THE Tory party was delivered shattering blows on the eve of its conference when Tory MP Mark Reckless stepped out onto the platform of the UKIP conference to announce that he was leaving the party, joining UKIP and forcing another by-election on the coalition.
Reckless becomes the second Tory MP to jump ship after Douglas Carswell came out of the closet last month to join UKIP, triggering a by-election in his Essex constituency – a seat he is predicted to hold – while UKIP leader Farage is boasting that up to eleven more Tory MPs are up for resigning from the party.
Just hours after the Reckless bombshell, another Tory minister, Brooks Newmark, was forced to resign, this time over revelations in a Sunday newspaper concerning his involvement in a sex scandal.
These two devastating blows to the Tory party came at a time when Cameron was congratulating himself on managing to survive being thrown out of the leadership over the Scottish independence vote and for having avoided another defeat in the House of Commons over going to war in Iraq and Syria last Friday.
On both occasions, he owes a great debt to the treachery of the Labour Party leadership who rode to his rescue.
In Scotland, Gordon Brown was drafted in at the last moment to head off the hatred of the Tories expressed in the Yes vote in the former Labour strongholds like Glasgow and Dundee, while on Friday, Miliband lined up to throw his full support behind Cameron and the bombing campaign – a campaign which Cameron made clear in his speech he was prepared to extend to Syria without coming back for another vote.
Far from operating from any position of strength, Cameron presides over a Tory party that is split from head to toe and mired in sleaze; a crisis that can only deepen if Carswell beats the official Tory candidate in October’s by-election, prompting a whole host of Tory MPs to seek political survival by jumping the sinking ship.
The root cause of this crisis tearing them apart lies in the very sharp nature of the world crisis and its impact on the weak British capitalist economy.
Faced with a massive and unrepayable national debt, the Tories are driven to declare permanent war through austerity on the working class at home.
This was made clear at the very outset of the conference, where Osborne outlined a host of welfare cuts, including stopping all benefits to young people out of work for more than six months.
At the same time as this permanent war on workers and youth, Cameron last Friday made it clear that the war against the people of the Middle East would also be permanent, saying the war in Iraq and Syria would be a ‘long haul’.
Cameron intends that workers will pay both for the massive bank debt and for the imperialist war to dominate the world and its resources through permanent austerity.
There must be action now to bring down the coalition.
The fact that Cameron and the Tories – weak, hopelessly split and universally hated by the working class and youth – are still able to keep going is down solely to the treachery of the leadership of the working class.
It is the refusal of the trade union leaders to take any action to bring down this government that allows Cameron and the coalition to go ahead with their war on two fronts.
Instead of mobilising the working class into action, at every turn they have sought to divert the anger of workers down the blind alley of one-day protest strikes, petitions and marches.
The time has come to put an end to protests and demand that these leaders either lead a real fight by calling an immediate general strike to bring down the government and go forward to a workers government and socialism or themselves be removed and replaced with a new revolutionary leadership.
This is the historic issue facing the working class and youth today.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists are building the revolutionary leadership required – join today.
