Theresa May gone, other British Conservatives should follow

This video from Britain says about itself:

A victim or racist Prime Minister Theresa May‘s racist “Right To Rent” policy, which uses landlords as unpaid rent a mob to check the immigration status of renters.

Recorded from BBC News Channel HD, 01 March 2019.

By Ben Chacko in Britain:

Friday, May 24, 2019

The Tory crisis is an opportunity for the left to shape the political agenda

THERESA MAY’S resignation inspires jubilation and fear in equal measure.

To see a hated PM leave is pleasant, but siren voices are already warning that we could be in for worse.

The favourite to succeed her atop the Tory Party is Boris Johnson, whose record of race-baiting provocations is extensive.

This includes the publication of articles claiming black people have lower IQs while he was editor of the Spectator, himself later describing them as “piccaninnies” and more recently a derisive comparison of Muslim women to “bank robbers and letterboxes” that sparked an immediate rise in Islamophobic attacks.

But to suggest that May “might be followed by someone worse” ignores her own role in the normalisation of racism in mainstream British politics.

It unhelpfully personalises a broader political trend towards increasing intolerance on the right, which is likely to continue whoever succeeds her, and reduces the socialist left to passive observers of a political crisis that we should be looking to exploit.

May might not rival Johnson’s penchant for offensive one-liners, but the outgoing PM was the architect of the “hostile environment” that saw black British citizens illegally deported from our country after living here for decades.

She was warned by Labour’s Diane Abbott that this would happen when she brought her Immigration Bill to Parliament in 2014, but pursued it anyway.

She was home secretary when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition deployed “Go Home or Face Arrest” vans on the streets of London to intimidate immigrants.

Her xenophobia was such that she clashed with the rest of David Cameron’s Cabinet over whether to include foreign students in net migration statistics, so that she could drive them from our shores.

And yet that Cabinet was also deeply implicated in legitimising racist prejudices, with Cameron talking of a “swarm” of migrants heading for Britain, and authorising a disgusting Islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Khan when he ran for London mayor.

None of this makes a Boris Johnson premiership less frightening, but it does illustrate that it wouldn’t be some radical right-wing break from a previously “centrist” party. It would confirm a trajectory that the Tories have been on for some time.

The cause of this is inseparable from the breakdown of British “politics as usual” in the wake of the financial crash of 2007-8, and the series of scandals that exposed the sleaze, dishonesty and violence at the heart of Establishment institutions — from Parliament to the police, and from the banks to the media.

If the Brexit vote was, along with the Jeremy Corbyn surge, the most dramatic illustration that Britain is refusing to be ruled in the old way, the grim farce that May’s premiership became exposed the utter inability of the old politics to tackle the consequences. Each of May’s repeated defeats in Parliament over Brexit would conventionally have forced a general election, but constitutional niceties went out the window when such a vote risked letting a socialist-led Labour Party into government.

With faith in liberal capitalism and British state institutions seriously shaken, and a newly mass-membership Labour Party showing how popular socialist solutions to the crisis can be, the ruling class has been divided.

Some wish to paper over the cracks and resurrect the pre-crash “free market” consensus — the goal of the Labour right, some “one nation” Tories, the Lib Dems, and Change UK.

This is a powerful trend, whose most visible policy aim is to keep Britain in the EU, and which has had considerable success in confusing Labour’s messaging, undermining the party’s appeal, and preventing implementation of the referendum result.

More far-sighted Tories have recognised the paradigm shift in politics and the futility of attempting to turn back the clock. These seek to direct the fear and insecurity created by austerity into hostility to immigrants and Muslims — using racism as a lightning conductor that channels public anger safely away from the edifice of capitalism itself.

Many of the concerns of leftwingers who want to remain in the EU are rooted in fear of the damage these chancers will do to working-class communities of all races and faiths if they succeed in shaping the new “centre ground.”

But it was the old “centre ground” that paved the way for the current crisis, and its lack of serious solutions is clear from the reheated Blairism that is the best it can do policy-wise.

The right must be taken on from the left, which means a bold anti-Establishment movement that recognises the need for radical socialist change, and makes clear its uncompromising opposition to a broken status quo.

On previous form, the Labour right will now be working on how to turn the Tory Party’s leadership crisis into a crisis for their own party.

Depending on the European election results, they may find an opening there. The left needs to be united in rejecting a Tory stitch-up which sees that party’s dwindling membership choose our next Prime Minister, and make May’s resignation the prompt for a general election.

This political demand can be amplified by a huge turnout at the “Stop Trump” demonstration on June 4, which can be turned into a mass rejection of the imperialist warmongering politics that he, the Tories, and Labour’s Blairite wing represent.

Tory disinclination to risk a vote can be challenged at national and at constituency level, with raising pressure for a general election a key task for local Labour parties and their allies.

Anti-racists can work to mobilise whole communities against the Conservatives and to demand an election now, while Labour’s commitment to save strategic industries like British Steel can be turned into a national political issue.

If the political struggle is confined to Parliament it will likely fail, but the case for an election amid Parliament’s inability to come to any deal on Brexit is overwhelming and can win public support.

In the process, we can recapture some of the enthusiasm and drive that saw Labour take such strides forward from 2015-17. Let’s not waste this crisis.

This 25 May 2019 parody music video from Britain is called Theresa May – Fields of Wheat (lyric video).

The song is a parody of Fields of Gold by British singer Sting.

It says about itself:

Theresa May presents her emotional farewell song, Fields of Wheat”.

Get a bit misty-eyed with Theresa May‘s nostalgic new single “

LYRICS:

You’ll remember me with a rueful smile
When you’re left with BorisJohnson
You can tell The Sun I’m strong and stable now
As I run through fields of wheat

So I took my friends for to run a while
Among the fields of barley
The farmers weren’t too pleased
They shouted stuff at us
Like, “Get off our fields of wheat!”

Now I take my love, my lovely husband Phillip
Back to those fields of barley
We’ll forget about all that Brexit stuff
Then we’ll go home and deport some people for old times’ sake

From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 24 May 2019:

Theresa May recognises she cannot govern — neither can the Conservative Party

IT was the richest man in the Cabinet who drove the last nail into Theresa May’s coffin. Jeremy Hunt followed Angela Leadsom in telling the Prime Minister her time was up.

Soon Ms May will tie on her hiking boots and head for the hills with her millionaire husband. Only the stony-hearted would deprive her of a period of quiet reflection in which she might consider just how fractured and dysfunctional her party has become. As an ardent Remainer turned reluctant Brexiteer in a party which has become an unreliable guardian of the now divided interests of our ruling class she has had an impossible task.

Her successor will have it no easier. Readers of these lines should be disabused of any suggestion that this constitutes an endorsement of the millionaire Boris Johnson but the two-faced hypocrite is the ideal person to lead such a party. For we can be sure that he has two speeches prepared for every eventuality and another one in case of surprises.

Tory MPs will get to choose just which two candidates go before the dwindling band of party members eligible to vote for our next prime minister. This process will consume their energies for the next weeks and will reveal much about the shifting patterns of opinion among this super-rich bunch who reflect the opinions of their party members almost as imperfectly as they represent the interests of working people.

It is a democratic absurdity for the choice of the next prime minister to be vested in a party that cannot command a secure majority in a Parliament that itself only imperfectly reflects opinion in the country.

Labour’s call for a general election must awake a democratic impulse in every person who desires release from this unprecedented period of political paralysis. Theresa May has bowed to the inevitable and recognises she cannot govern. Neither can the Conservative Party.

For the trade union and labour movement, for the working class as a whole and for every person for who desires the democratic renewal of our country’s economic, political and cultural life the election of a Labour government is the first step in what can become a renaissance.

Every person who presents themselves for selection as a Labour candidate must desire the election of a Labour government more than every other political objective.

If there is a scintilla of doubt about this then such a person cannot command confidence.

We have a Parliament that is disproportionately privileged and privately educated, drawn from a very narrow demographic where women and people of colour are underrepresented and where the proportion of skilled and semi-skilled manual workers is vanishingly small.

A Parliament that is so unrepresentative is one that will prove an unreliable vehicle for a government programme that puts the interests of the many before the few.

Parties represent class interests and Labour in Parliament needs to more convincingly represent the interests of working people.

There is much untapped wisdom in a crowd of working people. When polled, a popular majority is absolutely clear that it wants fewer lawyers and media types as MPs, more health professionals and teachers, more factory workers, more scientists and economists to represent them in Parliament.

Labour needs to look to who meets the twin tests of loyalty to its mission to form the next government and credibility as a defender of that government when it comes under assault.

Beyond that Labour in government must find new ways to draw into active participation in the on-the-ground implementation of its programme the millions of working people in whose interest it would govern.