UK Prime Minister Teresa May has spelt out the cost of 'controlling' the flow of European migrants into the UK. (It is now surely absurd to continue to imagine that Brexit in the context within which it was spawned had any sort of progressive aspect. Britain's right wing have successfully made the control of immigration the main principle of international relations and that cause is expanding rapidly into the domestic sphere - with loud echoes across the whole of the western world.)
It appears that if the EU does not agree to May's demand for free trade arrangements, under one title or another, then Britain's economic 'model' will be changed. The UK will become a tax haven for major banks, finance houses and corporations and set itself up as an entrepot on the western margin of the European Continent. Buccaneering globalisation would have triumphed in Britain. (May, who was entirely aware of the symbolic impact of making her speech in the same hall as Thatcher used, to announce and praise the single European Market, is now leaping backwards over Thatcher's head to model herself on Elizabeth 1st and her pirates!) Given the fact that Germany and the EU are not going to tear down the rational for their own existence, May's plans are very likely to be initiated, and while they are certainly a serious threat to the EU, the real tragedy is that they would would also be a drastic blow to labour in Britain and internationally.
The UK's large scale and dubious links to tax havens from Jersey to the Cayman Islands now come into their own.
The EU has just refused to accept the US 's ten year efforts to get a Continent to Continent free trade deal. Britain would be a natural place for European exports to find their way, without tariff or regulation, to the US. The EU refused the American deal because the US demanded the right of decision over whether goods were regulated properly, were safe, were legal under both EU and US jurisdictions. But US officials could be based in the new British Hong Kong without oversight. BMW could send their cars there without EU jurisdiction or even build them, in nominal part, in Britain. Big Pharma, the second biggest big Pharma in the world, would deepen mutual ties to their US friends. A British backdoor into the US market would be opened. And that is just dealing with the EU and the international crooks who want to own the NHS. In reality Britain would become the biggest tax haven in the world.
British labour would enter this deregulated paradise too.
To carry the May plan out would involve the crushing of virtually all rights of the organised labour movement and most of the social wage available to the working class. Labour organisation is an anathema to unregulated international Capital. This is not a theory. The proposition has been tested over and over again across the globe in the last quarter century. Second, health and welfare spending is the first target of a strong state that is managing the freedom of Capital. Today the City of London is responsible for £67 billion per year in tax. They are going to have to be bribed to remain in May's new world. May has nothing to bribe them with except reductions in taxes. Privatisation of all social services, based on the cheapest possible labour, has only just begun.
What are the obstacles in the road that May wants the UK to follow?
There are those forces in the working class, in places like London and in countries like Scotland, who already reject the idea that immigration is the cause of low wages and poor services. A great majority of the young are opposed to the right's agenda for Brexit. More widely and crossing the different directions of the referendum vote, organised labour has started up in the 'Gig economy' and partial victories have been won by food deliverers and Uber drivers. Struggles continue across health and education services as well as in transport. A large, effective movement and non sectarian campaign against austerity continues to build mass actions under the leadership of the Peoples Assembly.
It is clear that the right's still fragile grip on mainstream political leadership (an unelected May, without any popular mandate, who is yet to face major economic crises and political fractiousness in her own party and wider) is not yet, in any sense, a victory over the whole of society. The examples of resistance mentioned are all positive and essential developments in breaking up the fake choices that the referendum posed in Britain (guess what; both 'leave' and 'remain' gives you ... globalisation) and denying the further success of the right in mainstream politics. But the key to the next stage in this struggle is the Labour Party led by Corbyn.
It is still possible to challenge and defeat the right's political advantage achieved by their grip on Brexit and their successful political mobilisation of those worried by immigration. It is certainly true that the focus on immigration as the reason for rationed housing, low paid jobs and declining services has been successful. But a bold Labour leadership could slice that manufactured coalition into much more favourable proportions with a direct, credible 'New Deal' type plan to boost wages and house building and save services. This would isolate real racism in society.
But such measures depend on a laying a course for a class struggle leadership at the heart of British political life. Broad coalitions around such a centre are possible, in relation to a green economy and across an anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-austerity spectrum of political forces. Such political coalitions are essential for the left's political future. In Scotland for example, the political focus is the demands of the people on a genuinely social democratic SNP government, and the direction of travel is a renewed relevance of the national question as at least a transitional answer to May's aspirations.
And it is inevitable that the left's appeal to the working class will also have to drive through the Labour Party itself, particularly its MPs. Many of them will sheer away, either to pursue their ambitions in other spheres or prepare a wretched posse available to the highest bidder should the need for a new 'National Government' emerge out of the coming crises. Nevertheless, a minority force in Parliament, coupled to a mass movement both inside and outside the base of the party would signal the breath of fresh air that the mass of Britain's working class population are desperate to breath. Under such circumstances the initially small political presence in Parliament would be the tip of a social iceberg, with immense weight for the future of the country.
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