General Strike? National Government?

160,000 Tories are deciding who will be the next Prime Minister. Truss is most likely to win. She favours the new Tory right (a mini Thatcher) and Sunak isn't white enough. The very first decision of either of these two new PM's will be to try to smash the trade unions. Both PM candidates have sworn to increase the already extreme anti-union laws. The new laws are designed to demolish the already minimal rights of union voters. But millions of workers of all types are now battling against the bosses' resistance of the unions fighting for reasonable wages and conditions, following 2 decades of declining wages. The Tress-Sunak pair are both intending to crush organised workers into the dust. And this is meant to be the first success of whoever is the new PM. The key banner to define a conservative society. Thatcher made her first smashup over the miners. Reagan's earliest action was to break the aviation workers, ending them in chains. These were the symbols of the new governments. 

But today we face an entirely different context. The unsettled political leadership of the UK demonstrates the most obvious absence of any planning and an imminent crash. Boris was a 2 year glory that slipped away in, what was frankly, a joke. His only ability was his bellowing about his non-existence successes. His following about his half-done Brexit has not achieved anything other than make the UK appear more foolish. Boris's Brexit has barely started. His Covid decisions were a disaster, until the chemists told him about vaccines. The rest, from leveling up, to the Churchillian photos in the Ukraine, was not more than anything other than self aggrandisement. All this is daily more and more obvious.

What is less clear in society is the rapid shift from Boris, the apparent demi-hero to the 14 million voters for Boris in 2019, and now that are drifting away in their millions. We are also seeing the collapsing, previously dominant hard right which Truss hopes to lead. But instead of the far right we are facing a huge and deeply critical population who do not accept the new, fancy Tory PMs, but also neither do they turn to the adenoidal Blair, now Labour's Starmer. But what IS emerging is the day to day support for the new Trade Union leaders and their rights. 

Of course this is all still shifting. This includes the hints of a new type of society, partly started by the unions, and which ties in with the appalling disaster of the UK's economy. Virtually every day another shocking truth about the decades of rot that hits on millions already inside increasing wider and wider scales of the deep troubles. Most workers are overwhelmingly in work, but unable to live. The most recent example is Shell and Centrica who steal both £billions of profit while their gas and electricity costs fly higher every day. The axis of the unions and the day to day experience of the poorest people are cohering together with the unions - as against the Tory attempt to make the unions the problem. Our new Prime Minister will no doubt do her slavering best, but the Tories can't do their Thatcher 'thing' anymore. 

But even should there be an increasing hostility for the government and the possible combination of those battling for daily existence and those fighting for a decent working life, there is no obvious positive, wide scale movement to lead the 90% of the population. Current developments in the Labour Party leadership have managed to destroy the radical Corbyn program (which still stood for 10 million votes even in the 'Bust it with Boris' 2019 General Election). Starmer is simply another Tory. He is completely unable to understand the current political conditions, as the 10 million and more are standing up to fight. What pops up in the picket lines scares Starmer to death. No. The political conditions require a collection of forces that are able to form a leading bloc that can show, step by step, how each moment forward can solidify and then move forward to the next positive actions.

Which now begins with a possible new General Strike. The failure of the 1926 General Strike has been well studied. One part of its retreat was the absence of any agreed, forward, proposition; all was defence. This, and the domination of most trade union leaders, who were tied in a deep national support of the UK's Empire, broke the strike.

Today we have a significant political and economic melee that is already resisting a weak government. Those who fight for food and heat and those who demand decent work and wages are able, virtually immediately, to bring down a wobbly, tragic government. At least that proposal can gather the first objective, to build up the widespread for a General Strike. Alas, Corbyn's very welcomed, relatively radical programme, is now immediately unavailable. Starmer has little to offer. But as the crisis in Winter will gather, bringing the end of the government desperate to retain its class rule, there will be a likely offer for a National Government, 'to bring us all together in the crisis!' And, more frightened of a possible  General Strike, Starmer will likely agree. 

This particular scenario is just that. It is true that the UK's society is going through a massive class based clash. The elements of government and economy are fragile in the extreme and the vital response to that is a widespread action by the working classes. Truss or anybody else will not simply close it all down with a ferocious law. That far seems clear. And the only other alternative to the government's decision is an election. As this process unfolds it is essential to bring together all who are already battling away. A combined bloc, attached to active unions, to those working to get heat and food etc, could naturally develop a new Charter, a set of basic demands, from large scale wealth taxes, to insuring public service requirements, to peoples assemblies to decide progress and to the organisations we really need.   

Can the UK work for its people?

1. The very fine writer Tariq Ali recently published a blog on Boris's departure. (Read 'Adieu Boris, Adieu.') Both funny and revelatory, Tariq went through the Prime Ministers from WW2 to Boris. He pointed out that Boris's lies and pretences were relatively minimal in relation to the secret, guilty acts that PMs had previously carried out. 

Tariq's views of the character and role of the present ruling classes, including Prime Ministers, were not so accurate. Tariq was at pains to explain the distinct difference of Boris's political and economic plans compared with Trump's approach, with its signal, dominated party and its wildly right-wing ambitions. He does go through the declining changes of the British ruling classes and the break-away politics and economics via the UK's State, with its less and less international influence. But there are key aspects in respect of the UK ruling classes and their role in general that are increasingly significant in the direction of Trump and the similar Western and Eastern modern despots.

2. The increasing reality demonstrates the intense capitalist platform of the future of the UK but it is full of danger. For decades there has been minimal investment in the UK. The central part of the UK's wealth continues to be banking. The UK's main banking and other resources are held in a part of the world's offshore that amounts to $32 trillion. The UK itself holds £854 billion offshore and, as of the 24th of April 2022, the UK continues to top every other offshore tax haven. (See CITY AM.) But the UK is increasingly declining in relation to other financial nations that are emerging across the globe. The 2008 banking collapse both cut the UK based banks to smithereens and, at the same time the UK is reducing its wealth and strength in respect to all other capitalist activity including their offshore sector. 

The offshore, anti-tax, de-facto crime remains the key lever of the UK's vital capitalism - except more desperate after 2008. The UK's historic solid rock is seriously splintering. There are several new reasons for the increasingly rapid decline. Investment has longly continued as the lowest of all the main countries in the West. Beside the crisis of Covid, the UK faces the increasing revolt of West Indian and other nations that are determined to de-couple from their UK histories and the colonial shame involved, which directly cuts into offshore advantages. The UK is also internally removing from European markets for the time being and UK labour is largely working in local sales, marketing and building. As a result, in the absence of any real international production in the UK, the most drastic economic conditions apply, comparing badly with all of the rest of the West. 

3. The consequences of the UK's ruling classes over half a century is their very limited outlook, which is constantly narrowing. And now, most significantly, a huge social wave from other classes in the UK (not really touched in Tariq's comments) has boiled up. It includes immense strikes led by organised union workers, collective demands for massive food needs, large scale strikes against heating costs, possible windfall taxes and even the probability of rationing. All this is beginning to challenge the narrow capitalism of UK society. 

4. The initial use of Brexit as a racist social movement, led by Farage and UKIP, which went onto a far right definition of the initial referendum, was entirely incorporated by Boris and his new Tory Party, albeit underlined in Farage's terms. But by 2020 Brexit support had emerged into a more radical, democratic basis for the result of the referendum. By then the racist arguments had dropped in the polls to third or fourth place. But it was Boris and his minions that continued to open the racist argument again - for two reasons. First, the crucial win leading to racism in a Tory election, despite the previous decade of Tory impoverishment and secondly, to absorb this previous racist movement, now to be focussed on an imperial leader with a completely independent axis for his prepared UK politics to come. The content of Boris's apparent politics, like Trump, was not in his key requirement. His politics were used to assemble his dominance based on populist trends.

5. Now we pass Boris (and the would-be Thatchers and Boris's) but not abandoning his plans. What is really happening now is the beginning of a massive class war, which is going to change everything. 

The most globally dominant UK ruling class is deciding that it can dig in more of a new 'offshore' wealth; a future increasing away from the half-baked and often uninterested development, instead regarding society in the UK as entirely a means, which has only one substantial project, that is Banking 2. This is the (new) core of the forms of digital money now set to go by the Bank of England. The new goal passes by all the would-be digital monies already across the world, up to now, and which previously keep collapsing. The Bank of England, through the Financial Policy Committee will "create a wide range of 'Stakecoins' "which will initiate and overtake the new independent digit wealth - for all across our global UK!  

This is the central creation of a much wider financial scheme than previously launched; the sort that has brought Hull and other ports to allow their 'independence' i.e. non taxable, constantly moving shipping, with costs decided by private response. The surrounds of the new financial Stakecoins sweeps away from the previous necessity of building public, day to day investment for development and trade. Instead we face a 'free' Singapore topped by the new Stakecoin castles. It is the already dying globalisation now narrowed into instant wealth at all costs.  

6. In this rare and desperate context the class struggle arising in the UK has several dimensions. The first direct aspects are showing themselves in the organised unions refusing pay cuts. Coupled with huge collectives for free food, direct action to stop heat costs and combinations of local movements gathering to show public opposition over police failures, the failures of women's rights and the new racism, wide ideas are surfacing. A wealth tax proposal has arisen. Rationing of a modern time is surfacing. The redistribution of wealth is becoming a hard call. Self organisation sharing resources is changing parts of the country.

Surrounding the UK is the rising breaking away from English domination by the Scots, the Northern Irish (with both current acting parties that have agreed to offer democratic independence) and an irritated link by the Welsh when it comes to Tory provocation. These deep cracks in UK politics are now increasingly raw. The opportunities for large parts of the UK are obviously no longer rising and the new prospective financial diamonds are barely going to scratch even the highlights of London. The strain and weakness of the UK has never been more obvious. The breakdown of the UK has never felt more realistic. 

Brian Heron

Boris tries a Trump?

'14 million votes in the last UK General Election' was the call that Boris tried to win the argument and prevent himself from getting kicked out of 10 Downing Street. Thursday, 12 December 2019, the Conservatives made a net gain of 48 seats and won 43.6% of the popular vote, the highest percentage for any party since 1979. In his apparent last days Boris wailed that it was he and only he that had won the last General Election and that he was the only figure that could overcome the drastic economic debacle that was emerging into the Autumn UK. Trumpy eh? 

The UK's voting is more similar than the USA that most UK voters might think. Voters vote for parties and the choice of local state party leaders are voted in by all voters including party members. What is different, and novel for the UK, is the decline of the US political parties, following from the independence of the President once he or she has collected the national vote, which allows presidential, independent leadership of the whole nation beyond and ahead of the parties.

Boris has tried to go beyond his party. He has called on the 14 million voters from 2019 over the head of his party when his parliamentary party began to overthrow him. But he is not a President, yet. And Boris has not called for an upsurge of his 2019 voters as his own followers, yet. For the moment he is 'over'.

But Boris has fixed a trick. His Tory government contenders are already battling for the role of a new Prime Minister. Boris is currently and personally very low in the polls. But the new reality of the UK's politics is extremely volatile. And the future of the UK is about to go through another convulsion when it proportionally becomes the worst European nation for food, heat and services. Boris is 'serving as PM until his party chooses its successor.'  He'll be around when the real shocks hit. He's not chosen his continuation until October for no reason. By October most inclined Tory members, who choose their a hundred thousand votes and then the government's final twosome, will be sick as to who will seize the crown. And by then millions in the UK will be in a new type of desperate condition, annoyed and despairing with the endless mucking about, and quite possibly building up to a new possible movement for the full return of Boris. UK Trump returns? 

The 'good old boys' that still really run the Tories cannot imagine this sort of tricky palaver. Of course fellow Etonians, even those who provided Boris's pet name 'the Yeti, would find Trumpian activities not at all the thing. Boris has his own view. He's not interested in public school UK history - except as a background for his domination. He wants a Russian war, adoration from his supporting plebs, wealth, twinkling with top capitalists and a desperate fear of a public, social and political society. He functions because the serious worried rich are scared without him and he surely feels he can still do a Trump.    

A UK break-up close ahead

The agonising break-up of the UK is taking a further step into a trough. The pathetic Pincher affair sits in the PM's lap, but that is only the surface. Labour leader Keir Starmer has swallowed Brexit, hoping the Tory government will go for a quick election while dumping Boris, while Boris may pull an election to prove he's still able to lead. But again that is the shadow of the important UK matters. 

The real process starts with Tories who are in desperation as they review their leader and the disaster of empty food and fuel in the next months. Whatever lies and twists the Tories shout-out, the reality is more and more obvious. The government is dissolving. The example of the ridiculous Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Truss, deciding that the Ukraine will be provided with another Marshal Plan, is as fatuous as the UK's withering wealth - over the last months barely able to hold the sliding £pound. Coming from another source, Starmer is not just promising Brexit. He is trying to delay the many major strikes that are building up new directions. Really, Starmer is frightened by an early general election and terrified that the police send him back to the Law. Starmer openly thinks that Labour can only 'go to the centre' to win. In other words, to carry on more of the same. More idiocy that promises nothing of the enormous change that the UK is required to make. 

Nevertheless, the growing idea of a general election is hovering in the air. The Tories are breaking up and Labour has no serious ideas. What's next? Much depends on the strikes and strikers that Starmer wants to hide away. Meanwhile the possibility of an election will invariably show one thing. It will expose the lack of any substantial answer that the two main parties have to deal with the crisis; that is fundamentally the increasing uselessness of the UK's current Parliament. The most likely result of both the Tories and Labour's failures in the next year or so will initially create a National Government.

The standard, nervous, late and marginal politics that is running along with its failing English engine will stutter on. The dissolving UK will face hunger marches, the second modern collapse of public health and welfare, the desperate need for rations for essential food and, centre of it all, bringing down the continuing and increasing inequality. Politics will become less and less accepted as the regular histrionics in a deaf Parliament and more and more deciding, in action, for the many that need their basic needs. The search for a new real democratic politics is opening.