SO dire is the Tory crisis over the EU referendum that Cameron and pro-EU Tories have been forced to ‘step-back’ from the leadership of the ‘Remain’ campaign.
Cameron knows that the Tory government is hated by workers because of the austerity measures that Tory rule has brought to Britain. As well, the concentrated attacks on workers in Greece and France and Ireland and other EU states has opened up the eyes of the working class as to the class nature of the EU.
Consequently, the only chance of winning the June 23 referendum is to put what Lenin called the ‘Labour Lieutenants of Capitalism’, that is the Labour Party and trade union leaders, at the head of the campaign to try and fool the working class into voting ‘Remain’.
In times of great crisis, and this is certainly such a time, when capitalism is in danger, the call goes out to the right wing reformists in the Labour Party and trade unions to step up to the plate to try to rally the working class behind a bankrupt system that is intent on smashing every right workers have won in the past.
The call has been answered by a rush of Labourites keen to help the ruling class out! Yesterday Gordon Brown took the lead in the ‘Remain’ campaign with an intervention described as ‘carefully choreographed with No 10’.
In other words, Brown, the right-wing ex-Labour chancellor who boasted he could manage capitalism better than the capitalists, is acting on the direct orders from Cameron, and the bankers and bosses.
His speech yesterday was full of warnings about millions of jobs being lost as he parroted the line being pushed by Corbyn and Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, that workers should vote to stay in the EU and reform it from within.
Yesterday also saw this grotesque ‘popular front’ between Tories, bosses and labour leaders emerge in the form of a joint letter issued to every member of staff in British Telecom, signed by the leaders of the Communication Workers (CWU), the management union, Prospect, and the chairman of BT.
The letter urged BT’s 81,400 staff to vote to remain for the good of BT and its shareholders, along with the usual sop to staff that the EU helps protect workers’ rights – try telling that to the French workers who are daily fighting pitched battles on the streets with a government obeying EU instructions to smash their employment rights!
So far the CWU has not sent a similar letter to all its Royal Mail members. Possibly for the very good reason that postal workers well remember that it was on the direct instruction of the EU that the Royal Mail monopoly on postal deliveries was broken, opening the way for private companies to cherry pick the lucrative parts of the delivery service and leaving RM with the loss-making ones at the cost of thousands of jobs.
Not that this is of the slightest concern for the leaders of the CWU who have a treacherous history of selling their members down the river rather than fight the government. Royal Mail could not have been privatised without the active connivance of the CWU leaders who refused to act on a vote by 92% for strike action to stop the Tories privatising the company.
With this record of ignoring votes the CWU leaders will fit in nicely with the schemes being hatched by the ruling class to ignore any vote to leave the EU, the same tactic used in Ireland and Denmark.
It is a measure of the weakness of the Tories and the ruling class that they are forced to rely on the treachery of the Labour and trade union leaders to save British capitalism. A vote to leave the EU will shatter the Tory party into a million warring pieces, leaving open the only option for the ruling class to carry on with a popular front-type crisis government which would destroy the Labour party along with the Tories.
Brown’s last intervention to prop up British capitalism, the Scottish devolution referendum, resulted in a Labour free Scotland. His latest intervention will lead to a Labour free England with Labour supplanted not by nationalists but by the revolutionary party of the working class, that will lead the break with the capitalist EU and will bring in a workers government and socialism. A workers government will join with the working class of Europe in overthrowing the bosses and bankers union and replace it with the socialist united states of Europe!
