PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s senior adviser Wilbur Ross has just addressed the CBI bosses and given that body its orders as to what it must and must not do if the capitalist UK is to have a quick post-EU trade deal with the US.
Ross said his trip to the UK allowed him to ‘address with the UK some concerns we have that they may be tempted to include (provisions) in their agreement with the European Commission (EC) that could be problems for a subsequent FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with the US’.
After this reference to the much loved ideas of two or three or even indefinite years of ‘transition’ in which the UK would remain in the single market, the customs union and under the European Court, Ross continued: ‘It is … important that an eventual Brexit agreement takes into account our commercial interests, and does not hinder development of a closer post-Brexit US-UK relationship by continuing divergent standards and regulations and other protectionist measures.’
Ross said that if the UK chooses to keep the EU ban on genetically modified food and chlorinated chicken, there would be problems in having ‘a subsequent FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with the US.’ Criticising the EU’s external trade policy, he said: ‘The EU talks free trade but actually is highly protectionist.’
He insisted that the US has said it has been ‘fair and open’ in its handling of a trade row that threatens jobs at Bombardier in Belfast, and that import tariffs on the C-Series jet could yet be lifted. Ross said Washington understood ‘the political sensitivity’ around the dispute in Canada and the UK, but added: ‘The fundamentals remain: Even our best friends really have to play by the rules.’
As is well known, Trump’s policy is America first, and that all trade deals, including those with Japan, and China and the EU, will be renegotiated to return more jobs to the US, where the anger of US workers at the growth of mass unemployment and the slashing of living standards has reached explosion point.
His programme amounts to a US declared trade war with the current allies of the US that may not stop at the level of trade disagreements. The US ruling class is thus giving the UK bosses an offer it considers the UK ruling class cannot afford to refuse.
The UK ruling class is however split. It is agreed that the days of the UK standing alone are over, but is split over whether to swear allegiance to Brussels or Wall Street, with the working class to pay the price for either move by providing unlimited cheap labour for the bosses and enduring slashed living standards.
The trade unions are also split over whither the UK, with the major trade unions favouring chaining the working class to the EU. The working class does not have any choice but to drive forward to force the break with the EU, to tell the US bosses to get lost, and to get rid of capitalism and bring in socialism. The WRP is very clear on this issue.
The world capitalist system is in its death agony, with another acute economic and financial crisis developing whose semblance is the falling apart of all of the old regimes of government, and whose essence is that the working class must take the power and establish socialism – or go under with the system.
The working class must refuse to be put into a position where it has to decide under which regime – headed by Wall Street or Brussels – it must suffer a reduction of living standards to ‘Third World’ levels. Instead, it must build the new and revolutionary leadership of the WRP to lead the working class in a political general strike to bring down the collapsed Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
The UK workers must take the power and expropriate the bosses and bankers to bring in socialism and a socialist planned economy. It must then form an alliance with the EU and US workers to rid the world of the blight of capitalism and to go forward to a Socialist United States of Europe and then a World Socialist Republic.
Capitalism has had its day. Only a planned socialist economy can rationally utilise the explosive development of automation and robotics to establish the basis of a Communist society, foreseen by Marx, and capable of establishing the norm of ‘From each according to their ability to each according to their needs.’
May and Trump and Juncker must be sent packing, and the workers of the world must take a giant step forward to socialism via the victory of the world socialist revolution.
