How to get the Tories out

The Chartists, Britain’s first great workers’ movement from 1838 to the early 1850s, demanded parliamentary elections every year, not every five years.

One of the reasons why Karl Marx identified the Paris Commune of 1871 as especially democratic is that the representatives could be “recalled” — subject to new election — at any time when sufficiently many of their electors demanded it. Lenin later, in State and Revolution, identified that right of recall as a key democratic feature of the “workers’ semi-state” exemplified by the workers’ councils (Soviets).

In Britain today we have a Tory government able to do its varying will for three and a half years now, and for another year and a half if it wishes, without reference to the will of the voters, of whom on current polls only about 27% support it.

It was elected on a demagogic promise to “get Brexit done” — get it over with, whatever the merits and demerits — and of “levelling up”.

“Levelling up” has disappeared. Brexit is seen as a fiasco even by many who backed it. It will get worse: checks on imports from the EU to the UK are due to start in stages in October 2023, January 2024, and October 2024.

Boris Johnson, the chief figure of the Tories’ “electoral mandate”, was formally condemned by Parliament on 20 June. Hardly any even of his remaining supporters among Tory MPs would turn up to defend him.

Voters have much less effect on the government’s twists and turns than the big-business lobbyists and connections to whom the government answers every day.

This is a shrivelled democracy.

The only way to make the Tories go to an early general election is to raise strikes and street protests to a level which makes them find the country “ungovernable”. The labour movement achieved that in February 1974, in the midst of world economic turmoil triggered by high oil prices. The Tories then ruling, though 3% behind in the polls, concluded that they had to gamble for a new mandate, and were narrowly defeated in the election.

For now the government is holding firm against the major public-sector strike campaigns over pay and conditions — rail, civil service, schools, health, etc.

It is using its remaining time to push through the Public Order Act, amendments to the Police Act 2022, the Illegal Migration Bill, and the Minimum Service Bill, a bout of regressive legislation more concentrated than even Thatcher managed.

And it is steadfastly refusing to budge on its starvation of the NHS budget, which has the waiting list for NHS consultant-led treatment in England rising fast and steadily since mid-2020 to 7.42 million at the end of April. (The waiting list was two million back in 2010).

The public sector strikes so far have won some nudging-up of pay offers. That is all that could be expected from action done piecemeal, delayed, and scattered in drop-at-a-time fashion.

We will get something better when we move from drop-at-a-time to a vigorous flow.

And not just of strikes — of street demonstrations and protest rallies too. The “Corbyn surge” of left-wing mobilisation in 2015, which worried the Tories and led to the Tories almost being defeated in 2017, was generated by a rising tide of demonstrations about cuts, austerity, and the NHS in the years before then.

The Corbyn leadership then dissipated that surge by failure to campaign, failure to organise its youth support, and wretched evasions on Brexit and antisemitism. That’s another story. Strikes and protests aren’t enough by themselves: we also need politics.

Every extra contingent on a picket line or a demonstration can make a difference now. And the battle takes place in union, Labour, and campaign meetings too.

The Labour leaders round Starmer think they can win the next general election by promising little other than not to be the Tories. But those wretched politics sap mobilisation now, depress working-class hope and confidence, and give the Tories more scope to do their damage.

Solidarity works to rally activists in the unions, in the Labour Party, and on the streets to demand campaigning for the NHS with a scale and size comparable to the issues we face.

To push Labour to pledge to repeal all the anti-strike laws, and the Public Order Act, Police Act, and Illegal Migration Bill too.

To commit to public ownership of the energy industry, to lay the basis for a just transition to sustainable economics. To commit to tax the rich, rather than running scared of them.

Join us at Ideas for Freedom on 15-16 July, and at our local meetings, to discuss and coordinate.