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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Times change but nothing changes

NO-ONE should be surprised at Boris Johnson’s last days at the helm. He was, after-all, utterly useless as Prime Minister. Whilst he had plenty of time for his lavish wedding anniversary bash, he failed to turn up to emergency COBRA meetings over the heatwave. He’s done nothing to help people facing the sky-rocketing energy bills, instead he spends his final days in office lording it in Slovenia and Greece whilst the cost-of-living crisis worsens and the country bakes in a heat-wave not seen since the 1970s.

Johnson is incapable of seeing himself as others see him. In Downing Street he was surrounded by hand-picked people lesser than himself who pandered to his vanity.

When BoJo grudgingly threw in the towel in July his followers said this wasn’t the end of the story. Some said Boris, as they still called him, would rise again like a phoenix from the flames to lead the Conservatives in time for the next election. Others said he should either be appointed Secretary-General of NATO when the job comes up for grabs next year, or at least be made the UK’s special emissary to Ukraine by whoever succeeds him as Prime Minister when he finally goes in September.

Now Johnson’s become a political pariah. He’s jeered by crowds as he arrives for the Platinum Thanksgiving service in St Paul’s Cathedral. He’s booed and heckled by British holidaymakers on his trip to the Greek coastal town of Nea Makri, one of them shouting “Get back to work you fat ponce!”.

Enoch Powell, the maverick Tory MP, once said that “all political careers end in failure” – a comment that certainly summed up his own career as he played and lost in the House of Commons in the 1960s. Powell played the racist card in a bid for Tory leadership but ended up as a side-lined Ulster Unionist MP in Northern Ireland. And whilst his own political life ended in failure Powell’s law is clearly not the universal rule in Parliament.

Past Prime Ministers, with the obvious exception of Tony Blair, are still held in high esteem by their respec­tive parties. Some, such as Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, retired to the back-benches. Others, such as James Callaghan, had second lives as elder statesmen in the House of Lords. And nowadays John Major, Gordon Brown, Theresa May and even David Cameron can walk the streets without risking the wrath an angry mob.

The abuse Johnson is now getting reflects the anger on the street over the crisis we’re in now. The ruling class want to focus that anger away from themselves. They’ll blame Johnson.

The blame game starts with Johnson’s duplicity and incompetence and ends with some nonsense about the nature of the global economy. They’ll tell us things will get better in the hands of whoever takes his place, who will inevitably be one of their own or one of their place-men such as Sir Keir Starmer.

This is their agenda. We, on the other hand, have to put the communist answer to the crisis back on ours.

Changing the tillerman changes nothing. Changing the system through the social ownership of the means of production is the only alternative.