Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Photo: Andrew Parsons,10 Downing Street/CC

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Photo: Andrew Parsons,10 Downing Street/CC   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Sarah Sachs-Eldridge, Socialist Party national organiser

Tory ministers say they ‘can’t believe’ that Johnson said ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’. But his catastrophic approach to the pandemic makes it totally believable.

Britain has the world’s fifth largest official Covid death toll, with 127,681 deaths. It could have been even worse. But education workers in the NEU and Unison trade unions organised mass resistance to the unsafe full opening of schools in January.

At each point in the pandemic Johnson and the Tories have put the interests of big business and saving the capitalist system first. That’s what the Dyson and Greensill episodes reflect – how the Tories in government serve the interests of their big business friends.

The question of how Johnson paid for the decadent redecoration of his Downing Street flat is yet one more example bobbing along on the river of effluent spewing out of Westminster.

What’s missing is a political opposition which points out that sleaze is the inevitable result of a rotten capitalist system that puts the profits of a rich minority before the interest of the working-class majority. Based on private ownership of the means of production, capitalism means economic crisis and constant attempts to make the working class pay.

With Starmer’s Labour completely reclaimed for big business, there is no alternative from the official opposition. That is the main reason the Tories aren’t plunging in the polls.

But the proposed football Super League, a rotten example of the rigging of the system in favour of the billionaires, was defeated when mass anger was turned into protests. Voting socialist in the 6 May elections is the best way to protest at the ballot box.

Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) candidates include trade unionists and community campaigners with records of standing up to the bosses and fighting Tory austerity.

TUSC candidates will make no financial gain by being elected. Among them is TUSC national chair Dave Nellist who, as an MP from 1983 to 1992, only took the average worker’s wage and donated the rest of the inflated MP’s pay to the workers’ movement.

TUSC candidates are pledged to vote against all cuts to jobs and services – but also to use elected positions to help build mass struggle. That includes building a mass working-class party to put forward a socialist alternative to the rotten-to-the-core capitalist system.