Beware the Ides of March

That was the warning Julius Caesar foolishly ignored on his way to the forum during the last days of the old Roman republic. Caesar thought he was favoured by the gods. Boris Johnson has no such excuse.
    Johnson’s shambolic performance at the CBI’s annual conference this week was clearly the last straw for a growing band of Tory MPs who want Johnson out before the next election.
    The knives are out for Boris and there’s no shortage of those willing to take his place. Jeremy Hunt wants another crack at the Tory leadership and the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, does little to mask his ambitions. Even Liz Truss, the newly promoted foreign minister, is said to be interested in entering the race, if and when it happens.
    And that can could come early in the New Year, with some MPs already calling for the Prime Minister to step down following his failure to put the lid on the sleaze scandals that have rocked the Johnson administration in recent weeks.
    Around a dozen dissident MPs have submitted letters of no confidence to the chair of the powerful 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers. This is still well short of the 15 per cent needed to trigger a leadership challenge, but that could easily change if the crisis of confidence in the Johnson government gains momentum amongst the voters in the Tory shires and the heartlands of suburbia that the Tories rely on to keep them in office.
    The leadership of the Conservative & Unionist Party means nothing to workers who have no say in choosing who should be the parliamentary representative of the dominant section of the British ruling class. The future of the Tory party is matter of complete indifference to us. It’s the future of the labour movement that counts.

High speed derailment

The RMT rail union has denounced the scrapping of the eastern leg of the HS2 high-speed rail line, which the union says essentially tears up the Government’s levelling up agenda and its own climate change commitments. The Johnson government’s U-turn on key rail projects is a “great northern rail betrayal”. It’s a view also shared by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who said Labour was committed to the full HS2 proposals and Northern Powerhouse rail.
    What we really need is a genuinely integrated transport system that can only come through public ownership. The re-nationalisation of British Airways and the bus and rail companies would enable future governments build an eco-friendly, integrated transport system across Britain. But it would require immense investment that can only come from the coffers of the state.
    “Our climate and communities cannot afford false political choices between different rail projects when what we need is all these projects to go ahead and a historic mass investment in our railways that gets people out of cars and onto trains and public transport. But instead we get more Tory austerity, cut backs and attacks on rail workers’ jobs and rail services,” the RMT says. “Public transport investment pays for itself through the economic benefits it brings and it’s time the government took a proper long-term approach that reflects that fact.”