LABOUR right winger Owen Smith, in his desire to satisfy the big bosses and the bankers, is going even further than the Tories after the EU referendum result, when the working class and the majority of the middle class dismissed all the threats of doom to come by voting to leave the EU and end the grip of its Brussels dictatorship.
Smith says that he wants another referendum and that he will try to stop PM May formally triggering Brexit unless she promises a referendum on the final deal, or calls a general election to approve it, i.e. calls another referendum disguised as a single issue general election.
His line is that the stupid masses fell for a pack of lies, and that it is his job to put them right, by forcing another referendum onto them, in order to peddle his own even bigger pack of lies, accompanied no doubt by a helpful shutdown of sections of industry by the bosses, creating a major political crisis to help the workers rethink their mistaken vote.
Already a legal challenge is under way to try to ensure Parliament must approve Article 50 being triggered, despite the government saying this can happen without the need for a House of Commons vote. Presumably if the ignorant masses continue to reject the EU in a second referendum, Smith the great patriot, in the national interest, will seek to carry out a coup, through parliament, that the House of Commons is sovereign, and therefore it can put two fingers up to the mass of the working people, as long as the police and the armed forces earn their money by maintaining order in the streets using their much-rehearsed shoot-to-kill riot suppression techniques.
Owen Smith, in his rush to be the true servant of the bosses and the bankers, is heading towards maintaining the UK’s membership of the EU through a civil war and the imposition of a right-wing dictatorship.
Certainly, such dictatorial trends often come from unexpected quarters. Mussolini emerged from the right wing of social democracy, while Oswald Mosley was a Labour Party star, whose new party was founded to deal with the problem of mass unemployment, and was thought to be left!
Certainly, Labour’s right wing is distinguished by its devotion to the interests of the bosses and the bankers. Certainly, they are the most rabid opponents of the hundreds of thousands of new members that are joining the Labour Party from the ranks of the working class and the radical middle class.
They have just carried through a legal action to stop 130,000 new Labour Party members voting in the leadership election and are apparently discussing mass purges of the new membership to get rid of the working class element that has flocked into the Labour Party, as well as legal actions to steal Labour’s property!
The right wing longs for the days when a combination of support from the billionaire capitalist media and the nod from the trade union bureaucracy secured them MPs’ jobs for life – the good old days indeed! They are aghast that the ignorant masses can decide on such vital matters as their careers!
In fact, they aim to get their immediate revenge through splitting the Labour Party. The Tories are boasting that their opposite numbers in the House of Commons are telling them to call a general election, because of their belief that Labour will be wiped out, Corbyn destroyed, and the masses taught a big lesson – that is that they must not rock the job prospects of Labour Party careerists.
In fact, the Tories have already been assured by Smith: ‘What you won’t get from me is some lunatic at the top of the Labour Party.’ This was his message when he spoke in Hammersmith.
The essence of the current situation is that as part of the world crisis British capitalism is on the rocks. The big bourgeoisie and the bankers see membership of the EU as a matter of life or death, while the masses more and more see capitalism and the bankers as their main enemy driving them back to pre-1945. These are the two irreconcilable opposites in the current situation.|
The rise of Corbyn is the immediate reaction of the working class to this situation.
The issue however is that the working class will need to take the power to defend its gains in the period ahead. For that it will need the revolutionary party. We must build the WRP and the YS without delay!