18th November 2023
Cameron and Sunak – failed Prime Ministers unite
Not content with having a failed lame duck Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, in 10, Downing St; and two failed Prime Ministers (Theresa May, Liz Truss) on the backbenches; the Tories have now wheeled out failed former Prime Minister, David Cameron, to take on the role of Foreign Secretary.
Cameron, suddenly elevated to the House of Lords to overnight become Lord Cameron was, alongside his Chancellor George Osborne, the architect of austerity. In cahoots with the opportunist Liberal Democrats, who propped up the Tory government from 2010-15, Cameron and Osborne launched a vicious attack upon the public sector, slashing services essential to working class communities, piling the pressure upon local government and denying access to university and many further education opportunities to working class children.
Cameron’s was a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, typical of all Tory administrations, but one which made sure that the gambling debts, run up in the 2008 financial crash by the City of London speculators, were covered by squeezing the working class while the banks and the corporations got away scot free.
It is ironic to say the least that Sunak’s ploy in reshuffling his Cabinet, sacking right wing xenophobe Suella Braverman and bringing in Cameron, is intended to give it a more liberal hue, an attempt to woo back centrist Tories away from the lure of the Liberal Democrats.
The reality is that, however the Tory pack is shuffled, the working class will never be dealt a winning hand because the table is rigged and the Tories are being bankrolled by those who own the casino!
Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak have all had the keys to 10, Downing St since 2010 and the lot of the working class has only gone from bad to worse, while the City of London rakes it in and the number of British billionaires increases. There were 177 billionaires in Britain in 2022, up from 53 in 2010, with a combined wealth of £653bn.
Using inflation-adjusted wealth data from archive copies of the Rich List, the combined wealth of Britain’s billionaires is calculated to have risen from £53.9bn in 1990 to the £653bn level in 2022. This represents an increase in billionaire wealth of over 1,000% over the past 32 years.
By way of contrast recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that 3.8 million people experienced the most extreme form of poverty, destitution, in 2022. That is a 61% increase since 2019. More than 1 million of those affected were children. Many people are struggling to afford the basics to live and rely on charities and food banks to survive.
With an Autumn Statement next week, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is already trailing the prospect of squeezing the way in which welfare benefit increases are calculated, in order to create room for some pre-election tax cuts, in a desperate attempt to buy votes. Meanwhile, many local authorities are facing the prospect of Section 114 notices, meaning that they do not have the cash to fund their statutory obligations and are, in effect, declaring themselves bankrupt and unable to run essential services.
In the world’s sixth richest country the scale of poverty and the slashing of support should be a national scandal. Instead, the Tories simply engage in sleight of hand politics, creating more complex Mayoral authorities, and giving them back a fraction of the funds robbed from local government in the past fifteen years, under the guise of expanding local control of resources. Both at a local and national level Labour politicians are complicit in this confidence trick, arguing that having control over some resources is better than none at all.
Meanwhile, queues at food banks continue to get longer, more people are making the ‘lifestyle choice’ to sleep on the streets and working class young people are priced out of the property market, as well as having to expend a huge proportion of their income on renting often substandard accommodation.
The wave of strikes across a range of sectors from rail workers, postal workers, teachers, junior doctors and others over the past year points the way forward for resistance to Tory attacks. The massive marches across Britain in support of the rights of the Palestinian people in recent weeks are a further indication that the Tory narrative, domestically and internationally, is rejected by huge sections of the population.
The 56 MPs voting for a ceasefire in Gaza this week, in spite of the united front against that view from the Tory and Labour leaderships, not only demonstrates a recognition that the struggle of the working class is an international struggle but that there are still representatives within Parliament who can add their voices to the extra-Parliamentary activity which will be essential for lasting change.
However Rishi Sunak reshuffles his Cabinet, whatever tricks Jeremy Hunt tries to deploy in his Autumn Statement, nothing can disguise the political bankruptcy of the Tories. The challenge for the Left is to move the Labour leadership away from its current Tory-lite position and build upon the genuine desire for real change which is evident across the country.
Labour leader Kier Starmer continues to ignore the warning signs and persists in his strategy of hoping that being acceptable to ‘middle England’ will also keep the working class on board. As the militant mood in the country continues to grow however, Starmer may yet find himself in for a shock.
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