Mark Best, West London Socialist Party
Three months after announcing that she would leave Parliament, Nadine Dorries, Tory MP and Boris Johnson supporter, has finally formally stepped down. Dorries, who resigned in solidarity with Johnson after he was penalised for misleading Parliament about the parties held in Downing Street amidst Covid lockdown restrictions, used the opportunity to launch a scathing attack on the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak. He heads up a “zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has been achieved.”
Many people whose pay has stagnated while companies have increased prices may well agree with her, but Dorries is no friend of struggling families. Infamous for hiding her own money on a Channel 4 show testing if MPs could live on the then-called Jobseekers Allowance, she has backed the last decade of Tory austerity measures and attacks on the welfare system.
Dorries hasn’t spoken in the House of Commons for over 400 days and only voted six times in that period. Reports that constituents have not been able contact her to represent them haven’t stopped Dorries continuing to get her £86,584 salary as an MP. She might be the only worker in the country that has gone on strike and, until she formally resigned, her bosses were unable to stop paying her!
The hundreds of thousands of workers that have been on strike over the past year against the cost-of-living crisis don’t have a party that represents them in Parliament. Whether from the increasingly desperate Tories – who can’t stop tearing each other to pieces as they approach, in Dorries’ own words, an “electoral tsunami” – or from Starmer’s Labour, currently watering down its ‘New deal for Working People’ (see Labour U-turn on workers’ rights pledge) and penalising MPs like Sam Tarry for attending picket lines.
The Socialist Party fights for building such a party, to represent all those who want to fight back against the misery on offer from the main parties. We fight for unions to be able to back candidates that will fight for their members. We fight for a new mass workers’ party, armed with a socialist programme, to offer a real alternative.
