WITH 21 TORY MPS having the whip removed from them, now being joined by more Tory defectors like Amber Rudd, and while Labour makes it clear that it is only prepared to agree to a general election once leaving the EU has been made illegal, it is crystal clear that the crisis created by 17.4 million workers when they voted that the UK must leave the EU has become greater and greater.
This crisis has created a massive division both in the UK ruling class and in its political and trade union establishment, including the Labour Party and the TUC trade union leaders.
It has reached the point where Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell said yesterday that he wanted a second referendum before there was a general election, and that this would vote on a deal negotiated with the EU by a Labour-led caretaker government.
The deal that was agreed with the EU would be put to the people in a second referendum, in which he would campaign to ‘Remain’, rejecting the deal that his political pals had just negotiated. Leave would not be one of the alternatives given to vote on!
He is proposing to criminalise and disenfranchise the 17.4 million who had the temerity to defy their masters by voting ‘Leave’ in 2016. Tory leader Boris Johnson has said that he would rather end up dead in a ditch than go to the EU and ‘surrender’ by calling for an extension of the October 31st deadline.
The response of the ex-Tory attorney general to this has been to warn Johnson that he ‘could be sent to prison’ if he refuses to obey the new anti-Brexit law. The knives are out in the UK in a way that hasn’t been seen since the English revolution of the 1640s.
The Conservative Party now plans to stand a candidate against Speaker John Bercow, for his role in allowing MPs to take control of the Commons agenda after Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom accused the Speaker of ‘flagrant abuse’ of process.
The TUC Congress is meeting at a hugely important moment for the working class of the UK. Millions of its members voted to Leave the EU, the organisation of the bosses and bankers that provided the basis for privatising the railways and allowing EU companies to take over its parts. The choice being presented by the ruling establishment is whether to prostrate itself at the feet of Brussels or Washington.
The TUC recently produced a report detailing the catastrophic effects of austerity cuts and attacks on jobs imposed by the Tories on workers and their families since 2010. The report revealed that 3.7 million people have insecure jobs while 1.85 million self-employed earn less than the minimum wage. Workers are still facing the longest pay squeeze for 200 years resulting in one in five families relying on debt just to survive. Unsecured debt per household now stands at £15,880, an increase of £1,160 in the past year.
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘We’re at risk of going back to 19th-century working conditions.’ She continued: ‘We urgently need to reset the balance of power in our economy and give people more of a say about what happens to them at work.’
The TUC Congress has to take action over this disgraceful situation. The way to do this, is for this TUC Congress to call a general strike to get the UK out of the EU on October 31st, and to bring down the Johnson government, replacing it with a workers’ government.
This government will not prostrate itself before the US or the EU! It will move forward with a socialist programme to expropriate the bosses and the bankers to bring in a planned socialist economy. This is the only way to deal with what the TUC describes as ‘the working class being driven back to the horrible conditions of the 19th century’.
The TUC must be forced to dump its position of prostration in front of the EU, and create a different future for the working class by carrying forward a socialist revolution that will use the huge advances in technology to build a society whose watchword will be ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their need’.
Neither Brussels nor Trump can provide this future for the working class and the youth. On the contrary, capitalism is headed for a new worldwide slump. What is required is socialism in the UK, throughout Europe and in the USA itself!
