BRITISH parliamentary democracy was exposed as nothing more than a chaotic and rapidly collapsing sham on Tuesday when, for the first time in history, a vote that the Tory government was in contempt of parliament was carried, and yet not only did it not resign, the Labour opposition did not even demand that it resign.
Instead, PM May staggers on with her plan to leave the EU on terms agreeable to the CBI, that the UK will be a ‘backstop vassal’ state subservient to the EU, while nominally independent of it, to try and placate the over 17million UK ‘Leavers’.
Meanwhile, MPs from all parties, (which all advocated to Remain in the 2016 referendum) are desperately seeking a way of remaining 100% members of the EU – without provoking a revolutionary response from the working class.
Two lines of attack are being discussed. The first is to overturn the results of the Brexit referendum by Parliament taking upon itself the authority to unilaterally revoke Article 50 (the declaration of intent to leave) and simply remain.
This is the position of the SNP who took a case to the European Court of Justice arguing that MPs had the right to revoke Article 50 and halt Brexit. The EC initially rejected this, but this week the ECJ’s top lawyer, Manuel Campos Sanchez-Bordona, gave his opinion that Article 50 allows ‘the unilateral revocation of the notification of intention to withdraw’.
His opinion, which is often followed by the ECJ, has been seized on by those MPs desperate to remain even if it means openly declaring ‘to hell with the millions of workers who voted to leave’, and inciting a revolutionary storm. This attitude worries others in Parliament who rightly fear that such a dictatorial overruling of the ‘sovereign will’ of the people will end in the people deciding that it is Parliament that should be torn up, not their democratic vote. This group, which includes the Labour Party, is coalescing around the campaign for a second referendum, but this itself holds huge dangers for the ruling class.
In 2016, the Tory Old Etonian spivs, Cameron and Osborne, dreamt up the wheeze of calling a binding referendum on Brexit as a way to discipline a handful of unruly backbench Tory MPs forever moaning about the EU. What they didn’t count on was the working class seizing this opportunity to vent their hatred of the Tory party and the bankers responsible for the crisis and for the vicious austerity programme imposed on workers to pay for bailing them out.
Far from being stupid sheep blindly obeying orders, the working class, defied all of the major political parties, and took the opportunity to hit out at the bosses and bankers by voting to leave their EU, ending the political careers of Cameron and Osborne and creating a massive crisis over which class really ruled the UK!
They also saw the horrific poverty forced on Greek workers to pay back debts to German banks and experienced first-hand EU laws that demanded ‘opening up’ services like Royal Mail and the NHS to private competition. This decided them that they wanted no part in a capitalist conspiracy against the working class of Europe. Over the past two years of permanent austerity that have left millions of working poor unable to feed their families and relying on food banks to survive this hatred has hardened. A second referendum would have a bigger majority to leave!
The working class in Britain is also watching, sizing up and learning from the seismic events over the channel in France where French workers, the middle class and youth took to the streets across the country in a mass uprising against President Macron and his drive to impoverish them in the name of saving French capitalism and strengthening the EU.
‘Emperor’ Macron, gripped by delusions of grandeur, boasted he would crush these rebels with the fearsome armed might of the CRS riot police backed by the army. French workers proved to be much stronger than Macron and the French state forces, and forced him into a humiliating climbdown, and are on the point of bringing him and the French government down.
Workers in Britain must learn from their comrades in France that the only way forward is by taking mass revolutionary action here, to shut down the parliament that wants to ‘steal Brexit’, and replace it with a central workers council that will break from the EU at once and form an alliance with the workers of the EU to smash it and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
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