THE Tory government is now split over its EU referendum, with six cabinet ministers, and over 100 MPs advocating a vote to leave the European Union.
So deep is the split in the Tory ruling class party, that Cameron will be relying on the Labour leaders Corbyn and McDonnell, plus union leaders Prentis, McCluskey, and the TUC’s O’Grady rallying the mass of working class voters to back him and the EU.
If Cameron pledges to look again at a number of ‘extremist’ proposals in the anti-union legislation, then there is no doubt the TUC will be open for such business. A high point of the developing crisis could well be a permanent split in the Tory party so that if the referendum is lost a Cameron resignation will follow, leading to a crisis general election in a revolutionary situation.
If Cameron wins, the crisis that will emerge could well see the Tory split leading to an emergency coalition government emerging kept in power by right wing Labour MPs. However, this crisis of British imperialism is not just a British question or even an EU one.
Both the US president Obama and his defence secretary, Ash Carter, have already let it be known that Britain is required to be the US’ man in the EU, and as well retain its Trident nuclear deterrent for NATO, otherwise it is the end of any special relationship. The UK ruling class has been served notice that it will be on its own!
The truth is that history has caught up with the British ruling class, the country of the industrial revolution, the first capitalist country, the creator of the world market and for a century its master with its worldwide empire. GB stood on its own, and in Europe its policy was to keep France and Germany at each others throats.
When that policy failed you had the two world wars. Britain and its empire survived the first. However, the second signalled the end of the worldwide empire when 100,000 British and imperial troops surrendered to Japan, in the biggest capitulation in UK military history, in Singapore in February 1942.
After this it was impossible to hold onto India even after the 1945 victory. However, the empire mentality, GB, and divide and rule remained deeply imbedded in the consciousness of the ruling class.
With the post war rise of Germany, Britain became part of the EU, first as a free trade zone, and then after German reunification in 1990 – which Margaret Thatcher opposed – became part of an entity that began as a free trade zone but rapidly became an ever greater union.
The EU began to practise intervention and dictatorship and did not hesitate to intervene in the Ukraine in 2014 to help organise the coup. This was after it bombed Libya in 2012 to murder Gadaffi and then tried the same trick in Syria. At home the new state acted to crush the Greek workers when the economic crisis hit, and put Ireland and other states on rations!
Cameron hopes to achieve a special position in the EU as the real ambassador of the United States at its top councils. Gove and Co, in their last refuge from the loss of empire want to see a UK that has become a poisonous dwarf, anti-migrant, and anti-union with a shoot-to-kill state of gunmen and spies.
Trotsky in the early 1920s in his work ‘The Third International After Lenin’ looked at the prospect for a United Europe. He wrote: ‘A more or less complete economic unification of Europe accomplished from above through an agreement between Capitalist governments is a Utopia. Along this road matters cannot proceed beyond partial compromises and half measures . . . The United States of Europe represents first of all the only achievable form – of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Europe.’
On June 23rd vote to quit the EU of the bankers and the bosses, and instead set out to organise the British socialist revolution and the struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe. This is what has to be done!
