PM Johnson yesterday fled the country to go to the Ukraine, where he will be able to adopt what he hopes will be a winning anti-Russian stance by waving his fist in the general direction of Moscow. Patriotic warmongering is truly the last refuge of a scoundrel.
No doubt Johnson will tell the Ukrainian leader Zelensky that the UK will see to it that the Ukraine is able to join the NATO war alliance.
Ahead of Johnson’s visit to Kiev, the UK government announced it was giving £88m to ‘promote stable governance and energy independence’ from Russia.
It is believed that Johnson will pledge to Zelensky that the Ukraine will be able to join the NATO imperialist alliance that targets Russia. The motto of the trip seems to be ‘when in trouble start up an imperialist war’.
Meanwhile at home, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is putting an end to the lovey-dovey relations that the UK has with Russian oligarchs who, in turn, spend billions buying UK mansions. She said yesterday that legislation was being prepared to target a wider range of individuals and businesses associated with Putin.
Johnson is now, as everybody can see, a lame duck Premier, whose future has been put on ice while the Met police ‘are investigating’ Covid rule-breaking at 12 gatherings in Downing Street and Whitehall held during the pandemic, which the whole country knows took place.
Johnson said MPs must wait for the outcome of the Met’s ‘investigation’, as he rejected opposition calls to resign. He was commenting after Sue Gray published a limited report into the law breaking lockdown parties in Downing Street. The senior civil servant said there had been a ‘serious failure’ to meet the high standards expected of those working at the heart of government.
The Tory Party is now being led by the Johnson-Sunak axis which has agreed that the April 1st NI contributions rise will take place – taking billions out of the pockets of UK workers.
The next few months will see massive price rises and savage cuts that will hit millions of workers, youth and their families, and spread Johnson’s poverty programme like a new Covid plague.
The fact that the police are now central to Johnson’s manoeuvres only proves that in the period ahead it is the state and its repressive forces that will run the show with dictatorial measures.
The Tories are now seeking to bring forward a political and state leadership that will use force to impose poverty through massive cuts. Millions of jobs are to go as the crisis deepens and inflation rockets upwards.
However, as we have seen, the Tories are very weak while the working class holds the economic power in its hands. Indeed, the main lesson from the crisis of the Johnson regime is that it is very weak and crisis-ridden, and needs the state forces to keep it in office. It cannot survive without them.
Also, that while Tory MPs refused to dump Johnson, the TUC trade union leaders kept a deadly silence. In fact, they support Johnson and Sunak’s furloughing and will do anything to see it resumed – including tolerating the Johnson government.
In the past week, while MPs were much stirred and shaken by the crisis, it was the TUC that refused to take any action against the Johnson government, despite the fact that the bourgeois papers recognise that ‘today truck drivers have more power than bankers’.
The TUC is tolerating the Johnson government because it is hoping for more furloughing! They have refused to use the power of the working class. They have allowed the cynical Johnson to treat the working class as if they were idiots that any lie could fool. Millions of workers are now very angry at the Tories.
If the TUC had made the call for a general strike in the middle of last week, millions of workers would have stopped work and brought down the Johnson government. In fact, the TUC leaders are fully in tow to Sunak and Johnson and are desperate to renew the furloughing regime. But it has gone forever.
Now is the time to prepare really serious struggles in the UK which the working class must win if it is not to be driven back to the conditions of the Hungry 30s.
Workers in their trade unions must force the TUC to call a general strike and remove and replace the TUC leaders if they will not.
A general strike will bring down the Tories and the bosses and smash the repressive forces of the capitalist state to establish a workers’ government and a nationalised and planned socialist economy.
Now is the time to join the WRP and the YS to organise the British Socialist Revolution.