PM Cameron earlier last week insisted he would remain Prime Minister even if he lost the June 23 referendum.
This position has been challenged in no uncertain way by ex-Tory Chancellor and Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke. He told BBC Radio 4’s Week In Westminster: ‘The Prime Minister wouldn’t last 30 seconds if he lost the referendum and we’d be plunged into a Conservative leadership crisis which is never a very edifying sight.’
For good measure he added: ‘The House of Commons as a whole is overwhelmingly in favour of staying in the European Union. And the idea that David carries on saying: “Well despite what I’ve been saying in the last few weeks, I’m now going to lead a government which is going to leave the European Union and I’m going to sit down with you all and find out what it is you want to negotiate that will determine new arrangements for ourselves and our businesses and for our investors that secure a new base for us in the globalised economy,” I mean it’s just farcical.’
The Tory veteran said the party was ‘dangerously close’ to the bitter divisions that left it badly damaged and out of office for 13 years following clashes about the EU under former PM Major. Clarke said: ‘We’ve all got to make sure on both sides that it doesn’t go back that way. The party was unelectable because it had just had the most appallingly bitter civil war and it was impossible to see how it could carry on. Now we mustn’t repeat that.’ The Tory Party is in a deep and desperate crisis that threatens its very existence. It awaits the undertaker.
This reality is in complete opposition to the position put by the Labour leader Corbyn and the Unite trade union leader McCluskey, when they argued that the UK must stay in the EU because only the EU could protect working class gains from the Tories.
Corbyn said, trying to explain his amazing conversion to supporting the EU: ‘Just imagine what the Tories would do to workers’ rights here in Britain if we voted to leave the EU in June. They’d dump rights on equal pay, working time, annual leave for agency workers, and on maternity pay as fast as they could get away with it. It would be a bonfire of rights that Labour governments secured within the EU.’
For Corbyn the Tories are impregnable, and only the EU can save the rights of workers. This is in fact an insult to the working class and its trade unions that have enormous power, but whose leaders refuse to use it, and currently have leaders that will not use it! It is also an attempt to prop up and ‘save’ Cameron and his regime!
Unite’s McCluskey is peddling the same line and seems to be the author of the theme.
He also said on Wednesday that, ‘Outside of the EU, we will be at the mercy of a right-wing Conservative government determined to push that agenda still further. Even to those who feel let down by the EU, it is abundantly clear that only by staying in the EU will UK working people have any protection against the determined Conservative assault on our rights and living standards.’
Again it is the same message: The Tories are all-powerful. The unions are ‘at the mercy of a right-wing Conservative government’; only the EU and its EC and Central Bank can save us. In fact, the Tories are shaking with fear about their future, while the EU is in a desperate crisis. It has reached the stage where Chancellor Merkel has given the go-ahead to the German prosecutors to take action against a satirist who aimed his barbs at the Turkish leader Erdogan.
Erdogan demanded action against free speech, and he is getting it. So much for the EU’s defence of rights! For the EU leaders keeping in with Erdogan, whose regime is receiving 3bn euros to traffic refugees that the EU doesn’t want back to Asia, is much more important than the defence of democratic rights!
The truth of the matter is that the TUC leadership and Corbyn have capitulated to the EU and are desperate to save both it and the Cameron government. The lesson from all this is that if you want to get rid of the Cameron regime, vote to leave the EU on June 23rd. This will create the conditions to bring down the Tories and to fight for a UK workers government and a Socialist United States of Europe!
