TORY PRIME minister Theresa May suffered another humiliating defeat in parliament on Tuesday when the latest version of her ‘deal’ with the EU was thrown out by MPs by a majority of 149.
May has lost control of Parliament and lost control of the Tory party. She was forced to climb down and lift her threat to impose a whip on Tory ministers on yesterdays’ vote on Britain leaving the EU with no deal after dozens of ministers threatened to walk out on her unless she allowed them a free vote.
With the overwhelming majority of both Tory and Labour MPs determined to derail Brexit and reject any possibility of Britain carrying out the decision of the 2016 referendum to leave on March 29, the vote to reject a no-deal departure due late last night was certain to pass.
This will leave as the only choices being advanced by Labour and Tory Remainers to either extend Article 50 beyond that date to some indefinite time in the future with the aim of binding the country into a permanent and subservient union with the capitalist EU.
Alternatively, to simply cancel Brexit altogether and overturn the democratic vote to Leave through parliamentary decree – a coup by a handful of MPs over the vote of over 17 million to Leave in what was a binding referendum.
The proposal for a second referendum being touted as well would not contain the option of leaving with no deal but only on whether to stay or stay with a deal that would place British capitalism firmly under the legal and economic domination of the EU.
The ruling class dare not make the same mistake that Cameron made in 2016, so desperate are they to stay in alliance with the EU.
It is to be a rigged referendum to remain in an EU that is in a major economic crisis and facing an uprising of the working class across the continent. The object of the Remainers is to form a counter-revolutionary alliance with the would-be Brussels dictatorship against the working class of Britain and Europe.
Before the debate on Brexit opened, Tory chancellor Philip Hammond in his Spring Statement warned of economic chaos unless Brexit was overturned while announcing that the government’s ‘war chest’ has grown to £26.6 billion.
All these billions have come from the years of Tory austerity cuts to wages and public services and form a war chest that the Tories have built for the purpose of waging war on the working class through continued austerity.
This austerity has left over four million children living in poverty and workers forced to rely on food banks while record numbers sleep on the streets.
Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell replied to Hammond attacking the Tory record in driving working people into poverty but concluded by joining him in the demand to ‘take no-deal Brexit off the table’.
While McDonnell was in unity with Hammond over Brexit, within the Labour Party moves by the right-wing to split the party completely and dump Corbyn unfolded last Monday.
130 Labour politicians crowded into a room in Parliament to found The Future of Britain Group set up by the right-wing Labour deputy leader Tom Watson.
This party-within-a-party aims at splitting Labour irrevocably, dumping Corbyn and paving the way for a new political formation to join with the Tories in a national government to ‘save’ the nation from an angry working class.
They fear that Corbyn is too weak to lead a government capable of taking on the working class in open class struggle, that he would be unable to resist the pressure of the millions of workers who hate capitalist austerity and are determined to put an end to all the poverty inflicted to bail out this bankrupt capitalist system.
What is clear is that the only way to put an end to all the plotting to overturn Brexit is for the working class to organise the unions for political and industrial action, strikes and demonstrations, to bring down this Tory government and go forward to a workers government that will leave the EU without any deal and expropriate the UK bankers and bosses to bring in a planned socialist economy. This practice will spread like wildfire throughout the EU to bring in the Socialist United States of Europe.
