Posts Tagged ‘Europe’
Top Tips for Coming Food Shortages as Farage Warns “‘thugs and ‘bullies’ in the EU are taking advantage of the mutant Covid crisis to cut off UK and force Britain to sign a ‘bad’ Brexit deal.”
Clairvoyant Charles Moore had it sussed out in 2019.
Today his friend John Redwood agrees,
As an allotment holder I will spread this cheery message far and wide…..there still are plenty of Jerusalem artichokes on my plot, and the taste of carboard and flatulence bring back many a happy memory.
Should we be worried?
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) has already denounced the “confected” crisis over Brexit negotiations.
“COMMUNISTS SLAM BREXIT TALKS ‘CONFECTED THEATRE’
Britain’s Communists have sounded a sceptical note about the extension of post-Brexit trade talks between the British government and the EU. Addressing the party’s executive over the weekend, Alex Gordon said the continuing talks have ‘an air of confected theatre about them, although these are performances that not many people might pay to watch’.
He said it was ‘frankly incredible’ that the capitalist world’s largest trading bloc and fifth biggest economy could not agree to frictionless trading arrangements, especially when their ruling classes share such common interests. Mr Gordon rejected the whole basis of a ‘level playing field’ reported to be the main area of disagreement between British and EU negotiators.
The Morning Star, independent of the CPB and owned by the co-op, published a piece on this important statement.
The CP executive warned that continuation of the level playing field and restrictions on state aid would be used to “block progressive policies for public investment, public ownership and balanced economic development.”
Galloway’s Workers Party has a new mass fishing line.
Meanwhile..
Here is a top tip for anybody who has a CPB or Workers Party of Britain friend.
Morning Star Urges Labour to Campaign for Brexit…
“Socialist state aid in the service of a planned economy….was for a few years a real prospect in Britain.”
Part Four of our much-loved Series, Things that never happened.
The Morning Star, independent of the Brexit ultras of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the co-op, puts a marker down today.
Editorial: Labour must finally campaign for a Brexit that strengthens popular power
IT turns out that the self-imposed deadline for the conclusion of the Brexit talks dissolved as quickly as Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen’s after-dinner mints.
The wits of the Morning Star, who spurn bourgeois after-dinner mints, continue.
The issues at stake in the negotiations between the EU and our government are whether the substantial body of trade between the two entities will be conducted under Word Trade Organisation rules — which include constraints on the marketing and pricing strategies of both states and enterprises — or under a compromise formula which will include some of the constraints the EU itself places on market and pricing strategies.
Note John Rogan reminds us what the mass line of the CPB is,
They stated it clearly here — “ ‘Britain should leave the EU on WTO [World Trade Organisation] terms’, Communists propose.” (28 January 2019). A “WTOBrexit” is also known as “No Deal Brexit” as it is how we will trade with the EU if we leave without a deal on 31 October. The CPB have opposed all Article 50 extensions and continue to do so. Their vision of how the Irish border would operate after leaving the EU is on World Trade Organisation terms,”
This is the present state of play.
It is a negotiation and both actors have played endlessly with end times language. Nevertheless, in the end commerce will continue with countries in the EU and profits will unfailingly flow.
How true, the tendency for the rate of profit to decline, aside, the capitalists will be capitalists!
Innocent Remainers be warned!
Morning Star intern, Dave Spart, points out their errors,
the remorse of Remainers are a mirror image of the autarkic outrage of the barmy Brexit faction on the Tory fringes who thought Johnson really was one of them rather than an infinitely malleable instrument of ruling class consensus.
Should Labour oppose the Tory Brexit?
The Star gives the alternative view.
But the logic of Labour’s positioning — set out with clarity by Sir Keir Starmer — is that Labour will go along with whatever arrangement the EU and Britain arrive at.
This represents a missed opportunity to give a clear view of what kind of trading relationship would better serve the working people of Europe.
Which is to put the case for a socialist planned economy, the key issue at stake – for the Lexit mob and the Morning Star, though not for anybody else – when they lined up with Farage and Johnson to back Brexit.
Miliband would be better arguing the case for socialist state aid in the service of a planned economy that puts job security with high-skilled and well-paid work at the centre of a green industrial strategy. This was for a few years a real prospect in Britain.
That was and remains, the economic rationale for a break with the neoliberal logic of the EU that would begin a political challenge to privatisation and open the way to a common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
National neoliberalism, the actually existing Brexit can be wished away.
Labour in Parliament, no less than the working class and the labour movement, must find a way to channel the great desire for democratic decision-making and a break with privatisation and profit-seeking into practical proposals that transform the Brexit-to-be into an opening for popular power free of big business and the banks.
Brexit, it is well known in Star circles, was all about that. “great desire for democratic decision-making and a break with privatisation and profit-seeking” and nothing about xenophobia, racism, the project of an ‘anglosphere’ and the interests of that fraction of capital that funded the campaign to Leave and has now has its mouthpieces running the Cabinet.
Here’s a different take,
An Irish Marxist Blog
This means that the strategy of the British Labour Party of supporting Brexit through supporting or abstaining on the deal in Westminster will put it on the wrong side of history and make it joint owner of the disaster. The referendum and tortured path since have demonstrated again and again that Brexit is toxic. It will entail untold attacks on the working class, its rights and its standard of living. The Labour Party should not be looking to be a donkey that blame can be tagged on to.
The division of workers along national lines shows how reactionary Brexit has been by inevitably promoting division within the British working class itself. We can see this through the millions of workers opposed to Brexit and the rise of Scottish nationalism, nurtured by the idea that one variety of British nationalism is somehow qualitatively better than another. Already in England we see demands for some sort of autonomy for certain regions like the North of England, as if there was a geographical solution to a problem arising from the system that crosses all borders. It is as if nothing has been learned from the failure of proposing the fix of devolution for Scotland as the solution to austerity and decline.
On the Left, the so-called Trotskyists are saying it could all have been different when it couldn’t; while Stalinists wallow in their own nationalism, in their demand for national sovereignty and their own version of (nativist) identity politics.
Here’s one Beano to celebrate the Morning Star’s contribution to Brexit:
Enjoy!
Counterfire: “the Tories will not deliver the Brexit that people voted for.”
Not the Brexit We Voted For!
Part 3 of our popular series, Things That Never Happened.
After the Morning Star, and Socialist Worker, Counterfire enters the No Deal Brexit fray.
Blame Game:
But part of the reason there was any credence to Johnson’s claims was thanks to the pro-Remain campaign incessantly obsessing that Johnson was trying to sneak in a no-deal in 2019. Labour’s opposition was hamstrung by the Remain-at-all-costs brigade, and failed to back the initial calls for a general election, despite the fact it had been calling for since June 2017. So when Johnson did in fact pull a deal out of the hat, he wasn’t the one with egg on his face.
It would have been different but,
Neither a deal nor no deal under the Tories are going to be good, as both will be used to attempt a turbo charging of capitalism via deregulation. In Tory hands, the removal of the EU’s neoliberal shackles will give them space to erode further workers’ rights and environmental protections.
Corbyn was right, and it was inching towards Remain lost the election.
What is clear is that Corbyn’s promise to end the ‘rigged economy’ terrified the EU, so Labour moving ever closer to Remain had the effect of allaying the EU’s fears and making it increasingly unlikely that it was ever going to have to negotiate with a socialist, anyway, as astute observers in Brussels would have analysed the likely electoral effect of Labour’s position.
Faced with hundreds of thousands protesting against Brexit in 2019 Counterfire leader John Rees warned against Labour drifting in that direction.
He took the view that Second Referendum demonstrations were led by the wealthy to further the aims of the “overwhelming majority of big capital” It was a “middle class movement” with a “vanishingly small” union presence (where it was before it began to vanish was not described). It was a “variant” of a “mild (as yet)” mass fascist or populist right wing” groundswell. (Here).
Some suggest Counterfire were jealous, they could not organise their own People’s Brexit demonstrations.
There were some mass pro-Leave marches….
But that’s all in the past.
Today Johnson has to, or should, stand up to the EU,
But even though Johnson is not committed to public spending, redistribution and nationalisation, it’s hard to see how he can concede on this point without having to admit that the EU will maintain a level of control on how Britain is run.
So, in other words, getting out of the EU is a good thing, ending EU ‘control’, the bad thing is that the Tories are in charge of doing it.
This article ends with this,
Whatever the outcome, this government clearly has no legitimacy. And whatever happens, there will be a price to pay. We need to be prepared to fight against any attempt to put this cost on working people and to get this shower out of power.
So what did they vote for in the Referendum? The Lexit Brigade and Labour Leave cast their ballots with the Leave campaign, the far-right UKIP, Leave.EU (which became Grassroots Out) and Vote Leave (endorsed by Conservative Party Eurosceptics). The largest of these groups, Vote Leave has come to dominate the present Johnson government. One assumes that for Counterfire they do not count, they were not the “real” voters whose views the the revolutionary Marxist groupuscule has a special link with.
As far was one can tell Counterfire welcomes being free of the ‘shackles’ of the ‘neo-liberal EU’. The sovereign nation now unchained is, nevertheless, behaving badly. Perhaps this group thinks it will play a leading role in getting rid of the wrong “shower” in charge and get their shower into power. Reports indicate their presence in factional manoeuvres designed to create a split in Labour, through a variety of vehicles, which their merry band can join.
To left wing internationalists getting rid of chains of Brussels was always about the neo-liberal hard-right project of the European Reform Group and the dream of a new ‘anglosphere’, trading and cultural ties with the English-speaking capitalist nations.
The Tories Brexit agenda is not a policy but a project. It is anti-worker but not anti-state. It puts up new barriers to trade with Europe, but seeks deregulation and marketisation ‘at home’. It wants the state to spend big to support big business, especially in tech, is addicted to outsourcing and is disdainful of the public sector. This is pushing Britain towards a new, authoritarian, ‘crony capitalism’. As this becomes unpopular, the other aspects of the Tory agenda – the migrant bashing culture wars and ethnic nationalism – will become more and more important to sustain their political support.
The possibility that Brexit would be anything else never happened.
Tendance Coatesy 