Come to the next meetings of the Socialist Party in Bristol and hear more analysis of the referendum result and perspectives for what may happen now.
Tues 28th June, 7.30pm, Halo, 141 Gloucester Road, BS7 8BA
Tues 5th July, 7.30pm, YHA Bristol (Grain House), 14 Narrow Quay, BS1 4QA.
Below is a statement on developments since the referendum result from Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party
general secretary.
The vote to leave the EU has
rocked capitalist institutions - in Britain and internationally. It is yet
another reflection of the anger at mass poverty and savage austerity - and of
the growing anti-establishment mood. And now the political aftershocks are
beginning to reverberate.
When
faced with a popular revolt the strategists of capital have been heard
privately to echo a former California politician: "The people have
spoken... the bastards!" Following the EU
referendum result we witnessed a public display of fury by the bourgeois
'commentariat' which expressed barely contained contempt for those who had
dared to defy the powers-that-be and voted 'Leave'. Polly Toynbee in the
'liberal' Guardian vented her rage against the "uneducated" leave
voters who massively rejected austerity. Donald Tusk, Polish president of the
European Council, declared that the British decision represented "the
beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political
civilization". (Financial Times)
The
victory for the leave camp in the referendum has already had massive
repercussions for the future of Britain and, particularly, for the labour
movement here as well as in Europe. The vote - 52% to 48% - represents at
bottom a predominantly working-class revolt against austerity and the Tory
millionaire government of David Cameron and George Osborne which has laid waste
to living standards and working-class communities.
It is
totally false to draw the utterly pessimistic conclusions which some small left
groups have done that this result could lead to a 'carnival of reaction' in
Britain and encourage right-wing forces in Europe and elsewhere. No doubt the
European right will seek to exploit its outcome. But reports from the Left Bloc
conference in Portugal, held immediately after the result, showed that
representatives of the workers' movement in Greece, France and Spain have been
given a boost by the British referendum outcome.
It is not
automatic that reaction - through a figure like Boris Johnson or Michael Gove -
can inherit the crown from Cameron and establish a firm base without the
challenge of a general election, in which they can be defeated. The day before
the referendum, teachers showed defiance of the government's plans for
academies by voting by over 90% for strike action on 5 July. In fact, a
mini-strike wave is unfolding in Britain, including on Southern Railways and
strikes involving the Bakers Union.
Anti-establishment
Many
workers who have come into conflict with the government seized hold of the
opportunity presented by the referendum to strike a blow against the main enemy
- the hated Cameron and Osborne. What it did not represent was a vindication of
Johnson. On the contrary, the day after the referendum he was booed outside his
house, and not just by the 'Remain' side.
Also, in
the days after the referendum, Socialist Party paper sellers on the streets met
many who had voted remain and yet, through discussion, were convinced of our
class arguments for leave on a socialist basis. This gave a glimpse of what
would have been possible if the labour movement leaders had not lined up behind
the austerity commander-in-chief, Cameron, who has now been consigned to the
dustbin of history, as we predicted he would be if he lost the referendum.
The
relationship of forces between the organised working class and its allies and
the government can be strengthened in favour of the trade union and labour
movement, if it draws bold fighting conclusions from the outcome of the
referendum. Without in any way prettifying all the forces involved on the leave
side, the results of the referendum represent a major uprising of ordinary working-class
people against the ruling elite.
It is true
that the binary choice of a referendum allows participants to vote on the same
side as those who have quite different and opposite class reasons. This can
politically skew the outcome, making it difficult to draw clear general
conclusions. But not in this case. Traditional Labour areas and regions voted
heavily against the government led by the two 'big butchers', Cameron and
Osborne, with only Northern Ireland, Scotland and London voting for remain.
Even where remain won a majority there was an unmistakable working-class
determination to show 'them' - the Tories and the remain elite - that 'enough
is enough'.
On the
other hand, an estimated three quarters of young people who voted went for
remain, which was a distorted but nevertheless understandable expression of an
internationalist approach. They mistakenly saw the EU as a progressive factor -
an openness towards Europe and the world. This was cynically exploited by the
Tory 'remainers' and their supporters. As the Socialist Party consistently
pointed out, the EU is a neoliberal construct, a capitalist and imperialist
exploiter not just of the European working class but, through its trade deals,
a collective oppressor of the masses in the neo-colonial world.
There was
a steely determination in many working-class areas in particular to turn out
and vote leave. This was despite the unprecedented 'project fear' and hate
campaign, with an array of bourgeois economists lined up predicting that the
roof would fall in, there would be a new economic crisis, as well as
Armageddon, and a third world war if the 'people' did not vote 'the right way'
- that, is for remain. There was a determination to give the 'toffs' a bloody
nose - those who do not have to live in the deprivation that the Tories and
capitalism have created. There was an unprecedented mass participation in some
working-class areas, including on council house estates, with the overall
turnout an impressive 72%, higher than in the general election.
Playing
into the right's hands
It is
true that the racist UK Independence Party (UKIP) was for leave, as was the
Tory capitalist brutalist duo of Johnson and Gove, with an emphasis on
scapegoating immigrants. Some workers were no doubt seduced by the
anti-immigrant message of these reactionary forces. This was particularly the
case because the official leadership of the labour movement, both within the Labour
Party and the trade unions, played into their hands by completely abandoning an
independent socialist, class and internationalist programme. The Socialist
Party adopted such a class approach - both in this referendum and the one in
1975, when Jeremy Corbyn also held a similar anti-EU position.
Now,
unfortunately, Jeremy was trapped behind enemy lines, hemmed in by the Blairite
remain creatures. And they have rewarded him with Hilary Benn and other
plotters organising a coup against him. The right of the Labour Party would
blame him for everything, no matter what he did, including the weather. They
forced him - quite clearly reluctantly - into a remain position. He was damned
if he did and would have been even more attacked if he didn't!
We
pointed out during the campaign that if he would have come out clearly against
the EU on socialist and internationalist lines, demanding a socialist Britain
linked to a United Socialist States of Europe, he would have been in a stronger
position. The choice then would not have been between two Tory gangs but a new
general election in which the whole lot could be thrown out. The relationship
of forces that could have developed out of such a campaign would have meant
that this would immediately get a favourable response.
Many
workers rejected the racist programme of division but had legitimate concerns
about the heavy pressure in crowded working-class areas on limited resources,
school places, housing, etc. There is a real fear of a race to the bottom as
even more low-paid, zero-hour jobs are created. The solution to this problem
lies not in scaremongering against immigrants but in a programme which demands
increased resources, particularly through the building of council homes, as
well as a crash building programme for schools, rather than on the divisive
academies that are planned. There are 50,000 empty properties in London
alongside eleven million in the EU as a whole.
Not a
whiff of such a programme was heard during the campaign from the right-wing
summits of the labour movement who spent their time appearing alongside vicious
representatives of the class enemy in either the remain or leave camp. We were
treated to the spectacle of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appearing with
Cameron and 'taking on' Johnson in the defence of the capitalist EU. Previously
in the mayoral contest he came out for more billionaires for London - it
already has 141, the highest number in the world! This allowed Johnson to
demagogically denounce the inherent inequality of the EU and to obscenely
present himself as a defender of the 'little man and woman'.
The
'social Europe' myth
Tony
Blair, accused during the Iraq war of 'lying as he breathes', reverted to type
when he suddenly began to champion the rights of trade unions. In an article in
the Daily Mirror, he had the gall to write "don't abandon workers'
rights". Yet he had spent thirteen years in power maintaining intact all
of Margaret Thatcher's anti-union laws! The hapless general secretary of the
Trades Union Congress (TUC), Frances O'Grady, woefully declared that workers
would lose £38 a week by 2030 unless they lined up behind the bosses' EU.
It was
the EU, not the trade unions as fighting organisations, which was scandalously
presented in this way as a progressive vehicle for defending and lifting the
living standards of working people. There could not be a greater expression of
the complete bankruptcy of what is the leadership of the major workers'
organisation in Britain.
The trade
unions have found themselves in this baleful position because of their
adaptation to the capitalist EU. In 1988, the EU Commissioner Jacques Delors
offered to rescue the trade union leaders from the debilitating defeats in that
decade - the miners' strike, Wapping, the collapse of the struggle against
council rate-capping - by selling the idea of a 'social Europe'. This was
always a false prospectus. Any legislation ratifying the rights of workers can
only be achieved and maintained on the basis of struggle and industrial
strength. But the trade union leaders, in gratitude, sang the French song
'Frère Jacques' to him for opening up a seemingly painless means of maintaining
workers' rights.
From this
flowed class collaboration policies like 'partnership' which, on the basis of a
boom, could result in limited benefits during a period of economic upswing. But
when the economic crisis struck - particularly since 2007-08 with its
consequent historically extremely feeble growth - this has turned into the
opposite: stagnant living standards and attacks on past gains on all fronts.
It was
quite scandalous that, faced with the recent offensive of Cameron and Osborne
against trade union rights, the TUC did not organise effective industrial
action. They then compounded this retreat by offering a trade-off to the
government. They would campaign to remain in the EU if the government would
make some concessions on issues such as the check-off scheme, etc, which the
government duly promised to carry out.
A
neoliberal project
The
arguments of Blair and O'Grady that the EU protects the rights of working
people through measures such as the working time directive is completely bogus.
Any legislation that is introduced which may favour workers and the trade
unions is the result, ultimately, of the power and organisation of the unions
and not some innately 'progressive' inclination of the employers'
organisations, including the EU. Moreover, during the referendum campaign some
of the more brutal and venal employers - like the airlines EasyJet and Ryanair
- demonstrated just how they were prepared to consider strike-breaking when it
suits their purpose, irrespective of any EU regulations.
They
proposed to the EU that it coordinates action in the summer to circumvent the
effects of any industrial action by French air traffic controllers by allowing
German controllers to take over their work. Let us remember that it was Ronald
Reagan who initiated the dark era of neoliberalism in the US by firstly taking
on and defeating air traffic controllers in 1981. The conditions that were then
set became the benchmark for all other employers throughout the US. The fact
that such measures can now be proposed for the EU indicates its vicious
neoliberal character.
It should
be sufficient to mention the record of the EU on the issue of privatisation
alone, for instance in relation to Greece, to implacably oppose remain on sound
trade union principles. The EU has just forced on Greece a mass privatisation
programme of 71,000 pieces of property and businesses, including selling off
regional airports. A 'progressive' EU to a Greek worker is in complete
contradiction to their experiences at its hands! Millions are being forced back
to live on the meagre pensions of just one family member.
There is
no doubt that the struggles of the Greek workers will have been given an
enormous boost by the defiance of the British working class in the course of
the referendum. A new domino theory is posed for Europe, with the repercussions
of the events in Britain reflected in a similar leave pattern in other
countries, such as the Netherlands and Sweden, and maybe even Italy. They can
follow the path of workers in Britain, not by reinforcing nationalism but by
creating real solidarity among the workers of Europe on a trade union and
political level, linked to the prospect of socialism.
Nation
states
As we
have argued since the inception of the predecessor of the EU - the Common
Market - despite all their efforts, capitalism will never be able to carry
through the real unification of Europe. Some Marxists challenge this and even
invoked during the referendum campaign the writings of Leon Trotsky to justify
their support for remain - and the idea that capitalism can actually carry
through the historic task of unification and that this would be 'progressive'.
Such a conclusion - allegedly based on Trotsky's writings - is false to the core.
The urge
to unify the continent flows from the needs of production and technique in the
modern era. The productive forces have outgrown the narrow limits of private
ownership by a handful of capitalists, on the one side, and the nation state,
on the other. Modern industry - particularly the big monopolies,
transnationals, etc - plan not just in terms of the markets of a country but of
continents, and the biggest firms in terms of the whole world market. This
expresses itself in the tendency towards the elimination of national barriers,
limits on production, tariffs, etc, which goes alongside the creation of giant
trading blocs like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
This
process can be carried very far during a boom, as in the case of the EU. This
happened in the 'noughties'. This allowed some sections of the capitalists and,
unfortunately, some Marxists to dream that capitalism could actually overcome
national limits and proceed towards a unified European capitalist class.
To
justify their position, they scoured the works of Trotsky, using the following
quote: "If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an
imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing
situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material
base for the working-class movement. The proletariat would in this case have to
fight not for the return to 'autonomous' national states, but for the conversion
of the imperialist state trust into a European Republican Federation".
(The Programme of Peace, May 1917)
Trotsky
was quite clearly dealing here with a hypothetical situation which, moreover,
he did not expect to materialise. It is also not a description of the EU, which
has not 'merged' the nation states of Europe. He goes on to argue in the same
article that "the democratic republican unification of Europe, a union
really capable of guaranteeing the freedom of national development, is only
possible on the road of a revolutionary struggle... by means of uprisings in
individual countries, with the subsequent merger of these upheavals into a
general European revolution".
Stoked-up
anger
The
situation in Britain prior to the referendum and particularly following the
results - expressing as it does the stoked-up anger of the working class
against the Cameron/Osborne junta - offers a unique opportunity to completely
transform the situation in favour of the working class. Even before the
referendum the government had been compelled to undertake 20 u-turns or partial
u-turns with the wheels threatening to come off the Tory chariot. It remains
besieged on every front with the economy heading for another crisis, with the
biggest trade deficit since 1948 - notwithstanding recent improvements.
Unemployment has risen among young people and the catastrophe of the housing
situation in London and other big cities continues unabated.
One
borough, Waltham Forest, has seen a 25% increase in the cost of houses in one
year, while workers on the Butterfields estate face eviction and being sent
into 'internal exile' to cities hundreds of miles away. This is so that
rack-renting owners and landlords can sell off their humble dwellings to the
well-off who are pouring in to snap up houses with vastly inflated prices.
There is
also a brewing revolt on wages which have dropped by 8% since 2007. This, let
us remind TUC leader, Frances O'Grady, was when Britain was part of the EU!
There is a growing revolt within unions, reflected at a number of their recent
conferences. The Welsh TUC, due to the pressure from Socialist Party members,
passed a series of motions, including support for council 'needs budgets' and
were very sympathetic to the idea of the nationalisation of steel. These were passed
virtually unanimously, with new and younger layers of workers in particular
attending the gathering for the first time. At the GMB general union
conference, motions for nationalisation appeared on the agenda for the first
time in a long time.
At the conference
of the public-sector union, Unison, a new rank-and-file left organisation has
been formed to spearhead the drive to transform this union from a moribund
'witch-hunting' outfit into a fighting, militant Unison able to mobilise the
resistance of members. These all betoken a new combative era in Britain.
Political
civil wars
At the
same time, two 'civil wars' - one in the Tory party, the other within Labour -
have intensified in the wake of the referendum. As could have been predicted -
and was by the Socialist Party - the attempt to mollify the Labour right by
Corbyn's supporters in Momentum and others, by moving to the remain camp during
the referendum campaign, has not lessened their opposition to Corbyn but
emboldened them. Within hours of the result, Margaret Hodge MP circulated a
letter to the Parliamentary Labour Party for a motion of no confidence and a new
leadership contest in a campaign with the obvious intention of removing Corbyn.
The firing of Hilary Benn and the resignations of other shadow cabinet members
followed.
Clearly,
the Labour Party remains in a halfway-house position - locked in an ongoing civil
war between the rotten forces of the Blairites and anti-austerity, potentially
increasingly socialist forces gathered around Jeremy Corbyn. But the
opportunity had been squandered by the 'left' petty-bourgeois forces leading
the pro-Corbyn organisation, Momentum. It initially promised an open and
democratic regeneration of the labour movement with the centralised
bureaucratic structure of Labour Party of the past swept away. However, under
the disastrous sway of its current leadership, particularly Jon Lansman, the
early promise evaporated as this leadership attempted to mollify the right.
This served to embolden them in their determination to remove Corbyn and
reinstitute the rule of the Blairites.
Distrust
of the right led the conference of the PCS civil service union to defeat a
motion for affiliation to the Labour Party at this moment in time because the
Blairite right still controls the party's machine, particularly the
Parliamentary Labour Party. Indeed, during the referendum campaign, 71
'fieldworkers' were allocated by the Labour Party HQ to work for the defeated
remain camp. PCS members were mindful of the fact that affiliation would
require them to finance this Labour machine which, through the so-called
'Compliance Unit', acts as a right-wing barrier - a filter - to keep out of the
Labour Party any working-class fighters who want to return the party to the
path of socialism and struggle.
If they
cannot succeed in this task, the right is once more preparing to split the
Labour Party. The referendum indicated this already through the close
collaboration between 'left-wing' Tories and the Labour right. This
unbelievably led to a proposal, which was not carried through, that MPs of both
government and opposition sit on both sides of the House of Commons during the
special session after the murder of the Labour MP, Jo Cox.
During
the remain campaign there was already an element of a national coalition - with
right-wing Labour cosily collaborating with the 'left', 'liberal' Tories, as
well as the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, the Lib-Dem leader, Tim Farron,
concentrated all his initial post-referendum remarks on attacking Jeremy Corbyn
for being insufficiently ardent in support of remain. So the civil war within
the Labour Party which has existed since Corbyn's election continues unabated -
scarcely a day has gone passed without some attack aimed against him.
The
'blue-on-blue' attacks - between Tory 'friends' - have also left lasting
divisions between the Cameron/Osborne wing of the Tory party and the
Johnson/Gove outfit. A new Tory leadership contest will widen these divisions
and could result in an open separation, leading to some kind of alliance with
the right of the Labour Party and also drawing in Liberal Democrats.
The
referendum was similar to a giant boulder being dropped into a lake with the
ripple effect likely to last for months and years. It has already reverberated
throughout Europe and could lead, ultimately, to the collapse of the euro and
the break-up of the EU. It has posed the question of a new Scottish referendum
which could lead to the splintering of the UK. The ramifications are also
serious for Ireland, particularly for Northern Ireland, where a new 'border
poll' has been demanded by Sinn Féin, which could ratchet up sectarianism in
turn.
However,
in all the developments which will flow from the referendum, the labour
movement must draw clear socialist conclusions and act accordingly by fighting
on an independent working-class programme. The immediate demand is to fight for
a democratically convened emergency labour movement conference, open to all
pro-Corbyn left forces. The aim of such a conference should be to defend Jeremy
Corbyn by defeating the attempted coup of the PLP plotters - by adopting clear
socialist policies and democratic structures including a federal form of
organisation.
The EU
referendum was an earthquake for the ruling class and their shadows in the
labour movement, and the aftershocks will continue for some time. At the same
time, it is a big opportunity to reconstruct the labour movement on democratic
and socialist lines.
