BEFORE the Brexit referendum on June 23rd the masses of British workers refused to capitulate to the vast barrage of propaganda from Cameron and Osborne’s ‘Project Fear’.
Driven by the big wage cuts that have taken place since the 2008 banking collapse, and the huge sacrifices that the masses had to make to save the banks (costing £1.3 trillion), the workers rejected the Tory fear line and voted to quit the EU.
Make no mistake about it, this was a revolutionary vote, driven forward by the need for a revolutionary change in the UK, to rescue the living standards of the working class and the middle class.
The masses voted to reject all of their ‘betters’, the big bankers and bosses, the leaders of the Tory Party and the vast majority of Tory MPs, the leadership of the Labour Party, and over 90% of Labour MPs from Corbyn rightwards who counselled ‘Remain’, plus the ruling class’ servants in the workers’ trade unions, the TUC general council. Its members were hysterically in favour of ‘Remain’, and remain so, with the honourable exception of the RMT, Aslef and the Bakers trade unions.
Millions of workers and millions of the middle class rejected the entire ruling class establishment, and their allies, their fifth column in the workers movement, to the shock and horror of all, from Cameron, and Osborne to TUC general secretary O’Grady.
Now, current bourgeois politics consists of all hands being summoned to the pumps to try and rescue the bankers and bosses from this crisis. Attempts are being made to get the referendum result ruled illegal and non-binding as far as the House of Commons is concerned – pitting parliament against the people.
Efforts are being made to form a Labour-Tory-Scottish Nationalist-Lib-Dem common front, to insist that Article 50, the formal mechanism for leaving the EU cannot be activated in March, unless there is a vote in the House of Commons agreeing the terms that are to be negotiated.
Again this is another attempt to impose a ‘sovereign parliament’ onto its master, a sovereign people. The truth is that the ruling class is determined to sink the Brexit referendum result and to force the masses back into political subjugation by their ‘betters’, with or without a new referendum, by any and all means necessary.
The idea is that life can be made so intolerable for the UK workers they will be driven back to where they came from. In other words, the ruling class is on the brink of making another huge miscalculation, one that will cost it its place as the ruling class, as well as its enormous wealth.
Yesterday, the Sunday Observer let the nation know that the bankers that ‘we’ rescued in the years following 2008 are getting ready to quit the UK early next year, their relocation coinciding with the lodging of Article 50, no doubt.
The Observer quotes the chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, Anthony Browne, warning that ‘the public and political debate at the moment is taking us in the wrong direction’. . . He says: ‘Most international banks now have project teams working out which operations they need to move to ensure they can continue serving customers, the date by which this must happen, and how best to do it.’
He added: ‘Their hands are quivering over the relocate button. Many smaller banks plan to start relocations before Christmas; bigger banks are expected to start in the first quarter of next year.’
Browne, whose organisation has been in intense negotiations with the government, further warns the EU that banks based in UK are currently lending £1.1tn, therefore ‘keeping the continent afloat financially’, and that this arrangement is at risk.
There is only one way to deal with these would-be masters of the universe. The millions who made Brexit must make the TUC call an indefinite general strike to bring down the May government and to bring in a workers’ government that will nationalise all of the banks and the major industries and put them under workers’ management, bringing in a socialist planned economy.
There is no doubt that workers in the EU are waiting for this lead, will follow it and emulate it all over the continent to bring in a Socialist United States of Europe.
