Prime Minister Liz Truss is no more! Chaos continues
She wanted to make history, and she succeeded. By announcing her resignation after 44 days in power, Liz has just become Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister.
She is leaving office, rejected by her own party, rightly whistled at by protesting workers in various sectors. In any future textbooks of British political history, she will be remembered as an incompetent leader by accident who, in a moment of historical crisis, wanted to take from the poor to offer a gift to the richest of the richest.
So much she wanted to be Margaret Thatcher, apparently forgetting that history only repeats itself as a farce.
Her turboliberal ideas and economic lack of imagination horrified even her party’s free-market colleagues, as well as her Tory business sponsors. First she had to cancel record tax cuts for the wealthiest, now she is withdrawing from Downing Street altogether.
Conservative British media are writing today that Truss has lost the battle against the laws of economics. It would be more accurate to say that she simply lost to business and to those party colleagues who had a better understanding of what serious market players expect in Britain today. And they expect nothing less than a government that will create the conditions for them to continue to quietly multiply their profits, not allow them to have to bear the cost of the crisis, but at the same time calm the social situation enough to prevent the wave of strikes from turning into something even more serious.
Liz Truss, meanwhile, was going to push on with her dystopian, completely unrealistic vision of a ‘Britain unchained’, a free market with absolutely no restrictions. She also intended to go toe-to-toe with the trade unions. Now that soaring prices are causing tens of thousands of people to join strikes and campaigns coordinated by the unions. And those who happen not to be on strike are expressing their understanding and support for the protesters in the polls.
Speaking of polls, Truss’s ideas have sent the Tories’ poll numbers plummeting and Labour’s ratings to record levels. The Tories faced the prospect of losing hundreds of seats. The party got rid of Truss to avoid disaster. But it will not – because it would not be the Conservative Party if it did – get rid of its core principles.
It will not suddenly start defending the interests of the working majority of British men and women. It will not hit capital too hard, even though the situation is extraordinary because Britain has not experienced such a crisis for decades.
Whoever the new British Prime Minister is, he or she can be expected to reach for ‘austerity’ measures that will hit workers.
Probably without Truss-style excesses, perhaps in a more sedate, ‘professional’ and ‘responsible’ style. But the of the matter will be simple: it will be the working and middle classes who will be forced to pay for this crisis, like they paid for the previous one.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to responsibly predict that if the next Prime Minister were to turn out to be a Labour politician, he or she would do things very differently.
The Labour chairman Keir Starmer is a representative of the right wing of the party, successful mostly in cutting out the left wing. He is a ‘defender of workers’ who discouraged his partyMPs from joining the pickets of protesting railway staff.
He is a ‘left-winger’ who is very concerned that the party does not accidentally turn too far to the left, because it will ‘discourage’ moderates. The upshot is that, at a time of massive social upheaval, many Brits are struggling to say what the chairman of a nominally pro-worker party is actually called.
Mick Lynch, leader of the RMT, the railwaymen’s union, has said that Britain needs an uprising –
or, more specifically, a series of time-coordinated strikes in key sectors.
This is not just wishful thinking – these strikes will happen because workers are fed up with the burden of the crisis being placed on their shoulders. They are already protesting or just getting ready to do so.
British capitalism is crumbling. The question is whether the coming social mobilisation will be great enough to make it tremble in its foundations.
About The Author
