AT ELEVEN pm last night, Britain officially left the European Union. After a long, hard and determined struggle Brexit has actually happened and the UK is now officially no longer part of the European Union.
There is no doubt that it was the working class that did it. When it became obvious that Corbyn could not take on and defeat Labour’s ‘Remain’ right wing, and had agreed to a Second Referendum, the working class refused to vote for some Labour candidates and catapulted Johnson into office with an 80-seat majority.
The vote was not for Johnson, or the Tory Party, but to push Brexit through, something that the Labour Party refused to do.
The working class won Brexit right at the point where Labour right-wingers and their Lib Dem, Scot Nats, and Tory friends thought that the Second Referendum was in the bag, after the House of Lords had overruled the Commons and the Law Courts found that it was illegal for the PM to prorogue parliament and that he faced jail if he did not agree to a postponement of the leaving date.
They were still congratulating themselves on their victory when the working class hit back and showed that the Remain camp had feet of clay, and constituted not the vanguard of history but its rear end.
Now that the working class has proved its strength, and indeed, that it is the strongest class in capitalist society, Johnson and his ruling class backers know that they have to tread carefully since they will get the same treatment if they resume their ‘let them eat cake’ posture.
Nevertheless, the debt crisis of capitalism is emerging at a fantastic rate, bringing with it the threat of another economic catastrophe of the type that produced 10 years of austerity.
This leaves Johnson’s Tories with no alternative but to attempt to smash the great gains of the working class, the NHS, council housing, the right to strike, the benefit system and the education system.
Johnson intends to line up British capitalism with the US in trade deals which will have at their centre ‘no strike deals’, and will put the NHS under the heel of the US medical giants.
To make the UK into a Singapore-on-Thames requires the crushing of the trade unions so that capital can be confident that what it puts into the UK will not be lost as the working class rises up.
The working class, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with the European bosses and bankers, and nothing to do with the US bosses and bankers either!
The working class in this country has entered into a period of revolutionary struggle with strikes on the rail system, strikes in the councils, teachers’ strikes and this is just the beginning.
A further strike wave is coming – a London-wide bus strike, 74 universities coming out and a national postal workers’ strike on the cards. Numerous groups of workers at hospital after hospital are now winning back their NHS contracts and kicking the private companies out.
The Tories have been forced to re-nationalise Northern Rail, after the franchise collapsed, and during the week they were forced to bend the knee to China in order to get 5G rolled out, putting them at odds with their US masters.
The working class has felt its strength, imposed its will, dealt a decisive blow against all those who wanted to remain in the EU, and is now charging forward.
These same workers, who gritted their teeth to make sure that Brexit triumphed, will be in the front line of the struggle to bring down the Johnson government.
The working class, having firmly expressed its will through the election, and felt its own strength, will now see Brexit through in its own way.
At the first sign of a crash, it will move forward to expropriate the bosses and bankers and to bring in socialism. It will make a revolutionary alliance with the French workers to carry out the same struggle all over the EU and replace it with the United Socialist States of Europe.
What it will require in this situation is not just a revolutionary instinct but a revolutionary leadership to take the struggle forward to victory.
There has never been a more important or better time to build the WRP and the Young Socialists into the revolutionary leadership of the working class – to take the power. Join the WRP and the YS – there is not a moment to lose!
