YESTERDAY, the Tory government asked the Queen to suspend Parliament from 10 September, just days after MPs return, for 23 working days until 14 October, a move that has caused an eruption of anger from Tory Remainers, Labour MPs, the SNP and LibDems.
What Johnson has done is effectively close down Parliament in the run-up to the date for leaving the EU on October 31, thereby denying MPs the necessary time to carry out their plots to derail Brexit and remain in the EU.
On Tuesday, their plot to overturn the 2016 Referendum result was finalised in a meeting convened by Jeremy Corbyn between Labour and other opposition parties where it was agreed to use parliamentary legislation to block a no-deal Brexit using a no-confidence motion against the Johnson government as a ‘last resort’.
Corbyn hopes that such a motion, if passed, would result in him replacing Johnson as leader of a ‘caretaker’ government that would then call a snap general election where Labour would campaign for a second referendum to overturn Brexit.
By suspending Parliament, depriving MPs of the time to pass laws to stop a no-deal Brexit or put down a no-confidence motion, Johnson has effectively stymied this move.
This led to an unprecedented attack on Johnson, with the House of Commons Speaker, John Bercow, calling it a ‘constitutional outrage’, adding it was ‘an offence against the democratic process and the rights of Parliamentarians as the people’s elected representatives’.
Leading Tory backbencher Dominic Grieve damned it as ‘an outrageous act’ adding: ‘This government will come down.’ Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson was equally incensed at what he described as an ‘utterly scandalous affront to our democracy’, a view echoed by former Tory chancellor Philip Hammond who called it ‘profoundly undemocratic’.
These appeals to defend parliamentary democracy wilfully ignore the fact that millions of workers voted in 2016 to break with the EU. The democratic will of the people expressed in the referendum is clearly of no account when it comes to the decision of MPs to block and overturn it.
Although Brexit is the sharpest form of the war being waged in Parliament, its content is the world crisis of capitalism that is tearing the ruling class and the bourgeois parties apart.
The capitalist class is hopelessly split over how best a feeble and collapsing British capitalism has any chance of surviving in the fast developing world recession that is engulfing every country in Europe and the US.
One side sees its future remaining tied to the bosses’ and bankers’ EU, while on the other side, the hope is to survive by turning the UK into a subordinate outpost of US imperialism. What both sections of the ruling class are agreed on is that the working class will pay for the crisis of capitalism.
Since the banking crash of 2007/08, the entire weight of the capitalist crisis has been dumped on the backs of the working class to such an extent that millions of workers in the UK cannot afford to live and over four million children live in absolute poverty.
It was this hatred of capitalist austerity and the rule of the bankers that led workers to deal, in defiance of the leadership of the Labour Party and TUC, a decisive blow against the ruling class in Britain and the EU with the revolutionary Brexit vote.
Now is the time to end all the plots to kill off Brexit and insist the UK leaves the EU on October 31st. It also means bringing down the Johnson government, and the working class taking power and establishing its own workers government.
Let’s rapidly build a new leadership in the trade unions to organise a general strike in support of all those workers fighting to defend their jobs and livelihoods, which will bring down this government and establish the workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers under a planned socialist economy.
Join us and lobby the TUC on Monday 9 September to insist the TUC delegates carry this out.
Such action will unite with the struggles of workers throughout Europe to bring down their hated governments to build instead the United Socialist States of Europe.
