EX-UKIP leader Nigel Farage has said that ‘we should have a second referendum on EU membership.’ This is the biggest personal surrender note for many years in the UK.
The issue of a second referendum is crystal clear: Parliament voted that the people should decide whether the UK would leave the EU, in a referendum. The people decided ‘LEAVE’ and this is what must be carried out. In fact, if parliament will not leave the EU, then it is putting its own existence into question.
Farage said: ‘What is for certain is the Cleggs, Blairs and Adonises will never ever give up. They will go on whinging, whining and moaning about the whole process. So maybe, just maybe I’m reaching the point of thinking that we should have a second referendum on EU membership.’
In fact Farage is seeking to open the doors for those who want to wind back history, beginning with a second referendum. He made his comments straight after a meeting with EU chief negotiator Barnier. Perhaps his EU sponsored pension is at stake!
Ex-Labour PM Tony Blair last week called on the Labour Party to openly declare it wants a second referendum and to remain in the single market, in the customs union and in the EU. He wants a right wing coup against the masses. In appeasing Blair, Farage is playing with fire.
The fire they are playing with is the growing anger of the UK working class, a working class which rose up in its millions to defy the ruling elite, and its prophesies of doom, and voted decisively for Brexit.
Calling for a parliament imposed second referendum is like asking the Bolsheviks, after the 1917 socialist revolution, to withdraw from the Winter Palace and reconstitute the Constituent Assembly to make sure that the people really wanted a socialist revolution.
They are attempting to rewind history backwards, a thankless task in a period of great revolutionary changes.
It is a truly desperate course. How desperate it is can be seen by an example that is much closer to home and involves ‘our own’ parliament. In the 1640’s when the parliament of the rising bourgeoisie fell out with the absolutist Charles I, a new kind of force, the New Model Army, arose and drove the natural rulers from the field.
Oliver Cromwell sought talks with the King and found that he was unmovable, to the point where the monarch began a second civil war. This sealed his fate and this ‘man of blood’ was put on trial by his people and executed as a traitor. Cromwell and the New Model Army went on to purge even the bourgeois parliament, shut down the House of Lords and declare a Republic, with himself as Lord Protector.
If parliament defies the will of the people, by attempted to scupper Brexit and impose a situation where Britain remains in the EU, then it too will be regarded as the enemy of the people, and be purged and closed down to be replaced by a workers assembly of the type that was pioneered in Russia, a workers soviet.
If parliament vetoes their referendum, then the masses will show their anger on the streets, and bring down the government and the parliament with a general strike. Such a strike will begin the socialist revolution in the UK, to sweep away the old order and establish a workers government and socialism.
The English Republic was a beacon for the growing bourgeoisie of the world in the 17th century. A socialist revolution in the UK will be far more powerful and will blow up the EU of the bankers and the bosses. Workers in countries like Spain and Catalonia, France, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Ireland, who themselves have been savaged and pauperised by the EU, will respond to the British revolution by liberating themselves from the clutches of the European Central Bank, the IMF and the European Union (collectively called the Troika) by bringing down the EU and introducing a Socialist United States of Europe.
This is the struggle that is now under way. Workers in the UK must spell out that there will be no second referendum and that the UK must leave the EU at once and go forward to a workers government and a socialist economy. This is the only way forward for both the UK and EU workers!