BORIS Johnson’s reaction to the Tory Party’s massive by-election defeats at Tiverton and Honiton and at Wakefield has been to reject the advice and the example of his Tory Party chairman Oliver Dowden who resigned his post.
In a letter to Johnson, Dowden wrote: ‘We cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility and I have concluded that, in these circumstances, it would not be right for me to remain in office.’
Johnson has not only refused to follow Dowden’s example and resign, but when he was asked by reporters if he would like to serve a full second term in office – to 2028 or 2029 he responded: ‘At the moment, I am thinking about the third term and what could happen then, but I will review that when I get to it.’
When asked to comment later by other journalists he responded he was thinking ‘about a third term, mid-2030s’.
In fact, Johnson has no intention of resigning and must be put out of office by the organisation of an indefinite general strike by the TUC trade unions.
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph wrote about Johnson’s plan as soon as he returns to the UK to win back support in ‘Red Wall’ seats by hitting developing countries with ‘safeguard import limits’ designed to protect UK manufacturers from a flood of ‘cheap overseas steel’.
This comes hard on the heels of his failing campaign to defeat the rail trade unions and impose job cuts, mass ticket office closures, safety measure cuts, and mass redundancies.
Johnson fancies himself as a Bonaparte-type figure balancing with one foot on the ruling class and another on collaborationist sections of the trade union bureaucracy who are fearful that foreign competition will undermine ‘their’ trade union positions.
Johnson in fact is now rushing in anti-union laws that will allow bosses to bring in agency workers to break strikes. The measure also contains a quadrupling of fines and penalties for trade unions that are taking part in ‘illegal’ strikes with fines from £250,000 to £1 million.
Johnson’s foreign policy is to try and strengthen world capitalism by spending billions in aid to Ukraine, to try and involve Russia in a never ending war that will weaken it to the point where the Western capitalist powers can decide who will rule Russia for them.
This policy has led to fantastic inflationary rises in food stuff and raw materials prices, leading to a situation where workers in the EU-UK and USA are having their living standards smashed.
In fact, this policy is a vital one for Johnson. It is that higher food prices and higher energy costs to pauperise the UK-EU and US workers are the ‘price of freedom’, that is the freedom of the bosses to attack Russia and plunder the working people of the world.
In fact, Johnson has declared that he would only resign if he lost a general election, or if the West allows the ‘Ukraine to lose the war’. His anti-union policy in the UK, is to make workers pay the full price for the crisis of the capitalist system.
UK workers in their trade unions must take advantage of the crisis of the Johnson regime by bringing it down with a general strike, and by bringing in a workers government and socialism.
The rail struggle is only the first of the major class battles between the UK working class and its ruling class.
Higher food prices and higher energy costs are not the ‘price of freedom’, they are the price that the working class is being made to pay for the continuing rule of the capitalists in the US, the UK and the EU.
The working class must now hit back at the UK bosses and bankers and their Johnson government.
The masses of the working class must force the TUC to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the Johnson government and to expropriate the bosses and bankers through a socialist revolution establishing a workers state where the means of production are owned by the working class.
Society will be organised on the basis of: ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’ Build the WRP and the YS – Forward to the British and world socialist revolution.
