Brexit and sovereignty

In one of those apparently increasing contradictory political developments in the post USSR world (like the growth of Chinese capitalism under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party or the support of a large swathe of the US working class for Trump) the British High Court has decided that Parliament (MPs and their Lordships) is the only institution with the sovereign power to make or remove a law, in this case the removal of a law that allows the initiation of Britain's departure from the EU. Brexiteers are furious.

Among the multitude of contradictory elements that have emerged since the Brexit vote, like a spray of sparks as a hollow log collapses in the fire, we have now a new set of democratic tribunes. Meet the Daily Express, the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph, all demanding that the High Court plutocrats (including a foreigner!) retreat against the tide of the Peoples' wishes as expressed in the June EU referendum. All four papers are owned by multi-millionaires. All four have a rank record in regard to the working class interest and have bitterly opposed anything emerging from the 'Peoples wishes' in the past - including every government elected that was not Tory (with the exception of Blair's).

But this is not just another convoluted mess that confounds traditional 'left' and 'right' approaches to its resolution. There are echoes of two different class struggles going on in this latest melee about Brexit.

The first is created out of a very old but uncompleted class struggle. The High Court judges are not holding the ring for Parliament's sovereignty against 'the People.' They are defending it - against the King! That was the major political gain won by the English Civil War in the 1640s, expressed in legal terms. What the wretched May and her Cabinet had supposed is that they would initiate the official exit procedures from the EU via an order in Council. This is the Queen's Council; the Privy Council. In the mess of compromises and ambiguities constructed by the new ruling classes in England following the 1660s 'Restoration', the Privy Council was set up to be a collection of the great and the good, centred round a pliant monarch, acting as the political and moral centre of the nation, should ever again Parliament become subject to unhelpful and unworthy pressures from below. Today orders in Council are strictly speaking executive powers that prevent and override Parliamentary decision making. And they are required now to prevent the British Parliament being tied up for a decade in the removal or amendment or the reaffirmation of the laws tied to EU membership. The reason for that is that Parliament is now and for the foreseeable future, a very unsteady ship of state indeed.

For many decades most serious business dealing directly with Britain's wealth and power has been removed from Parliament's orbit. But Brexit was unforeseen and old instruments had to be dusted off and prepared for the new conditions. There was a howl of anger focused on the High Court from those who voted for Brexit. But the British ruling class's most powerful legions, who opposed Brexit, are now congratulating the judiciary in its historic defence of the powers of Parliament against the executive! (Read - the power of MPs to delay Brexit.)

This is a typical confusion of the modern age. To unravel its meaning, a deeper reference must be made to the nature, composition and evolution of a very different, significant and contemporary class struggle.

This is the (hidden) struggle for a different type of sovereignty altogether, going on in Britain (and, in different ways, across large parts of the globe.) It is nothing less than a potential, political convulsion of momentous significance - now covered in Britain by the flurry over a High Court ruling. In reality the modern struggle over sovereignty contains the seeds of a total transformation of British politics.

It is useful, in the effort to solidify and identify the emergent shape of this transformation, to start from a powerful historical abstraction, rooted in the history of the most advanced capitalist society in a social system that remains dominant across our planet. The US anti-colonial and then its anti-slavery wars produced the ultimate version of sovereignty yet established by the capitalist social system (and it is unlikely to be surpassed now in the days of decline!)  The US's 'Founding Fathers' did not use the term 'sovereignty' when describing their own base for rule, as they had just defeated the world's most powerful country and that country, Britain, was headed up by a titular sovereign. A hundred years later Lincoln, speaking at Gettysburg, expressed it perfectly in his resounding phrase of 'a government of the people, by the people, for the people'.

This is not a piece of empty rhetoric. Its perceptive originators meant that the rulers of the nation should be from all classes - not just from the old aristocracy of heritage or the new one of wealth; that government should not be overwhelmed or sidelined by other, unofficial, shadowy, or official but unaccountable - as with the civil service -, institutions or forces, and lastly that the purpose of government should be the promotion of the means by which the interests of the people together were advanced. This was a bold, victorious capitalist class taking on the leadership of society as a whole.

The overwhelming fact that Lincoln's great proposition failed is the story of the ensuing century and a half. The fundamental reason why it failed was the central dynamic of history that followed Lincoln's address. It was a relentless, universal and over-determining struggle between the Capitalist class and all of the other classes which the Capitalist class first created, periodically re-organised and subordinated, in the US and across the globe. Because 'the People' were divided into contradictory camps, the vast majority of the world's population - whether under despotic or Parliamentary rule - were prevented from being in government; were excluded from governing and faced a politics and economics totally inimical to its interests.

The strains and contradictions of this reality are still obvious across the world, most brutally in Syria in a struggle against tyranny and barbarism but also apparent even in the West, including in the USA. The newly characterised 'political class' is despised by millions of working class people in the most advanced capitalist countries in the West. (While economic development in China, India, South Africa and Brazil has been novel and rapid, so too has been the growing sense of political alienation by the mass of the working class people in those societies.) In Britain the same process has taken on its own, unique shape.

As the big majority of UK citizens have had little to do with the Queen and are encouraged to see her role as 'good for tourism', they have little interest in the High Court Judges' battle in defence of Parliament against the monarchy (or its executive.) This particular battle is past its sell by date. A new arraignment of the classes in society has changed the focus for the majority of 'the People.' The judges are seen as part of the problem in the conflict between 'them' and 'us.'  Their support for Parliament is seen as a stick to beat 'the People.' Attitudes towards the British Parliament are more critical today among the British population at large than at any time since the adoption of universal franchise. As a consequence for anybody who appears to resist the results of the EU referendum, the first political act that appeared to be a real example of mass democracy, they face sharp rebuttal. Alongside Parliament the main political parties are similarly despised and the growing support for Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party has more to do with the idea that he has to transform his party into something completely different, than any return to 'traditional' party loyalties.

From this polarisation, between a large majority of working class people and the political institutions that are supposed to rule, emerges new political facts and conditions. And the British experience may be locally specific but it is not unique.

Because the US is still the most powerful nation and the most nakedly and overtly driven by Capitalist wealth and the market, the conditions of the battle over sovereignty (over who rules and how they rule and to what ends they rule) are much more explicit. What Trump's support shows among millions of his supporters is their hatred for a political system that does not work for workers and their families. Because Trump has no intention of breaking that political system (its debt to the wealthy, its place-people, its roots in special interests) he ties his vitriol for the establishment to racism and nationalism, as though these were the solution to the failure of US politics and its traditional parties. In fact it is these latter two causes that Trump will draw on - precisely in order to save the political system (the heart of the establishment) and its $ Billionaire bosses, from the anger of the working and unemployed poor.

In the US, the only alternative to Trump is Bernie Sanders, who also thinks and says that the US's political system must be overturned but is genuine. He calls for a political revolution, which, unlike racism and nationalism, does have the potential to benefit the working class rather than politically destroy it. Sanders's emphasis on class politics to unite the poor is a valid response to Trump's racist hysteria. His two proposals so far are deeply radical in that they would take big money out of national politics and maintain and grow a mass movement to promote change. (Exactly from that point of view, what ever decision Americans make about voting against Trump, it was a mistake in Sanders own terms to endorse the Clinton candidacy which stands foursquare for big money and against the influence of mass movements.)

In the UK today it is only the new Labour Party leadership that has the political weight for its voice to be heard in the real, essential argument over sovereignty - if it really understood its significance and its role in the reorganisation of the country's working class movement and its potential to make a breakthrough into the leadership of the whole of society. It is the absence of that voice, and the thought that goes with it, which is the most obvious weakness and danger facing Labour's new leaders.

The Labour Party now has a front and centre position to take on Britain's rotten political system. Alongside the evacuation of austerity, a policy designed to save and then enrich the bankers and their system, consciously based on the reduction of living standards for the rest, Britain has a Prime Minister without a single vote cast for her or her policies, a corrupt and self-serving Parliament that does not represent those who voted in the last election and a voting system that produces more and more of the same.

Just as Trump's candidacy is a deliberately false, racist and nationalistic perspective on how 'Americans can get back their country' (currently owned by $Billionaires) so Brexit in the UK plays the same role. The tragedy is that everybody knows in their hearts that there is absolutely no chance that more governmental power and sovereignty will flow back to the British people as a result of turning off the EU. Worse, in any case most of the British people rightly despise the Westminster Parliament into which all this fictitious new power would settle! As the results of Brexit (which will be the same, albeit at a different tempo, as the 'results' of remaining in a crisis ridden EU) become more obviously a blind ally in this regard, so the opportunity for the Labour leadership to announce its own political revolution becomes more pressing.  And that would mean embracing those partial steps already taken by the Scots and the Welsh who now have the ability to oppose by their governments, albeit partially, all the trappings of austerity and the new corruption in Westminster. But the chance for such a bold initiative and the alliances it would create will not last long.