The outbreak of war between the various factions of the Tory Party is a consequence of the crisis that the government, far from resolving, has made worse. Capitalism’s global crisis of profitability, of over-accumulation, has hit the British economy with particular force because of Brexit. Prominent Brexiteers have fallen out with each other as they invent the supposed benefits of Brexit. Former Business Secretary Rees-Mogg has criticised his successor Kemi Badenoch for removing the so-called ‘sunset’ clause in the Retained EU Law Bill. This would have automatically revoked all EU law retained in existing legislation and would have created chaos. Coming after the Tories’ disastrous performance in the May local elections, these divisions are tearing the party apart. Circling Prime Minister Rishi Sunak like a shark, Home Secretary Suella Braverman acts with impunity as she manoeuvres to become the next Tory Party leader.
Brexit fantasies
Badenoch’s retreat over the Retained EU Law bill was inevitable. The potential chaos if the ‘sunset’ clause became law would be huge since all associated case law would become null and void, and the regulations that had been part of EU law would have to be relitigated at great expense. Yet this did not stop the Brexit fantasist Rees-Mogg from denouncing what he described as ‘an inability of Whitehall to do the necessary work and an incapability of ministers to push this through their own departments’.
Meeting in Bournemouth on 13 May, the Conservative Democratic Organisation, essentially a right-wing fan club for former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, saw a succession of MPs, including former Home Secretary Priti Patel and inevitably Rees-Mogg, attack Sunak both directly and indirectly for reducing the bill’s scope. Patel stated that senior Tory leaders had ‘done a better job at damaging our party’ over the previous year than Labour and condemned MPs for removing Johnson, saying they had overseen the ‘ousting of our most electorally successful prime minister since Margaret Thatcher’. Johnson’s allies are now indignant that the Cabinet Office has referred allegations to the police that he held illegal parties at Chequers during Covid-19 lockdowns, describing it as a ‘witch hunt’.
Even more extreme was the ultra right-wing National Conservatism conference in London the following week, with Home Secretary Suella Braverman attacking her own government over migration in the pursuit of her leadership ambitions. Hinting at her discredited claim that grooming gangs were mainly Pakistani, she now said ‘The ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators is the sort of fact that has become unfashionable in some quarters.’ More generally she said people should be ‘sceptical of self-appointed gurus, experts and elites who think they know best what is in the public’s interest, even when that public is quite certain that they need something different from what those experts are proposing.’ The Cabinet Office now has to regularly fact-check her claims, such is her disdain for the truth. Her protestations of innocence in May over the handling of her car speeding awareness course were as unbelievable as any of her claims about the nature of grooming gangs, but of course she got away with it.
In addressing the record levels of immigration that were supposed to end with Brexit, she said ‘There is no good reason why we can’t train up enough HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers. Brexit enables us to build a high-skilled, high-wage economy that is less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour.’ However, a high-skilled economy costs, and the massive staff shortages in social care can only be addressed by a huge training programme and ending poverty pay in the sector. With the government cutting back even on medical school places there is clearly no intention to build the ‘high-skilled’ economy she trumpets.
Other speakers expressed even more extreme fantasies, with up-and-coming backbench MP Miriam Cates describing low birth rates as the result of a ‘cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls’. Rationality would have pointed to the prohibitive costs of child care and its inadequate availability, or the astronomic level of house prices and rents as the underlying reasons. Another backbencher, Danny Kruger, took aim at what he called ‘a mix of Marxism and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship.’ These may seem fringe views, but they are a sign of where a section of the Tory party is heading: borderline fascism.
It took Rees-Mogg to introduce a note of reality to the conference when he admitted that the introduction of voter ID requirements at the local elections had been motivated by the desire to restrict the anti-Tory vote, saying ‘Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.’ He had been of course wholly in favour of the legislation when it went through parliament, despite the absence of any evidence of the voter fraud it was supposed to tackle.
Brexit realities
In the lead-up to the 2016 referendum on EU membership we argued that:
‘The parasitic character of British capitalism, its dependence on the earnings from its vast overseas assets and particularly those of its parasitic banking sector to sustain the British economy, shows not only its vulnerability to any external financial or political shocks, but also that it is no longer capable of withstanding the economic and political challenge of US or European imperialism as an independent imperialist power.’
(David Yaffe: ‘EU Referendum: the position of communists’, FRFI 251, June/July 2016)
One example which shows Britain’s incapacity to challenge US or European imperialism is demonstrated by the government’s National Semiconductor Strategy published on 19 May which promises a mere £1bn support for the industry – whereas the US has allocated over $50bn and the EU €43bn to their respective strategies, and even Ireland has a promised investment of €630m in a semiconductor research facility by US company ADI.
Car battery gigafactories
Another example is electronic vehicle (EV) battery production. The automotive industry is demanding changes to the Brexit deal requiring a 10% tariff or tax to be added to the price of EVs traded between the EU and Britain unless they include at least 45% of EU- or British-made content. The Brexit deal delayed implementation of the tariff until 1 January 2024 because of insufficient European battery production. Car batteries make up about half of the cost of an EV, and with just one small-scale car battery plant in Britain there are doubts as to whether British-built EVs can meet the content requirement to qualify for tariff-free trade. This is particularly true for when the content requirement rises to 65% in 2027. Stellantis, which owns Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroen and Fiat, has said that its plans to produce electric vehicles at Ellesmere Port are under threat as a consequence.
In January 2023 Car magazine estimated there were 100 battery gigafactories in China, just six in Europe and with the collapse of the Britishvolt gigafactory in January 2023, none in Britain. In the second week in May, the construction of three new gigafactories across Europe was announced with a total of more than €7bn investment (EE News 14 May 2023) whereas all the British government has been able to announce is £1bn to support the extension of Nissan’s car battery production and £500m for a Jaguar Landrover car battery factory in Somerset. Total car battery investment in the US in 2022 exceeded $70bn. There is a need for at least five gigafactories in Britain to support local car production, and they have to be in production by 2030. This involves a colossal investment – Britishvolt alone needed £3.8bn – without which up to 800,000 automotive industry jobs will be in peril.
Brexit: a ruling class nightmare
The notion that Brexit would encourage British manufacturing has proved a pipedream as Britain’s trade in goods deficit with the EU more than doubled in 2022 compared to 2021, from £43.4bn to £91.9bn. More broadly, British imperialism’s external liabilities in Quarter 3 2021 (the latest figures) at £12.74 trillion exceed overseas assets of £12.27 trillion by almost half a trillion pounds, nearly a quarter of the UK GDP of £2.23 trillion for that year. Inflation was still at 8.9% in March 2023, having barely moved since the high point of 9.6% in October last year. Interest rates increased again on 11 May to 4.5% and are expected to rise to 5%. With the worst-performing economy in the G7 group of advanced capitalist countries, and the currently unknown consequences of the recent US bank collapses, Britain’s economy is indeed susceptible to external shocks.
Local elections – a Tory disaster
Falling real wages, record demand at foodbanks, a fifth of households reporting that they were skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day on the one hand, and on the other, widely-publicised record profits for energy companies like Shell and BP and banks like HSBC, were bound to have an effect on the outcome of the May local elections, and so it came to pass. A loss of over 1,000 seats together a net loss of 56 councils – such was the scale of the Tory defeat. Labour increased the number of councils it controls by 21, and the LibDems by 11. Compared to 2022, the Tories lost 1,396 councillors, while Labour gained 479 and the LibDems 287. This left Labour as the party with the most council seats for the first time since 2002.
A breakdown of votes by region showed Labour’s share of the vote increasing by 6% or more compared to 2019 in the North East, Yorkshire and Humberside and the West Midlands. Other analysis showed that Labour gains were higher in Brexit-voting wards than in Remain-voting wards where Libdem gains were greatest. While the Tories were claiming that Labour gains were below expectations, the fact that LibDems won so many Tory seats in Tory-voting constituencies added to the overall sense of Tory crisis.
Robert Clough
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 294, June/July 2023
