PRIME Minister Cameron said last Thursday night that he would respect the defeat of his ‘strike Syria’ government motion by 285-272 in the House of Commons, (with 51 Tory MPs voting against or abstaining). He ruled out joining the expected US-led strikes on Syria.
If he had not given this assurance there is no doubt that his leadership of the Tory Party would have been immediately challenged and he would have faced being removed.
His defeat was at the hands of his own party. The Labour Party motion for a more cautious approach to attacking Syria was defeated by 114 votes!
As it is, Cameron has bought a little time for his premiership, but at home and abroad where Britain has been posing as the most dependable, and even indispensable, ally of US imperialism he has been fatally wounded.
At home, because of his policies of fattening the bankers and handing out super-austerity to the workers and the middle class he is both loathed and hated.
He is a political dead man walking after he tried to take the country to a place where it was determined not to go, to a replay of the Iraq war in Syria – all to preserve the special relationship of master and servant with the US, and to preserve the illusion that capitalist Britain remains a major imperialist power, instead of a historical has-been.
His arrogant determination to do so even brought him into conflict with a number of ex-military chiefs who are all too aware of just what a lightweight British imperialism has become.
In fact, the Tory Party has been exploded by huge historical forces. These include the end of empire, and the ending of its dominant role as seen in the Suez Crisis in 1956. This forced Tory Premier Eden to resign after both Russia and the US ordered the ending of the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, after which the US established that it was the leading imperialist power.
To a certain extent, the undermining of UK imperialism was veiled by the post war inflationary boom, which as it came to an end exposed British industry as being completely out of date, while the Welfare State and the power of the trade unions both held back capitalism and its rate of profit.
Heath sought to tackle the problem, and Thatcher sought to resolve it through using the North Sea oil wealth to finance a civil war to destroy the mining and printing unions, and privatise state-owned industries.
The NHS was relatively untouched by Thatcher.
However, after the 2008 financial crash which bankrupted the major banks, the crisis of capitalism intensified, since the banks were marked down to replace the empire as the source of the UK’s wealth, some of which was going to trickle down to the masses in the service industries and keep them quiet. The banks are now bust beyond recovery.
In bankrupt Britain, the NHS and the Welfare State are unaffordable, and have to be privatised or just closed. Capital has to be rebuilt on the basis of zero hours contracts, non-unionism and super-exploitation.
This is what the Cameron, Osborne government represents – war against the working class and the middle class at home and its continuation abroad as part of the drive, as the junior partner of US imperialism, to restore the power of capital.
The prototype for Syria was Iraq, 2003. The Iraq war and those who perpetrated it are loathed in the UK.
Osborne and Cameron’s drive to war in Syria ran into the buffers of the massive opposition of the working class and middle class, who were already suffering under the austerity lash, and knew that they would have to pay the cost of any new war through an even more savage austerity at home.
These are the powerful class forces that undid the Tory Party, already at war with itself over UKIP, with pro and anti-EU, and pro and anti-US factions at each other’s throats.
Britain is in fact a tinder box waiting to explode.
Workers are opposed to imperialist wars and see them as an extension of the class war that is being waged against them at home to smash the Welfare State.
The TUC Congress is meeting shortly. It must finish off the job that the masses began with the defeat of Cameron in the House of Commons.
It must act for the whole country and call an indefinite general strike to bring down the Cameron government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
