THE electorate, combined with Britain’s rather perverse electoral arrangements, have gifted Boris Johnson an undeserved 80-seat Commons majority and for the moment it appears that his main opposition is behind him.
Caught between the security obsessions that Donald Trump seems to share with former CIA director Mike Pompeo and the powerful desire of much of Britain’s telecoms industry to use Huawei’s infrastructure expertise, he opted for a solution that prioritises Britain’s commercial interest.
From Tory back benches currently populated by people who backed him in his ascent to office — and from a claque of Atlanticist obsessives whose notion of patriotism puts the priorities of the US security state higher than any specifically British interests — comes a wail of anguish.
In as far as our working class has a material involvment in this dispute, Johnson deserves mild approval.
Rest assured that Morning Star readers will not see much of this sentiment. Rather our interest lies in how the unending series of contradictions between Johnson’s election rhetoric and ruling-class priorities plays out.
As the controversies surrounding HS2 divide the shire squadrons of Tory MPs from MPs representing his new northern dependencies, Johnson is now faced with the complete collapse of Northern Rail.
Rail privatisation is the poisoned tribute to Margaret Thatcher that John Major has bequeathed every Tory prime minister since the Iron Lady was shunted away to rust in the scrapyard of failing market solutions.
Handing over Britain’s rail network to a host of fly-by-night train-operating companies — legal entities that disposed of little beyond a logo, some livery and a back office of lawyers and which rented their power units and rolling stock from a consortium of banks — was always a disaster in waiting.
Hiving off the infrastructure and signalling operations and disposing of generations of operating and maintenance expertise while contracting out repairs created a hazardous situation in which accidents began to happen with alarming frequency.
No-one needed to tell a succession of Tory leaders (or instruct their New Labour analogues) that privatisation was the new orthodoxy.
And as the European Union assumed a leading role in giving shape to these policies and developed a regulatory framework which today drives the disaggregation of rail operations across the Continent, devotion to the doctrine of privatisation is what unites the warring Tory tribes.
Britain’s railways, like our NHS today, was underfunded so that the arguments for privatisation acquired a spurious credibility when contrasted to the dispiriting reality that neglect and underinvestment entails.
In the past few years the private ownership of rail has proved beyond doubt that essential public services and utilities are natural monopolies that require integrated management and investment strategies that serve the public good rather than private profit.
Our buccaneer class of corporate cowboys has proved beyond doubt that the drive for profits — in the case of rail only sustainable by massive public subsidy — is incompatible with efficiency or public service.
It is clear that Northern Rail must return to government control and some form of public ownership.
This is an opportunity for Labour to renew its front-bench critique of casino capitalism, work in close harmony with rail unions and passenger groups, reach an accommodation with the freight lobby and devise a decent strategy in close co-operation with regional authorities and labour mayors in northern cities.
At the same time it needs to renew its contact with every diverse class of commuters, not only in and around London but in Scotland and Wales, East Anglia and the West Country.
A campaigning turn to the people will keep the Tories on the back foot and renew our resistance.
