Amid runaway inflation and surging worker fightback, Britain's chaotic ruling-class merry-go-round has turned--for the moment--to filthy-rich Rishi Sunak, the UK's third prime minister in six weeks. Britain's instability reflects the international crisis of capitalism: a looming worldwide recession/depression, the implosion of the old U.S.-led liberal world order, the bosses' escalating attacks on the international working class, and the global volatility that will lead U.S. rulers—Democrats and Republicans alike—to full-blown fascism and world war with China and Russia.
Britain, once the reliable junior partner for U.S. imperialism from Iraq to Ukraine, is a political train wreck. Following clown-car opportunist Boris Johnson and the dead-on-arrival Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak's job is to try to discipline the hopelessly divided British bosses as he assaults workers with spending cuts. The son of Indian immigrants, Sunak will lead the Conservative Party's racist campaign to scapegoat immigrants for the profit system's failures. He’s the latest example of the deadly illusion of identity politics. Workers must not be fooled!
In Britain, hundreds of thousands of workers, led by critical railway workers, are fighting back in “one of the most significant waves of industrial unrest the United Kingdom has seen since the ‘winter of discontent’ in the late 1970s” (msn.com, 9/1). The Progressive Labor Party's task is to win these workers to the historic struggle for communist revolution, the only solution to fascism and inter-imperialist war.
The bosses’ boss
A practicing Hindu, born to affluent immigrant parents, Sunak received an elite ruling-class education, married into one of India's richest families (Infosys), and trained at Goldman Sachs before stealing another fortune as a hedge funder and venture capitalist. He made a swift rise through Parliament by supporting his Conservative Party’s lethal principles: "free" markets, deregulation, privatization of health care and other social services, mass poverty, the shredding of the social safety net, and widening racist inequalities.
For Sunak and the finance capitalists he serves, the goal is to restore Margaret Thatcher's austerity regime of the 1980s, a brutal attack that decimated the working class. Under Thatcher, the proportion of workers below the poverty line more than tripled, from 13 percent to 43 percent. Child poverty more than doubled. Meanwhile, the rich saw their tax rates cut in half, from 83 percent to 40 percent (Guardian, 2013). With inflation now exceeding 10 percent and the British pound in free fall, Sunak's job will be to balance the books through the death and despair of our class sisters and brothers.
The austerity regimes of Sunak’s more recent Conservative predecessors, David Cameron (2010-2016) and Theresa May (2016-2019), created the massive economic pain that paved the way for Brexit, Britain’s departure from the European Union, which has only aggravated the country’s crisis. With unemployment, housing, and disability benefits gutted, millions of workers’ lives were destroyed. As an aging population required more care, the National Health System was hollowed out to the verge of collapse. Tuition at many universities tripled as tax cuts helped the rich (Harvard Business Review, August 2019).
Smash the bosses’ racist attacks
In line with a long and disgraceful British tradition, Sunak's government will rely on racism to divide workers, scapegoat immigrants, and regain lost profits with more super-exploitation. The racist British legacy of imperialism and colonialism spans over four centuries and five continents. British imperialists pillaged and plundered their way from South Asia to Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean.
In particular, Britain is notorious for its virulent anti-Asian racism. After World War II, it deported hundreds of Chinese seamen who’d been recruited for the war effort, deeming them an “undesirable element” in British society. During the COVID pandemic, vicious attacks against Asians rose by 300 percent (Al Jazeera, April 2021). For nearly two centuries, Britain’s colonial bosses said they couldn't leave India because the people there could not rule themselves. Now, out of desperation for their failing system, they have turned to the son of Indian immigrants to bail them out.
As Boris Johnson's chancellor of the exchequer, Sunak backed the racist scheme to return refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda. He has reappointed hard-right racist Home Secretary Suella Braverman, another child of South Asian immigrants, who spearheaded the Rwanda plan. In a sick statement, Braverman declared, “I would love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession (thenational.scot, 10/1). This disgusting callousness shows what’s in store for the working class, and why communist internationalism is vital for smashing racism.
Like Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama and Top Cop Kamala Harris, Sunak has only one loyalty: to the capitalist bosses. Identity politics is a fatal trap. Workers have nothing in common with bosses who happen to look like them. They have only one true identity: as members of the international working class.
Liberals are the main danger
After the latest Tory debacle, it’s only a matter of time before the so-called Labour Party returns to power–more bad news for the working class. Like the Democratic Party in the U.S., British liberal bosses are the main danger. On the surface, they may seem to care about workers. But behind their mask of compassion lies a group of bosses who are eager to sacrifice workers to protect their dirty profits. Time and again, the Labour Party has proven itself to be a disgraceful, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, war-mongering cesspool.
In 2003, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997-2007) joined George W. Bush in fabricating the weapons of mass destruction myth to justify the U.S./UK invasion of Iraq. Under Blair’s leadership, Britain’s prison population doubled despite a decline in crime. Countless workers struggling with the diseases of capitalism, including drug and mental health issues, were funneled into prison (Independent, July 2009). Now leading in the polls by more than 30 percent, Labour has been accused of ignoring reports of sexism and anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism by senior party members (Guardian, 10/2). These hypocritical liberals are poised to intensify Britain’s attacks on immigrant workers: “Labour’s pitch is not for open borders, but to make laws smarter and police the borders better” (New York Times, 10/26).
No capitalist politicians can serve our class interests. There is no “lesser evil” among the rapacious, murderous bosses. Only one party stands with and for the international working class: the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Workers must unite to overthrow the profit system that enslaves us. Join PLP! We have nothing to lose but our chains!J