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Only protests and stoppages in communities, towns and cities will stop Johnson

The embryonic movement forming this weekend already faces a choice: radical, insurgent and to topple the government; or conventional and steered by those whose genius lost the Remain campaign three years ago? asks KEVIN OVENDEN

CHILDREN going hungry. A right-wing government of millionaires in contempt of Parliament. British ministers dancing to Donald Trump’s tune. Assorted venal MPs of various stripes desperate to avoid the wind of democratic accountability and a general election.

That’s not an apocalyptic vision of this coming autumn.

It is a description of spring and summer. Foodbanks this week reported running out of supplies due to the number of hungry kids during the holidays.

Boris Johnson’s gambit of suspending Parliament has not caused this crisis. It has brought to a head the all-encompassing crisis that has been gathering for over a year and that brought down his predecessor.

He’s provoked a backlash. The issue now is whether it can grow and deepen to bring him down too or whether it is narrowed and frittered away, allowing him room for further provocations, to divide popular opposition and to ride out the storm.

He has taken a huge risk — and there are more to come — but his strategy is clear. It is to claim to represent “the people” and change against a discredited Parliament and vested interests. It is to brand the opposition with defending a status quo that has failed working people across the country.

It is a monumental lie — “fake populism [from a] phoney outsider,” as Jeremy Corbyn nailed it in a speech two weeks ago that spelled out exactly what is at stake as all the tensions and conflicts of Tory, austerity Britain boil up.

Corbyn spoke of a storm of “political and constitutional crisis this autumn.” More than that, he explained the reality beneath the official-speak of prorogations, privy councils and parliamentary procedures, things that leave cold millions hounded on universal credit, unable to afford the kids’ school uniform or on zero-hours contracts. There are 14 million people in poverty in Britain (21.2 per cent of the population).

This is about a power grab by a government for hedge funds and millionaires, stuffed with mini-Trumps, against the interests of the millions and with the overriding aim of stopping a radical Labour government coming to office.

Its priorities were clear in July: tax cuts for the rich and further privatisation. Sajid Javid’s emergency budget next week is already revealed as smoke and mirrors. Hospital managers have shown that “new money for the NHS” is nothing of the kind. Enforced concessions on schools funding aim to neutralise it as an electoral issue.

It’s an attempt to buy time and appear to be addressing people’s burning concerns beneath the cloud of Brexit political chaos.

It can work only if it is allowed to — if Labour and the popular opposition look like they are more concerned about the procedures in a neo-gothic building on the Thames or the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh than they are about working people: all working people, however they voted in referendums and previous elections.

Corbyn refused that path two weeks ago. Instead he outlined a compelling vision of seeking to bring down this government by vote of no confidence and popular pressure, force an election and mobilise the labour movement to win a radical government.

“A general election triggered by the Tory Brexit crisis will be a crossroads for our country,” he said.

“It will be a once in a generation chance for a real change of direction, potentially on the scale of 1945.”

It was exactly that vision, and a raft of radical policies, that confounded the pundits and the polls in 2017, depriving Theresa May of her majority and setting on its path the storm that is breaking now.

Don’t anyone think that a Tory leadership still not sure what happened then is confident of it not being repeated in another election in the coming weeks or months.

The Guardian columnist who this week opined that Johnson wants to lose a no confidence vote so he can have an October election was also spectacularly wrong in saying that Labour should obstruct the 2017 election because it would be wiped out “worse than in 1983.”

The corporate media did its best to ignore Corbyn’s speech. But at events throughout the summer it has resonated with people in all parts of Britain.

Now the course of action it proposed is being confirmed by events — and from some unlikely quarters.

On Tuesday the Labour leadership made an unnecessary compromise in accommodating the petty Lib Dem leader and other parliamentary fragments by saying no confidencing the government would be “a last resort” not first order of business next week.

Johnson spotted the weakness and moved the following morning to cut the parliamentary session. A political “coup” it may be, but don’t hold your breath on the courts ruling it unconstitutional. It is anti-democratic. But so is the constitution in basic respects — and so are the courts.

It is an extraordinary moment to mobilise the labour movement and millions of working people to fight
for a ‘once in a generation’ change

The blatant attempt to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, as May did before him, has brought a big reaction that touches on much more fundamental matters than the length of a parliamentary session.

The two organs of big business opinion in Britain, the Financial Times and the Economist, have both come out with extraordinary editorials excoriating the government and calling for it to be brought down in Parliament.

That is, they say MPs should vote no confidence in the government next week and install Corbyn as a caretaker prime minister to hold an October general election.

In other words, just what Corbyn outlined two weeks ago. If the voices of big business are saying that, then why on earth should Labour and an incipient popular movement instead allow the Lib Dems and independents to veto tabling it?

Kenneth Clarke and other Tory grandees have also said they are prepared to see a Corbyn interim to hold an election.

They and big business would, of course, campaign in that election for an alternative to Labour and its radical programme.

But the point is that for their own reasons — their alienation from the Johnson leadership — they are advocating this course.

It is an extraordinary moment, a perfect storm, to mobilise the labour movement and millions of working people to fight for a “once in a generation change.” But there’s a problem.

There are voices of the continuity-Remain campaign — which does not in fact speak for most of business that is reconciled to a “soft Brexit” —  summed up by the Lib Dems. They do not want an election. They talk of “defending” a parliament whose composition is long out of kilter with the people and not fighting for a democratic revolt to elect a new one.

One path is of broadening the incipient movement to foreground the concerns and social crisis affecting all working people, and uniting it across Remain and Leave voters to topple Johnson.

The other is to narrow it to Parliament — with protests demanding more parliamentary manoeuvres — and to Brexit, thus dividing it along lines the labour movement has been struggling to overcome.

One leads to the chance of forcing Johnson out and electing Labour; the other to weakening Labour in the hope of the kind of new Blairite confection that the hapless Change UK was supposed to become.

That’s not what a lot of ordinary people opposed to any Brexit want. But it is what those political forces want who are every bit as opposed to a Corbyn government as Johnson is.

That way lies disaster, playing into Johnson’s hands in two ways.

First, it allows him — of all people — to claim to represent the people against a parliamentary elite.

Second, he and much of his cabinet did previously vote for May’s deal. They would like to get some tweaked deal from Brussels — with things like the Irish backstop rebranded. They are prepared to threaten no deal to get it.

But they will also use the threat of no deal to drive through a revised one in October if they can get it agreed.

Focusing on no deal not on a change of government would leave them holding all the cards — and then to go to the country at a time of their choosing, with Labour painted as speaking for the few, not the many.

Johnson has a notional majority, even with the DUP, of just one. There is going to be a general election.

The only question is whether it’s forced on him imminently, with the shout of Tories out ringing on the streets, or when he wants, after popular anger is dissipated and made to look like it is opposed to popular democracy.

The embryonic movement forming this weekend already faces a choice. Radical, insurgent and to topple the government; or conventional and steered by those whose genius lost the Remain campaign three years ago?

If you talk of a Tory “coup” then the answer does not lie in a QC’s submission to the Supreme Court or an ancient “humble address” in Parliament.

It lies in massive working class, anti-Tory mobilisation — fusing the demands for radical social and democratic change. Protests and stoppages in communities, towns and cities. Popular assemblies.

Change — for the 99 per cent, against the 1 per cent: a Bernie Sanders message of political revolution, not a Hillary Clinton kind of message that failed to stop Johnson’s friend Trump.

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