THE ECONOMIC crisis engulfing British capitalism is causing a seismic split in the Tory government, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces a rebellion from his own MPs over plans to increase corporation tax on big business from 19 to 25 per cent in the budget next month.
According to an editorial in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph: ‘The government is finally facing an orchestrated and coordinated challenge to its economic agenda’ as leaders of six Tory backbench groups, along with big business leaders, sent Sunak a letter demanding the proposed increase is scrapped as it would ‘damage’ plans to level up, inhibit investment in the UK and ‘damage economic growth’.
These five Tory MPs represent six groups on the extreme right of the party with a total membership of 150 Tory MPs.
Nearly half of Tory MPs are in open rebellion against Sunak’s government.
The claim that an increase in taxation on the massive profits being run up by giant corporations will damage ‘levelling up’ can be discarded immediately – the bosses have not the slightest interest in levelling up. All they are concerned about is keeping hold of their profits.
There is no economic growth in the UK economy, and all Sunak’s talk of creating a ‘science superpower’ is just wishful thinking from a prime minister whose only policy is to ruthlessly drive down wages and let the working class bear the agony of recession and an inflationary cost of living crisis driving millions of workers to rely on food banks.
The increase in corporation tax was purely a sop to try to convince workers that Sunak was prepared to place some of pain on the broadest backs – that is the massive profits being made out of the crisis by corporations and banks.
Even this sop is too much for the factions who are in the process of ripping the Tories apart. They want the cost of the crisis to fall only on the backs of workers and their families.
Sunak was installed as prime minister after the disastrous, and very short, stint of Liz Truss.
Truss was ousted when the international banks turned on her over the tax cuts she attempted to bring in, tax cuts that were to be funded through a massive increase in government borrowing, pushing up the already gigantic national debt of £2.4 trillion.
It wasn’t the tax cuts for the rich that brought on the wrath of the bankers, but the prospect of yet more debt that threatened to crash the UK even further into bankruptcy.
They orchestrated a run on the pound that forced Truss out and brought in Sunak, the bankers’ man.
But now the Tories are rising up against Sunak, claiming that Truss was right all along, she just didn’t think things through enough, and what Britain needs is lower taxes on the giant corporations paid for by super-austerity cuts in public spending and driving the working class into poverty.
Meanwhile, as the Tories tear each other apart in bitter factional in-fighting, Labour leader Keir Starmer has positioned himself as a true friend of the bosses and a worthy partner in a national government with sections of the Tories to ‘save’ British capitalism.
On Sunday, the Guardian reported that left-wing Labour MPs were living in fear of having the Labour whip withdrawn from them during the purge being carried out by Starmer to dump any MP and bar from selection anyone suspected of harbouring left-wing sympathies or questioning his subservience to capitalism.
This was underlined in a tweet from Labour shadow Northern Ireland secretary Peter Kyle, saying: ‘If you’re anti-Semitic or you don’t agree with support for business … then this isn’t the party for you.’
With the Tory government imploding, and Starmer manoeuvring for inclusion in a national government, the only way forward for the working class is to demand the trade unions act decisively by calling a general strike to bring down the Tories, bar the way to a reactionary national government, and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
