TORY prime minister Theresa May is this week teetering on the brink of political annihilation as it emerged that her Brexit secretary, David Davis, is at the point of resigning and causing a massive split in her party that would doom both May and the government.
The immediate cause of Davis’ anger at May is the so-called backstop agreement May is pushing her cabinet to agree to. On the surface, this agreement is supposed to address the question of the Irish border, a completely artificial dispute that has been pushed by the right-wing ‘remainers’ in both Labour and Tory parties and gleefully seized upon by the EU as a means of overturning the referendum result.
Basically, this backstop is a plan to keep not just the north of Ireland but the whole of the UK in a customs union with the EU after the leave date. The full details of May’s backstop proposal have not been released but it is clear from those who have seen it that it is a completely open-ended commitment with no legal cessation date.
In other words, Britain would be tied forever into this agreement. One Tory MP, former Brexit minister David Jones, said: ‘It would be the Hotel California scenario: we’d have checked out but we couldn’t have left.’
Under this agreement, Britain would remain in the customs union and the single market but without any vote or say in the decisions made by the EU in Brussels and still be bound by the decisions of the European Council and the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
This latest manoeuvre by May, acting on behalf of the British bankers and bosses who are desperate to remain in the EU at any cost, has provoked a rebellion from Davis’ fellow anti-EU Tory MPs and has prompted a telling comment in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, house organ of the Tory party, from their chief economic correspondent.
Headlined: ‘Weep for Brexit: the British dash for independence has failed’ this article contains a serious warning to the ruling class saying: ‘There will be no return to full sovereign and democratic self-rule in March 2019, or after the transition, or as far as the political eye can see. Britain will be bound and hemmed until the latent contradictions of such a colonial settlement cause a volcanic national uprising, as they surely must.’
This Wednesday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn twice refused during Prime Minister’s Question Time to unequivocally rule out calling a second referendum on leaving the EU. This refusal is the culmination of a series of capitulations by Corbyn to Labour’s right-wing which involve abandoning the 2017 general election Labour Party manifesto pledge to leave the EU and the single market.
Corbyn has reneged on these pledges and now accepts staying in the single market and remaining as a vassal to the EU in the customs union. This is a desperate effort to appease the right-wing and convince them not to split the party and carry out their plot to join with Tory remainers in trying to impose a reactionary coalition government dedicated to keeping Britain in the lethal embrace of the bosses and bankers in the EU.
The Telegraph article warns that British capitalism is heading for a volcanic national uprising. Indeed; but the burning issue of the hour is for the working class to take action now to put an end to the coup plotters by bringing down this Tory government.
Workers must force the TUC leaders to either call a general strike to kick out this collapsing Tory government or face being removed themselves and replaced with a leadership that will. The only way forward for workers is to bring down the Tories and advance to a workers government that will immediately break with the EU and will settle the Irish border issue by abolishing the border – let the Irish people themselves determine their future.
A workers’ government will expropriate the bosses and bankers under a planned socialist economy. There can be no ‘dash for independence’ for workers under capitalism – socialist revolution is the only way for the working class to break with the capitalist EU for good.
