TORY Prime Minister Liz Truss finally emerged from Downing Street yesterday to make her first public statement on the economic crisis that has brought British capitalism to the point of bankruptcy.
The crisis erupted following her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, who stunned Tory MPs and the world’s financial markets with an uncosted ‘mini-budget’ that handed billions in tax cuts to the rich and wealthy corporations to be paid for by a massive increase in government borrowing.
The capitalist stock markets responded with alarm at this plan, with international money traders, who make their profits from buying and selling currencies, dumping the pound in a fire sale that sent the pound plummeting to its lowest level ever against the US dollar.
The crisis escalated out of control within days with the Bank of England forced to reverse its policy of cutting back on printing money to finance the government and announce that it would be printing £65 billion, with the promise of unlimited further billions, to buy up government bonds in an attempt to stop the collapse of government debt that poses the real threat of state bankruptcy for the UK.
Tory MPs, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) along with every other political party, are begging Truss to cancel Kwarteng’s mini-budget, and got their answer from Truss in a round of radio interviews on local BBC stations yesterday.
Far from any retreat, Truss rejected the idea that she and Kwarteng had made any error, insisting that tax cuts for the rich are ‘the right plan’, that ‘urgent action’ had been required to grow the economy, that these cuts would ‘grow the economy’ and she was ‘prepared to do what it takes to make this happen’.
In fact, there is no way on earth that British capitalism, already in an economic recession and diving even deeper into collapse, can be grown by tax cuts to the filthy rich corporations and £150 billion bail-outs to the energy companies.
Truss and the ruling class know this and have now decided the only way for capitalism to survive is to let the crisis rip.
Let businesses collapse into bankruptcy, let mass unemployment rage through the working class while wages are cut and inflation allowed to run riot, while every public service from the NHS, schools and social services have their funding slashed and the privateers take over.
Out of this carnage, Truss is pinning the hope that some will survive while the weakest go to the wall.
This is the desperate last throw of the dice that has driven Tory MPs to panic and call for Truss and Kwarteng to be sacked as they rightly fear it will mean a class war to the finish against the working class and increasingly the middle classes.
Truss is prepared to split the Tory party irrevocably, dumping for good the traditional façade of ‘one nation’ Toryism with all its promises of levelling up to bring in a new form of rule – a dictatorship backed by the police and military and armed with all the new laws to make strikes illegal and criminalise anyone daring to protest.
With the Tories split, divided and fearful of the consequences of Truss’s desperate gamble of taking on and defeating a powerful working class, there has never been a better opportunity to bring them down.
The only thing that will keep Truss and her government in power will be if the TUC and trade union leaders refuse to mobilise the working class to kick them out.
The TUC must not be allowed to continue to prop up the Tories by refusing to organise the full strength of the working class in a general strike to bring them down.
News Line urges workers and young people to join the lobby of the TUC Congress in Brighton on Tuesday October 18th at 8am to force the TUC to immediately call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the banks and major industries and bring in a planned socialist economy.
This is the only way to end the capitalist crisis and ensure a future for workers and youth. Forward to the British socialist revolution!
