Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister from Liz Truss. He is the fifth PM elected since the Brexit Referendum in 2016, the first who is not white, the youngest and the richest who has become head of government. He will try to rescue the kingdom from the abyss in which it finds himself, with right-wing, neoliberal policies at the service of the privileged. The Tories continue to sink the people while the Labor Party turns right and offers only reformist patches for the serious social situation suffered by the workers and the people. We must support the struggles, unite them, demand mobilization and a general strike to impose an emergency plan. It is urgent to set up a new left alternative, heading towards the strategy of a workers’ government and socialism.
By Julio Santana – ISL UK
Liz Truss’s occupation of 10 Downing Street was undemocratic, as it was anointed by 130,000 Conservative affiliates, without any popular consultation. Likewise, bourgeois politicians can always stoop lower. Rishi Sunak was elected Prime Minister because Boris Johnson didn’t garner enough support to come back and Penny Mourdant resigned, who couldn’t even get a hundred votes from her party. The millionaire Rishi and his friends from the financial market are happy about the election, even if it was by discard, because they want to close the succession of falls in power.
Who is the “Golden Boy?”
Rishi Sunak is a descendant of Indian immigrants, one of his grandparents collected taxes for his “Gracious Majesty” in India. Between 2001 and 2004, he was an analyst at the Goldman Sachs investment bank. He then continued at the Children’s Investment Fund Management, becoming a partner in September 2006. In November 2009 he joined a new hedge fund, with former colleagues from California. In 2010 he was part of the launch of Theleme Partners. At both hedge funds, his boss was Patrick Degorce, accused of tax evasion for trying to protect millions of pounds in a film financing scheme. A lifetime at the service of usurious banking, of the powerful and of the oldest right-wing political positions.
Billionaire civil servant
When Sunak was young he worked as a waiter for a summer, a detail that is not enough to hide the fact that he is a billionaire. He is the richest prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom, with a fortune shared with his wife valued at 700 million pounds, greater than that of king Charles III. The insulting ostentation of the rich allows him to: buy five houses, pay £14,000 a month in electricity for his spa, wear £400 Prada shoes and own a £179 smart mug so that his coffee is always at the optimum temperature. As a sign of the decomposition of the regime, a handful of conservatives elected as Prime Minister a rich man who leads a life of luxury, totally removed from the most basic needs of the great popular majorities. Just at a time of great suffering and social inequalities, in which working families do not have enough income to make ends meet or to pay utility bills.
He comes to try to make the workers and the people pay for the crisis
We must not be fooled. Rishi Sunak was elected by a hundred people, but with the approval of his bosses in British big industry, banking and commerce. He will not go against the economic interests that allow him to live as an aristocrat, he will seek to protect and increase the profits of the powerful. In a leaked video, Sunak said: “We inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labor Party that pushed all the funding into deprived urban areas.” And then he bragged about taking public money from “deprived urban areas” to go to rich cities. In footage obtained by the New Statesman, Sunak boasted that he was the one who started reversing those policies as chancellor. (The Guardian 10/24/22).
There is no normal
As if nothing bad happened to the British people, they frivolize and try to normalize the crisis of the capitalist system that the people are suffering. They seek to give the feeling of “normality” when there is none. In this sense, The Guardian launched a superficial and bland article asking only “How green are the candidates” to speculate on their ecological commitment, leaving aside social suffering and inequality. They want to divert popular attention to hide the fact that the new government is coming to try to lower wages, increase the taxes paid by the people, defend companies that have become rich, promote privatization, lay off the public sector and keep mortgaged houses whose buyers they cannot pay the fee. In short, the conservatives will continue with economic measures so that the millionaires become more millionaires and the poor poorer.
The “electoral advance” and the Labor Party
If the elections are advanced and the Labor Party governs, there will be no substantive changes as needed. Labor leader Keir Starmer gave details of the policies they would carry out, warning that the incoming government would have to make “difficult decisions,” that they would not be able to do some of the things they want, not as quickly as they would like. (BBC One Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program 10/23/22). He also signaled that he would continue with Conservative plans for harsh sentences for climate protesters who block roads, despite reiterating Labor’s promise not to get new oil and gas licences. And if the elections are not advanced, will we have to wait until January 2025? Who will bear this?
Workers and class independence
Labor is run by an aristocracy that acts as a transmission belt for the interests of the bourgeoisie. Sir Keir Startmer wants to hammer the nails into the coffin lid of the Labor Party which was based on the unions. For this reason, currently, the leaders order not to support strike pickets, sing “God Save the King” at their party conference and expel those who dare to seriously question the policy they are carrying out. It is the continuation of the work undertaken by Tony Blair, who eliminated clause IV of the party’s statutes, which mentioned the socialist economy, imposing a “Third Way.”
The essential tasks
No one can venture what will happen in the immediate future since the United Kingdom is going through a deep and vertiginous economic and political crisis, within the framework of the world capitalist crisis. But, if there is something certain, it is that the working class is waking up. Unfortunately, our boxer is fighting with one hand tied behind his back, since the union leaderships do not unify the struggles. In the press they mention the need to “coordinate actions,” but they neither unite the struggles nor call for a general strike. When they mention it, they do so only as media pressure towards the government and businessmen. The main union leaders speculate on the possibility of an early election that will place the Labor Party at the top of power. Over time it has been shown that bipartisan alternation between Tory and Labor leads to disaster. What is needed is to support and unite the struggles of the working class and advance in the union organization, even if their leaders do not. With each passing day it becomes more urgent to set up a new anti-capitalist and anti-monarchist left political alternative. The regrouping of the revolutionary socialists can give impetus to the immediate tasks in the perspective of a strategic exit by a government of the workers and the socialist.