Posts Tagged ‘People’s Brexit’
Brexit to Open Floodgates to US Agribusiness and Poor Quality Food..
Pro-Brexit Left Still Claim Leave Shattered “Neoliberal shibboleths”.
The Brexit ultras of the Morning Star were content to report, without comment, this story yesterday,
Farmers stage Westminster tractor protest over threat to British food standards
Labour called on ministers to put a “guarantee in law” that food standards will not be lowered as a result of trade deals being sought with countries such as the US and Australia.
Shadow environment secretary Luke Pollard said that it would be “absurd” if the Tory government voted against its own manifesto pledge to protect food standards.
He warned: “There’s still a serious threat that they will drop that promise to get the trade deals they’re so desperate to secure with Donald Trump and others.”
Unite national officer for agriculture Bev Clarkson backed the call for standards to be enshrined in law to protect them from being watered down.
She told the Star: “British farming has long been held up as the benchmark for global food and animal welfare standards.
“However, the suspicion remains that the government would be prepared to sacrifice these standards, built up over many decades, to achieve post-Brexit trade deals.”
Well that went well:
In a drive to open UK markets up for a US Trade Deal, and the creation of an ‘anglosphère’, this happened last night.
This is not just bad news for farmers.
Last night this was on Channel Four.
Dirty Secrets of American Food
For Dispatches, Morland Sanders investigates the American food that could soon be coming to Britain, to a supermarket near you, as part of a post-Brexit trade deal.
The Channel Four programme on last night was horrific in so many ways, from treatment of animals in the vast industrial farms in the US, and the use of chemicals in agriculture, to the prevalence of diseases, but what struck me was the point that if low standard bacon from the US is fifty pence cheaper than the UK product, many would buy it.
In Suffolk there is a lot of outdoor pig rearing, in good welfare conditions. This will go to the wall.
The Daily Mail headlined,
- E. coli allegedly found in 90% of turkey products destined for US supermarkets
- US pork up to six times more likely to have salmonella than UK pork, study claims
- 13% of pork samples tested for salmonella in US meat were positive for bacteria
- E. coli was also found by experts in 80% of chicken, 70% of beef and 60% of pork
- Preliminary results of US study be aired in Channel 4 Dispatches at 8pm tonight
You would have thought that with these stories, only one of heap, that the brains behind the pro Brexit left, whose campaigning to leave the European Union helped bring the project of an ‘anglosphere’ onto the political agenda, some serious reflection.
There is no space for their claim that Brexit would be the time to be “seizing the historic opportunity Brexit offers for restoring popular sovereignty, repairing democracy, and renewing our economy.” (Full Brexit).
One does not expect them to wear hair-shirts and retire from public life to hermits’ grottos, though that is not such a bad idea.
But they are still at it.
The alliance of leftists, Communists, Blue Labour and the Brexit Party is holding this event.
Neoliberal shibboleths have also been shattered, with the government intervening to save jobs and businesses, while even the EU has set aside its treasured state aid rules (despite continuing to try to force the UK to abide by them).
At the same time, governments around the world seem short on imaginative ideas to reboot the economy. The priority seems to be trying to restore a pre-crisis system that was already failing millions long before COVID-19.
So how do we really “build back better”? How do we avoid a slow, jobless recovery – a degraded “new normal”? What policies and programmes are required to allow working people to take control of their lives, and enjoy a more prosperous and fulfilling future?
Join two world-leading experts to debate these crucial issues:
- Professor Costas Lapavitsas, renowned economist, former member of the Greek parliament, and author of The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2019), and
- Professor Bill Mitchell, one of the leading lights of Modern Monetary Theory, and co-author, with Thomas Fazi, of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto, 2017).
Lapavistas, serial electoral failure in Greece (Monster Raving Looney Party scores), has found new friends in the sovereigntist Catalan nationalist left – in case you hadn’t guessed already sobiranies refers to sovereignty.
Away from the exalted world of Covid-19 Basic income – and, why not? a world of Fourier’s Perfect Harmony – this is how Brexit in the UK is shaping up. How have the “Neoliberal shibboleths” been shattered?
The facts, as shown with these moves to open the floodgates to dirty US food, indicate the exact opposite.
“Taking Back Control”: Brexit, Putin, to Free Trade in Public Services, and Low-Quality Food.
Getting Brexit Done means “Taking Back Control”……
During the EU Referendum those who backed Leave talked of “taking back control”.
There were those on the left who denounced the EU as a “capitalist club”. They wanted a “People’s Brexit”, a ‘Left’ Brexit.
The former Labour MP Ronnie Campbell spoke for his camp when he said he wanted to “take back control of UK laws, taxes, budgets, and public spending”.
For the alliance of Blue Labour, the Communist Party of Britain, Labour Lexiteers, members, and supporters, of the Brexit Party, The Full Brexit, the phrase gave voice to a “popular revolt against the status quo”.
“The Leave campaign’s slogan, “take back control”, resonated with millions of people whose interests are no longer represented in British politics.” Brexit, and the restoration of National Sovereignty, gave the UK the “opportunity to reshape Britain for the better”.
After the result the Lexit (pro-Brexit left) campaign issued this statement.
It began,
The Leave vote is above all else a rejection of the entire political establishment by millions of working class people who have been left to suffer austerity for decades with few defenders among the mainstream parties.
The Leave-Fight-Transform (Pro-Brexit) campaign from the same stable asserted in August 2019 that,
the left must ensure the 2016 referendum result is implemented, so that the UK breaks with the treaties, institutions and laws of the EU as well as the structural racism of Fortress Europe.
Locating the origin of racism in the EU was a bold move, one yet for Brexit Britain to challenge.
But it looks as if the break with what is left of the its treaties, institutions and laws is underway.
In a statement on Brexit Day (3rd of February 2020), the pro-Brexiteers issued a statement on the ” likely terrain for the battle”.
They predicted a “crisis in Britain’s ruling class”, a phrase battle-hardened leftists find handy for any time in history.
A trade deal with the US looked fraught “with tensions”. But some light for the left was there, “Johnson wants to be free to engage in state investment. That requires a ‘Canada-plus[i]’ deal with the EU.” A step forward. “This new vision, brought on by economic necessity and the wishes of a section of British capital, as well as by the political reality of how Johnson won his majority, is rather different from the delusional, harking back to empire vision beloved of Tory Brexiteers in the European Research Group.”
Things were not so bad (compare above “crisis”). Indeed, “…much of British capital is confident that it can cope with whatever happens in post-Brexit Britain, providing the City of London’s banking and financial interests are kept safe.The EU, they predicted, would negotiate a way out. The Tories would try to respond to the “concerns” of those who voted for them.
The Brexit left claimed that conditions for a real struggle looked bright: “What couldn’t be done has been done: a major country has broken with the largest trading bloc in history.” After Labour’s historic election defeat, the post-Brexit terrain offered an “opportunity for the left.”
Today there are two major news stories about “taking back control” Brexit-style.
The first is on the post-EU trade negotiations,
MPs have defeated an attempt by Tory backbenchers to ensure parliament has a vote on any post-Brexit trade deal.
An amendment to the Trade Bill currently going through the Commons would have given MPs and peers a say on any new agreement signed by the government.
Jonathan Djanogly, the Conservative MP who led the rebellion, had argued that the US congress approves similar deals.
He accused the government of taking a position of “less scrutiny than we did as a member of the EU”, because EU trade deals are subject to a vote in the European Parliament.
Free of EU ‘neo-liberalism’ the government can agree with Donald Trump to open up UK public services to US businesses, and our shops to low quality American food.
Brexit is said to offer many more such opportunities.
It seems that Jeremy Corbyn had the clairvoyance – along with hundreds of anti-Brexit commentators – to foresee this.
Yet, as this tweet indicates…
Then we have this:
This story is still developing.
We note that Arron Banks, who gave money to ‘Trade Unionists Against the EU”, a campaign led by Paul Embery, a supporter of the Full Brexit, and promoted during the Referedum by the Socialist Party, gets a mention,
Government rejects ISC’s call for inquiry into Russian interference in Brexit referendum.
Here is the statement from the Committee itself.
Press release from the Intelligence and Security Committee, July 21:
There have been widespread allegations that Russia sought to influence voters in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU: studies have pointed to the preponderance of pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories on RT and Sputnik, and the use of ‘bots’ and ‘trolls’, as evidence.
The actual impact of such attempts on the result itself would be difficult – if not impossible – to prove. However what is clear is that the government was slow to recognise the existence of the threat – only understanding it after the ‘hack and leak’ operation against the Democratic National Committee, when it should have been seen as early as 2014.
As a result the government did not take action to protect the UK’s process in 2016. The committee has not been provided with any post-referendum assessment – in stark contrast to the US response to reports of interference in the 2016 presidential election. In our view there must be an analogous assessment of Russian interference in the EU referendum.
Observers predict that the Morning Star is about to carry a story attacking ‘anti-Russian hysteria” and “Putin Bashing”.
(1) Report:
Case study: the EU referendum
Lexit Left Victory as Johnson Declares ” People’s Brexit” is underway.
Lexit Left ‘Victory’.
Jim writes (Labour leavers gloat and bleat over Labour’s Brexit stance).
Various uncritical Corbyn-fans, Stalinists and little-Englanders are wasting no time in claiming “we lost because we were too pro-Remain.”
This weekend’s Morning Star, in typical tawdry and dishonest fashion, uses its front page to gloat that “REMAIN IS OVER”, quoting two union leaders (Dave Ward of the CWU and Kevin Courtney of the NEU), neither of whom has any noticeable record of actually campaigning for Brexit/”Lexit” within the labour movement.
The same paper’s editorial bleats that “Labour’s leader was the first to call for Article 50 to be triggered after the referendum result in 2016, and long resisted the efforts to trap his party in a Remain box. Had Labour paid more attention to its leader, it might not have suffered such devastating losses this week.”
The Morning star did more.
It cited the Aaron Banks funded Red-Brown (involved in the ‘Full Brexit’ which brings together Labour Brexiteers, Blue Labour, supporters of the Brexit Party, and Conservatives, ) Trade Unionists Against the EU” .
A spokesperson, perhaps anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigner Paul Embery, said.
A spokesperson from campaign group Trade Unionists Against the EU suggested that the Tories could face challenges from the public after pushing through Brexit.
“A Johnson government is a Brexit government, defined by Brexit, elected to deliver Brexit; it has a single purpose: to get Brexit done; it has no other mandate,” it said.
“It legitimacy ceases once we leave the EU.”
‘Remain has been defeated. The movement needs to move on,’ unions say
In other words, good on you my son Johnson, do your job and then we’ll meet in friendly combat.
The enemies of the internationalist left are still at it.
The People’s Brexit mouthpiece Counterfire carries this post:
Speaking for the ‘Pithead’ he declares,
The truth is, no matter how unpalatable, that Johnson’s “Get Brexit done” is what persuaded many workers in the Labour heartlands to vote for parties other than Labour.
….
This tells us that the deciding factor was not the appeal of Boris Johnson, but the desire to reinforce Doncaster’s vote to leave the EU. There is little doubt that if Labour had stuck to upholding the result of the referendum and simultaneously fighting for social and economic justice, the results would be very different.
Hammering home this message Lindsey German wrote on the same site, wearing one of her many hats (Stop the War Coalition onwards), she said,
The People’s Vote Campaign played a big part in forcing this shift and was an amalgam of Tories, the Lib Dems and Blairites like Alastair Campbell. These people claimed, supported by many on the left like the Another Europe is Possible campaign, that they only had to worry about Remain voters and that most Leave voters wouldn’t vote Labour anyway. Well, they haven’t now. And Brexit will follow in the coming weeks.
At yesterday’s successful and, in the circumstances well-attended (over a hundred) Another Europe is Possible Conference a number of speakers gave a different message.
The internationalist left heard from a speaker from County Durham who said that we should make no concessions to the nationalist right.
One member spoke of the way in which the Brexit left had thwarted Labour’s need to underline the reactionary charge of Brexit, in any form. He said that the Lexit Left would try to confuse the responsibility for the defeat by blaming the pro-Remain left (see above). Pro-Brexit factions were one of the main causes of Labour’s disastrous result, by encouraging the belief that there was a progressive ‘People’s Brexit’ on the cards. It was little wonder that voters who heard that message would prefer the only actually existing Brexit: Johnson’s.
These are some of the concluding speeches.
Now that the Tories offer a People’s Brexit what’s to stop the Lexiteers joining in?
The fight against the national populists now trying to influence Labour is only just beginning.
Now there is also this:
Tendance Coatesy 