THE Tories and the LibDems were whipped around the country in the council elections, with Labour retaking Liverpool and numerous cities and towns, as voters gave their response to Cameron and Osborne’s austerity measures.
In Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Bradford the electors gave their thumbs down to having more bourgeois politicians as they vetoed having elections for city mayors, as in London.
In the London Assembly the main contenders, Livingstone for Labour and Johnson for the Tories, were said to be running neck and neck towards the end of the count, with Johnson getting less than 50% of the vote, with a second round necessary.
The turn-out nationally was at 32% not the lowest ever, but the lowest since the year 2000.
This made clear that Blair-Brown’s 13 years of betrayal in government have broken the unquestioning class allegiance of the working class to Labour that was a basic fact of life since the Second World War. The working class now has a mature understanding of the situation and considers that, while the Tories and their LibDem servants are the parties of their class enemy, it will take much more than a Labour victory to defeat the ruling class.
Labour leader Ed Miliband commented that: ‘Labour can change Britain for the better.’ The party gained over 700 seats and has taken control of councils, including Birmingham and Cardiff, with Tories losing over 355 seats and the LibDems at minus 211.
Labour said it was a ‘wake-up call’ to the government to change course, while Cameron said that he would stick with ‘difficult decisions to deal with the deficit.
Many consider that the Tory big chiefs will bring in their ‘Clown’ Prince Boris Johnson to try and revive their fortunes, but such a change will only aggravate an already sharpening class struggle since Johnson does not even bother to try and pretend that ‘we are all in it together’.
Based on results so far, Labour are projected to end up with a 40% national share of the vote, with the Tories down four on 31%. The LibDems’ share of the vote is estimated to be unchanged at 16%, with the party’s total number of councillors dipping below 3,000 for the first time since the party was formed in 1988. On this basis, a general election would return Labour as the majority party.
However, the Tories are not going to commit suicide by either resigning or by calling a general election.
They will fight on and rely, as they have been doing up till now, on the trade union leaders refusing to lead the class battles that are necessary to bring them down.
It has to be said that, despite all of their problems and their crises, the treachery of the labour leaders, both trade union and Labour Party, have allowed the coalition to wage war on the workers and begin the privatisation of the NHS by turning the Health and Social Care Bill into a law.
The truth of the matter is that the Tories will have to be put out of office, and that requires the building of a new leadership in the trade unions to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government.
That this is so has been shown by the way that Unison has dropped the pensions struggle and Unite is refusing to call a tanker drivers strike.
Workers must join the WRP, to build the leadership in the working class and the trade unions that the situation requires, one that is prepared to use the full strength of the working class to bring down the coalition in order to put an end to capitalism and go forward to socialism.
This is what has to be done.