SPEAKER Bercow, with his condemnation of any invitation to US President Trump to address both Houses of Parliament, has shown just how split and divided the British ruling class and its political servants are over how they are going to survive in a period where the world crisis of capitalism is creating revolution everywhere.
Bercow raised moral issues as the source of his position, that is Trump’s alleged ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’. However, the UK parliament is up to its neck in the blood of millions. In 2003 it decided to attack Iraq in an aggressive racist war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destroyed a whole state and then an entire region.
Before that there was, among many other emergencies, the campaign against the Mau Mau in Kenya, where tens of thousands of Kenyans – men, women and children – were hung, raped or shot in concentration camps like the Hola Camp, in a dirty war to try to hold together the remnants of the British empire. They only recently received some compensation.
Most recently in parliament, just a few weeks ago, hundreds of Labourites were screaming to bomb Syria, just as Aleppo was being liberated from the IS. It was from this moral historical highground that Bercow condemned Trump.
The same Bercow hosted the visit of the Chinese President to Westminster Hall, where he addressed both Houses of Parliament on October 10th 2015, when the Cameron government was seeking desperately to get the Chinese Communist Party to invest in the UK.
All the previous talk that the Chinese Communist Party was oppressing Tibet, and had killed millions to take the power and hold onto it, was forgotten. Bercow, in introducing Xi Jinping, gushed: ‘Your visit here today, Mr President, reinforces the links between the United Kingdom and China. Those links are social and personal as well as economic and political and are all the stronger for that. This trip should provide the means for both sides to come to understand one another better. The Chinese people have many, many, friends in this Parliament.
‘Those friends are familiar with what you, Mr President, have described as the “Chinese Dream” and which others have referred to as a second Chinese Revolution.’ Bourgeois moral considerations were forgotten in the interests of trade and banking.
Then came the Brexit shock; the referendum that forced the UK out of the EU, sacked Cameron and saw the ‘remainer’ May appointed Tory leader. The popular revolt defeated the ruling class and its representatives who supported the EU and left them with nowhere to go. The EU is now going up in smoke, and capitalism is in a great crisis, with the ruling class in the UK split over whether it should try to save itself by embracing Washington or forcing a return to Brussels.
The British ruling class and its Tory and Labour Parties are split and divided. Trump seeks to tackle China and put it back in its place, make NATO pay for its own defence and opposes the EU, instead, seeking an understanding with Russia. It is now either Brussels or Washington for the ruling class, it can’t be both, and the UK ruling class is split and divided. It understands that its rule is threatened since it can no longer afford to have an NHS or tolerate workers rights. It has announced that homelessness is here to stay and that the property owning democracy was pure fantasy. The most that can be offered now is the return of a few post-war prefabs!
It is threatening even more anti-union laws and is spelling it out that the Uber way of individual workers with no rights is its way forward. In fact, it has just announced that it has a programme to replace 270,000 civil servants with robots, who do not have to be fed, housed or paid.
Capitalism is going under and the working class has the task of burying it. It must defend its interests by building up the revolutionary party, and a new leadership in the working class to bring down the May government with a general strike and go forward to a workers government and socialism. This will be part of the world revolution that will see the workers of Europe replace the bankrupt EU with the Socialist United States of Europe, and the US working class take power to put an end to world capitalism.
