The Tories
As Brexit begins to open out Britain's long-term economic and social weaknesses (and Britain's PM, Teresa May, reveals that, following the instigation of her interviewer, she had 'shed a tear' when she realised her Tory Party had not won its expected landslide victory - but no tears over the Grenfell Tower tragedy) it is now time to draw an initial balance sheet of the UK's blossoming political crisis.
May should be weeping daily. Her attempt to dominate British politics via the June 8 General Election turned into its opposite. And the latest wave of Britain's political crisis starts from splits within Britain's ruling class over the EU, which are now overt. Top companies, most especially a section of the financial sector, are desperate not to find themselves marooned in the British Isles as their access to the EU ebbs away. The uberite service sector see their pools of cheap EU labour dwindling. The major cartel that is now 'further education' watches the drop in EU based applications just as their fees have been hyped to dramatic levels. Only export driven industry, responsible for a tiny proportion of the UK's GDP, welcomes sterling's fall.
The cracks are now even cutting through single sectors. It is only one section of the financial sector that fears Brexit. Other globally based sharks, particularly US based investment funds, see a more than viable financial future (read pumped up profits) if Britain is outside the EU. Britain, as many commentators and leading politicians have now stated, might have to become the largest tax haven in the world. No deal is better than a bad deal said May. And for some, no deal is better than any deal. The US finance wizards have formed their own political bloc in the UK parliament led by Trade Minister Dr. Fox. His main work since June 8 has been to destroy his party's Chancellor, Hammond.
These splits (and others - see below) are registering themselves front and centre in the limping minority Tory government. They currently take the form of arguments (in the Tory Party) about 'soft' and 'hard' Brexits, about possible 'transition phases', about the continuing role of the European Court of Justice and even whether the UK can manage its atomic energy via 'Euratom'. The so called 'Great Repeal Bill', designed to put all of the EU laws that the UK has adopted into solely British legislation, is already under siege right across Parliament.
As Parliament staggers into its summer recess May becomes less popular (Labour is five points ahead of the Tories at 46 per cent, stated the Sunday Times - 25 June. But May’s approval rating is at minus 17, a mirror opposite to Mr Corbyn’s plus 17.) May is significantly less popular than her party in all the polls since the General Election.
There is little doubt therefore that with Brexit getting harder and the economy weakening, that with May's descending popularity, Britain's teary PM will be first to go. An early election will then be forced by a Parliament that cannot agree on any of the key Brexit steps, also by a bumpy economic decline and by an anti-government mass movement that has already started and which wants to defend the majority against another potential economic and social disaster delivered by its rulers.
However it would be a mistake to overestimate the fragility of the Tory Party's political life. Since the 1800s the British Tory Party has regrouped itself in the historic memory of a ruling class that came out of the 17th century revolution. And the principle in all of its various twists and turns, from the expansion of the franchise and the repeal of the Corn Laws onwards, has been to create and recreate a sovereign bloc that can resist insurgency and insurrection from 'beneath'. The Tory Party took a tremendous blow on June 8. And it has lost the political and social initiative in society. Millions of voters have taken a significant turn to the left. Nevertheless, at this moment of terrible weakness, and tortured as it is by its seething factions, the Tory Party scored 42% of the popular vote (out of the 69% of the electorate who voted.) Thatcher scored the same in 1982 and 1987, and with it destroyed the trade union movement and reordered society.
The political right in British society has not gone away. No doubt part of its general defeat in June was spun out of the initial victory of the far right in its identification of Brexit with racism - a shock across society that crystallised a left response that in turn changed the terms of the country's direction on several fronts. But the left's alternative remains untested. And as Europe's refugee crisis deepens so British racism (now led by PM May rather than the remains of UKIP) will be encouraged to rise again, if not to prevent Uber et al recruiting their workhorses, but rather to break up the momentum and coherence of the new Labour leadership's base in society - as a means to prevent radical change.
Labour
The triumph of Labour's new leadership has been, if anything, underestimated in the mainstream media. Corbyn's vote was the same as Blair's victory in the 2001 election. It was 11% higher than Gordon Brown's Labour vote in 2010 and 10% higher than Ed Miliband's Labour scored in 2015, meaning Corbyn would have won both elections. (This is not as abstract and fanciful as it sounds. For instance, imagine if Labour had fully and frontally confronted the banks in 2010 and refused to force austerity on working class people as the 'only way' to save the economy?)
Corbyn's election is aptly named. The bulk of Labour's MPs, after 18 months of hostility to Corbyn and two Party leadership elections, 'decided' that they would turn off their venom towards their Party leader while the election was on, 'to show' as several MPs explained to a cheerfully cynical media, 'that Labour's coming catastrophe was all Corbyn's fault.' When Corbyn and shadow Chancellor McDonnell left their election counts in the late evening of June 8, they went to Labour's election HQ only to find their electronic entry cards to the building no longer worked. (See the BBC's Political Editor on the BBC's election night programme who referred to the plan by Party staff to remove Corbyn et al immediately following what they still believed to the bitter end would be a Tory landslide.) The bulk of the parliamentary Labour Party were more hostile towards Corbyn than to a victory by the Tories. A decisive defeat of Corbyn by the Tories meant success to most Labour MPs and was to be the signal for the proper Labour Party to re-emerge.
Instead Corbyn, and more significantly his Labour Manifesto, mobilised millions of voters and has set the political direction in the country for a different future.
The paradox here is that while the modern Tory Party is riveted with factions, intrigue and malice, is currently exhausted and totally unable to give a lead to society, it is the Labour Party that faces a real seismic breach. The divisions in the Tory Party are divisions that echo internal ruling class differences. Those between the two wings of Labour, the bulk of the membership and the Corbyn leadership on the one hand and the Party apparatus and most MPs on the other, is not an internal class matter. Labour has always uneasily represented both main social classes. Now Labour's virulent internal argument sums up nothing less than the division between those two main social classes. The Labour Party faces the clash between classes, with contradictory interests, that cannot be healed.
By way of an example; Labour Peer, Lord Sainsbury, ex supporter of Labour's last right wing split, the SDP, who has given more than £3 million to 'Progress', the Blairite wing of Labour since 2004, also provides 'core funds' to 'Policy Network'. This operation, led by Blair supporter Mandelson, runs on over £900,000 a year and reaches out beyond Labour MPs like Chuka Umunna to Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable and Tory Nicky Morgan. Umunna led the first break from Labour after the June 8 election, rounding up 50 of his fellow Labour MPs and 51 others from the Tories and the Liberals to vote for the 'EU's single market'. (In reality this vote had no other significance than the establishment of a distinct alternative 'political platform' in the new parliament.)
Blair has re-entered the British political stage with an explicit goal of the recreation of a centrist political bloc in Parliament. Jonathan Freedland, the British Guardian newspaper columnist, has published a call for a second referendum on the EU.
A clear statement has now been made. And while the British ruling class may be at odds with itself regarding the future physiognomy of Brexit, one thing remains inviolable. No British government can be allowed to challenge ruling class rule. The key object in the here and now of any 'centrist' regroupment in Parliament is first and foremost to block Corbyn (and the mass membership of the Labour Party - and the growing movement in the country to end austerity.) While Tories hammer away at Corbyn's 'extreme' programme, the emerging Labour 'centrists' will use the call for a new referendum to split Corbyn's new base in society.
Prospects
Taken as a whole, both the main parties, for different reasons, are unable yet to 'solve' or even moderate Britain's political crisis, and there will be further, convulsive evolution across all mainstream parties and political movements throughout Britain in the next year.
The 2016 EU Brexit referendum is now ancient news as history and Britain's political crisis speeds up. A mainstream rightwing coalesced around Brexit in 2016, using racism to build its influence and carve away traditional Labour voters within society. The new right was rapidly absorbed by the Tory government and then the new right wing's leading personnel knocked themselves to pieces in their craven ambition to 'take it all.' May emerged as Tory leader and the saviour of the the far right's agenda. But the 2017 General Election 'over-determined' the political impact of the 2016 EU referendum. May found herself facing a reunited working class movement behind a radical Labour manifesto and, at the same time, a centrist push by big capital and its political allies to stop a tax-haven Brexit.
The potential economic restructuring emerging from Brexit will create further alarm among Britain's capitalist class. This will emerge either cautiously, with a growing number of calls to re-run the referendum (a new referendum which would now have the effect of entirely preventing radical answers to an already sick system in favour of a return to an enfeebled, failing and unwanted status quo) or instead offensively with the demand to launch the US (read tax-haven) option, where all basic work takes place under the old, Third World type conditions. Meanwhile austerity's strain on, and sometime disintegration of, public services will deepen - with increasingly dire results in larger society.
The fight among the Tories will ebb and flow while it retains its core purpose. The paradox for the Labour leadership and its party members is that they have to promote their battle within the party apparatus and break the new 'platform' emerging in Parliament. The Labour leadership and the party's membership has their 'real enemy' presiding among many of their own MPs. The struggle inside the Labour party, led by the leadership, is a crucial part of Labour's way forward if it is to guarantee Labour's radical promise to survive as an option, as an alternative choice to austerity and impoverishment.
The arrival of the Corbyn campaign, currently in the established lead of the Labour Party, combined with mass action and huge movements in the population for basic rights and an end to the plague of inequality, are potentially the new political factors that can break the mainstream political logjam. The political moment of now, of one month, of one year, of two years, is fraught with both danger and possibility. However history ticks away, the initiative taken up by the left must be acted on instantly. May and her sack of Tory cats must be torn away. A new election must be held. Another election cannot win for the people unless it is accompanied by an emergency Labour Party Conference, with its own internal election, that must ring the party changes needed to carry through Labour's Manifesto.
The SNP experienced a retreat in Scotland on June 8. They had fought the 2017 election on the call for another independence referendum. They were pushed back because, like the EU vote in 2016 being repeated now, it has already become the wrong referendum. Scots did not see in 2017 the overwhelming need to have a country based on a timid SNP future. But Britain and all of its nations do need new referenda, a new General Election, not on the EU, not on the prospect of an eternal mediocre SNP, but rather on the sort of society, the sort of countries that people want to have in England, Scotland, in Wales and in Northern Ireland - after facing a decade and more of living in a Britain that is progressively and rapidly and angrily - not what they want.
Showing posts with label Britain and the EU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Britain and the EU. Show all posts
Friday, 21 July 2017
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
The EU - what to do?
Of course there should be a United European Federation, with a common market and equitable living standards, a common currency, a progressive international policy and the ability to call together armed forces to defend itself.
Global questions necessitate at least continental answers. World poverty; imperialism and the international repercussions of war leading to the mass movement of whole peoples, famine, global warming, the meretricious, criminal, utterly self seeking behaviors of the super wealthy and their control of the banks, the corporations and the world's capital, all of it and more, requires at least a continental wide response.
All this is absolutely and objectively obvious but, it might be argued, fatally abstract. After all, look at the main obstacles in the way of progress towards a European Continental Federation based on meeting the concerns listed above! Front and centre is the current EU itself, its apparatus, leadership, its policy and structure and the totally compromised political and financial class that holds the stinking edifice up. Then there are the proto-reactionary nationalist movements and parties in individual European countries that recognise the weakness of the current EU but who promote the entirely utopian and reactionary view that individual nations can somehow isolate themselves from the worse effects of the predominant global social and economic system of late, rapacious capitalism. The idea that any version of the current EU structure, or, alternatively, the 'winning back' of some sort of spurious national independence from Europe can open up the possibility of the Europe that the mass of Europeans, not to say the rest of the world need, is simply absurd.
It is therefore not that the goal of a united Europe based on an alternative to the tail end of a vicious, out of date and poisonous social system that is abstract - in the classic sense that it has no connection to real life - on the contrary such a Europe was never more required. Rather it is the utterly abstract ideas that either the reform of Europe's current structure or simply that falling back into the nation state, have ever offered any sort of means to get there that are the abstractions, that are completely remote from real life. Of course there will be EU reforms and, conversely national upheavals on the way to the united Europe that is needed. But without the goal of an utterly different united Europe, committed to a social transformation, in this epoch solely nationally based efforts in that direction will all fail and all die with horrible consequences and in short order.
It is the question: should we get out or should we stay in the EU that is, today, the most dangerous abstraction. In Britain, the ruling Tory party have launched a referendum along those lines. The Tory leaders' goal is to try and re-cement the party's social and political base. And despite the new right, represented by UKIP with its 4 million votes in the last General Election, claiming that the referendum vote is the most important vote that the British will have in 'in their lifetimes', in reality either outcome will change very little. The core of the current Europe, the Eurozone, is already without Britain. And in Britain itself the economic dominance of 'the City of London' and the big international corporations remains untouched.
Most of the new left in mainland Europe are still struggling with the idea that the EU as it stands cannot be reformed. The treatment of Syriza and Greece was a sharp lesson in that regard. Even Podemos in Spain, which has argued in the past that it will win the reforms that the Spanish people need from the EU because of the larger weight of Spain, is reviewing its approach to the EU's structure. Europe's new left were already committed to an international view of their struggle, which was one reason offered why a section of the old Syriza leadership made the potentially disastrous decision not to launch their own currency when threatened over debt. It is a paradox but nevertheless an essential paradox to grasp as Greece shows, that while there is certainly no road for any single European nation to get to a socialist society on its own, the route to a socialist Europe may pass through nationally based initiatives which then can become a centre of an alternative to the existing European structures.
To get away from the abstraction, 'inside or outside the EU' and instead to begin to develop the real transitional measures towards a genuinely progressive Europe, an 'alternative' Europe has to be built. In the intense revolutionary days of 1905 and 1917 Russia, soviets or councils were directly established by soldiers, workers, peasants and their parties, which grew in their popular legitimacy and created a dual power in Russian society. Many practical steps have been taken by different sections of the new left in Europe to build initiatives that echo the idea of a popular alternative to the rigmarole of Europe's current proto-state structures. Today, with huge left surges into mainstream political life and even government in Greece, Spain and Portugal, with projected left developments in Ireland and a new mass Labour party with left leadership in the UK, there are new and much more prominent platforms to begin the construction of an alternative Europe. This might start with a European debt conference, focused initially on Greece who have called for it and which issues a new programme to the whole of Europe for fair and progressive debt relief. We shall then see how the popular legitimacy of such measures contrasts with that garnered by the decaying institutions of the current EU as the left begins its work towards a popular new European Constitution.
And the British referendum? It is not a turning point for Britain's future. It is not a new 1975 and has much more in common with a second 2011. It is a vote preeminently about local concerns and British politics. British voters afraid or appalled at the prospects of more immigrants will vote 'no'. And most left or progressively minded people (with the exception of those influenced by the politics of the 'British Road to Socialism' and the British Communist Party) will probably vote to stay in the EU in order to prevent what would, and will, be seen as a racist (and not an anti-capitalist) victory. What matters is what happens before and after the ballot.
Global questions necessitate at least continental answers. World poverty; imperialism and the international repercussions of war leading to the mass movement of whole peoples, famine, global warming, the meretricious, criminal, utterly self seeking behaviors of the super wealthy and their control of the banks, the corporations and the world's capital, all of it and more, requires at least a continental wide response.
All this is absolutely and objectively obvious but, it might be argued, fatally abstract. After all, look at the main obstacles in the way of progress towards a European Continental Federation based on meeting the concerns listed above! Front and centre is the current EU itself, its apparatus, leadership, its policy and structure and the totally compromised political and financial class that holds the stinking edifice up. Then there are the proto-reactionary nationalist movements and parties in individual European countries that recognise the weakness of the current EU but who promote the entirely utopian and reactionary view that individual nations can somehow isolate themselves from the worse effects of the predominant global social and economic system of late, rapacious capitalism. The idea that any version of the current EU structure, or, alternatively, the 'winning back' of some sort of spurious national independence from Europe can open up the possibility of the Europe that the mass of Europeans, not to say the rest of the world need, is simply absurd.
It is therefore not that the goal of a united Europe based on an alternative to the tail end of a vicious, out of date and poisonous social system that is abstract - in the classic sense that it has no connection to real life - on the contrary such a Europe was never more required. Rather it is the utterly abstract ideas that either the reform of Europe's current structure or simply that falling back into the nation state, have ever offered any sort of means to get there that are the abstractions, that are completely remote from real life. Of course there will be EU reforms and, conversely national upheavals on the way to the united Europe that is needed. But without the goal of an utterly different united Europe, committed to a social transformation, in this epoch solely nationally based efforts in that direction will all fail and all die with horrible consequences and in short order.
It is the question: should we get out or should we stay in the EU that is, today, the most dangerous abstraction. In Britain, the ruling Tory party have launched a referendum along those lines. The Tory leaders' goal is to try and re-cement the party's social and political base. And despite the new right, represented by UKIP with its 4 million votes in the last General Election, claiming that the referendum vote is the most important vote that the British will have in 'in their lifetimes', in reality either outcome will change very little. The core of the current Europe, the Eurozone, is already without Britain. And in Britain itself the economic dominance of 'the City of London' and the big international corporations remains untouched.
Most of the new left in mainland Europe are still struggling with the idea that the EU as it stands cannot be reformed. The treatment of Syriza and Greece was a sharp lesson in that regard. Even Podemos in Spain, which has argued in the past that it will win the reforms that the Spanish people need from the EU because of the larger weight of Spain, is reviewing its approach to the EU's structure. Europe's new left were already committed to an international view of their struggle, which was one reason offered why a section of the old Syriza leadership made the potentially disastrous decision not to launch their own currency when threatened over debt. It is a paradox but nevertheless an essential paradox to grasp as Greece shows, that while there is certainly no road for any single European nation to get to a socialist society on its own, the route to a socialist Europe may pass through nationally based initiatives which then can become a centre of an alternative to the existing European structures.
To get away from the abstraction, 'inside or outside the EU' and instead to begin to develop the real transitional measures towards a genuinely progressive Europe, an 'alternative' Europe has to be built. In the intense revolutionary days of 1905 and 1917 Russia, soviets or councils were directly established by soldiers, workers, peasants and their parties, which grew in their popular legitimacy and created a dual power in Russian society. Many practical steps have been taken by different sections of the new left in Europe to build initiatives that echo the idea of a popular alternative to the rigmarole of Europe's current proto-state structures. Today, with huge left surges into mainstream political life and even government in Greece, Spain and Portugal, with projected left developments in Ireland and a new mass Labour party with left leadership in the UK, there are new and much more prominent platforms to begin the construction of an alternative Europe. This might start with a European debt conference, focused initially on Greece who have called for it and which issues a new programme to the whole of Europe for fair and progressive debt relief. We shall then see how the popular legitimacy of such measures contrasts with that garnered by the decaying institutions of the current EU as the left begins its work towards a popular new European Constitution.
And the British referendum? It is not a turning point for Britain's future. It is not a new 1975 and has much more in common with a second 2011. It is a vote preeminently about local concerns and British politics. British voters afraid or appalled at the prospects of more immigrants will vote 'no'. And most left or progressively minded people (with the exception of those influenced by the politics of the 'British Road to Socialism' and the British Communist Party) will probably vote to stay in the EU in order to prevent what would, and will, be seen as a racist (and not an anti-capitalist) victory. What matters is what happens before and after the ballot.
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