organisations that give daily revolutionary leadership to the working class to mobilise it for a socialist revolution.
Such a revolutionary movement will spread worldwide with the crisis of capitalism intensifying and creating huge political crises in France, Germany, Greece and a host of other European states as well as in the United States.
Labour has been told in no uncertain terms by millions of workers that Starmer must go at once. The trade unions must now dump all those leaders that want to have a corporatist relationship with Johnson.
Now is the time to build the revolutionary leadership and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide. Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
