TORY leader Kemi Badenoch has written to Keir Starmer and six other potential contenders in the race to replace him, offering to help out increasing defence spending by slashing benefits and pensions.
The letter was sent out to Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Al Carns, Catherine West, Darren Jones and Ed Miliband.
Carns was included in this list owing to the fact that he stormed out of his job last week as Labour’s armed forces minister along with his boss John Healey over the demands by the UK military for more spending on defence.
Carns, a former Royal Marine colonel nicknamed ‘Action Man’ by MPs, on Friday indicated in an interview on LBC radio that he was prepared to stand against Starmer.
Clearly, Carns is being groomed as a potential leader in the reactionary coalition Badenoch is calling for in her letter.
The letter itself proposed the Tories working with the current or any successive Labour government ‘in the national interest’ to defend the country from the threat of invasion by Russia being hysterically promoted in the bourgeois press and repeated enthusiastically by both Labour and Tory leaders.
She wrote: ‘Since the Parliamentary defeat of your modest attempt at welfare reform in the summer of last year, it is obvious that your left-wing MPs will not support any real attempt to cut the welfare bills.’
Badenoch continued that, faced with the impossibility of driving savage cuts through Parliament despite an overwhelming majority: ‘Therefore, the support of the Conservatives will be critical to delivering substantive reforms that will reduce the benefits bill.’
Badenoch refers to previous proposals she made offering to ‘work with’ the Labour government to push through slashing the welfare budget.
Last September, Badenoch proposed a cross-party committee of Labour ministers and their Tory counterparts to agree plans to make savage austerity cuts ‘in the national interest’.
She made this offer for the Tories to rescue Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves in the aftermath of the humiliating retreat forced on Starmer by the rebellion of Labour MPs over plans to cut benefits for the disabled.
Last year, the focus of the Tories and Starmer was on demanding massive austerity cuts to welfare and benefits in an attempt to cut back the massive national debt of around £3 trillion.
Starmer’s ministers dismissed Badenoch’s offer of support in cutting welfare, as opposed to increasing taxes, but the fact remains that the drive for a coalition with the Tories to inflict massive economic pain on the working class has increased dramatically.
Today, the latest crisis engulfing the Starmer government is focused on defence spending, with the Tories and the capitalist press increasingly ramping up the threat of war and demanding billions in increased spending for a war against Russia and any other country designated as a ‘threat’ to the security of the British capitalist state.
Starmer’s Labour government proved too weak to carry through the ‘modest’ cuts demanded by the capitalist class and now faces being torn apart over the refusal of the working class to submit to the destruction of all the gains of the Welfare State in order to keep UK capitalism from crashing into bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the Tories have been shattered politically, and the ruling class are seeking to impose a new form of rule capable of dealing with an insurgent working class.
The capitalist class are increasingly turning towards some form of coalition government, containing the right-wing Labourites like Carns along with Tories and Farage’s Reform party, to ‘save’ bankrupt capitalism at the expense of workers and youth.
The only way forward is for the working class to intervene and mobilise its strength to resolve this crisis by demanding that the TUC end its shameful silence and inactivity over the development towards a reactionary coalition.
The TUC must be forced to immediately call a general strike to bring down the collapsing Labour government and block any attempt to install a right-wing coalition or government for the national salvation of capitalism, bringing in a workers government and socialism.
This is the only way forward.
