WEDNESDAY’S meeting of the Labour Party’s shadow cabinet saw the deep split in the Labour leadership widen into a chasm as former loyal Corbyn supporters mounted a charge to force the party to adopt an openly anti-Brexit position.
John McDonnell and Diane Abbott urged Corbyn to come out decisively in favour of remaining in the EU with McDonnell telling friends that while he understood Corbyn’s respect for the decision of the 2016 referendum and his attempt to try and appease both the Remain and Leave sections of the party the time had come to abandon any commitment to Brexit and emphatically endorse remaining in the EU.
McDonnell and Abbott have made common cause with Labour’s right-wing deputy leader Tom Watson, who on Monday trashed the vote of millions of workers in the referendum and declared that: ‘Our members are Remain. Our values are Remain. Our hearts are Remain.’
Watson has been behind all the right-wing attempts to oust Corbyn since he was elected leader and now he is going all-out to align Labour with the Tory Remainers and the LibDems in some coalition to dump Brexit for good.
At the meeting, a paper was presented analysing the latest voting trends which stated: ‘There is an evident risk that shifting to a more explicitly pro-Remain position would leave us vulnerable in seats we need to hold or win without enough potential seat gains in winnable Remain majority areas.’
None of this matters to Watson and the right-wing. They don’t care about Labour losing the support of millions of workers who voted for the party in 2017 on a platform of leaving the EU, ending austerity and the hated Universal Credit along with the policy of re-nationalising industries privatised by the Tories.
This programme won the support of working people across the country and resulted in the Tories losing their parliamentary majority and being reduced to the status of a weak minority government.
Instead the right-wing are determined to destroy the Labour Party through splits and move towards a coalition government to ‘rescue’ British capitalism at the expense of the working class. They are eager to jump at the offer made by Tory leadership contender and ex-MI6 agent Rory Stewart for unity between Labour and Tory to thwart a no-deal Brexit.
Now, they have been joined by McDonnell and Abbott who are attempting to ‘nudge’ Corbyn towards moving on from his conciliatory position, calling for a general election and failing that to go for a second referendum, to the position of dropping the call for an election and going all-out for a second ‘people’s vote’, a vote in which the option of leaving will not be on the ballot paper.
While the right-wing is plotting to bring Corbyn down and destroy the Labour Party he is prevaricating like mad in a futile attempt to keep them on-board and avoid a split.
Appeasing the right-wing will not save Corbyn – instead he must make a stand on the election manifesto of 2017 and call for the working class to mobilise behind Labour’s pledges to end all Tory attacks on working people.
So far, all Corbyn has done is retreat in an effort to keep the Labour Party a ‘broad church’ where every treacherous right-wing collaborator with capitalism can flourish and plot.
While the Labour Party is split and its policies on Brexit are being changed daily and becoming increasingly in favour of Remaining, there is absolutely no doubt about the position of the Workers Revolutionary Party.
This position is quite clear – the working class must intervene in the chaos caused by the collapse of the two main parties by organising a general strike to kick out the Tories and take power, going forward to a workers government.
A workers’ government will expropriate the banks and main industry placing them under workers’ management as part of a socialist economy, break completely with the EU and call for the workers of Europe to join in replacing it with the united socialist states of Europe.
We urge all workers and young people to join the WRP today and fight for these policies.
