When 8 Labour MPs opposed the Labour Party's vote in Parliament which was aimed at preventing a 'no deal' Brexit, they defeated the Party's resolution and thereby secured the current Tory Government's immediate future. At what a cost! The 8 effectively decided that maintaining the worst government in Britain since World War 2, with the guarantee of austerity multiplied, was better than agreeing either a possible manageable Brexit deal in Parliament and/or a further vote on Brexit. Sectarian, anti-working class madness. This was the first, significant attack on the Corbyn-led Labour Party which has a potentially drastic outcome for huge numbers of people, that has been thrown up by Labour MPs.
309 to 298 votes in Parliament now allows the virtually unchallenged Tory heir to the throne, Boris Johnson, to maintain his fantastical vision of a Brexit future. A future where his 'no deal' threat is supposed to force the EU into compliance and which will actually lead to new depths of impoverishment for millions - even should any emergency measures be temporarily accepted. If the 8 had abstained, as 13 other Labour MPs did, then Boris (and the mini-Borises') would have started to lose their platforms. The Tories would then have split under pressure of Farage's Brexit party and there would likely have been a very early, anti-Tory, General Election.
What is the engine driving these degenerate acts? Undoubtedly sickening self-aggrandisement generally contests with basic fear among those MPs who identify themselves as the masters of politics and the arbiter of all important decisions. They turn the (very rare) major, contested, political issues in Parliament into the smallest scraps of individual consequence. More significant than the psychology of the hangers on of the political class is the utterly false understanding of the meaning of Brexit itself. It is not addressed as it should be understood, that is from the point of view of the interests of the working class (which is supposedly the basis for the Labour Party's political representation.)
The fundamental object of a political party is to change (solidify or reverse) the conditions of the majority of the people. The drastic decline of Britain's majority, in contrast to every generation since 1945, means that it falls to the Labour Party to reverse the big trends that have created that condition. Uniquely (in Europe) the current British Labour Party not only has a chance to form a government, but it does so on the basis of a radical program of reforms. And this is by far the most important issue in British politics today.
Throughout political history, the most effective changes, including the development of democracy itself, are mostly created by the sustained mobilisation of ordinary people in all the areas of day-to-day life. (The 'yellow vest' movement in France is such an example.) While there have been mass actions in Britain in the last three years, from the point of view of many (but far from all) ordinary people, they have been wracked by the Brexit issue and not focused on action needed against their sinking conditions. Instead it is Brexit that has (deliberately) stood as a symbol of the capacity of ordinary people to change things, which has stirred a third of Britain's population but is of course a genuine fake! And this idea has been heated by classes on the margins of Britain's dominant rulers and by political movements that define a whole system of society by its local enemies rather than any of the great issues of life.
While attachment or otherwise to the EU is a serious question, it is, in reality, utterly subordinate to the immediate changes necessary and possible in Britain's society. The EU is not a neutral organisation. It is the largest international block against radical reform in the UK (or elsewhere in Europe.) But today's question is getting rid of the Tories and backing a new, radical government. (The Peterborough bi-election is a hint that it is possible to get beyond Brexit in a strongly Brexit borough.) The last thing it involves is defending, as our 8 Labour MP's did, a Tory Brexit which is meant to prepare a Tory election victory in 2 years time.
In the way that history can begin with the end, so the mass movements to come in Britain will probably be those which take the cautious reforms of Corbyn's Labour and turn them into the actions that challenge a whole system of society. But it is that door, winning a Corbyn government not fiddling with this or that version of Brexit, that must be opened now.
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