ON TUESDAY night, Theresa May suffered yet one more humiliation at the hands of her own party when almost 100 Tory MPs voted against her plea for Parliament to beg the EU for a three-month extension to Article 50.
Included in those voting against were six members of her own cabinet. A further 80 Tories abstained and the vote was only won with the support of Labour and other opposition MPs.
Only 131 Tory MPs voted to back May, meaning that she was in a minority within her party and solely reliant on Labour votes to survive. May has lost control of the Tory party.
Marcus Fysh, a Tory Eurosceptic, said after the vote, ‘Only 133 out of 314 Conservative MPs voted for extension of article 50 this afternoon. The government simply does not have the support for its current direction on the main purpose of its existence, inside the parliamentary party, the party in the country, or the wider country.’
May headed off to Brussels yesterday to present this latest plea for an extension to a summit of EU leaders who have already made it clear that they will not countenance anything other than a much longer extension.
Donald Tusk, the European Council President, has demanded the UK stay in the EU until 31 December, insisting that a short extension to the end of June was too much of a ‘risk’ given the complete chaos and meltdown of the UK parliament.
French President Emmanuel Macron has put forward his own proposals to make the UK an ‘intermediate member state’ for an extended period during which Britain would have no say or vote on anything and be required to undergo a review of its membership every three months to make sure the country was behaving itself and obeying every diktat issued by the EU.
This would put the UK effectively in an unlimited probation period where it must do as instructed by the bosses and bankers of the EU or be kicked out.
The arrogance of the EU leaders stems from their knowledge that May has lost complete control of her government, her party and parliament.
This week parliament voted to make it illegal for the government to leave the EU on April 12 without a deal. Indeed, the vote means that leaving the EU at any date without a deal is now legally impossible unless the EU condescends to giving its approval.
Handing the EU the power of life and death over Brexit means that May will be forced to accept whatever humiliating deal the EU leaders wish to impose.
Having abandoned leaving the EU without a deal and now facing a series of draconian demands from Tusk and Macron, the conditions have been created for the majority of Labour MPs and Tory Remainers to ditch Brexit and demand a vote on cancelling Article 50 completely.
Tory chancellor Philip Hammond has already told May that if the EU refused to grant the extension she is begging for, then the pound would plummet and MPs will revoke Article 50.
With the Tory government in a state of complete collapse, only propped up by the Labour Party determined to kill Brexit, and Parliament now pitted against the democratic vote of 17.4 million workers and middle class people who voted to ‘Leave’, there can be no doubt the only way to leave the capitalist conspiracy of the EU is for millions of youth and workers to take decisive action and put an end to this charade of Parliamentary democracy.
Workers must rise up in their millions to stop Brexit being knifed in the back by this reactionary Tory-Labour conspiracy by bringing down the May government and going forward to a workers’ government that will break with the EU with no deal and expropriate the bosses and bankers and advance to a planned socialist economy.
Only by the working class seizing power through socialist revolution can Brexit be achieved, a revolution that will inspire and win the support of workers and youth throughout Europe and open the way for a European socialist revolution and the building of the United Socialist States of Europe.
