AMIDST all the chaos and downright farce in Parliament on Wednesday only one indisputable fact remains – on the 23rd June 2016 in a nationwide referendum 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU!
This vote was a crushing blow to the British ruling class and its servants in Parliament who had waged a campaign of fear, threatening the direst consequences if Britain should leave.
Cameron, who called the referendum, fled the scene after his stunning defeat and May was parachuted in as PM with the remit to pay lip service to the referendum result while working overtime to completely derail it and keep British capitalism tied indefinitely to the EU through her ‘deal’.
Even this sell-out wasn’t enough for the vast majority of the 650 MPs from all parties who were determined to overturn Brexit through one scheme or another.
With May insisting that it was ‘her deal or no deal’ these MPs came up with a plan. Parliament would ‘take control’ away from May and her government and impose their own solution to the thorny issue of how to remain in the EU while trying to pretend that they were not completely overturning the sovereign will of the people.
Seizing control of the Brexit process resulted not in any great solution but led to the farcical debacle that took place on Wednesday night when MPs filled in ballot papers to register their preference for 8 Brexit options.
All these options failed to get a majority of votes making a nonsense of the claims that Parliament was in control of anything. Prior to voting Tory MPs met with May who made the extraordinary offer to resign if they would only pass her Brexit deal – surely the only case in history of someone threatening suicide if they got their own way!
Her promise of resignation was enough to sway previously hard-line Brexiteers like Johnson and Rees-Mogg who announced they would vote for her deal, but this support was scuppered by the refusal of the DUP to vote for her.
The Labour leadership were pushing their own plans to betray the referendum result.
Corbyn attempted to force through the option of calling a second referendum by whipping Labour MPs to support an amendment demanding a second referendum on any deal – the so-called ‘people’s vote’.
This was defeated along with the rest, but it represents a complete betrayal of the millions of people who voted to leave without any deal and abandons Labour’s last election manifesto pledge to uphold the referendum result.
While the right-wing of the Tories and the left-wing of Labour are contriving to ditch Brexit the President of the European Council Donald Tusk was demanding that Britain hold elections to the European Parliament so that all those Remainers in the country could be represented ‘because they are Europeans’ and that they must not be ‘betrayed’ as they ‘are not sufficiently represented by the UK Parliament’.
On the contrary, it is the millions who voted to leave who are not represented by a Parliament stuffed full of MPs determined to overturn Brexit and the decision enshrined in UK law to leave the EU today.
Tusk doesn’t give a damn about their democratic rights. Given the chance he appears to want to disenfranchise this unruly rabble and put them under the domination of ‘Europeans’; in reality under the domination of European bankers and bosses.
The great seizure of power by Parliament has descended into a complete and utter farce. Now is the time for the working class to take action and seize power itself by mobilising mass demonstrations and strikes to shut down Parliament, putting an end to the farce of bourgeois democracy through socialist revolution.
Only socialist revolution and the establishment of a workers’ government that will expropriate the big bosses and bankers under a planned socialist economy can carry through the decision of the
referendum.
Socialist revolution in Britain will win the support of millions of workers and young people throughout Europe and open the revolutionary floodgates to the struggle to bring down the EU and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.