ON Monday Tory PM Cameron warned that if the UK leaves the EU it could trigger off another great European war. What a condemnation of European capitalism, and what a strange depiction of bloodsoaked UK capitalism as a peacemaker!
His Tory rival and leader of the ‘Leave’ campaign, Boris Johnson, responded that if this were the case, why did Cameron agree to a referendum in the first place, when he stated that he would fight for his reform agenda and then if it was not successful lead the campaign to quit the EU himself.
Cameron’s Monday remarks were clearly those of a desperate demagogue. Another Tory leader, its late workhouse master, Ian Duncan Smith has also spoken up to state that Cameron’s ‘reform negotiations’ with the EU were a fraud.
He said that Germany had exercised a ‘de facto veto’ over Cameron and that he had ditched his plans in 2014 to demand an emergency brake on migration after Chancellor Merkel said ‘no’.
Smith said: ‘I saw the draft. I know that right up until the midnight hour, there was a strong line in there about restricting the flow of migrants from the European Union – an emergency brake on overall migration. That was dropped, literally the night before. And it was dropped because the Germans said if that is in the speech, we will have to attack it.
‘The whole thing was shown to them. The Germans said from the outset, you are not getting border control. Full stop.’ He described the concessions made to Cameron as ‘marginal’ and that, in return, the UK had lost its veto on future fiscal and political integration within the eurozone. Duncan Smith concluded: ‘We have gone from wanting to lead on Europe to being on the end of a lead in Europe’.
Oh how low the once mighty British ruling class has fallen! It is now completely split over its future. With the end of Empire the Cameron-Osborne group are willing to become a puppet of the German bourgeoisie – providing the price is right.
The Johnson gang want to try and preserve British bourgeois democracy and, as in the past, control ‘their own’ country, ‘their own’ parliament and ‘their own’ armed forces. They are aghast that the EU Commission is already planning a European army, and all that it has learnt from its disastrous intervention into the Ukraine is that it cannot rely on NATO to do its colonising for it.
The Tory ‘Leave’ campaign champions British bourgeois ‘democracy’ and British capitalism. Meanwhile, the world capitalist crisis deepens with its banks loaded with trillions of dollars of debt, while the world economy sinks.
The UK’s trade deficit for the first quarter is at its biggest since 2008. The gap between imports and exports for the first three months of 2016 stands at £13.3bn, up from £12.2bn in the fourth quarter of 2015, says the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The figures were described as ‘truly horrible’.
The ONS said the UK trade gap widened over the quarter because of a £1.9bn rise in imports in such as mechanical machinery, cars, clothing, jewellery and footwear. Exports increased by just £500m, led by chemical products. Meanwhile, Germany’s trade surplus hit an all-time high in March as its exports surged.
It is this capitalist crisis that is driving the ruling classes of the world into wars against the working class at home and bloody imperialist adventures abroad creating millions of refugees. There have been huge demonstrations in Greece and in France of millions of workers and in the London council elections workers gave their verdict on the policies of the would-be ‘liberator’ Boris Johnson.
As London Mayor he turned central London into a paradise for the rich and a place where no worker can live because of extortionate rents and sky high living costs. This was why Sadiq Khan was elected as the new London Mayor with a vote of over 1,300,000!
The next step for workers must be to vote ‘Leave’ on June 23 to bring down the broken Cameron government and to bring in a workers government and socialism to transform the UK. The working class must then join hands with the workers of Europe to overthrow the European Union and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe!
