THE TORIES have been smashed by two huge by-election defeats, in a couple of their ‘safe’ seats, Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, where their large majorities disappeared overnight, with Labour taking both seats. Now they must be finished off!
The Labour Party saw off a challenge from the Liberal Democrats to make history in Mid Bedfordshire, overcoming a 24,664 Tory majority to win the seat for the first time.
In Tamworth there was a 23.9% swing to Labour from the Tories.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Labour was ‘redrawing the political map’, in fact it is the working class that is doing the redrawing, and it won’t stop at a few parliamentary seats.
In fact, Starmer’s Tory look-alike Labour Party was the beneficiary of the huge hatred for the Tory party in the country because of the way that, under the Tories, hunger, homelessness, union busting, and unemployment are racing forward at record speeds, alongside the undermining of the NHS.
The popular mood is that nothing could be worse than these Tories, so quite correctly they are being dumped by the electors, by the working class and sections of the middle class.
Tory Party chairman Greg Hands said the results were ‘disappointing’ but that the ‘biggest problem was Conservative voters staying at home’.
The largely rural constituency of Mid Bedfordshire has had a Tory MP since 1931 and has never been held by Labour in its century-long history.
The 24,664 Tory majority was the biggest the Labour party had overturned in a by-election since 1945, and Labour’s Alistair Strathern secured a swing of 20.5% to win by 1,192 votes.
Tory chairman Hands said that ‘fury’ among voters over the ‘background’ to the by-elections was partially to blame for the Tory defeats.
Part of the fury was that the Tamworth by-election followed the resignation of former Tory MP Chris Pincher, after he lost his appeal against a proposed suspension from the House of Commons for drunkenly groping two men.
The case and how it was handled triggered the wave of ministerial resignations that brought down Boris Johnson’s government last year.
Labour’s Sarah Edwards, a union organiser for Unite, overturned a Conservative majority of more than 19,600 to win the Staffordshire seat, which has been held by the Tories since 2010.
Calling for a general election, Edwards said voters had ‘sent a clear message to Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives that they have had enough of this failed government, which has crashed the economy and destroyed our public services’.
In fact, the Tory regime has been a disaster for the UK workers and for the working class of the world. It must be given no quarter and be brought down right away by the TUC calling a general strike to bring in a workers government and socialism.
There is not a moment to lose in Britain or abroad, especially in Palestine. In fact, capitalist Britain is under the thumb of Biden’s USA. Biden has just made the case for a ‘smart investment’ of billions of dollars in wartime aid for the Ukraine and Israel.
He added that Hamas and Russia want to annihilate a neighbouring democracy’ that is Israel, and that he would be sending an urgent funding request, expected to be for 105bn dollars to Congress to back Israel’s wars against Hamas.
The Tory Sunak in his trips to the Middle East has made it clear that he is Biden’s man and when Biden says jump further into the Israeli nightmare he will do so.
On Thursday night in Palestine, at least 55 Palestinians were arrested after widespread raids were carried out as the Sunak-Biden policy of supporting the Zionist regime’s slaughter of the Palestinian masses continues.
The UK supports the artillery and air attacks on Gaza that has killed thousands of workers and youth. Sunak supports Biden’s plan to step up Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip! He also covers up the Israeli war crime – the destruction of the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.
Smashing the Tories in the by-elections must just be the start of the matter. It must be followed up by the TUC calling a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government to end the onslaught on Gaza by carrying out socialist policies at home and abroad!
