PM MAY confirmed yesterday that she will be running off today to meet with EU president Donald Tusk to beg for an extension to Article 50 past the deadline for the UK to leave the EU on March 29.
Her plea is that an extension until June 30 would provide time for her to conjure up a new deal acceptable to the EU and which would stand a chance of being agreed by the majority of MPs.
Given that her previous ‘deal’ with the EU has suffered two massive defeats in Parliament, no one in their right mind believes that she can come up with anything acceptable to the EU or to a Parliament of 650 MPs, the overwhelming majority of them determined to kill Brexit stone dead.
Indeed, there is absolutely no guarantee that the EU will agree to any extension despite all her crawling. Nor is there any guarantee that any extension won’t become virtually permanent, extending on for years and keeping Britain tied indefinitely to the bosses and bankers of the EU.
But even this surrender by May wasn’t abject enough for the majority of MPs who voted last week to rule out entirely a no-deal Brexit.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn yesterday repeated the demand for a second referendum to overturn Brexit coupled with his demand for a deal that would keep the UK within the single market and customs union without any voting rights in the EU, in other words keeping British capitalism as a complete vassal state.
This complete breakdown of the parliamentary system with both Labour and Tory parties being torn apart over how best to kill Brexit has exposed the complete sham of bourgeois parliamentary democracy and brutally exposed the fiction that it represents the will of the people.
The will of the people was forcibly expressed in the binding referendum of June 3 2016 when 17.4 million workers and middle class people voted to leave the EU in spite of a campaign to remain led by the CBI, the TUC and Labour and Tory parties.
Labour’s success in the 2017 general election was achieved on the back of an election commitment to honour the Brexit vote, a commitment that Corbyn has now treacherously reneged upon. Indeed, even the Tories didn’t dare oppose Brexit in their manifesto.
Parliament then went on to invoke Article 50 which began the process of leaving on 29 March 2017 by a majority of 384 and the Brexit date was written into law.
But the people’s will or laws that they themselves passed mean nothing to a Parliament that is controlled by MPs who serve only one master – the capitalist class.
British capitalism today is so weak that for the bosses and bankers the only future is to remain tied completely to their fellow capitalists in Europe. The fact that the EU countries themselves are being torn apart by economic crisis and facing a revolutionary uprising across Europe by workers is a sign of just how desperate the crisis is for the British ruling class and its loyal servants in Parliament who have been ordered by their masters to stop Brexit at all costs.
The issue couldn’t be clearer for the working class.
If Parliament refuses to carry out the will of the people or even laws that it itself passed then it is Parliament that must go, not Brexit.
Workers must immediately organise a campaign of mass protest and industrial action to force Parliament to bend to the will of the people or be disbanded and replaced by workers’ councils that will carry out Brexit and leave on the 29th without any ‘deal’.
This will form the basis of a workers government that will deal with the capitalist class by expropriating them, placing the banks and industry under the management and for the benefit of the working class under a planned socialist economy.
This revolutionary action will win the support of workers across Europe in struggle against austerity brought on by capitalist crisis and hasten the victory of the European socialist revolution and the creation of a Socialist United States of Europe.
Only the WRP and the Young Socialists are fighting to build the revolutionary leadership necessary to take this fight forward to victory. Join us today!