YESTERDAY, Scottish appeal court judges ruled that the decision by the Tory government to suspend parliament for five weeks in the run-up to the deadline for leaving the EU on October 31 is ‘unlawful’.
This overturned earlier findings by the courts that they did not have the power to prevent Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament.
In the opinion of Scotland’s leading judges, the suspension order was ‘null and void’ in that it broke the constitution and was purely designed to prevent any parliamentary debate on Brexit.
In effect, the judges were ruling that Boris Johnson had lied to the Queen when he requested the suspension, claiming that it was just normal parliamentary procedure.
The judges stopped short of issuing an injunction forcing Johnson to immediately reopen Parliament but this didn’t stop Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer from declaring he would personally march on the House of Commons, bang on the door and demand it be reopened.
Starmer was speaking at the TUC annual conference and immediately proclaimed that it was a ‘huge’ vindication of Labour’s fight to keep Parliament open so that it could kill off Brexit on 31st October for good.
Starmer announced: ‘I need to get back to parliament, to see if we can reopen the doors and hold Johnson to account.’ Starmer went on Sky TV to demand an immediate recall of Parliament to ‘look at this judgement as a Parliament and decide what to do next’.
Everyone knows what Starmer and the Labour leadership want to do next and that is to overturn the result of the 2016 referendum and keep Britain tied to the EU forever.
The only disagreement between these leaders is how best to achieve this objective of knifing in the back the will of the people expressed in the referendum.
This split in the leadership emerged on Tuesday when Jeremy Corbyn, in his address to the TUC, rejected any call for an immediate general election, instead insisting that Labour’s priority was to ‘stop No-Deal’. Only then would he support an election which Labour would fight on a policy of supporting a second referendum ‘with a credible option to Leave and the option to Remain’.
This flatly contradicted the position put forward two days before by his shadow chancellor John McDonnell that Leave would not be on ballot paper.
Corbyn is clearly worried that removing the option to Leave from a second referendum would destroy the support of the millions of workers who voted to Leave.
Corbyn wants to carry on with the illusion that Labour hasn’t entirely dumped the commitment to honour the Brexit result while McDonnell clearly does not give a damn about keeping up any pretence about Labour now becoming the party of Remain.
Corbyn’s right-wing deputy, Tom Watson, went even further yesterday when he announced that Labour should ‘unequivocally back Remain in a fresh Brexit referendum and only then pursue power in a general election’.
Watson then proclaimed that there was ‘no such thing as a good Brexit deal’ and that the 2016 Leave vote had been ‘invalidated’ – presumably by a few hundred Labour, nationalist and Tory Remainer MPs voting to make No Deal illegal.
While Corbyn, who has twice rejected the offer of a snap general election and wants any election taking place without Brexit being mentioned followed by a second referendum, Watson wants Brexit killed before any election by holding a second referendum (with no Leave option on the ballot paper) and then an election.
After this, Watson and the right-wing hope that ‘normal’ bourgeois parliamentary relations can be resumed and MPs can return to the job of screwing the working class to keep bankrupt British capitalism from collapse. There can be no return to the old bourgeois parliamentary system.
The political crisis has reached a decisive crunch point where the only way forward for the working class is to march on Parliament, not to reopen it but to close it down by seizing the power and replacing it with a workers’ council.
Today, only socialist revolution can achieve Brexit on October 31st and resolve the economic and political crisis of capitalism by advancing to socialism.
