How stupid do the British ruling class think we are? The hidden masters of the Tory party knew perfectly well what they were doing by enabling Truss to become Prime Minister. No attempt was made to disguise her vicious policies. Even a very placid working class would find it difficult to swallow the astonishing tax-relief for the upper-crusters that she and her Treasurer inaugurated. Now a newly militant working class led by the rail workers are facing a bitter “restraint” on real wages – after inflation, that is. Truss’ rival in the leadership campaign – the slimy Sunak – made clear she was destined to alarm the financial elites. They would worry about underwriting upper-crust bonanza while falsely promising relief to the working class for the coming winter of discontent. Something did not add up, nor does it now! Can we really believe this was all a mishap?
We know Marx’s famous words on “personages in history”: “once is a tragedy, the second time is farce“. But five times in six years! Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and now…
Opportunist ex-Home Secretary Suela Braverman smeared Guardian readers as “tofu-eating wokerati”. But as the writer Polly(-Anna) Toynbee blithely boosts Starmer and Labour, Braverman seems ‘woke’ – if this is read as a falsely aware person. The ruling class want disemboweled, sanitized ‘leftists’ and those exorcised out of Marxists’ party – i.e., Labour in power.
Three years ago on the Berlin Left platform, I suggested that “the UK ruling class was sorely divided about which direction to go. The Conservative Party was hijacked by the section of the ruling class whose mandate is to tie the apron strings of the UK back onto the (Trump-ite) USA. A significant part of the Labour Party hierarchy seems to have bought into this.” But the best laid plans of these mice have been fouled….
After their “success” of Brexit, the lies and machinations have fallen apart. The major matter for them is that Biden’s USA and his pushing of Germany to ‘spine up’ against Russia, finds the UK far less relevant than Trump’s USA did. And things are dire for workers in the UK.
As Toynbee rightly says, inequality has grown. The “Living Standards Audit 2022” states: ” the UK’s Gini coefficient for disposable income was 0.37, lower than that in the US’s (0.39) but higher than all other G7 countries, and higher than every country in Europe other than Bulgaria.”
At the same time, the former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney says: “Put it this way: In 2016, the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70%.” The Economic and Social Research Institute data shows “reductions in UK to EU goods trade by 16% and trade from the EU to UK by 20% relative to the scenario in which Brexit had not occurred.” So much for Singapore-on-Thames.
The ruling class wants to trim sail, as the working class got uppity. But their right wing was rather noisy. What better way to disillusion them of their pretences that the UK could still rule the world than by allowing Truss and Kwarteng show how dependent the UK actually is? This is a Suez moment for the most right-wing upper class ideologues who seized the UK by the neck. I believe a smoother operator – Starmer – will be relied upon to straitjacket the working class.
Truss was no mistake. The working class needs its own party and not a social-democratic facade for the ruling class.