THE POLITICAL and economic crisis over Brexit has reached explosion point this week, with negotiations between the Tory government and the leaders of the EU virtually collapsing on Wednesday night.
British PM Johnson and EU leader Ursula von der Leyen met over a three-hour dinner in Brussels for ‘a frank discussion about significant obstacles which remain’ and came away with no sign of any agreement on a deal with Britain to exit the EU while retaining access to the EU’s single market on January 1st.
Johnson left Brussels saying he did not want to ‘leave any route to a possible deal untested’ while the European Commission responded yesterday by publishing a full range of ‘no-deal’ contingency plans, with von der Leyen tweeting that: ‘Negotiations are still ongoing but the end of the transition is near.’
This provoked outrage from the Tory ERG group, the most vocal pro-Brexit wing of the Tory Party, whose spokesman David Jones denounced it as ‘blackmail’ and ‘piratical’ behaviour, insisting that: ‘I’m pretty sure the response the Prime Minister will give is that this country does not buckle in the face of intimidation, threats and blackmail.’
In fact, the Johnson government is a government of crisis. Yesterday morning, Tory Home Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that despite this Sunday being agreed as the absolute deadline for either reaching a deal, or the UK leaving the EU without one, he couldn’t rule out yet another deadline being missed as Johnson desperately seeks an agreement.
Johnson is caught in an insoluble historical trap, British capitalism is at the end of its historical role, not at the beginning. The only deal that the bosses and bankers of the EU are offering is that after officially leaving on 1st January British capitalism remains under the domination of the European courts, legally bound by its decisions.
British capitalism would become a mere off-shore province of the EU with all the obligations of membership and none of the advantages.
If Johnson caves in and agrees to this then it will explode the Tory Party, and greatly anger the millions of workers who voted for Brexit. The overwhelming majority of Tory MPs are demanding ‘sovereignty’.
If Johnson leaves with no deal this will be a disaster as far as the British bosses and bankers are concerned, and he will immediately have to seek to impose an austerity programme onto the working class.
The bosses know that all the boasts about setting the nation free to form trading relations with every other country on the planet will collapse under the reality that the UK is a tiny bankrupt capitalist country struggling to survive in a world gripped by the biggest economic crisis in history.
The great hope of Johnson was to offer up Britain to the US – and to exchange being a vassal of the EU to becoming a vassal of America.
In fact, the only interest American imperialism had in the UK was as its loyal puppet within the EU. If Britain leaves the EU with no deal the US has no interest in propping it up as president-elect Joe Biden has made clear.
British capitalism is now gripped by an historic crisis and the only way out of it is for the UK working class to mobilise to carry through the British socialist revolution, to expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy that will provide homes and jobs at trade unions rates of pay for all.
In fact the attempts to unite the European capitalist states in the EU is too little and far too late as the massive class struggles in France, Greece, Italy and Spain have shown.
The time has come for British workers to show the way by bringing down the Johnson government and going forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
The time has come for the WRP to provide revolutionary leadership in the UK and to build the International Committee of the Fourth International, particularly thoughout Europe.
UK workers must unite with the workers of France, Greece, Germany, Spain and Italy to carry through the European socialist revolution to smash the bosses’ and bankers’ EU and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
This is the way forward. There is not a moment to lose!
