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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Boris backtracks already!

by New Worker correspondent

BORIS JOHNSON’S new Tory government was sworn in this week, boosted by last week’s general election that won them 365 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. The Johnson government confirmed that its first priority was to withdraw from the European Union — a pledge that clearly helped the Tories smash through Labour’s ‘red wall’ in northern England.

Johnson posed as a ‘One Nation Tory’ during the election campaign. But he’s speedily backtracked on promises to meet working class demands amidst reports that his “people’s government” intends drop the pledge to uphold existing labour rights guaranteed by the EU whilst introducing further reactionary laws to ban national strikes in the transport industry and outlaw civic support for the boycott Israel campaign.

Although Jeremy Corbyn has said he will step down in the early part of next year the Blairites want him out now. Tony Blair and other old has-beens such as Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell are trying to pin the blame for Labour’s defeat on Corbyn and his left alliance to divert attention away from their disastrous Remainer campaign that drove tens of thousands of traditional Labour supporters into the Tory camp in the December poll.

Labour’s right-wing is calling for 100,000 new members to drive the Corbynistas out and put Labour back in the hands of the old guard that did so much damage to the labour movement during the Blair era. But they’re unlikely to win even a tiny fraction of the new intake to their banner, let alone find a credible candidate willing to openly embrace class collaboration and the crawling to the Americans that so typified the Blair era.

There’s plenty of left posers willing to serve the right if it helps them up the greasy pole and a number of the usual suspects have already thrown their hats into the ring. The Labour leadership contest is expected to start on 7th January and end with an election by the end of March.

Dark forces also played their hand in the general election. One prominent Labour MP has openly accused the BBC of “consciously playing a part” in Labour’s election defeat and another, hounded out on trumped-up charges of “anti-Semitism”, says the Israelis mobilised their “assets” to stop Jeremy Corbyn winning.

Andy McDonald, Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary, publicly accused the state broadcasting agency of bias that he said was partly responsible for Labour’s defeat whilst Chris Williamson, the pro-Palestinian MP who lost his seat after he was hounded out of the Labour Party, said that Israel is “a hostile foreign government” that had “mobilised its assets in the UK — which Israeli diplomats call their ‘power multiplier’ — in an attempt to prevent a Corbyn-led Labour government”.

“They’ve done this by terrifying activists, co-ordinating with anti-Corbyn journalists and MPs, and using faith organisations, many of them charities, to promote the anti-Semitism narrative.

“first they said ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’. Then they said ‘anti-capitalism is anti-Semitism’. In this election, they’ve sought to prevent dozens of anti-imperialist socialists from standing for Labour.”

“Their secondary goal was always to blunt the internationalism in our movement and normalise Zionism in the Labour Party,” Williamson said.

Williamson, once tipped for the deputy-leadership of the Labour Party, lost his Derby seat to the Conservatives after being forced to defend it as an “independent” following his suspension from the party.

And Baroness Jenny Tonge is refusing to apologise to fellow peers for similar remarks about the election made on social media. The independent member of the House of Lords who was driven out of the Liberal-Democrats for up holding the Palestinian cause, said: “The Chief Rabbi must be dancing in the street. The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn.”