THE TUC trade unions have a duty, and have the power to end the death agony of the Johnson government. Even bankers have remarked that today they have less power than lorry drivers, who if they use their power, can bring capitalism down.
The trade unions must not just stand by and watch the Tories fight it out over what programme and leadership they want to see.
The TUC must be made to take advantage of the class enemy’s weakness by calling a general strike now to bring the country to a halt, and to consign this rotten government to the ‘dustbin of history’, where it has a well-deserved place already reserved for it.
The reality is that PM Johnson, after the EU referendum victory, where his stand to ‘leave’ the EU had the support of millions of workers, has been seeking to ride a dozen horses at the same time, championing ‘levelling up’ sections of the working class at the same time as being the servant of the banks.
For the middle class this meant they they would be levelled down, while the bosses thought that this was lunacy, and not a clever move, and would end in the working class trampling all over the bosses.
In fact, at exactly the same time as the government has taken on enormous furloughing debts, and pledged to spend billions dumping fossil fuels to mitigate climate change – it is now about to be hit with interest rates going up through the roof, while inflation slashes wages, salaries and pensions, alongside a growing mass unemployment.
As well, it is rearming and getting ready for war with Russia and China to maintain capitalism as the dominant social system.
This message is now being spelt out on a daily basis by the US and UK ruling classes. In fact, there has been a major political change in the UK ruling class and their political representative, the Tory Party.
Under the Cameron-Osborne government, China was feted and trade with it boosted to the point of China building nuclear power plants in the UK.
John McDonnell, the left Labour MP brought this to public attention when he tossed a copy of Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ over to the Tory side of Parliament and urged Chancellor Osborne to read it carefully for hints about how to cuddle up to the Chinese ‘comrades’.
At that time, Russian oligarchs were adopting London as their own and Osborne even sought to get a big donation for the Tories from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, so close were the two.
Today, the situation has completely changed. Russia and China are being depicted as the enemy, endangering the existence of the human race, and many Tories are now saying that war with Russia and China is inevitable and must be be prepared for.
Ahead of Johnson’s apology on Wednesday, Tobias Ellwood, MP for Bournemouth East and one-time defence minister, said Johnson needed to ‘show some contrition’ and get a grip of the situation – or he would be ‘out of office’.
Another former minister told the BBC: ‘Johnson is toast … if you were the chief whip looking at him you’d say he’s not fit to do any other jobs in government, you wouldn’t make him a junior minister, he doesn’t work hard enough.’
And a senior Tory MP said ‘there is a lot of scepticism around that there isn’t anyone ready to take the reins. That buys Boris time. But he shouldn’t confuse that with another chance.’
The issue of the hour is that capitalism is facing the greatest crisis in its history and the ruling class considers that Johnson is too lightweight to be able to defend the system.
Now his opponents are demanding that the number one Tory concern has to be the economy, everything else is secondary including the Covid crisis which they say UK workers will have to be made to live with.
In this crisis situation the powerful trade unions have an absolutely crucial role to play. It cannot be just to observe the crisis in the Tory Party and just hope it gets worse. This is the road to another National Government led no doubt by Starmer and Johnson.
The trade unions must demand a recall TUC Congress to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
Such an example will spread all over the capitalist world from Berlin to Washington, and will see the working class of the world putting an end to capitalism and going forward to world socialism.
