WHAT has emerged out of the bankruptcy of Parliament this week is that the Labour leadership, along with the other opposition parties and rebel Tory Remainers, have decided a No-Deal Brexit is ‘illegal’ and that there must be no general election until Brexit is killed off completely.
A general election is of secondary importance to the Labour leadership than seeing the vote of 17.4 million workers who voted to leave in 2016 trashed by a vote of 328 MPs.
Upholding the laws passed by a bourgeois parliament is now the main concern of the Labour leaders, and to hell with the referendum result.
Corbyn and McDonnell are terrified of a snap general election in which Johnson would pose as the defender of the people’s will against a Parliament packed with Remainers – and that in such a battle between Parliament and the people Johnson would be able to portray himself as being on the side of the people!
Corbyn attempted to wriggle out of this in his speech delivered to the TUC Congress yesterday where he accused the Tory government of ‘hijacking the referendum result to shift even more power and wealth to those at the top,’ and that ‘a No-Deal Brexit is really a Trump Deal Brexit … leading to a one-sided US trade deal negotiated from a position of weakness.’
Corbyn and McDonnell have not just hijacked but betrayed the referendum result – along with all Labour’s pledges to uphold it.
Corbyn depicts the working class as powerless and warns that a ‘No-Deal Brexit ‘will put us at the mercy of Trump … and the big US corporations itching to get their teeth further into our NHS … sound the death knell for our steel industry … and permanently drive down rights and protections for workers.’
At a stroke, Corbyn dismisses the very idea of the working class as a revolutionary class prepared to battle for its jobs and rights. Instead, the powerful working class is relegated to being nothing more than the helpless plaything of capitalism whose only choice is to be exploited by either the European or US bosses and bankers.
This contemptuous writing off of the working class is apparent throughout his speech which was littered with pledges to ‘protect’ workers from the all powerful employers by creating a Workers Protection Agency that would have ‘the power to enter workplaces … and bring prosecutions on workers’ behalf.’
Corbyn even announced: ‘We’ll give workers a seat at the Cabinet table … by establishing a new Ministry of Employment Rights.’
So much for Labour being the workers’ party.
A government agency to ‘protect’ the poor workers and a seat at the government Cabinet table for selected members of the TUC bureaucracy, along with promises of workers on the boards of companies and shares for workers in large companies.
This is a crude version of EU corporatism!
Corbyn is proposing that the trade unions become incorporated into the government and capitalist state while workers are to become shareholders in capitalist enterprises, and have a seat in the Labour bourgeois Cabinet.
As for nationalisation, all he promised was: ‘We’ll bring rail, mail, water and the national grid into public ownership.’
Leaving aside the fact that the EU he is desperate to remain in makes it illegal to re-nationalise these utilities, he completely rejects outright the socialist demand for expropriation and nationalisation of all major industries and the banks, placing them under the ownership and management of the working class.
Instead, he proposes re-nationalising a few utilities – while leaving capitalism intact.
In this way Corbyn and the Labour reformists hope to keep a bankrupt British capitalist system from being brought down by a working class that is rising up against austerity and against the domination of the bankers and bosses in Europe, and who will not tolerate being handed over to US imperialism by Johnson.
The working class are not helpless bystanders in the world crisis. In 2016 they intervened to break with the EU and delivered a revolutionary blow to capitalism that has shattered all the old parties. In the period ahead the working class will take the power and put an end to capitalism!
