Britain's Brexit troubles.

When US President Trump walked across the G20 podium, ignoring the host Argentina's President Mauricio Macri, he was heard demanding to someone in the wings to -
'Get me out of here!'
Trump likes to populate his own podiums and carefully constructs his 'love-in' audiences. The UK Prime Minister, Teresa May is the opposite. She is uncertain on her Party's podiums and frightened of her closest allies. Teresa May, is secretive and suspicious. The pressures of Brexit have sharpened, even exposed, many characteristics of of Britain's leading politicians. PM May is revealed by her haunting ambitions to remain PM at all costs - regardless of the loss of dignity, the hostility of her party members and her lack of any strategic imagination, she keeps running only on her sense of her own significance. She is of course a product of the dire condition of her party that has itself vacated from its traditional role in its historic defence of Britain's ruling class.

PM May, despite her dogged self-defence, will be seen as a minor, unresolved and uncertain figure in Britain's political history. Unlike Thatcher for example, May has no vision or perspective for the future of British capitalism, let alone British society. Even her would-be pithy sayings have collapsed spectacularly, virtually almost as soon as she had (endlessly) related them. A 'strong and stable government' was washed away by an election that she called, and which has created the most incoherent government in living memory. 'Brexit is Brexit' has turned into 101 versions of Brexit without any deal that protects the majority of British working class people. 'No deal is better than a bad deal' has been entirely reversed by her own proposal of a very bad deal indeed. That same 'deal' destroys her prediction that 'nothing is agreed until everything is agreed'. Instead May proposes that the UK pays the EU and follows its rules while nothing substantial has been agreed at all.

Could it get worse? It does. May's one talent of keeping-on, keeping-on and the fear of all of the factions of the Tory Party of a General Election, is the increasingly sterile basis of her utterly uncertain command. PM May would literally allow anything rather than accept a Corbyn-led Labour government. She reminded us all of the real danger of the 'dark forces' represented by Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell, Labour's main leaders, even as she was defending herself from being shot down by her own party!

The leadership crisis in Britain's mainstream politics also extends to the Labour Party (which is riven by class contradictions as well as its factional differences.) This has two key aspects. One large, group of Labour MPs give first priority to a new EU referendum, based on the general mainstream view that the UK economy will do less well in all versions of Brexit so far, compared with remaining in the EU. Others, closer to Corbyn, still argue that a General Election is the first priority. Labour's strategy, as voted at their conference, agreed with this priority and placed support for a possible 'Peoples Vote' as a last resort. The millions outside the Labour Party, looking for answers to the Tories' crisis, accurately see Labour's two different proposals not as a logical extension but rather as a confusion of alternatives. And they are right.

It is a simple truth that the most radical parts of the new Labour Party's 2017 Manifesto run against EU laws and rules. Yet it is the strongest weapon in Labour's armoury. It would be the means by which Labour could win an election - at least in respect of the big majorities in society who are angry at inequalities, private mismanagement of public services, the running down of community police, schools and the destruction and theft of public wealth.

Labour's uneasy Labour Party conference 'alliance' between MPs that want to remain in the EU, as much as anything else because it would be a block Labour's manifesto measures, and those that demand an election to open the possibility of a new sort of economy, cannot hold. The 'alliance' is already preventing Labour from directly and powerfully winning the hearts and minds of an increasingly puzzled and demoralised population which sees the Tories collapsing and Labour apparently dithering.

Of course Britain's political crisis is a crisis of the mainstream parties. It was always inevitable as social forces erupt. But Britain's two main parties have different destinies in which the Brexit battle is only a part. Eventually, perhaps later than sooner, the new Tories will coagulate around the mission of a regrouped ruling class, in or out of the EU. A Labour Party and government however will face a class war against its proposals - a war which will require the removal of the EU's rules either inside or out, and Labour's implementation of its projects and its divisions will see its MPs falling on either side of the sharpest line of all - the division between classes.

The responsibility of the new Labour leadership is to explain, now, to the people, that their essential reforms will require overturning the whole status quo - which includes breaking Brussel's main economic rules and the traditional direction beloved by the bulk of Labour MPs.