TORY PM May’s latest capitulation to the European Union over Brexit has been met with furious anger from Brexiteers and others in her own party. She has conceded to extending the transitional period by a year, whetting the appetite of the EU which is now demanding an indefinite backstop requirement, ie permanent membership of the Customs Union.
Indefinite as everyone knows is a euphemism for permanent, and of course, if you remain in the Customs Union to respect the EU’s Single Market, you are remaining in the EU! Former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith said extending the transition period would see the UK paying the EU ‘tens of billions’ more.
He told BBC’s Newsnight he could not understand an extension when the UK ‘still hasn’t got anything back in return’ and admitted the negotiations ‘look more like a capitulation’. He continued: ‘It would be very hard to tell the British people that we are extending another year or more into the implementation phase, and we’re then going to pay tens of billions of pounds over, when we actually say we need it for other domestic programmes.’
The penalty to be paid for the transitional period is a continuation of super-austerity!
Meanwhile, the European Union refused to set a date for the next meeting until ‘progress has been made’ over the Brexit deal. May was slapped down by both German Chancellor Merkel and President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. Both sent the message to the UK: ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’
Remainers in the Tory Party are also seething. Plymouth Tory MP Johnny Mercer branded his own government as a ‘shitshow’. In an interview with The House magazine, he warned that if Tory rows over Brexit let in Jeremy Corbyn, ‘I don’t think we’d be forgiven for a generation and we wouldn’t deserve to be.’ He then went on to say that with hindsight he wouldn’t vote for his own party.
However, while Tory MPs slam their own party, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and sections of the Labour Party are not calling for a general election but are awaiting May’s call for a permanent Customs Union, so that Labour can ‘put the nation first’, and vote with May to defeat her Brexiteers. Then as the crisis worsens and deepens, Labour can really put the capitalist nation, that is the bosses and bankers, first, by forming a national government, to save the nation of course, by remaining in the EU.
Labour has openly declared that it would be delighted if the UK stayed in a Customs Union permanently and Corbyn made overtures at the Labour Party conference to May, stating that if she supports staying in a Customs Union, Labour will vote for her deal.
Labour has torn up its election manifesto which won big support for insisting that Labour will ‘respect the referendum result’. It was this, alongside a socialist programme of ending all university fees and the mass building of council housing that defeated May. She lost her majority and relies on the extreme right-wing nationalist DUP to rule. The DUP have made it absolutely clear that they cannot be relied on to vote for May’s Brexit deal.
The Brexiteers in the Tory Party have said that she cannot rely on them to vote for her deal. This leaves the Labour Party to ride to the rescue for a complete capitulation to the EU in defiance of the referendum result.
This will not be a ‘BRINO’ deal as they call it: Brexit in name only – it will be 100% ‘remain’ – the real thing. That this is completely and utterly unacceptable to the vast majority of the working class who voted in their millions to leave the EU is obvious. The only answer to May’s cringing and Corbyn’s capitulation to the EU is the organisation of a general strike to bring down the May government and to bring in a workers government and socialism.
This will not only immediately leave the EU, it will resolve the crisis of British capitalism by expropriating the bosses and bankers and putting the major industries under workers management. Such an example will spread like wildfire throughout the crisis-ridden EU!
