THE leaders of the EU took just one minute of discussion last Saturday to agree on imposing measures designed to beat the Tory government into submission so as to be able to teach the UK working class a lesson – that they must not defy the rule of the bankers.
The EU agreed to demand a payment of £51 billion from the UK for the right to leave, and an agreement on the border between the north of Ireland and the Republic and on the legal status of European nationals living in the UK.
Not that these leaders give a damn about the rights of EU nationals to live and work in the UK or about the just rights of the Irish people. The EU strategy is to humiliate the Tory government by forcing acceptance of these pre-conditions before there can be talks about the conditions for being allowed to remain in the single market, with the aim of creating a situation where the Tories, in coalition with the ‘Fifth Column’ of right wing Labour MPs, overturn the referendum result – by any means necessary.
The tactic is designed to try to discipline the British working class, to try to drive it back and teach it a very harsh lesson on the folly of disobeying their leaders in the Labour Party and trade unions when they voted to leave.
It is crucial for the bankers to inflict a brutal lesson on workers, as the referendum result reflects the mass wave of opposition from the working class of Europe against the austerity insisted upon by the banks – austerity that has devastated the lives of millions of workers across the EU.
Yesterday Macron, the ex-Socialist Party minister and candidate for the French presidency, issued a warning that unless the EU reforms there will inevitably be a ‘Frexit’. However, the EU is incapable of self-reform.
The EU strategy of attempting to break the working class and force its leaders to accept as inevitable massive austerity was used against the workers of Greece following the election of the ‘left’ Syriza government in 2015. Syriza was elected on a platform of ending austerity by re-negotiating the terms imposed by the European, primarily the German, bankers to pay back the bail-out loans.
The Syriza prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister Yanis Varoufakis were confident that the bankers would see sense and allow debt relief, given that everyone from the EU through to the IMF knew that Greece could not afford the crippling repayments insisted on.
In his latest book covering this period Varoufakis, who resigned when Tsipras capitulated to the bankers’ demands, reveals that the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, admitted to him that German bankers were prepared to bankrupt Greece and grind the Greek people into the ground as an object lesson to the working class of Europe that they would share this fate if they resisted.
Varoufakis recounts how Germany blocked a Chinese rescue deal for Greece and how an attempt by the then French economy minister Emmanuel Macron to broker a deal involving debt relief was thrown out on the orders of Angela Merkel.
At the height of the crisis, Varoufakis reveals the Syriza government went in fear that the EU leaders were planning a military coup. Given the EU’s involvement in spearheading the fascist-backed coup in the Ukraine their fears were fully justified.
Varoufakis offered the following advice to Theresa May this weekend saying: ‘My advice to Theresa May is to avoid negotiation at all costs. If she doesn’t do that she will fall into the trap of Alexis Tsipras, and it will end in capitulation.’
The Tories will not break off negotiations. With the full support of the Labour Party reformists they will capitulate in the full knowledge that terminally weak British capitalism has no chance of survival except to cling to the wreckage of the EU.
British workers must take heed of the lessons of Greece and demand: no negotiations, and an immediate withdrawal from the EU. They must kick out the Tories on June 8th and then organise a general strike to immediately break with the EU and to go forward to socialism in the UK by expropriating the bosses and the bankers. A common front must then be formed with the French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Irish and German workers to bring down the EU bankers and bosses and replace them with the Socialist United States of Europe.
