The EU and Teresa May's tragic triumph.

Within days of the British referendum result on membership of the European Union, key EU leaders insisted that the UK would need to start its negotiation of Brexit by agreeing to pay as much as €50 billion for the UK to meet its already agreed obligations. Most of the British mainstream media hooted their derision at this calculation. Cabinet members in Teresa May's government decried such sums as absurd. The (then and current) Foreign Secretary said;
'Let them go whistle.'

In the last few days and hours May and her Cabinet have accepted the EU's initial financial approximation. 17 months of wily negotiation, led by Tory hard-man David Davis, has dumped Britain's rulers straight back to June 2016.

Additionally, the EU are to get a phrase 'agreed' by May along the lines of 'continuing regulatory alignment' to describe how Northern Ireland will effectively remain in the EU. (The Scottish National Party will have all sorts of fun with this.) And some other fuggy phrase will be 'agreed' allowing the EU's supreme court precedence over British law regarding EU citizens living in the UK.

The first act of the farce that is the Tories bash at Brexit looks like it is over. On all three cardinal points - Money, the EU court and Northern Ireland (four if you include the Tory's early insistence that the 'divorce' payments should go along side expected EU concessions over trade) May has completely collapsed. All this slow-motion car crash will be presented as some sort of triumph back in the UK of course. But even the most cynical British commentators seem shocked at the complete defeat of May and her government and are equally amazed that the wing of the Tory Party that thinks 'no deal is better than a bad deal' as May herself used to say, is not now howling for an end to the endless one-way concessions.

So what does May think she has won from her surrender? Political survival. And that is not as personally self-serving as might be thought.

The constant background hum in these days, where the Tory red lines are being unceremoniously rubbed off the map, is that only May can deliver Brexit. And it is particularly hard line Brexiteers, who want to echo Trump's only triumph and turn the UK into the world's second largest tax haven, that are insisting on May's indispensable role.

It seems obvious, after Trump's one legislative 'success, that the UK's 'no dealers' have not dropped their own ambitions. Supporting May, including right down to the bitter end over Brexit they hope will show everybody that a new course is inevitable as well as essential. They are happy for May to play her cards. They surmise that only in that way will the British realise that they do need to go it alone. But the whole Tory party and the establishment networks that sustain it are deeply aware that a General Election defeat, and a real and Corbyn led, alternative, is a disaster for all their potential futures.

So, for the (very short) time being 'only Teresa May can deliver Brexit' will remain the collective Tory watchwords. But the pressures in British society are much greater and building much faster than the Tory's dilemmas. And politics is moving much faster than the dismal plots hatched by Tory wannabes.

The Northern Irish concession - even were it to be delayed - will crack and muddle the Unionist position not just in the Westminster Parliament but in the North of Ireland itself. The SNP in Scotland is afforded a new platform and Scotland's Labour Party will regroup in a common cause. (Or shrivel further.)

Concessions to EU courts and to regulations or 'continuing regulatory alignment' strike at the heart of the argument that Britain's sovereignty is at stake in in the Brexit issue, or that resolving this is at the core of what Tory Brexit will deliver.

And the impact in society, with its widening social and economic gaps, the terrifying growth of new poverty, the gathering decline in key social services, that the endless cash already agreed that the UK will continue to pour into the EU's banks and bureaucracy, speaks, or rather shrieks, for itself.

The Tory's Brexit failure part-one, has sped up the future, accented the critical contradictions in a failing country, and sharpened the possibilities of social upheaval.

Some of those contradictions pass through the Labour Party itself. Corbyn's leadership and Labour's Manifesto remain the signals across society of the prospects of a real alternative. But it seems that the resolution of Labour's own internal fight will need in part to come from a active link to the hundred and one new battles that are opening out across society, in order that Labour has the both the social and the political heft to deliver that alternative.              

What is the real future of Brexit?

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.