TORY MPs and members knew that Boris Johnson’s entire career as a journalist and politician was littered with lies – that’s why they selected him as their leader, to win a general election based on “levelling up” lies.

They closed ranks over the Dominic Cummings affair and showed no moral scruples over the Tory corruption scandals and their own cronyism of fast-track VIP recommendations of lucrative PPE contracts, the wasted £37 billion Test and Trace fiasco, the promotion of Tory donors to the Lords or the latest privatisation or outsourcing of NHS services.

Johnson has clearly broken the law and should be fined £10,000 as others have, and should be forced to resign. But for Tory MPs, Johnson’s only moral transgression was to break the 11th Commandment.

The real reasons why they will remove him, now or later, are the opinion polls and by-election results.

They will do anything to save their £80,000-a-year jobs and the lucrative contracts and directorships with big businesses they can bring.

They never took protection of people’s lives seriously if that got in the way of them and their millionaire friends making more money. Self-serving and self-entitled, they all voted for Sunak’s budget which is now cutting our living standards.

The problem is, Sir Keir Starmer’s 'Labour' party just pursues the fundamentally same economic policies for big business but with more 'competence'.

He also dishonestly broke his promise to keep pro-worker policies once he was selected as leader.

Now he has ditched his pledge to renationalise the privatised energy, water and rail companies, supported by two-thirds of voters, just when they are all making us pay higher bills.

So in the coming electoral reckoning, working class people will need their own voice and a real alternative.

It’s now time for the trade unions to create a new party for working people to defend living standards through socialist policies.

Brent Kennedy,
Cumbria Socialist Party