IN NORMAL times a Tory party that had been taken into an ‘unnecessary’ snap election with its leader demanding that the electorate return it with a majority of between 100 and 150 MPs, so that she could become the great dictator, but was then completely rejected by the same electorate which even removed the party’s overall majority, would have responded with its 1922 Committee sacking the leader responsible and imposing or electing another.
The Tory party is noted for its ruthlessness – remember their great heroine, Margaret Thatcher, leaving Downing Street in tears! Mrs May has so far avoided the knife! The reason is that the entire party leadership backed May’s drive for dictatorship, and considered that the Labour leader Corbyn was so weakened by his Blairite right wing, that the Tories could easily get a huge majority, with which to stand up to the EU leaders and make war on the UK workers.
The Tory party as a whole entered the campaign enveloped in an aura of invincibility! It had learnt nothing from the disaster of the 2016 EU referendum, where it was working along the same lines. It is now desperately seeking to avoid the results of their latest, even greater blunder.
Their big mistake was to write off the UK working class as a spent force. May even had the illusion that this time round the Tories were going to win a swathe of what had been safe Labour seats, and concentrated her campaign in the north.
In fact, the working class over the last ten years has been transformed by the banking collapse and the crisis of capitalism, especially by the way that its living standards have been decimated, and its youth pauperised, at the same time as the Sunday Times Rich List showed that the rich are getting richer, with the numbers of billionaires multiplying.
This produced the Brexit vote, and has now brought the Tory party to the point of explosion after May’s election failure and Labour’s victorious campaign. First of all Corbyn was able to see off numerous leadership challenges. Then with the Blairite right wing hoping for a massive electoral defeat so that they could remove him, Corbyn was able to win the youth and then persuade the mass of the working class that he was not just a petty bourgeois intellectual but a leader who would fight for them.
This was why, while May was sure of victory and the Labour right wing was getting ready to knife him, the youth and the working class was preparing to raise him up on their shoulders, which they did, and they haven’t finished yet!
The outcome is that the assassins of the 1922 Committee are fearful of immediately knifing May, since the following election would see a Labour victory. Instead, they have seized on the very risky option of the Tory party hanging onto office for a couple of months through forming an alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party of the north of Ireland. This alliance the Tory leaders know will end all notions that the power-sharing government in the north can be restored, and could push Ireland to the brink of civil war, since the Tories will not dare to take any action that will offend their allies of the DUP.
The Tories know any alliance with the DUP contains this risk, but they are willing to pay such a price for this alliance, to try and hold off a resurgent working class placing Labour into power. The truth is that this is a crisis situation of the Tories own making and now they must be made to pay the full price for it.
The trade unions, workers and youth in the UK must now take action to drive the Tories out of government and bring in a Labour government with its minimum programme to defend the NHS, education and the Welfare State.
In 1974 the Heath government sought to remain in Downing Street after they lost the general election that was called by Heath to establish that he ran the country not the trade unions. He was driven out of office. The same must happen to May and the Tories, before, during or after their Queen’s Speech next Monday.
The return of a Labour government will see big business seek to sabotage its limited programme of action and bring it down. In this situation the working class will have to be organised to take the power. This is the situation that the WRP is preparing for. Join it today!
