LORD Heseltine is notorious for his closure of the mining industry in 1993, as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the Major Tory government.
Now he has answered the call of Tony Blair – the totally discredited former Labour PM, responsible for the imperialist wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia – to rise up and reverse the decision of the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.
Heseltine intends to rebel against the government when peers debate the bill giving PM May the authority to trigger Brexit on Tuesday March 7th. Last week, peers gave an unopposed second reading to the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, following a two-day debate involving more than 180 speakers. This week this has all changed.
Labour, Tory and Lib Dem unelected Lords, led by Heseltine, intend to amend the bill so that the UK parliament has the right to overturn the referendum result, trampling on the will of the people, by rejecting any deal that PM May makes with Brussels.
Lord Heseltine wrote in the Mail on Sunday echoing Blair: ‘The fightback starts here. My opponents will argue that the people have spoken, the mandate secured and the future cast. My experience stands against this argument.’
He added: ‘In the end the outcome of Brexit will have to be confirmed by parliament. It will also have to pass in 27 national European parliaments, several sub-national parliaments and the European Parliament.
‘It was perhaps unwise for our government to suppose that our parliament should be excluded where all others were included. Very sensibly, after the Supreme Court interpreted the law, that position was reversed and parliament was restored to its rightful constitutional role as the ultimate authority. I will vote in the House of Lords to ensure that position is legally intact.’
Gina Miller, the investment manager who brought the successful legal challenge against the government in the Supreme Court, forcing the Article 50 issue to a vote in parliament, yesterday displayed her contempt for the same parliament accusing the House of Commons of ‘cowardice’ in giving the bill a ‘rubber stamp’.
Looking to the unelected House of Lords she added: ‘The will of the people does not negate the weight or wisdom of the Houses of Parliament.’ The will of the people counts for nothing, as far as Miller, Heseltine and Blair are concerned. All that counts for them are the requirements of the banks and the biggest bosses.
However, the fact of the matter is that in June 2016 17.4 million voted to quit the EU with 16.1 million voting to remain. Millions of workers voted to get out of the EU especially in the north east where Sunderland, Gateshead, Darlington, Durham, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Stockton, Redcar and Cleveland, North Tyneside and South Tyneside, and Northumberland voted to to leave.
They will not allow their votes to be treated as rubbish by the likes of Blair and Heseltine, supported by the unelected Lords and many Labour MPs. If their will is defied they will carry on with a good old British tradition that saw would-be despots lose their right to rule in the 17th century.
Oliver Cromwell set an example to be followed today when he and his ‘New Model Army’ purged parliament, shut down the House of Lords, beheaded a monarch who believed, like the current Lords, that he ruled by divine right and declared a republic. He stopped short of universal suffrage since being a good bourgeois he believed that a propertyless majority might abolish the property of the rich.
When Heseltine, Blair and Co move to defy the will of the people as expressed in the referendum result, millions of workers who voted to leave the EU must organise a general strike to shut down the Lords and force through an immediate break with the EU. It is clear that the only way to secure the exit of the UK from the EU is through a socialist revolution that will expropriate the bosses and bankers in the UK and bring in socialism. There is no doubt that such a revolutionary movement will spread throughout the whole of Europe bringing down the EU in the process, and bringing in a Socialist United States of Europe!
