CAMERON yesterday launched his campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in an EU referendum – which has been pencilled in for June 2016 – telling his audience: ‘When you look at the challenges facing European leaders today, the changes that Britain is seeking do not fall in the box marked “impossible”. They are eminently resolvable, with the requisite political will and political imagination.’
That this would be his position was settled last October 29 when Obama’s trade representative Michael Froman, who negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in the Asia Pacific and is negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union, issued a public warning to the UK.
Froman said that the UK, in the event of a British exit from the EU, would face trade barriers with America just like China, Brazil and India. He stressed that Washington would not seek a separate free trade agreement (FTA) with Britain. For added value he stressed that the US is Britain’s biggest export market after the EU. In 2014, $54bn worth of goods entered the American market and, as Froman made clear, a vote to quit the EU could see the UK kept out of this market.
With the Japanese motor car industry, also a well known exporter from its UK base into the EU, and also clear about what Cameron had to do, yesterday’s speech was highly predictable. In his speech, ahead of the publication of a letter to EC chairman Donald Tusk, Cameron outlined the four objectives at the heart of the UK’s re-negotiations:
These were
• Protection of the single market for Britain and other non-euro member countries
• ‘Boosting competitiveness’ by not being bound by EU law and its Working Time Directive, so that UK workers could be the most super exploited in Europe
• Exempting the UK from any ‘ever-closer union’
• Restricting EU migrants’ access to in-work benefits such as tax credits until they have completed a number of years of residency.
Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell meanwhile told the BBC that Labour’s position was that Britain should stay in the EU and ‘negotiate our reform agenda as members of the club’, and therefore had no difference in principle with Cameron over staying in the EC-run dictatorship.
Perhaps McDonnell has not noticed such issues as the EU’s attempts to crush the Greek workers, its efforts to prevent a left government taking office in Portugal, and its machinations to pay African countries up to 3bn euros to take back millions of refugees, plus the prospect of services like the NHS being privatised and sold off to US companies, with the TTIP trade treaty making it impossible for it to be renationalised.
In Greece, the EU dictatorship has just refused the first release under the 87bn euros bailout deal because key privatisation reforms have not been carried out! Greek workers are now very angry. In Portugal, the Communist-led left bloc is about to take office after defeating a plot by the EU to stop this happening. The EC is now convinced that left forces are rising up all over the EU, and cite France where workers have been chasing bosses and ripping the shirts off their backs as a sign of revolution to come.
The UK is no exception to this movement of the working class and the middle class to the left against mounting repression, witness the junior doctors’ struggle and the impending imposition of new draconian anti-union laws.
It is under these conditions of a raging capitalist crisis and the emergence of revolutionary forces all over Europe that the News Line says: Down with the EU, Vote ‘No’ in the referendum, but you do not need to wait until the Referendum is called to show the world what you think of capitalism and its EU.
The junior doctors will shortly be taking strike action – the notorious Tory anti-union bill had its third reading yesterday and will soon be law. The way forward is to get mobilised. Take strike action alongside the junior doctors!
Mobilise for a general strike to win their struggle, smash the anti-union laws and bring down the Tories! With Europe on the road to revolution, now is the time to establish unity in action with the Greek, Portuguese, French, German and other EU workers.
Now is the time to mobilise to bring down the European Union with socialist revolutions to bring in workers governments and replace the EU with the Socialist United States of Europe!
