26 July 2019, World Socialist Web Site
(Australia) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/26/bori-j26.html
By Chris Marsden and Robert Stevens
Newly elected Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson is now prime
minister of Britain’s most-right wing, anti-working-class government since the
Second World War.
His is a class war government, with all the main positions filled by
representatives of the extreme right of a very right-wing party. On Wednesday
evening, Johnson finalised a Cabinet dominated by hard Brexiteers, with former
pro-Remain Tories having to sign up to support leaving the European Union on
October 31, with or without a deal. He sacked 17 ministers who were either
Remainers or allies of outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May.
Johnson nominated as Chancellor Sajid Javid, who favours slashing
corporation tax from 19 percent (the lowest rate in the G20) to 12.5 percent
and has mooted abolishing altogether the 45 percent rate of income tax paid by
the richest.
Among the most significant forces in Johnson’s government are those
grouped around Dominic Raab, a clique within the Thatcherite Free Enterprise
Group involved in publishing Britannia Unchained in 2012. The collection
of articles written by Raab, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Chris Skidmore and
Liz Truss argued for deregulation of trade, tax cuts and hiking up the
exploitation of the working class,
declaring, “The British are among the worst
idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our
productivity is poor.”
Raab was handed the post of foreign secretary and deputy prime minister.
Patel is home secretary. Kwarteng is the minister for business and energy and
industrial strategy minister.
In the past, Patel has argued for the restoration of capital punishment.
She is chair of the Conservative Friends of Israel. As Secretary of State for
International Development she opposed giving aid to the Palestinians without
guarantees that it would be used for “health and education services, in order
to meet the immediate needs of the Palestinian people and maximise value for
money.” She was forced to resign in November 2017 for organising private
meetings with leading Israeli political figures including Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Truss is international trade secretary. Her chosen side project is
working with a group of extreme right political and media figures to secure
funding for a Museum of Communist Terror to be established in London. At a
recent fundraising dinner, she called for the defeat of the “monster of the
hard left.” The right had been “asleep at the wheel in the battle of ideas”
since the end of the Thatcher government, she complained.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the head of the backbench European Research Group, who
has been described as the “minister for the 18th century,” will become Leader
of the House and co-ordinate the government’s parliamentary business over
Brexit.
Johnson’s main pro-Brexit rival, Michael Gove, will co-ordinate Brexit
policy across the government’s departments, with a mandate to “turbo-charge”
preparations for a “no-deal Brexit outcome.” He will work with Johnson’s new
adviser, Dominic Cummings, who led the Vote Leave campaign.
In the November following the 2016 Brexit referendum, Margaret
Thatcher’s former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, wrote an opinion piece for the Financial
Times declaring, “Brexit gives us a chance to finish the Thatcher
revolution.” Her transformation of the British economy “was done by a
thoroughgoing programme of supply side reform, of which judicious deregulation
was a critically important part.” Now, however, the UK was “bound by a growing
corpus of EU regulation which, so long as we remain in the bloc, we cannot
touch. Brexit gives us the opportunity to address this … to finish the job that
Margaret Thatcher started.”
This is Johnson’s agenda for government. In his statement to parliament
in the government’s priorities, he said leaving the EU “is not just about
seeking to mitigate the challenges, but about grasping the opportunities … we
will begin right away on working to change the tax rules to provide extra
incentives to invest in capital and research. We will now be accelerating the talks
on those free trade deals, and we will prepare an economic package to boost
British business and lengthen this country’s lead … as the number one
destination in this continent for overseas investment.”
There are two de facto members of Johnson’s government who are not in
his cabinet—Nigel Farage, of the Brexit Party, and US President Donald Trump.
The pro-Remain former Tory whip Nick Boles complained to The Times,
“The hard right has taken over the Conservative Party. Thatcherites,
libertarians and no-deal Brexiteers control it top to bottom. The Brexit Party
has won the war without electing a single MP. Boris Johnson isn’t our new prime
minister, Nigel Farage is.”
Farage is in the US, where Trump hailed Johnson’s victory and said he
and Farage would achieve “tremendous things” together. Picking Farage out of
the crowd at a Washington rally, Trump said, “I know he’s going to work well
with Boris,” who he described as “Britain’s Trump … That’s what they wanted.
That’s what they need.”
Writing in the Daily Telegraph about a possible electoral
alliance with Johnson, Farage declared, “If he is able to convince us, then
together we would electorally smash the Labour Party, he would assume a big
working majority, and he would go down as one of the great leaders in British
history. All this is possible, but is Boris Johnson brave enough?”
Trump backs Johnson because he is seeking to break up the EU as part of
his “America First” agenda. The “alliance” he offers the UK, on which Johnson
bases his own strategy, will deepen the descent into trade war—pitching Britain
against German and French imperialism—and bring with it further colonial-style
wars.
Backing US aggression against Iran is already being described as the
acid test of the new alliance, with the Wall Street Journal speculating,
“Johnson could simply announce that the UK is joining America’s
maximum-pressure campaign and calls for a new (Iran) deal … The rest of Europe
would likely have no choice but to join its Anglophone partners—and finally
present a united front.”
The dangers presented to the working class are acute and no response can
be expected from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. His spokesman spent
yesterday in a spat with the new Liberal Democrats leader Jo Swinson, who
accused Corbyn of “aiding and abetting” a Conservative Brexit by refusing to
immediately call for a vote of no confidence—which is the privilege of the
leader of the main opposition party.
Corbyn has said he will only do so when it is “appropriate.” A Labour
spokesman described such a vote as a “nuclear option.”
Pro-Corbyn sources are stressing that the party is preparing for a
possible snap general election in the autumn, in anticipation of Johnson
failing to secure a deal with the EU and a Tory rebellion against a no-deal
exit that would have devastating economic consequences. But all discussion is
focused on Corbyn arriving at a formula that satisfies the pro-Remain demands
of the Blairite right of the party.
The five election pledges launched by Corbyn yesterday centre on the
promise of a public vote on any Conservative Brexit deal, in which Labour would
campaign to remain in the event of a no-deal or a poor deal.
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