Only one choice...

Some of the childish elements on the left would have us believe that nothing could be worse than a Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer. But last week’s Tory conference showed that no matter how bad the current Labour leadership is, the Tories are much, much worse.
There, in Manchester,  nonsensical talk about raising the retirement age to 75 was taken seriously while the former UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, who was covering conference for GB News, virtually outshone everyone on Rishi Sunak’s front bench.
Though Rishi Sunak had hinted that the former Brexit campaigner would be welcomed back by the party he left in 1992 no one seriously thinks it will ever happen, least of all Farage who says he’s not even interested in returning to Sunak’s “broad church”,.
But working till you drop could happen if former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has his way. The Tory grandee told delegates that “the honest truth is that the pension age is going to have to go up quite a long way to solve this problem [of reducing public expenditure],That seems to me the best way of getting out of it in the medium term”.
“The big blocks of spending are health, pension, and benefits,” says the noble lord. “If you don’t tackle those you’re not really tackling anything. People are much healthier than they used to be and I think [the pension age] does need to go up,” he said. Asked whether it should be raised to 70, he replied “75, it’s quite a lot higher”.
Needless to say this is too much for even the Blairites to swallow. And as we’re in the run-up to the next general election there will, thankfully, be few takers in the Sunak camp for Frost’s draconian plan.  But this is what we’re up against.
Crawling to the Americans isn’t just about preserving British imperialism’s interests around the world or upholding the “special relationship” with what some Tory politicians still regard as our “trans-Atlantic cousins”. It’s about admiring the unfettered capitalist system that operates in the United States – a billionaires’ playground that’s hell on earth for the poor,  and the sick and the elderly who cannot afford to pay for treatment in the “land of the free”. This is what they want here. Liz Truss leads the pack but there’s plenty more that agree with her free-for-all neo-con economics that nearly brought Britain to its knees during her brief spell in office last year. 
The social-democrats may not be much better. The slavish support of their leaders for what they think is the dominant section of the ruling class has led to betrayal after betrayal.   
 But the possibility of change remains as long as Labour retains its links with the trade unions and the co‑operative movement.
We need to defeat the right‑wing within the movement and strengthen the left within the Labour Party and the unions to create a democratic Labour Party that will carry out the demands of organised labour when in office.
Bourgeois democracy is a fraud. It is democracy for the exploiters and dictatorship in all but a formal sense of the exploited. Bourgeois elections, when they are held, are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.
Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour only divides the movement and ignores the obvious fact that, at the moment, the only realistic alternative to a Tory government is one led by Labour.