Nurses strike against Tory pay austerity (Photo: Guy Smallman)
Lots of people are thinking “Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer—that’s not much of a choice”. And they’re right to do so.
Capitalism offers war, poverty, racism and climate chaos. And neither the Tories nor Labour offer a way out because they won’t even begin to confront the system that produces these horrors.
The Tories’ record of class assaults on workers and the poor mean millions want to see them driven from office. Huge swathes of people see the Tories as the scum of the earth.
This is not some small shift in opinion. It could be an avalanche that undermines for many years—or destroys—the most successful party of British capitalism and a global leader on the right.
The lowest share of the vote ever recorded for the Conservatives was 29.2 percent—in 1832, before the era of widespread parliamentary democracy, when the party was led by the Duke of Wellington. The polls now suggest Sunak could go lower than this. This could be only the second general election since 1945 to see one party with an overall majority in parliament be replaced by a different party that gains an overall majority.
The business media, which might usually be expected to have some reverence for the Conservatives, openly treat Sunak with contempt.
An article in The Economist magazine last week sneered, “The Conservatives require a miracle to stay in office.
“Mr Sunak’s own actions, from his time as chancellor to his tenure as prime minister right through to the decision-making process that leads to a sodden man making an inaudible speech, makes that miracle less likely.
“Perhaps the prime minister has a secret strategy. Perhaps he is simply a gambler. Perhaps he is just bad at politics.”
Labour is set to win. But there is very little enthusiasm for Labour leader Keir Starmer. Ben Page, the chief executive of polling organisation Ipsos, said last week, “Starmer’s personal ratings are the lowest Ipsos has ever seen for an opposition leader who is so far ahead in the overall voting intention.
“It is more disgust at the Tories than delight at what Labour offers that is driving politics.”
In the 2017 and 2019 general election, Jeremy Corbyn—Labour leader at the time—pitched a vision of change, however weak and limited.
Whereas Starmer has overseen a process of not just making Labour acceptable to the ruling class, but becoming the first choice of the corporations and the right wing media.
The Tories returned to office in 2010 claiming they would “fix broken Britain”. But together with their Liberal Democrat coalition partners, they immediately took a wrecking ball to jobs, wages, benefits, health and social care.
They destroyed services that working class people depend on. It was a class war where the poor paid the price for the rich.
Over the course of what would become 14 years of Tory rule, terms such as “zero‑hours contracts”, “bedroom tax” and “food banks” became everyday language for millions of people.
Prime minister David Cameron declared gleefully, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity”. He announced billions of pounds worth of public spending cuts.
For him, the economic crisis that began in the banking sector was not so much a disaster but an opportunity to reshape Britain. Ministers slashed wages with a succession of pay caps and freezes for millions of public sector workers, meaning ordinary people suffered with stagnating wages.
Alongside the pay cap, the Tories cut jobs. They sliced the number of doctors and nurses and reduced training places and bursaries. A quarter of local government jobs vanished.
Those hit hardest by the austerity cuts were those already struggling on low wages and pitiful benefits. And it was women who were on the front line.
Lorna, a school canteen worker, talked about the humiliation of poverty. “I felt very ashamed having to go to a food bank the first time,” she told the Oxfam charity. “It was down to my son’s school liaison officer coming round to my house, because I hadn’t sent my son into school for a couple of days as I couldn’t afford a packed lunch for him, and I couldn’t afford to pay for a school dinner.
“I couldn’t do what a mum should do for them—look after them. I couldn’t even feed them.” Day care centres that provided activities for disabled people and the elderly were shut down. Playing fields were sold off, and museums and libraries closed.
But while the government hammered working class living standards some people did very well under austerity.
As wages fell, profits rose sharply, and shareholders had never had it so good. At the very top, the richest 1,000 people saw their wealth increase by £138 billion in real terms between 2009 and 2013.
So much for Cameron’s austerity claim, “We’re all in it together.”
There are but a few reasons to remember Theresa May’s time in Downing Street, which began in 2016 after David Cameron resigned amid his lost Brexit referendum.
May had introduced the antimigrant “hostile environment” policy when home secretary—a racist policy that deliberately devastated the lives of migrants and refugees.
And as prime minister she oversaw the scandals that resulted from it. People, most often from the Caribbean, faced deportation, even after living here for decades.
Many victims of the policy, which demanded official documentation, were thrown into poverty because they lost their jobs, benefits or pensions. Some people were deported to countries they had left as children and barely knew today.
And in the aftermath of the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in 2018, May refused to meet residents.
For many people, that cemented her reputation as a racist. May was also tasked with appeasing the Tory right over Brexit—while at the same time satisfying the European Union negotiators.
It was an impossible task that led, after two no confidence votes, to her resignation in May 2019.
Boris Johnson would like to be known as the prime minister that got “Brexit done”. Instead, he should be remembered as the prime minister who has the blood of thousands of people on his hands.
He was in office during the Covid pandemic—and ensured Britain had one of the highest death rates of comparable countries.
Johnson and the right deliberately played down the danger of Covid, even as the death count rose. His government argued continually against the most basic safety measures on the basis that they were a threat to bosses’ profits.
Today, Johnson says he didn’t really understand how dangerous the virus was. But cabinet minutes from the time show that being explained to him time and again.
It was only the sheer scale of the crisis that forced the prime minister into announcing a series of lockdowns. But Johnson didn’t think that such rules applied to him. Downing Street politicians and staff partied their way through the pandemic with booze‑filled “work events”.
Pictures of Johnson show him toasting his team, wine glass in hand, at a time when indoor gatherings of more than two people were banned.
Ordinary people could not visit friends and family sick in hospital. They couldn’t even attend their funerals. Johnson and his mates thought they could flout the rules they themselves had made.
The cops went on to fine Johnson and his cronies. Johnson’s only response was to make a series of fake apologies to the Commons. And the prime minister responded to recurring waves of Covid infections by delaying and refusing further lockdowns, saying, “Let the bodies pile high.”
Such revelations threatened to destroy him. But Johnson thought his handling of Brexit might save him from disaster.
He delivered the most right wing interpretation of the decision to leave the European Union. That vision, he said, had won him a landslide election victory against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in 2019.
Now he wanted to use the nationalism and racism that characterised his Vote Leave campaign to distract from his government’s failures.
But Johnson’s buffoonish character couldn’t hide his contempt for the “little people”, and he soon turned from a Tory party asset into a rope around its neck. Johnson resigned as prime minister and an MP in June last year.
Liz Truss was only prime minister for a month and a half—the shortest serving prime minister in British history.
She promised tax cuts and handouts to the rich, but faced huge revolt from both within the Tory party and bankers, who were terrified of the economic instability that tax cuts could bring at a time of rampant inflation.
Truss’s forgettable time as prime minister did prove one thing—the Tories don’t have a shred of care for ordinary people, they only care about doing whatever they can to stay in government.
Looking towards the July election, Rishi Sunak says that he is all about the future, not the past. But he is deeply involved in all the worst Tory policies. The most despicable is the racist Rwanda plan.
Since becoming prime minister in October 2022, Sunak has pushed the plan through parliament. It aims to round up refugees and deport them to Africa without their case being heard in Britain.
In a bid to win back votes from the far right Reform UK party, Sunak is trying to use the issue of “small boats” crossing the Channel to fan the flames of racism.
The prime minister has already presided over a massive cost of living crisis in which the Tories froze pay but allowed energy bills, rents and mortgages to soar.
Not that rising prices bothered him much. The personal wealth of Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty rose by £122m last year, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
The newspaper now estimates the couple’s fortune at £651 million. And, if all this makes you angry, Sunak has also passed a series of anti-protest laws designed to criminalise the most effective tactics.
Labour's advance was clear in working class areas as the SNP declined
The movement on the street isn't going away just because of the election
