In “Conceptualising Brexit”, Tom Wood argues in a rather abstract way that withdrawal from the EU makes “Socialism” more possible in the UK; this begs a number of questions.

Why did a section of the ruling class want Brexit and what are they trying to do with it?
The ruling class in the UK was split over Brexit. Significant sections, especially in manufacturing, wanted to stay in. The largest donation to either campaign was to Remain from Sainsburys. The next four largest donations all went to Leave and all were from Hedge Funds.

The faction that wanted out was motivated by a desire to align the UK with the labour and environmental standards of the USA; as these are significantly lower than those operating in the EU. No paid maternity leave as a right. Lower holiday entitlement. “Cutting red tape” and letting business “off the leash” of tedious bureaucratic health and safety standards and overheads. Time for Atlas to shrug.

It was and is a class war initiative designed to shift resources from wages and social conditions to profits. An attempt to break out of the UK’s long steady decline and stagnation with a spectacular act of will that would mobilise and cement a section of the working class into a revived national project on deeply reactionary grounds. The notion that “with one mighty bound” the UK would shrug off its European shackles and boom off into the distance has not come to pass. In fact, the already deadly slow pace of business investment has stalled even further, as this graph from the FT shows: making temporary upticks feverish and unsustainable. If I were a patient with a graph like that at the foot of my bed, I’d be worried.

As the projected economic benefits turn sour, with Richard Hughes of the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting that the long term economic impact of Brexit will reduce UK GDP by 4% – double the long term impact of the Covid pandemic, the ongoing dynamic of this is to try to keep this political bloc together by playing up the hostility to immigrants and refugees that was the dark soul of so much of the Leave vote.

A trade deal with the US, harmonising standards on their model, is still what they are after – perhaps to be consummated after the Second Coming of Trump (or one of his acolytes) after 2024.An acceleration of the creeping privatisation of the NHS, with US companies starting to take over consortia of GPs practices, is a precursor. Fire and rehire the bracing new model of labour relations, or so they hope. Such a deal will be entirely on the USA’s terms. Negotiations with the Americans by weaker economies tend to be short. The Americans write the deal. The other country signs it.

While Tom is right to argue that this was all overlaid with the delusions of restored British buccaneering grandeur and imperial nostalgia, and it’s apparent that some of the Tory right really believe in this if Daily Telegraph opinion pieces are to be taken at face value; it was also instrumentally useful prolefeed, cutting with the grain of a deeply backward looking national culture, nostalgic for past imperial glories and fearful of the future that runs deep in older, whiter workers in “left behind” areas; who look at shuttered factories and closed mines and see national decline not the brutal indifference that characterises the care the ruling class takes of them, their communities and their lives. Sink or swim. On your bike.

Where he is completely wrong is in any notion that there was any symmetry in the pro-Brexit faction in their desire to trade with the USA and China. “Glorious Global Britain” could no more be a free agent in trade than it is in military and foreign policy. Trade with China is now freezing into a Cold War framework; with pressure from the USA channelled by the right, and mainstream Labour, for increasing scrutiny and barriers to Chinese trade and investment – and even academic cooperation – on “national security” grounds. This is already doing damage to the UK economy in areas like 5G and nuclear energy. Keeping Huawei out of 5G infrastructure means using slower and more expensive Western substitutes. One indication of the consequences of this is that China’s very successful zero Covid strategy relies partly on a contact tracing App that actually works. None of those tried here works anything like as well. There are many reasons not to go nuclear, but the decision to exclude Chinese investment leaves an investment and technology gap that will be hard to fill; imposing additional costs on what is already a prohibitively expensive energy technology and a reliance on US or French companies notorious for cost and construction over runs and technical breakdowns.

What are the consequences for the UK?
Tom argues rightly that both the EU and the UK are now struggling for advantage; but the asymmetry between the economies means that this is a game of chicken between a British bubble car and a European ten-ton truck.

The impact on the “home nations” is centrifugal.

The stresses in the North of Ireland are a case in point. The North remaining in the EU single market means that it has been doing rather well economically. The problem with the Protocol is for British-based companies that now face additional paperwork, which has hindered their ability to sell into the 6 Counties. Attempts by the UK government to foment Loyalist mobilisations against this –shown by Lord Frost making it a priority to see the suits who front up Loyalist paramilitaries as his first port of call earlier this year – have foundered on three problems.

1. The majority of both communities in the North voted to Remain.
2. Virtually no one in the North wants a land border between the 6 Counties and the Republic.
3. The United States has made it plain that it will not support any course of action that threatens the Good Friday Agreement and is therefore backing the EU stance.

The political fall out in the North is that the DUP are in crisis, losing support to the centrist Alliance Party on one side and, more significantly, to harder line Loyalists on their right. In the forthcoming Stormont elections, other things being equal, Sinn Fein are set to be the largest Party, and would therefore take the First Minister position. Although the next General Election in the Republic does not have to be held until 2025, Sinn Fein are also currently well ahead in the polls there. There is a long way to go between here and there, and the UK and Irish ruling classes will move heaven and Earth to stop it, but either or both of these developments could put a border poll on the agenda; which could take the 6 Counties out of the UK altogether; and the St Patrick’s cross out of the Union Jack.

Tom’s argument that “Scottish nationalism has been undermined” by Brexit and presumption that there will be a Labour revival North of the Border – with Labour offering Scotland a “socialist future” is taking wishful thinking a little far. A General Election tomorrow would see the SNP increasing its support. Support for full independence hovers around 50%, mostly just below. So, not enough to successfully force the issue, but more than enough to stop it going away. Like Catalonia. The majority Remain vote in Scotland gives the prospect of independence in the EU a big market over the water to aspire to belong to as a pull to add to the push given by the sense that successive Conservative governments treat the UK as little more than Greater Little England. Even in Wales, which marginally voted Leave, support for independence is growing.

The impact of the pandemic has raised the profile and standing of the Scottish and Welsh First Minsters, who have each taken a marginally better line on keeping it under control, but have both struck a tone that has been more humane and competent than Johnson; whose standing has correspondingly shrunk. The dynamic of politics in each component of the UK is diverging and becoming more unique. The sudden ubiquity of Union Jacks – behind ministerial podiums and on a flagpole near you – has a slightly desperate air about it; as if they fear that if they weren’t there, we’d forget where we are. The tectonic plates are moving, slowly, under their feet.

What are the consequences for Tory Party and ruling class politics?
Boris Johnson’s New Model Tory Party, with Remainers purged and the Brexit Party vote incorporated, is more libertarian for the rights of business, and more draconian and repressive on civil liberties. Every time you see someone from the Covid Recovery Group banging on about the precious liberty to not wear a mask or turn down a vaccine, check out their view on the Police Bill or the Nationality and Borders Bill. Their concern for the right to go unvaccinated or maskless is the bravado of those who believe that it is good for the soul to take risks with your life so you can go to work. The liberties they champion are all those that smooth the path to unrestrained consumption. Block a highway to try to save the planet, on the other hand, and your feet won’t touch the ground. 51 months inside and an unlimited fine for you. Standards and order, after all, must be upheld. Ever unoriginal and derivative, they are adopting themes, slogans and attack lines off the peg from the US Republican Party which sets them up for an ever more delirious politics.

Crucially, contrary to delusions held in sections of the trade union movement, they have not and do not intend to abandon austerity. Spending vast amounts to keep private companies afloat in the face of the pandemic is what you might call “socialism for bankers”. And every time Rishi Sunak has the delusion that the pandemic is all over, he starts talking about the need to get the public finances in order, reduce the debt AND reduce taxes on the rich. Same old tune.

Despite labour shortages in some sectors giving some workers a bit of leverage, overall wage settlements are running at 2%, while CPI inflation is 5.1% and RPI (which includes housing costs) 7.1%, and there is a public sector wage freeze. This is not a nativist high wage economy in the making. Quite the reverse.

The sum total of “levelling up” is a bit of pork barrel spending on small scale cosmetic developments in Tory-held seats – the not so subtle message being “vote for us and get a bypass, don’t vote for us and we leave you to rot”. The adjustments to the social care bill – which primarily hit poorer home owners in the North and benefited wealthier people in the South – and the pruning back of rail investment in the North – showed that they just can’t help themselves.

The extent to which the Tories are coming unstuck at the moment is that after almost two years of one of the worst per capita death rates in the world and no end in sight, the penny is dropping that we are not all in it together, they make the rules to suit themselves and cock a snook at the rest of us and, when discovered, try to brass it out with laughably ludicrous denials and evasions; and this shows what they are like about everything else.

What are the consequences for Labour?
The self-comforting myth that the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn was solely a side effect of Labour’s 2019 Brexit policy has some traction on the Labour Left, because it allows us the delusion to think that the forces we are up against are nothing like as powerful as they actually are; so no deep rethink of strategy is needed.

The defeat was actually the result of every single pro-ruling class political faction making it their priority to stop him, over and above their position on Brexit, or anything else. So, not just the Brexit and Tory Parties, but the Lib Dems and SNP too. Had the Lib Dems and SNP actually been concerned primarily with stopping a hard Brexit in 2019, they’d have supported a temporary Corbyn-led government to get that done. They chose instead to precipitate a General Election that they knew Johnson was likely to win.

This was also a concern of the US State Department, who were quite overt that they were making Corbyn “run the gauntlet” (as Mike Pompeo put it).

The function of Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party is primarily to reassure the ruling class that Labour is a safe alternative government – the B team for when the Tories fall apart – and poses no threat to their interests. Much energy has been put into being “statesmanlike” and giving the government support “in the national interest” during the pandemic. Union Jacks have been as common behind Shadow as government Ministers. A relentless purge of the left of the Party, at every level, from the removal of the whip for Corbyn, to panels for local council candidates that keep left candidates off, to the growing number of auto exclusions for ordinary party members send the message that Labour is safe for business, the rules-based international order and the Atlantic Alliance.

The new Unionism even extends to Ireland, where Keir Starmer has said he would make the case for the Union in the event of a Border Poll; and Louise Haigh was reshuffled out of her role as Shadow Northern Ireland spokeswoman within a week of arguing that Labour should stay neutral.

Is Brexit a step on the road to socialism?

Tom’s central arguments are
1. that the constitutional arrangements of the EU are an obstacle to socialism and that therefore “while Brexit Britain may be at risk of being led down a blind alley by the uber-globalists, it is also, in equal measure, able to pursue Socialism. In a post-Brexit Britain, socialists would not be restricted as they had been since Britain joined the EU.” (my emphasis)
2. “Brexit shatters the myth that capitalism can be tamed and that long term liberal, capitalist cooperation is possible.”

Constitutional arrangements are, in themselves, not an insuperable obstacle to the expression of forces in class struggle. When the contradictions get too great, they crack. Making any kind of advance in current circumstances, or even taking effective defensive measures, requires the working class in every country to be both internationalist and seek international alliances and organisation, irrespective of whether we are part of the same trade bloc or not. A struggle for socialism also means seriously engaging with countries that see themselves as socialist and connecting with the recomposition of the left globally that is currently taking place; rather than presuming that we can build social democracy in one country, while paying no attention to the actual domestic relation of class forces – not least in the Labour Party.

The balance of class forces in the Leave campaign and Brexit strategy is a bit of a clue to the direction Brexit has taken, and was always going to take. It was, and is, completely dominated by the most reactionary fraction of UK capital, which controls the Tory Party and therefore the government, with a wing led by Farage directly plugged into the most right-wing fraction of US capital – always primed and ready for an astroturf revival to keep the Tories on the straight and narrow – and its street fighting component around Tommy Robinson standing back and standing by on the one side, and the small collection of “anti-EU voices on the left” on the other – some in Labour, some in the CP or from the SWP tradition. The latter would hardly have been welcome on pro-Leave demos, even had they wanted to go. Physical violence would have been likely. Who has the power here? Who is hegemonic? Conclusions should be drawn. There is a world of difference between struggling against restrictions on state ownership and investment from a position of strength and mobilisation – possibly in government – and looking for international allies in that fight; and taking part as a subordinate element in a movement aiming to remove restrictions on attacks on the working class driven by revanchist nationalism.

All politico-trade agreements between different nations and states are subject to stresses and none of them are eternal. The UK itself is a case in point on a smaller scale than the EU. It has held together because it was very successful as an imperial power for a quarter of a millennium. Its decline is putting its cohesion under strain.

The same applied to Yugoslavia, as a socialist federation broken apart by an economic impasse that allowed more powerful outside forces to put unbearable pressure on its national/political fault lines, with horrific consequences.

The EU is a kind of Hayekian Holy Roman Empire, with Germany big enough to call most of the shots, but not big enough to subordinate and absorb the other big economies, in the way Prussia did with the Zollverein to create the Second Reich. Its future depends partly on internal stresses, but most crucially on the centrifugal pressures put on it by the USA on the one side and China’s Belt and Road initiative on the other; and this overlaps with the eastward military drive of NATO and consequent increasingly fraught relations with Russia. It is hard to imagine that the refragmentation of the EU would follow the scenario Tom sketches of a grateful continental workers’ movement looking to the shining example of socialism being developed in Britain – hardly an immediate prospect in any case – and breaking away to follow our example. Two, three, many Brexits, could be more like Yugoslavia on a much bigger scale.

The UK capitalist faction that drove Brexit and is – for now – in charge are not “uber-globalists”. They are dyed in the wool Atlanticists. And so – for now – are the leadership of the Labour Party. That means being signed up for a US trade deal and complete fealty to the US alliance and the New Cold War. The dynamic of that anchors the Labour leadership in collusion with the Tory government – seen most recently in Starmer giving them credit for putting health first on Covid when they have presided over one of the worst per capita death rates in the world – and will drive them ever further rightwards. Their “gentleman’s agreement” on by-elections with the Lib Dems is a precursor of the least progressive coalition option possible for an alternative government; and possibly a centre recomposition on US Democrat party lines, dumping the organic connection with organised labour, as long hankered after by Blair.

The decisive task for the Labour movement, Party members and trade unions, is to resist this.

This article was first published here

The election of 2019 has given Boris Johnson the majority he craved. His campaign was fought on the most fundamentally dishonest basis: that he could provide a Brexit that would regenerate run-down post-industrial communities and restore Britain to its mythical place in the sun. In reality, this new government will smash or sell off the remnants of the welfare state, destroy all remaining rights and protections, and further reduce the living conditions of those hardest hit by years of neo-liberalism to those currently experienced by the US underclass. In the process, social conservatism will increase, accompanied by violence and intolerance, feeding the far right and its most extreme elements.

Labour fought to win, on a programme that would have brought about a sea change in British social, economic and political life. But the valiant efforts of tens of thousands of Labour Party activists, who worked tirelessly to try and defeat the Tories, were unable to turn back the tsunami of lies and disinformation that the establishment and its allies, in the press and media, wove through the entire campaign. There were two key messages that the Tories stuck to and which enabled their victory: Get Brexit Done and the vilification of Corbyn as a traitor and an anti-semite. The Labour Party’s compromise position on Brexit did not win back Leave voters and lost the party support from some who’d voted to remain. More than 80% of the Tory vote intersected with the Leave vote. In the final days of the campaign the Tories ramped up the racist rhetoric around migration and Brexit with Johnson saying ‘EU migrants have been able to treat the UK as if it’s part of their own country for too long’. Nobody should doubt that a vote for the Tories was a vote for bigotry, xenophobia and racism.

This is a new political situation. It was no ordinary defeat but one which marks the entry of the far right into mainstream British political life via the Tory Party. The Brexit Party was smashed by the Cummings strategy and gained no seats but Farage will no doubt still have his political reward for standing aside in Tory-held seats. This new government is already far to the right of any previous Tory administration. There will be new draconian legislation on sentencing, on migration and new restrictions on trades union rights and attacks on the independence of the judiciary. There will be changes to the voting system with the introduction of photo ID. The more liberal sections of the media are already under attack – Channel 4 News have had their license to broadcast threatened. The NHS will be opened up to US pharma companies and further privatisation. A ‘no deal’ Brexit is now on the cards with all the economic chaos that would entail. This is a victory for the most reactionary forces in British society.

We must now prepare for a long period of bitter defensive struggles. The analysis of this defeat must focus not just on the proximate causes but also its deeper roots. The neo-liberal onslaught of the last 40 years, privatising and deindustrialising, destroyed working class communities, many of which turned away from Labour to enable Johnson’s victory. These old industrial areas suffered not just from Thatcher’s policies but were also left to rot under New Labour. Poverty and social decay had provided an ideal breeding ground for far right ideas, uncontested by a Labour Party which had itself embraced neo-liberalism. Corbyn’s policies correctly identified and sought to address these long standing problems with strategies of investment and economic regeneration but confidence in Labour had been long destroyed.

This breaking of the relationship of trust between Labour and sections of the working class took place incrementally over many years. Labour abandoned its traditional role as tribune of the working class, from the late 1980s onwards, and parties of the far right moved to fill that space in former industrial areas which often were treated by Labour merely as reliable voting fodder, safe seats for party front-benchers. In general elections from 1997 to 2010, throughout the New Labour period, the British National Party (BNP) vote rose from 35,000 to over 560,000 and many of the largest votes were in these areas. As the BNP went into decline the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) emerged and it built on those votes. And just as the BNP vote morphed into a much larger UKIP vote in those areas, so this laid the ground for the turn to the Tories in this election. Paul Mason wrote about Leigh, the old mining seat where he was born, ‘Voting Ukip turned out to be a gateway drug to voting Conservative’.

The defeat mirrors Trump’s 2016 victory in the rust-belt states in the US; Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, and Marine Le Pen’s rise in the former industrial areas of northern France. Johnson’s victory is based on the further erosion of Labour’s vote in its traditional heartlands; up until the election most of these new Tory seats had been Labour’s for generations. He achieved this through convincing enough former Labour voters in the Midlands and the North that the ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan stands for them. Indeed it has come to represent many things to many people and often little to do with EU membership: giving the elite a kicking, keeping out foreigners, taking back control of their own lives and making Britain great again. Johnson’s brand of English nationalism has subverted the pride in community that existed formerly though the collective strength and dignity of the organised working class and steered it towards xenophobia and intolerance devoid of class consciousness and solidarity. But however voters have interpreted Johnson’s promises, he will deliver nothing for these communities.

The trade union and labour movement is deeply conscious of the social deprivation in these areas and many had identified the real problems that Labour would have in sustaining its vote. But the very different prescriptions on offer were insufficient to stem the tide. When dissatisfaction with Labour was far more deep-rooted than simply appearing to be a Remain party, and the Leave vote had come to represent a much more complex set of factors than simply leaving the EU, Labour’s last minute attempts to nuance its approach to a second referendum, or to send out more Leave shadow cabinet members to canvass in working-class Leave constituencies, were hardly going to touch the problem.

For the last 40 years the trade union movement has been substantially weakened by the neoliberal offensive. The anti-trades union laws that Thatcher introduced in order to curtail trade union power were never challenged in the New Labour years. There were many bitter battles starting with the steelworkers’ strike in 1980 in which major sections of the working class came into struggle but all were left isolated and all went down to eventual defeat. The most important and decisive was the great miners’ strike of 1984/5. This was a heroic struggle by the most important section of the working class and it contained the possibility of defeating Thatcher and changing the course of recent history. The miners were betrayed by the leadership of both the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress and we are still living with the outcome of that betrayal.

The UK now has the most restrictive anti-trade union legislation in Europe. This October members of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) voted for strike action. It was one of the biggest turnouts in a ballot for many years and 97.1 per cent backed a strike. However the employers went to court and got an injunction to prevent the action on a small technical point. There was little response to this from the broader trade union movement. All hope rested with a new Labour government which would repeal the anti-trade union laws.

Trades union membership has been seriously eroded, halving since 1979. Four million workers are already either on zero-hours contracts or casual contracts with ‘hours to be notified’ or suffering from intermittent employment or underemployment. This section of the working class – the ‘precariat’ – is not unionised and will expand under this new Tory regime.

We have reached the point where it is almost impossible for strikes to take place or to be effective. The Johnson government will introduce more laws to curb the unions and Brexit will see workers’ rights further undermined. The Tories want a cheap labour force unprotected by trade unions or employment rights. The post-Brexit economic model that the Tories are proposing is that of the authoritarian city-state Singapore with low corporation tax, low wages, weak trade unions, and few welfare provisions. Migrant labour will still be employed in the agricultural and other sectors but these will be guest workers with no rights at all and therefore prey to the worst employers. However, the Tories’ plan for a deregulated casualised economy won’t overcome the relative decline of British capitalism.

The anti-semitism campaign

The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is enormously popular amongst Labour’s activists and amongst young people generally but there was a considerable antipathy to him in those areas where Labour lost heavily. Much of this was manufactured by the media, the establishment and by his opponents within his own party. It is to Jeremy’s enormous credit that he emerges from this campaign with great honour having withstood the most sustained personal vilification of any politician of modern times.

The political assassination of the Labour leader has been the central preoccupation of both the establishment and the right-wing within the Labour Party since he won the leadership in 2015. Former members of the security services have presented him as a threat to national security. He has been maligned as unpatriotic, a supporter of terrorism, a Stalinist, and an anti-semite. He has faced every possible smear, but the most effective and the one most developed over the last four years has been the anti-semitism campaign.

Anti-semitism exists in British society and across all political and religious groupings. The 2017 Staetsky report, ‘Anti-semitism in contemporary Great Britain’, does not show higher levels of anti-semitism on the left than on the right. In fact the reverse is the case and there is no serious analysis showing that the Labour Party is institutionally anti-semitic and therefore there are no grounds for the malicious statements during the election, by the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, that Jeremy Corbyn was unfit for high office because he has been ‘complicit in prejudice’ and allowed the ‘poison of anti-semitism to take root in the party’.

This hostile campaign has been deeply damaging. It has been a manufactured and fraudulent, almost evidence-free, offensive. Central to this campaign has been the attempt to re-define anti-semitism to include opposition to the policies of Israel, and to curb criticism of these policies, particularly in relation to the suppression of the Palestinian people. This campaign to de-legitimise criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is international. Thus two new members of the United States Congress Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, were denied visas to visit Israel because of their support for the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Labour Party has been unable to counter this campaign, despite having adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-semitism in full and making speeding up and strengthening of its disciplinary procedures a top priority. The truth is that this is a campaign little concerned with racism; its central aim is to destroy the Corbyn leadership. It has sought to redefine anti-semitism and politically weaponise it against the left. Comrades from Jewish Voice for Labour have worked tirelessly to counter this campaign but it also needed support from the leadership which has not been forthcoming.

Socialist internationalism

Following this defeat Jeremy Corbyn will resign and the right wing will seek to blame him personally for this defeat. However the argument that Labour would have won under a different leader is wrong. The campaign against Corbyn has been vicious and any Labour leader proposing the changes that Corbyn did would have faced a similar onslaught. A new leader will not in itself resolve the political crisis Labour now faces. It would be a mistake and a misunderstanding of the political landscape and the source of this defeat to believe so.

In the election the Labour Party tried to face both ways on Brexit. This was not a credible policy; it was unsustainable and it lost more votes than it gained. The Tories’‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan dominated the campaign and left little room for the Labour manifesto to make the kind of impact it had in 2017.

Brexit has been the vehicle for the far right’s ascendency. The hard right has taken over the Tory Party, driving out ‘one nation Tories’, transforming the Tory Party into a new UKIP. Brexit facilitates a reactionary anti-migrant nationalism and must be fought from an internationalist socialist perspective. Solidarity with migrants from inside and outside the EU and opposition to the proposed Tory migration laws is an essential part of our campaigning work and will become even more so.

Brexit is the attempt to resolve the deepening contradictions of post-war British capitalism through economic nationalism. However it is presented by sections of the pro-Brexit left, it is a false solution. In the era of world economy and world politics it is not possible for the problems of war, poverty, unemployment, racism and environmental destruction to be dealt with at the level of the nation state. The nature of the system we face demands an internationalist strategy.

The present conditions of capitalist reproduction cannot be made eternal. The globalisation of capital deepens the growing rivalries between states. The contradictions within the world economy have been sharpened by the policy prescriptions taken to resolve the 2008 crisis. The US/China trade war has already led to a decline in world trade and Trump threatens to open new fronts at every turn. French luxury goods will be subject to 100% tariffs if Macron implements a digital services tax aimed at Google and Amazon. Thus the re-assertion of economic protectionism and nationalism echoes that of the 1930s which saw the preparations for a world war. US power has been ebbing since the 1960s and the immediate crisis revolves around the challenge from China to US dominance over world economics and politics.

The financial deregulation of the 1980s makes it now impossible for any state, and this includes the USA, to carry out an independent economic policy. It is not possible therefore for any government of the left to establish socialism within national boundaries. The labour movement must make central the question of internationalism and its opposition to Brexit located within that understanding. The lesson from Syriza in Greece – and this election – is that the left must propose policies within the framework of systemic change.

The world is more globalised, more integrated and joined up than ever before. There is no going back. There are no national solutions to our economic and social problems. Whether it is the environmental crisis or the disastrous economic system, we must work across national borders.

What Next?

This new Johnson government will be vicious but it has no underlying policy narrative and no solution to the problems facing British capitalism beyond subservience to US capital. The political crisis that the Brexit vote unleashed is not resolved. Scotland has swung significantly towards the SNP and there will be pressurefor  a second independence referendum.

Only a genuine democratic mass movement can defeat this government and that must be organised both in parliament and on the streets. There must be the widest and most open discussion throughout the labour movement about our strategy going forward.

There may now be some demoralisation among activists but there will also be anger. That anger will be the base on which working class struggle is rebuilt. Those of us who hold to an internationalist, anti-capitalist, pro-migrant perspective must unite our forces and find those forms of organisation that will enable us to forge a path that takes that offensive to this government.

The mass movement that propelled Jeremy to the leadership still has enormous potential. There is a deep desire particularly among young people for social change. Momentum which was set up to support Jeremy’s leadership has a membership of many tens of thousands and is an effective organisation for campaigning within the Labour Party and for electoral work. The World Transformed has developed an impressive range of political education. Many young activists are working within these structures – this is necessary work, but the centralised nature of these organisations can stifle the dynamism that is essential in building inclusive mass movements.

The concentration on political struggle has been focused within the Labour Party itself sometimes to the detriment of wider struggles and crucial social and political movements. This was partly explicable by a defensive focus when Jeremy faced almost constant attack from the right-wing in the party and repeated attempts to undermine his leadership. No doubt there will be further battles within the Labour Party and this defeat will strengthen the right-wing but it must also mark a turning point for us on the left. We require a new strategy to defeat this Johnson/Trump government. Let us unite our forces and bring together those activists both within and outside the Labour Party who share a common political understanding, recognising the shift to the far right that has taken place.

A central part of the work we now face is the rebuilding of the fighting capacity of our trades unions. The older larger unions could take some lessons from the small new unions that have emerged over the last few years. Organising amongst migrant and very low-paid casualised workers, unions such as the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain have had some very successful strike actions, for example, with groups of outsourced workers at the London School of Economics and with Uber drivers and others.

We cannot wait for the next election in order to challenge the anti-trade union laws. The entire movement will have to face the necessity of more generalised strike and solidarity actions. This will be essential if we are to defend workers’ rights, mount a defence of the NHS or to push for the action necessary to stop climate change. Let us link together the campaigns which already exist.

Johnson’s victory will empower every racist and fascist in the land and therefore anti-racist and anti-fascist work must be central to our activity. We are proposing to the European Left Party a second No Pasaran European-wide conference in 2020 bringing together all those opposing racism and fascism.

At the heart of our work now must be the building of concrete links across borders bringing together campaigns to defend migrants, to resist the rise of the far right, to fight climate change and to co-ordinate action against capitalism. The French general strike and events in Latin America and the Middle East show the scale of working class resistance and the determination to build an alternative.

A radical alternative that challenges the system of capital itself and unites social, industrial and political struggles is necessary.

During the terminal months of Theresa May’s zombie regime, a group of senior Conservatives launched a top-secret operation, which they code-named “Project Arse” – a title chosen, according to one leading conspirator, “so that everyone knows who we’re talking about”. Like most recent Tory plans, it failed, and the “arse” in question, a man Frankie Boyle once described as “a cross between a brain injury and an unmade bed”, is now Prime Minister.

Boris Johnson may win this election; regardless, the Conservative Party is in deep crisis. The proximate trigger for this is of course Brexit, long championed by those David Cameron referred to as “swivel-eyed loons” and “closet racists” inside and outside of the party he once led. This previously fringe position is now the animating force of the Conservatives, tying their raw political survival to a course of action opposed by the great majority of the capitalist class it has for so long been their job to represent.

Why has this historic dislocation occurred, and how deep is the crisis? To fully grasp its severity and scale – and why it may differ from comparable episodes in the past – we have to understand the role of the party within the British political system across its multiple stages of evolution. In the words of Edward Heath:

“The historic role of the Conservative Party is to use the leverage of its political and diplomatic skills to create a fresh balance between the different elements within the state at those times when, for one reason or another, their imbalance threatens to disrupt the orderly development of society.”[1]

Heath included organised labour as “an element within the state”, reflecting the post-war model of statist capitalism that entered into crisis during his premiership. But this role of “balancing” divergent elements had long been played by the party, not least between different factions of a changing ruling class.

As Nigel Harris explains in the introduction to his 1972 book, Competition and the Corporate Society,

“the Conservatives, once they had freed themselves from a specific Tory identification with the squires of England, sought to make themselves the political voice of the elite groups of British society. Since industrial Britain was in a process of almost continuous change, different elite groups struggled to positions of pre-eminence, while others declined. To make itself the voice of the new was a precondition for Conservative survival.”[2]

This role of mediating between different elite interests, while retaining a “facility for disentangling itself from temporary association with any one group”,[3] has made the Conservative Party supremely suited to the role of state managers. This is reflected by its remarkable political dominance over the course of multiple, fundamental shifts in the social, political, and economic history of the United Kingdom. In adapting to these changes and exercising such a hold over the British state, the Conservatives may reasonably claim to be the most successful and reliable political instrument ever created by the ruling class of a core capitalist economy.

The other side of this relationship is that a crisis in the Conservatives reflects a transitional phase in British and global capitalism, to which the party is struggling to adapt, or more seriously a crisis in capitalism itself which is escaping effective political management in a more general sense. This is confirmed by history and by the obvious fact that the party’s present crisis coincides with and is closely related to the general crisis of world capitalism in its neoliberal phase.

This period, commonly associated with a political crisis for the left, has in the long-term caused severe problems for the Conservatives as a broad centre-right party. More specifically, the hollowing out of state capacity and competence under neoliberalism precludes the careful statecraft and long-term accumulation strategies once considered the hallmarks of Tory rule. Secondly, the ruling class itself has undergone a process of recomposition and fragmentation, gradually undermining the once organic relationship between capital and its hitherto impeccably reliable political representatives.

None of this makes electoral success in the near future impossible, or even particularly improbable. But it does suggest that, if the Conservative Party emerges from its present crisis, it will do so fundamentally transformed.

The Conservative Party, the State, and Neoliberalism

Consider, first, the Conservatives’ role as state managers. To quote Neil Davidson, since the 1970s “neoliberal regimes have increasingly abandoned any attempt to arrive at an overarching understanding of what the conditions for growth might be, other than the supposed need for lowering taxation and regulation and raising labour flexibility”[4]; this is evidenced by the abandonment of policy instruments which once allowed governments to intervene directly in the economy: the abolition of exchange controls, the setting of interest rates by an independent Bank of England, the subordination of state budgets to apparently objective measures of fiscal responsibility.

The growing inability and/or unwillingness of state managers to do other than satisfy the immediate demands of the wealthy reflects the transition from what Wolfgang Streeck terms “the tax state” to “the debt state”. This shift, he explains, “marks a new stage in the relationship between capitalism and democracy, in which capital exercises its political influence not only indirectly (by investing or not investing in national economies) but also directly (by financing or not financing the state itself).”[5] The servicing of debt and the maintenance of favourable credit ratings, rather than any broader economic development, thereby become the overriding objectives of governance.

Austerity regimes exemplify the resulting strategic malaise: very lucrative for the very rich, but as a response to crisis there is little historical evidence that such pro-cyclical fiscal contraction is an effective way of stimulating long-term growth. Lacking the ability to conceive of any viable and stable accumulation strategy, the Conservatives are instead blown between a series of wildly contradictory and purely tactical ideological positions: Cameron’s initial pledge to match Labour spending, following by years of insistence on the necessity of cuts; Theresa May’s doomed flirtation with a half-baked Christian Democratic “Red Tory” authoritarianism, followed by Boris Johnson’s incoherent melange of One Nationism and disaster capital.

The rapid adoption and disposal of this succession of pseudo-strategies not only reflects a disintegration of collective purpose and understanding, but creates an environment in which figures like Johnson can thrive: his only speciality is in chronic, slap-dash short-termism and the reflexive bluster of unprincipled, inbred class arrogance. The party has at least elected a leader who truly reflects its state of being.

Beyond the growing ineptitude of political state managers, the bureaucracy has also steadily declined. The civil service is now half the size as that inherited by Margaret Thatcher. Entire departments associated with economic management have been abolished; once vast institutional knowledge and expertise has been decimated.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the tortuous process of negotiating Brexit. The “impact reports” on the implications of Brexit on various sectors are horrifically lazy cut-and-paste jobs, of which the government is rightly embarrassed, while it is painfully clear that the British state simply lacks the personnel and expertise to negotiate or even comprehend such a wide-ranging economic realignment as leaving the European Union will entail. In the words of David Edgerton:

“the state can no longer undertake the radical planning and intervention that might make Brexit work. That would require not only an expert state, but one closely aligned with business. The preparations would by now be very visible at both technical and political levels…Brexit is a promise without a plan.”[6]

According to this reading, the Brexit debacle is a particularly acute demonstration of the inability of state managers to set a strategic direction for capital in a moment of crisis, a consequence of the delegation of such competencies under neoliberalism to either the private sector or multinational institutions like the EU itself – part of a much wider-ranging technocratic, post-political regime of governance, described so well by Peter Mair in Ruling the Void.[7]

This, of course, is not a problem only for the Conservatives. But, given that party’s exceptionally close association with the British state, and its historic use of the latter to weld divergent elite interests into a coherent political programme, this decline of state capacity and competence poses severe problems for their long-term revival as a party of the entire ruling class able to construct stable hegemonic blocs.

The Recomposition of the Ruling Class

A second long-term consequence of neoliberalism has been a radical recomposition of the ruling class itself. Historically, the British elite – regardless of its changing personnel and marked shifts in evolution – has been an exceptionally well integrated social group. That internal cohesion has now gone.

A basic marker of this shift is the great and rising proportion of foreign ownership of capital on the London Stock Exchange. From under 4% in 1981, this had risen to around 40% by 2010. In 2014, for the first time in history, foreign investors held more direct investment assets in the UK than British capitalists owned abroad: rather than a centre for exporting capital across the globe, the City now provides a low-regulation environment for attracting it from abroad.[8]

While such trends are not unique to the UK, they are unusually advanced: as early as 1990, the ratio of foreign investment to GDP was 21.2% in Britain against an 8.1% average for developed economies, with nearly a third of the 100 largest firms foreign-owned, no “national champions” to speak of, and a Sunday Times Rich List dominated by wealthy foreigners seeking a tax haven.

The difficulty that this posed for the Conservative Party was seen as far back as the early seventies by Nigel Harris. Three years before Thatcher had even been elected party leader, he wrote:

“[The Tories] are again seeking to straddle the increasing gap between an old declining segment of business and a new rising one. But this time, the rising sector is part of a world beyond Britain’s boundaries. And the declining sector constitutes ‘Britain’, part of a heritage Conservatives are supposed to conserve. The leap from a party of small and large national business to one of international companies would be one of the most agile transformations of all for the Conservatives, for it would involve the dissolution of the British national State on which the Conservatives have been for so long dependent. Yet for many Conservatives there seems to be no viable alternative: either internationalisation or suicide.”[9]

A more detailed measure of declining elite cohesion can be found by comparing current networks of interlocking directorships and major shareholdings with historical patterns. A study of these linkages in the British economy between 1904 and 2003 found that since the 1980s:

“Forms of corporatist concentration and relatively high levels of national economic co-ordination have given way to more ‘disarticulated’ national economies with internally fragmented structures.”[10]

Particularly key to pre-neoliberal corporate interlinkage was “a core elite of mutually connected people, centred on the banks, who dominate[d]the big boards and comprise[d]the leading edge of business decision-making”.[11] This “inner circle” constituted the so-called “gentlemanly capitalists” of the City ­– to whom Thatcher took a sledgehammer when pushing through the financial reforms known as the “Big Bang”.[12] In so doing, she inadvertently smashed the economic group which had played a central role in reproducing elite cohesion at the national level.

As the ruling class has changed, so has its relationship to the Conservatives. Over 70% of Thatcher’s first cabinet were corporate directors, collectively serving on the boards of 475 companies.[13] A 1966 survey similarly found that “243 Tory MPs held 290 positions of chairman, deputy chairman, or managing director of enterprises” and only twelve had no recorded outside interests.[14]

These connections were reinforced by the dominance of a handful of public schools and elite universities in the backgrounds of Conservative politicians and businessmen (for they were almost all men) alike: 94% of all Conservative cabinet ministers between 1925 and 1955 were educated at private schools, slightly falling to 83% by 1983. Over three quarters of company directors born between 1920 and 1939 – that is, the post-war business elite – attended private schools, and this dominance was likewise seen throughout the civil service, the military officer class, directors of the BBC, and many other institutions and sectors.[15]

The British elite thus not only shared a common class position, but were bonded by established processes of collective socialisation. The Conservative Party served a particular function within this nexus, with a mass national membership and deep social roots. Writing in the New Statesman, Ferdinand Mount reminisced about a survey he carried out for the Conservative Research Department in the early 1960s regarding the state of the party as a membership organisation. He toured the country and, in his words:

“met with the support of every local business owner worth his salt. There they were…with waistcoats and watch chains: wool merchants in Bradford, steel men in Swansea, carpet makers in Kidderminster, fireworks manufacturers in Halifax.”[16]

The party, with its national network of cheap pubs and elite clubs, provided a shared environment in which the socially conservative worker could identify with the local bourgeoisie, and the owners of small and medium capital themselves could rub shoulders, greet one another with secret handshakes, exercise influence and envisage their own progress to greater prosperity. Such a party did not require formal structures of internal democracy to mediate between local and national, large and small capitals. Through this deep and wide social embeddedness, the Conservatives were able to arrive at the approximation of a general class interest and, financed by the Empire, secure broad social consent for its programmes.

While the ruling class obviously still exists and exercises enormous power, that shared social world is gone. A clear minority of company directors and CEOs, and a slight minority of even Conservative MPs, now attended private schools or Oxbridge. Corporate elites no longer specialise in any particular sector: instead, an overwhelming majority study accountancy, business management and the like. Their only expertise is fomenting in constant, chaotic change: mergers, downsizing, the immediate maximisation of shareholder value, takeovers, and restructures.[17]

Where this elite intersect directly with the Conservative Party, it is no longer as captains of industry, but as representatives of those sections of capital least suited to taking any kind of broad strategic view and, perhaps not incidentally, most in favour of a hard Brexit: witness Johnson’s “government of all the lobbyists”, whose skill sets lie precisely in attempting to further reduce state managers’ room for strategic manoeuvre.[18] They are fittingly led by Johnson, whose only “professional” experience outside politics is as a fiction writer for right-wing newspapers, and whose only skill appears to be the deployment of a reflexive class arrogance that commentators apparently misread as something they call “charisma”.

This process of elite recomposition has severely undermined the organic links which once bound an exceptionally cohesive ruling class to its political representatives. The shock of Brexit has revealed that, for all its near unchallenged recent influence, large, highly international capital is unable to discipline and stabilise the Conservative Party at its moment of crisis, and has itself become highly fragmented. To quote Bob Jessop:

“The state has been unable to act in an effective dirigiste, corporatist, liberal (or, more recently, neo-liberal) manner. Muddling through on a week-by-week basis while trying different grand strategies is its modus operandi…And surprisingly, given how significant Brexit is for the prospects of business and finance, it has taken two years for major commercial, industrial, and financial interests to articulate their positions in public. In part, this reflects the fact that the Balkanisation of the UK economy means that there is no significant national or comprador bourgeoisie that could benefit from Brexit and that the multiple international linkages of capital also block a coherent stance…there is no collective voice of capital.”[19]

The previously tight integration of state and capital, and what we might summarise as the former’s loss of “relative autonomy” under neoliberalism, has given way to a sudden and sharp unmooring, triggered by a political miscalculation by the once trusted party of the ruling class. Lacking the ability to formulate anything resembling a strategic response, all the Conservatives find in this new space is more rope to hang themselves with.

The Unravelling of Conservative Power

Both the ditching of the post-war settlement in favour of neoliberalism and the associated pivot towards European integration were driven by the Conservative Party in response to the crisis of social-democratic, national capitalism. These were rational responses, which correctly identified and adapted to pre-existing, ascendant tendencies and, for a while, more or less effectively managed Britain’s relative decline as an economic power.

Yet the long-term consequences of this reorientation have undermined the ability of state managers to govern strategically, while eroding the once exceptional class solidarity of the British elite and severing its hitherto deep, inbred connection to the Conservative Party.

Meanwhile, the geographical unevenness of neoliberal development, in concentrating wealth in the Southern regions of England, has also seen the Conservative Party retreat to its historic heartlands. Exiled from power during the Blair years, the party clung desperately to its decimated membership and receding support. In doing so, it fostered a petit-bourgeois, “populist” nationalism incipiently hostile to large, international capital, precisely at the moment when the instruments of government through which it might seek a measure of independence from such forces had been cast aside.

As this hostility grew, the previously solid Conservative coalition between large and small capital began to disintegrate. A quarter of small- and medium-sized business owners voted UKIP in the 2014 European elections, with only a very slight majority supporting membership in 2016; over 20% of Conservative members now view big business as exploitative of common people. Rather than alienated northern workers, it was this embittered southern middle class, animated by perceptions of personal and national decline, which primarily drove the Brexit vote.[20]

Precisely as its remaining base began to break from the capitalist class proper, the Conservative Party chose to empower them with a minimal level of internal democracy, allowing the rank-and-file to elect the leader and thus directly influence policy for the first time. Setting itself against the interests of large capital thereby became the price for securing the overriding priority of raw political survival; the vote to leave the European Union both sharpened this internal party contradiction and elevated it to the level of the British state itself, without offering any clear means of resolution.

The squeezed and embittered petit-bourgeois and middle-class layer that railed in the Tory base through their years in the political wilderness has been joined by a minority section of finance capital, primarily hedge-funds with little real connection to the UK economy, chaffing against the threat of tighter regulation at the European level in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.[21]

Brexit is seen as an opportunity to re-assemble something close to the Conservatives’ traditional social base, winning sections of working- and middle-class support in Northern England, even if the rest of the Union seems lost. But the re-heated One Nationism through which the party aims to achieve this reconstitution, with Johnson promising to return rates of government spending to levels last seen in the 1970s, is incompatible with the agenda of the extreme Thatcherite Brexit elite and their international backers.

The Conservatives may still win this election; they might even successfully reinvent themselves, as they have done in the past, and avert what seems likes unavoidable collapse. But, lacking the social, institutional, intellectual and economic assets which allowed the party to emerge from previous crises, any reincarnation is likely to be unstable, improvised, and increasingly reliant on the tactical deployment of a socially combustible, xenophobic authoritarianism to hold itself together. Unlike Thatcher, Johnson has little besides such “psychological compensation” to offer his base: the council houses have been sold, the national companies privatised, the North Sea oil money squandered on tax cuts. Bigotry, Boris will eventually find, doesn’t pay the bills.

The issues faced by the Conservatives are not unique, even if their form is specific to the ways in which the party has been historically constituted and is presently unravelling. At heart, these problems illustrate the diminishing strategic options available to all political managers of neoliberal capitalism and their inability to chart a path out of the slump, let alone effect any global economic reorganisation comparable to those which followed previous world crises. The long and increasingly grotesque Conservative decline is one of many morbid symptoms of this impasse, portending the future that awaits us if no alternative is found.

While we know what should happen – Labour and the unions should be mobilizing people on the streets in huge numbers to counter the ‘people versus parliament’ narrative pushed by the Tories and their creatures in the press – we are instead having to watch a damaging level of confusion and even complacency within the left. Though there has been a degree of activity to stop a no deal Brexit, this has mostly been confined to parliament, with the exception of the mobilisations against the prorogation, which were addressed by leading Labour politicians, but were actually organized by much smaller groups under the umbrella of Another Europe is Possible (AEIP). The court victory against Johnson’s anti-democratic action in proroguing parliament was achieved by individuals. Labour MPs, though a few had talked of refusing to leave Parliament, in the end left it to the courts to end the prorogation.

Recently I have been thinking about Zimmerwald and the divide in the socialist movement precipitated by the First World War. No doubt people will say any parallels with today are hyperbolic. It’s true that we are not in the midst of a barbarous war, nor are the prospects for revolution at all of the same order. But for the first time in my life – and I began to be an active socialist in the early 1970s – I perceive a very fundamental divide in the post-1968 left, which I would broadly characterize as between those of us with an internationalist perspective and those with a national one. Hence the Zimmerwald reference.

There was always a ‘left’ with such a national perspective of course, but it was not part of the post-68 left. It was in the Labour Party and in the Communist Party, and it conceived of the tasks facing it as being to take control of the British state machine and use that to institute a British Road to Socialism. The opposition to joining the EEC (as it then was in the 1975 referendum) on the part of those forces was based in the view that membership of the EEC was incompatible with pursuing a national road to socialism. The opposition of the revolutionary left then (though it wasn’t united) was based on our reading of the impact of a yes vote on the balance of forces in the working-class movement, which had just seen the highest level of class struggle since 1945. Our view was that it would reinforce the strength of the right in the labour movement, which was dedicated to demobilizing the working class in the interests of the Labour government of the time.

Moving forward to 2016, against a backdrop of an extremely low level of working class organization and combativity, and with a Tory government in power, most of the post-68 left, inside and outside of Labour, took the view that it was necessary to call for a vote for Leave, on exactly the grounds that the Labour left and CP had based their 1975 policy: namely on the character of the EU itself and that membership of it was an obstacle to reform of the British state and specifically to the successful execution of Labour’s strategy under Corbyn. This decision ignored the character of the Leave campaign, based as it was in the right wing of the Tory Party and UKIP, with a platform of nationalist xenophobia and extreme free market economic policies, backed vociferously by the most reactionary elements of the Tory press. Somehow this was all irrelevant. They claimed that if only Labour had placed itself on the Leave side, the nature of the campaign would have been utterly transformed. It also ignored the international context of the rise of far-right populism, viewing the UK as an exception because Corbyn had been elected leader of the Labour Party.

Subsequently, the need to preserve Corbyn’s leadership became the overarching objective of much of the left, with the forces wanting to oppose an increasingly ‘hard’ Brexit being derided as middle class and/or pawns of the ‘Blairites’. Even now, with the reactionary nature of the Brexit project so glaringly obvious, parts of the left still can’t bring themselves to oppose it. They oppose ‘no deal’ but they are vague as to what kind of actual Brexit they would support. Again, the recent ambivalent policy adopted at the Labour conference was passed because delegates were persuaded that regardless of the fact that the majority of Labour Party members and voters oppose all forms of Brexit, to insist that party policy reflect that would represent a victory for the right inside the PLP and would therefore be a defeat for Corbyn. The irony, of course is that it’s a policy very likely to doom the entire Corbyn project, as it seems extremely unlikely Labour can win a majority in the forthcoming election.

Against that, a portion of the left has put forward a policy of Remain, but with the perspective of joining forces with other left movements across the EU in order to revolt against the policies which have immiserated Greece and other southern European countries, and to end Fortress Europe rather than erecting Fortress UK. Those of us who support this are regarded as hopelessly naïve, because, we are assured, it’s impossible to reform the EU, while it’s evidently quite possible to reform the British state (all previous failed attempts to the contrary).

Quite apart from that, the actual policy of the Corbyn-led Labour Party on a central issue of the “Remain, Reform Revolt” platform – the defence and extension of Freedom of Movement – has been absolutely terrible. The Labour conference did pass an excellent motion on the subject, pushed through with a huge amount of work and against the general silence of much of the left on the subject. However, the next day, Diane Abbott said that the motion wasn’t binding in terms of what would be in the Labour manifesto. There are laudable efforts to try to ensure that isn’t the last word, but don’t hold your breath for freedom of movement to be in the election pledges. So the denunciation of left Remainers as patronizing and writing Leave voters off as racists should rightly be applied to the Labour leadership, as they obviously believe that arguing for freedom of movement would alienate too many Leave voters. While much of the left has not gone so far as to justify immigration controls, where there has been an attempt to provide a ‘left’ case for restricting immigration, on the basis that cheap migrant labour undercuts “native born” workers and exerts a downward pressure on wages or that the EU is forcing workers to move from their home countries in the east, it’s within an unashamedly nationalist perspective. An excellent analysis of what is wrong with such ideas can be found here.

So where does this leave us? The crucial errors made by much of the left in the 2016 referendum and afterwards, and the fact that the most influential trade union leaders and those advisers closest to the Labour leadership are not prepared to fight Brexit, have meant that the majority of Labour members and voters, and many rank and file trade unionists, have been left to take individual decisions about how to oppose Brexit. Many have participated in the huge People’s Vote marches, but they have seen only Liberal Democrats and Tories, or the odd Labour Party MP or minor trade union leader, on the platforms. Unions haven’t mobilized and haven’t tried to affect the character of the protests. Only a minority, around AEIP, has formed a left bloc on the marches and called for open borders. The rest of the post-68 left has stayed away, declining even to pass out placards or give out leaflets to explain their position. The absence of union banners or left Labour speakers is then used as justification for ignoring the literally millions of people on the streets. Even now, when Johnson’s clearly anti-democratic manoeuvres led some of the Lexiters to come in from the cold, the Labour and most union leaderships have not thrown their weight decisively behind the protests, presumably fearful of contamination with the Remain virus.

What can we do about this situation? Essentially we have a gap. There are large numbers of people who want to stop Brexit, who loathe the present government and the kind of hostile atmosphere it has encouraged towards minorities, and its aggressive Little Englander nationalism. They are often the same people who want to take decisive action against climate change. On the other hand, there are very small numbers of socialists who have the necessary clarity about the dangers of the present situation. We need to unite those socialists, whether they are inside or outside the Labour Party, and find every possible route to connect them with those who want to fight.

There are many voices arguing that the priority is not to ignore or ‘write off’ those who have perceived Brexit as a way of redressing the injustices they feel. This is frequently, but not always, accompanied by the idea that we should not alienate them by being too assertive in our opposition to Brexit, in our solidarity with immigrants, with ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, or even in our opposition to climate change. That view – that ‘identity politics’ or ‘middle class liberal metropolitan elitism’ has led the left to turn its back on ‘the working class’ – is fundamentally mistaken. It rests on an anachronistic view of what the working class is, and it breaks with the idea that as a left, you organise amongst the most advanced elements and, by doing so, you bring waverers behind them; anyone who has tried to improve working conditions or pay in a workplace understands that. You try to isolate those who hold ideas which align them firmly against you (hard core racists, deferential working class Tories, the inveterate anti-union individuals). You have to start with those who are already clear who the enemy is (and who their friends are).

In the present situation that means mobilising those implacably opposed to Brexit: young people, migrants, people of colour, those who know that anything being proposed by the Tories can’t be good news for them. In a determined fight against the Tories, Farage and the far right, you hope to bring others with you, but without allowing the pace and direction of that fight to be dictated by the need to make concessions to those who don’t see that clearly. Perhaps the most powerful argument in this respect is the utter failure of the ‘nationalist’ left to make any progress in pulling the pro-Brexit working class (as they perceive it) to the left and away from its inclination to vote for Farage or Johnson. Indeed, it’s not clear that they are trying to do so, beyond urging people to vote for a Corbyn government. A reformist Labour government is indeed desirable. But the path to getting there has been made muddier and more convoluted by many of the people who claim to want it most.

]]> https://prruk.org/facing-up-to-the-crisis-urgent-questions-for-the-left/ Mon, 30 Sep 2019 09:52:43 +0000 http://prruk.org/?p=11220 British politics have entered a profound crisis, characterised by an escalating hard right threat against working class communities in all their diversity. The growing menace of a hard-right Tory or Tory-Brexit Party government is paralleled by the threat – and increasing reality – of reactionary violence in the streets and communities.

The Supreme Court decision against Johnson, and revelations alleging corrupt payments while he was Mayor of London, create new difficulties for Johnson – especially carrying out the promise to leave the European Union by 31st October. The short-term prospects for Johnson’s coup hang in the balance. The Tories have the Brexit Party breathing down their neck, waiting to cry ‘betrayal’ if that date for EU withdrawal is not met. Johnson’s way out, of course, is a general election on the theme of ‘get Brexit done’. There is no ambiguity about what is intended. This is not going to be a ‘business as usual’ election, but an immense reactionary spectacle in which the right-wing media are deployed at hysterical levels against Corbynism, designed to get a mandate for a no-deal Brexit and smash the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party.

Johnson’s coup attempt and the escalating level of violent language have emboldened the fascist and semi-fascist right. Every day brings news of more racist and xenophobic attacks. There are more threats against MPs and anti-Brexit activists. A serving soldier sends a letter threatening to kill Angela Rayner. The office of a Birmingham MP is besieged and many MPs who oppose Johnson receive death threats. Tommy Robinson’s supporters chant Boris Johnson’s name, just as the KKK and US fascists chanted the name of Donald Trump.

In this mix Brendan O’Neill, a commentator for the extreme-right website Spiked!, has called – on BBC Radio – for riots to push through a hard Brexit.

The central danger we face today is that of a general election won by the Conservatives or a Tory-Brexit Party coalition. Right-wing commentators fear that without a Johnson-Farage lash up, the election could be won by Jeremy Corbyn. Farage and the Johnson-Cummings team are now competing to outdo one another with ranting language, to win an increasingly-radicalised and mobilised pro-Brexit base. While Johnson talks about ‘traitors’, Farage promises to ‘take the knife’ to Whitehall bureaucrats.

A Tory-Brexit Party link-up?

While the Tories want to give away as little as possible in terms of seats, reality is pushing them towards an electoral pact with Farage. Influential Sun commentator Rod Liddle says a pact is vital to ensure a Labour defeat, and new chair of the hard-right Tory European Research Group, Steve Baker, is also campaigning for a coalition.

While attention has been focussed on Parliament and the Labour Party Conference, the Brexit Party has been holding large rallies across the country. It claims to have 600 candidates in place for the election.

Hate Mongers

In the right-wing mass media, growing reactionary hysteria is deliberately stoked by abusive language. In the Sun, Rod Liddle says:

“We all want this awful mess over with as soon as possible. Labour and the ludicrous Lib Dems are stopping that from happening. We will have a general election very soon. Most likely in November. And what Boris and his colleagues need to do is make sure they have a deal in place with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Without it, they will lose the election.”

Liddle’s rhetoric is dire. Opposition MPs in Parliament are “gibbering, self-serving weasels”. Corbyn’s popularity is between “a sick bucket and the Ebola virus”. Anna Soubry is a “demented squawkbox”. Corbyn supporters are a “retinue of dingbat Marxists, Hamas lovers and Trots.”

Some people on the Left seem only amused by these rantings, especially if they involve denouncing Tory politicians. But it is much more serious than that. When Anna Soubry is threatened by fascists in the streets, this enables and encourages right-wing violence – violence that is already targeting the Left, as shown by the assault on Owen Jones and the clashes with fascists in Whitehall after a pro-democracy demonstration two weeks ago.

The crescendo of reactionary rhetoric is designed to mobilise hatred against Corbyn and the Left, to de-legitimise and demonise opposition and energise an increasingly reactionary mass base.

Unfortunately, the decision at Labour Party conference for a neutral position in a new referendum worsens its electoral prospects by failing to minimise the possibility of Remainers defecting to the Liberal Democrats or Greens. As Jonathan Lis explained in the New Statesman:

“The problem is that this stance makes an election victory much less likely. What was decided on Monday was not bad policy so much as bad politics.

“The first reason is that the policy is extremely hard to explain. Not only is Labour suggesting it might negotiate something and then campaign against it, but it refuses to confirm what it thinks about the key issue of our time. On the doorsteps it could come across not as noble or conciliatory but evasive and absurd.

“The second and more important reason is that Labour’s destination is now all but locked in. It is a de facto Remain party. The vast majority of its MPs want to remain. So does the shadow cabinet. So do the party’s members. So do its voters. …Eventually the party will have to admit that. The mistake was not to admit it now. Why didn’t they? Put simply, it wants to convince voters that the party may eventually back Leave. It sounds dishonest, because it is.”ⁱ

Creeping Fascism: Threat of a Hard-Right Government

For some on the Left there is complacency about the dangers of a Johnson or Johnson-Farage government, a complacency that often comes out of a fatal misreading of Brexit and the Brexit Party. Either a Johnson Tory government or a coalition with the Brexit Party would result in a government hell-bent on smashing up the last remnants of the welfare state, imposing new anti-union laws and restricting the right to strike even further, tying Britain to a crushing trade deal with the US and victimising immigrant workers and refugees. There are already straws in the wind of a redefinition of ‘extremism’ to include not just the far right and terrorist Islamism, but the radical left as well.

Such a government would double down on austerity. It would be a disaster for those poor and neglected communities that often voted heavily for Brexit. Boris Johnson will pledge to spend billions on public services in order to win the election and those promises will evaporate when the election is done.

The election of a hard right government would not come in a vacuum, but against the background of escalating economic recession, an exultant reactionary and fascist right and ever-deeper austerity. It would also result in a profound political demoralisation in the labour movement and the Left, and probably result in the collapse of the Corbyn movement.

We have talked about creeping fascism and situated the hard-right nationalist Brexit project in the context of the international rise of the hard right – not least Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary. The truth of this will become increasingly clear: there is no left-wing Brexit, it is a fantasy, a pipe-dream.

The Brexit Party already has many of the features of fascism, mobilising from the petty bourgeoisie and often more impoverished sections of the working class. It is backed up and surrounded by the gangs of fascist street fighters. The direction of travel is clear.

Prospects

The Left has a number of inter-linked tasks. It should fight against any no-deal Brexit and back the October 19th ‘Let Us Be Heard’ march in central London. It is important to build the Left Bloc at the heart of the march.

We have to prepare for a bruising and difficult election, against the odds trying to deprive the Tories of a majority and win a Labour government. We have to say to those opposing Brexit that the only chance of a government that will stop Brexit is a Corbyn government.

We have to reach out to the youth and others mobilised by Extinction Rebellion and explain the urgent need for a Corbyn government – for the environment and the future. The Extinction Rebellion mobilisations and those in the aftermath of Johnson’s suspension of Parliament show the scale of progressive, anti-Tory opinion in the country. These forces have to be mobilised against a no-deal Brexit – the best way to prepare for a general election.

And we have to continue to raise the alarm over, and mobilise against, creeping fascism, the rising tide of right-wing extremism and racist attacks. If Johnson wins the coming election, and implements a hard Brexit, this will be a huge defeat that will eclipse that of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. The alarm must be sounded.

We need to open up the broadest possible discussion in the Left about the meaning of the crisis and the way out. Business as usual will be swept aside in an almighty thunderclap in the coming weeks. We need to be prepared.

Without a doubt the street mobilisations have been in part inspired by Extinction Rebellion. The boldness and civil disobedience tactics of ER, together with the school climate strikes, has struck a major chord with the public, especially the youth, in the light of the inspiring example of Greta Thunberg – and of course the ongoing climate crisis exemplified by the fires in the Amazon and the Greenland melting. The spontaneous unity of the Extinction Rebellion and anti-coup demonstrators in occupying Manchester’s Deansgate is symbolic of this. The fight against climate extinction is also the fight against the hard right.

The mass movement transformed the situation for Corbyn and Labour. Jeremy Corbyn has been de facto the central spokesperson of the anti-hard Brexit forces in parliament and the country. The anti-Corbyn Labour right-wing has been caught off guard by this, although on Wednesday Jess Phillips made an aggressive anti-Tory Commons speech in an attempt to get back in the limelight. But some of the right – Stephen Kinnock, Caroline Flint and about eight others – have been in the pro-Brexit camp and foolishly tried to bring Theresa May’s plan back from the grave.

The defeat of stage one of the coup has forced Johnson to reach for his major weapon, the preparation of a general election. This will be an elaborately prepared carnival of reaction. Johnson’s speech on Thursday in front of massed ranks of police gave a flavour of what is to come. It is the beginning of the Trumpisation of his campaign. Mass meetings featuring xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Europe nationalism and attacks on unions, benefit claimants and the alleged liberal elite are being prepared, especially in those Labour areas where there was a big Leave vote. An alliance with the Brexit Party is central to this road to victory for Johnson.

Nigel Farage is quite right that he personally is the key to a Johnson victory. If Johnson meets a number of preconditions – hard Brexit or nothing! – the Brexit party faithful will be mobilised for Johnson. At a certain stage it is quite possible his rallies will also feature Farage.

This Saturday’s demo by the Football Lads Alliance – ‘Support Boris and the Queen’ – will be an indicator of the scale of the reaction to come. The reactionary onslaught will of course be led by the Tory press, with the Sun and the Mail in the vanguard

The whole of the Left must completely reject the Johnson-Brexit line that the government is fighting to implement the democratic will of the people as indicated by the 2016 referendum outcome. The 2016 Brexit referendum was not a democratic exercise and, in any case, the British people did not vote for a hard Brexit – on the contrary they were told a trade deal with Europe would be easy and everything would be tickety-boo, European UK residents would be safe etc etc. This has now been revealed as rubbish. In fact a softer Brexit was available in May’s plan, and not passed largely because the Tory right (and DUP) wanted only a hard Brexit. In this sense it is ridiculous for the Morning Star to say that Parliament has frustrated the democratic will of the people. That is repeating Johnson’s line.

Any attempt to further impose a disruption of the anti-hard Brexit bill by some new parliamentary trickery would be a continuation of the coup. This now seems unlikely. The battle will unfold – eventually on the electoral terrain around implementing a hard Brexit. For the moment the central issue for the left is to defeat a hard Brexit. This is because, as this site has argued repeatedly, Brexit will be a massive attack on working class living standards, on the rights of immigrant workers, as well as aligning Britain with the US against China and the European Union.

Further, Brexit is the centre-piece of a prolonged campaign by the Tory right to impose a hard right government, smash up the post-war welfare state consensus and hobble the workers’ movement with more anti-democratic measures against the unions, strikes, demonstrations, the right to organise etc. The imposition of a Johnson government, inspired by the ideas of Britain Unchained and by the examples of Trump, Bolsonaro and Salvini, would not signal a fascist government – but would be an important step on the road of Creeping Fascism.

What would an electoral victory for Johnson mean? First, a hard Brexit. This, contrary to what some on the left think, is completely opposed to the interests of the working class. A crashing pound and trade chaos will cause a massive surge in prices. Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph produced a special report saying that Britain was already in recession, and this is likely to worsen with a hard Brexit.ⁱ A repeat of the 2008 financial crash, which Brexit and austerity make more likely, would result in a massive attack on the savings and living standards of millions of British workers.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers will be in limbo, and open to deportation. The Tories have already indicated that family reunion for children will be ended. EU legislation on working conditions and the environment will be ended.

Under a Johnson government Britain will become a vassal state of the United States, forced to accept a UK-US trade deal that would open up all public services to US companies. Britain would lamely follow Trump in international politics, likely breaking with the Iran nuclear deal and aping his China trade sanctions.

The relationship of the Brexit Party to the Conservatives has some echoes of the relationship of Salvini’s Lega party with the fascist Brothers of Italy. But with one difference. The Brexit Party is much more powerful than the Brothers, and could be in a position to call the political shots much more decisively.

The coup crisis has shaken up British politics across the board. The purge of the Tory MPs, unthinkable even under Thatcher, shows the ruthlessness of the domination of the hard right. It reflects a split in the capitalist class itself, with Phillip Hammond and friends representing the interests of both finance capital and major industrial forms. This is likely now to further deepen pressure for a new centre party. It is unclear whether this will simply be another regroupment around the Liberal Democrats. Their recruitment of pro-privatisation and homophobic ex-Tory MP Philip Lee shows the contradictions of the LibDems, and the difficulties they will have with their right-wing past in the coalition government. It is noticeable however that the resignation of Luciana Berger from Labour to join the LibDems has been hardly noticed. Her decision to work inside the Liberal Democrats may be motivated by factors other than the Brexit controversy.

The coming election will be the most tumultuous and decisive since 1979. Now the whole labour movement must proceed to wage a massive campaign against the Trumpisation of British politics. All the forces of social progress must be challenged with the choice – either a left Labour government or a hard-right government aligned with Trump, Salvini and Le Pen. In particular, a fight must be waged with all anti-Brexit forces against voting for the Liberal Democrats. Only a Corbyn government can stop a hard Brexit.

The UN estimates that the world now contains 71 million displaced people, 29 million of whom are refugees displaced from their home country, including 3.5 million registered asylum seekers.[1]

These are the most high-profile – and also the most vilified – of the victims of the global crisis. Their displacement is the result of some combination of four factors: war, genocide, poverty, and climate change. People leave their homes either because they are in fear of their lives or because they face destitution if they stay put. They leave their homes because they have no hope if they do not.

The world is like this because capitalism is geared to private profit, not human need or ecological balance; because it is a system of competing corporations and rival states whose purpose is to enrich the 1%. Greed and power are all that matter.

The ‘inadmissables’ are the system’s collateral damage. Not only that: they are also its ideological shock-absorbers.

As the system wrecks people’s lives, it leaves behind great pools of social despair. This might crystallise into anger against the system – against the asset-strippers, the privatisers, the landlords, and the corporate debt-collectors. So the system allocates a special role to its ‘inadmissables’. Let them, the poorest of the poor, the most powerless of the powerless, take the blame.

So important is this role that demand quickly outruns supply. So valuable are ‘inadmissables’ that more are created. Take the case of the Indian province of Assam.

Indian state fascism

The Hindu chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi has just deemed 1.9 million residents of the north-eastern province of Assam to be ‘illegal’. Hindu chauvinism – as my colleague Seema Syeda has explained in the second edition of our book Creeping Fascism – is the Indian form of fascism. ‘A new revolution, to defeat the alien enemy, is beckoning,’ proclaims a promotional song of India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). ‘Bravely let us shield our motherland.’

The NRC leaves no-one in doubt as to the identity of the ‘alien enemy’. The official NRC Facebook page displays a message from an Israeli woman that reads: ‘This Israeli sends her love to India: I stand with India in their fight against Pakistani terror.’

Modi has just put mainly-Muslim Kashmir – a territory in dispute between India and Pakistan since Partition, and contested in three subsequent wars between the two countries – under martial law.

The NRC is turning Assam Muslims who fled Bangladesh in 1971 into ‘illegals’. At the same time, Modi’s BJP party is considering a bill to enshrine the rights of Hindu migrants in law. Pakistan is the external enemy. Muslims are the internal enemy. The long-term aim is an exclusive Hindu state.

What will happen to the newly created Assam ‘illegals’? They have been given a right of appeal – a grotesque travesty given India’s expensive, clogged-up, and increasingly chauvinist courts. ‘Everyone will be given a right to prove their citizenship,’ Assam’s BJP law minister told the BBC. ‘But if they fail to do so, well, the legal system will take its own course.’ Pressed further, he explained this meant deportation.

To where? Bangladesh has said it will not take them. So they will be locked up. The BJP regime is building new camps for the mass incarceration of Muslims deemed ‘illegal’.[2]

The regime is also giving the green light to Hindu-fascist pogroms.

An estimated 24,000 Rohingya Muslims were murdered, 18,000 raped, and 116,000 beaten in state-backed pogroms in Myanmar in 2017. Around 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

A wave of Islamophobic violence by state police and communal mobs in Hindu-chauvinist India, a country of 1.4 billion people, where Muslims account for 14% of the population, could turn the Rohingya Genocide into a historical footnote.[3]

American state fascism

Take another example: Trump’s America.    The US operates the world’s largest migrant detention system. Around 20,000 people are held on the US-Mexican border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), more than 50,000 elsewhere in the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and more than 11,000 children by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

As well as deporting around a third of a million people at the south-western border each year, the US state is currently targeting around one million ‘illegals’ inside the country in paramilitary-style raids, arresting and incarcerating hundreds of workers at a time, many of them with children at home, who are then left abandoned.   Conditions inside US concentration camps can include: families separated and children either incarcerated apart from their parents or left to fend for themselves; hundreds of sweating men held in wire pens in the heat; lack of access to showers, washing facilities, and toothbrushes; lack of access to private toilets; lack of access to clean clothes; lack of hot meals or even enough food.

At a camp in El Paso, Texas, 900 migrants were ‘being held at a facility designed for 125. In some cases, cells designed for 35 people were holding 155 people.’ One observer described the facility as a ‘human dog pound’.

Children at a facility in Clint, Texas, were reported sleeping on concrete floors. Observers described ‘children as young as 7 and 8 … wearing clothes caked with snot and tears’. A doctor described camps he had visited as ‘torture facilities’.[4]

European state fascism

Now let’s take a look closer to home.

The EU currently has around 900,000 asylum seekers in limbo, their applications for entry pending, most of them incarcerated in detention centres. The rejection rate has risen from 37% in 2016 to 64% in 2019. So a majority of the people held will, in due course, be deemed ‘illegal’ and deported back to the violence and poverty from which they have fled.

Around 9,000 of these people are living in a concentration camp at Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos. Here, people live in metal containers or tents surrounded by rubbish. More than 70 people share a toilet. Raw sewage seeps into children’s mattresses. Suicide attempts are at epidemic level. Traumatised children held in the camp draw pictures that show stormy seas dotted with terrified faces, lifeless bodies floating in the waves, planes dropping bombs, and eyes that weep blood.

Around 140,000 people reached Europe across the Mediterranean last year. But many who tried failed to make it. Some were drowned: an average of six a day. But many were herded back by EU-funded Libyan coastguards, many recruited from warlord militias, and many of these ended up among the estimated 5,400 held in Libyan concentration camps. Crowded into huge breezeblock and corrugated iron warehouses, hundreds together, they sleep on bits cardboard. Most are considered by refugee agencies to be ‘at risk’, and there are reports of murders, rapes, suicides, and deaths from disease and starvation.[5]

In another part of the Med, the EU has paid the authoritarian regime of President Erdogan £4.6 billion in aid to prevent Syrian refugees reaching Europe. Around 3.5 million are living in the country. Some have been shot dead by Turkish police and army. Thousands have been driven back across the border into the war zone. Only 200,000 are accommodated in camps, though some of these are little more than giant warehouses for surplus people. The rest are rooting for themselves on the margins of society and dodging police raids against the ‘unregistered’ (another of the terms favoured by state racism). A measure of the extreme marginalisation of the refugees is that an estimated 80% of Syrian children in Turkey do not attend school.[6]

Britain holds about 25,000 people in detention centres. The Guardian described conditions thus: ‘In some senses, they look, sound, smell, and taste just like prisons: bland food, bleak corridors, standard-issue tracksuits and blue flip-flops, and the mechanical clunk at 9pm when everyone is locked in for the night. But Britain’s network of immigration removal centres are a case apart for the 25,000-plus people who pass through one each year: there is no rehabilitation, no criminal sentence, very often no time limit on the loss of liberty. Many of those incarcerated say the conditions are far worse than actual prison.’[7]

The British state – under the Brexit regime of Boris Johnson – is promising further repression. The Tories are talking about raising the income threshold for immigrants from £30,000 to £36,700 per year – this being the amount they must earn to secure residence rights. This, one assumes, will now be applied to a new category of ‘illegals’. Around 40% of the 3.6 million EU citizens resident in Britain are being denied permanent residency in the run-up to Brexit on 31 October. Their plight was encapsulated by the televised plea on 29 August of a Portuguese woman who has lived and worked in Britain for 20 years. ‘I have no voice… The resettlement scheme is not working… I can’t just be kicked out… I am very angry,’ she told a Sky News reporter.[8]

This is the true meaning of Brexit for the working class: the division of the population into ‘nationals’ and ‘illegals’. This is the face of state fascism.

This is what fascism looks like

The ‘illegal’ Muslims of Assam and the ‘illegal’ Europeans in Britain have not actually done anything to earn their new status: it has been imposed upon them by the state. They have not murdered a black man in a cell like some police do. They have not stolen public money by fiddling their expenses like some MPs do. They have not sexually abused children like some celebrities do. They have not dodged their taxes like some corporations do. The Muslims of Assam and the Europeans in Britain have not done any of these things. Instead, simply by virtue of who they happen to be, they have been designated ‘illegal’, reclassified as ‘unregistered’, turned into ‘inadmissables’, by a nationalist-racist state.

How many people were held in Nazi concentration camps in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, more than six years after Hitler first came to power? Compared with what was to come, not many. One estimate puts the number at 21,000.

When the war ended, of course, there were three-quarters of a million in the camps, and some 12 million had been murdered. It was the war, and in particular the Nazi conquest of Poland and western Russia, that created the context for interwar fascism’s hideous culmination in the Holocaust.

Fascism is a process. It has begun again.

The people of the world must organise, mobilise, and fight – by any means necessary – to stop the wave of nationalism, racism, ande fascism that is now threatening to engulf us. And we must face the hard and simple fact that the main enemy is the state itself.

The upsurge of mass resistance to the Brexit Coup has to be seen as part of a global struggle to smash second-wave fascism.

Never again! Onto the streets!

Stop the Coup! Stop Brexit!

All Migrants are Welcome Here! No-one is Illegal!

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it.

[1] https://www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-at-a-glance.html

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-45002549

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49520593

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/asia/india-muslims-narendra-modi.html

3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49460386

[4] https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/united-states

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/14/politics/ice-raids-undocumented-immigrants/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/12/politics/mike-pence-border-immigration/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/asylum-seekers-limbo-eu-countries

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/03/trauma-runs-deep-for-children-at-dire-lesbos-camp-moria

https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/press/2019/1/5c500c504/six-people-died-day-attempting-cross-mediterranean-2018-unhcr-report.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/31/un-calls-for-evacuation-of-libyan-refugees-amid-dire-conditions

[6] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pictures-of-life-for-turkeys-25-million-syrian-refugees-crisis-migrant-a6969551.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/turkey-6000-refugees-arrested-istanbul-crackdown-190724113011835.html

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/life-in-a-uk-immigration-removal-centre-worse-than-prison-as-criminal-sentence

[8] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/priti-patel-migrant-minimum-salary-threshold-home-office-a9056846.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/30/eu-citizens-uk-settled-status-alarm

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2019/aug/29/i-need-a-voice-portuguese-womans-brexit-plea-video

There were angry protests everywhere – from Bodmin to Orkney, from Swansea to St Albans. People in cities, towns, and villages – many of whom had never been on a demonstration before – came out against an illegitimate government. Across the country, the chant ‘Stop the Coup’ rang out.

In London, tens of thousands filled Whitehall, and thousands of young people went from there to take direct action – closing roads and bridges and marching on Buckingham Palace. They were outraged by Johnson’s attack on democracy, overwhelmingly against Brexit, solidly anti-racist and committed to free movement.

A new mass movement is being born.

Many of these protests were spontaneous. Many others were organised by campaign groups such as Another Europe is Possible. All credit to them!

The Labour leadership called on people to join the protests. Jeremy Corbyn spoke in Glasgow and Diane Abbott and John McDonnell in London. Many grassroots activists spoke alongside them, as well as Laura Parker from Momentum and the new general secretary of the UCU lecturers’ union, Jo Grady.

What is at stake? We are entering a struggle for the future: not just of this country but across the world. It is a struggle against the politics of the far right – the politics of the 1930s.

The suspension of Parliament is the latest stage in the right-wing takeover of the Tory Party and the Government that began with the Brexit referendum in 2016. The Leave campaign was pumped full of money by billionaire Aaron Banks. It used unlawful data targeting methods. It was fed by the lies of the Tory press. It was the opposite of democracy.

Anti-migrant xenophobia was the key to the victory of the Leave camp. And in the frenzy whipped up by the far right, MP Jo Cox was tragically murdered.

If we don’t defeat it, the suspension of Parliament will mean a calamitous hard Brexit, followed by a general election. In this, Johnson will posture as the politician who carried out the will of the people. He will advance an utterly reactionary programme based on being ‘tough’ on crime and fake spending promises.

The chickens of the 2016 referendum are coming home to roost. This was never simply about crashing out of the EU. It was always about the extreme right seizing control of the Tory Party and then the Government. They have done so.

Now they want to impose their ultra-right programme. They want to turn Britain into a deregulated, cheap labour, low-tax, outpost, with minimal workplace and environmental regulations. With no EU deal, Johnson will be forced to accept a trade deal imposed by the United States – with grave implications for the NHS. This will make Britain a vassal state. A cornucopia for ruthless billionaires, exporting cheap labour, operating as an off-shore tax haven.

There would be huge tax cuts for the rich, paid for by the working class. There would be soaring prices, stagnant or reduced wages, a collapsing health service and social care sector. Zero-hours contracts would be hugely expanded, with a reduction or abolition of the national minimum wage further down the line. Cue rampant racism and attacks on immigrants. Cue new attacks on trade unions and democratic rights. Cue British servility to American militarism world wide.

This is the hard Brexit that must be fought. It’s the only one on offer. So the Labour Party must fight for Remain.

On Saturday, Extinction Rebellion activists occupying Manchester’s Deansgate spontaneously joined their actions with the anti-Brexit coup mobilisation. This is the kind of unity that is needed. We need to come together to fight and win.

There seems little chance that parliamentary action alone can stop the coup. Even with opposition parties united – a moot point – it needs Tory rebels to stand up to their leadership. In the past, all such rebellions have faded away. Johnson is threatening all Tory MPs who oppose his plans with immediate deselection. Tory MPs have few principles, but keeping their seat in Parliament is one.

Stopping the coup in Parliament would require a complex operation that could be derailed in the Lords. And even if Parliament succeeds in voting it down, the Johnson regime threatens to deepen its attack on democracy by ignoring it.

The present spontaneous mass action is showing the way. Now we need Labour and the trade union leaders to step up and play their part. They must call a national demonstration – a million-person (or more) march. Trade union leaders such as Dave Prentis from Unison, Len McCluskey from Unite, and TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady all recognise how calamitous Johnson’s plans are for workers and their families. The threats to union rights, to the NHS, and the threat of mass casualisation and large-scale unemployment are staring them in the face. They cannot step back from this fight.

Trade unionists must call for our unions to join together with Labour in preparing this national mobilisation, linking with the new movement that’s forming. The Labour and trade union movement has the strength to overturn the drive to dictatorship that the Johnson government represents.

Tory strategists will be reckoning that however this plays out, they can win a general election with a hard Brexit message, topped up with promises to build more prisons, lengthen sentences, exclude more unruly pupils, and spend more on the NHS.

The best way for Labour to prepare to win the election is to join with the mass mobilisation against the Brexit coup. The politics played out in the next few weeks will determine the future of Britain for years.

MPs can’t win the fight in Parliament without the mass action and civil disobedience we’re seeing across the country. We have to step it up on both fronts. This is a continuing struggle and we must link up with others across Europe and beyond who are facing the same attacks on democracy.

We must act, but we must also debate. We must decide strategy and tactics as we go forwards. This is the reason for this bulletin. It is an initiative of anti-Brexit internationalists on the Left. Please contact us with reports of actions in your area and ideas about the way forward. Contact us for further copies. Let’s work together to stop the coup, stop Brexit, and launch the fight for a better world.

Now is the time to act.

]]> https://prruk.org/hundreds-of-thousand-mobiulise-nationwide-against-the-brexit-coup/ Sat, 31 Aug 2019 17:21:22 +0000 http://prruk.org/?p=11106 Where were today’s demonstrations against the suspension of Parliament? Everywhere!

A mass movement has been born. The 100,000+ in Whitehall is what you might have expected  at a major national demo, but today it was just part of the action. Demonstrators turned out in big cities like Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham,  Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle  and Leeds, but also  in smaller towns including York, Brighton, Litchfield, St Albans, Oxford and Clitheroe. Great receptions for Jeremy Corbyn in Glasgow and John McDonnell and Diane Abbott in London.  Here are just some of the photos from #StoptheCoup and #StoptheBrexitcoup. Some of these twitter photos are not great quality, but they give a feel for the scale of the mobilisation.

Whitehall

Sheffield

Bangor

Whitehall

London

Brighton

Clitheroe

Leeds

Exeter

Manchester

York

Glasgow

Trafalgar Square

Satanists against the coup

Malaga, Spain

Parliamentary options to protect democracy are limited, but we can use mass civil disobedience to create a situation politically unbearable for the Tories.

We’re being collectively gaslighted, and we know it. When Boris Johnson and a string of ministers tried to tell the British people that it was “routine” to suspend Parliament for five weeks, we could see from their faces and body language that they knew it was a lie.

But this cynical deployment of the smirk and the shoulder shrug comes at a cost, as Johnson will now find out. Last night, as I joined the thousands occupying the greens and squares around Parliament, I met people furious at the blatant theft of their democracy. Some had simply left their office with a hand-scrawled sign, to take part in their first ever political act.

They did so because they have an innate sense of the beauty and fragility of parliamentary democracy, even if they don’t get the intricacies.

They know that Johnson has broken our constitutional principles in two ways: first, he used a technical suspension of Parliament that normally lasts days to call a shutdown of Parliament against its will, for five weeks. Parliament has never been shut down against its will in our lifetime.

Hundreds marched through the Cotswold town of Malvern on Thursday evening

Secondly, his staff briefed the media that, should Parliament vote to stop him, or to remove him as Prime Minister, he will ignore them. We are now warned, again by his unseen spokespeople, that he will refuse to forward any emergency laws passed to the Queen for Royal Assent. That’s what makes this a coup.

This is such a clear attack on parliamentary democracy that it not only brought progressive people to the streets, it has knocked the wind out of the middle class racists and xenophobes who support the Brexit Party and No Deal as a project.

The moral strength of the Leave argument was always that we would “take back control” via parliamentary sovereignty. It drew on a strain of radical democratic principles that has always been strong within English nationalism, and which stand at odds with what Johnson has done. So, from today, the struggle is no longer about Leave versus Remain. It’s about whether Britain is going to be a political and economic colony of Trump’s USA.

But where do we go from here? It’s said that Johnson wants exactly this kind of confrontation. We know his backroom mastermind, Dominic Cummings, revels in military geek-speak from the Vietnam War era. For Cummings, the aim is always to “make the enemy react to you” – and to shape the battlefield in advance so that we lose.

Looked at this way, Johnson’s parliamentary shutdown was simply the programmed response to opposition MPs throwing him off-balance. On Monday, MPs from across all parties agreed to take control of parliament and block No Deal. So within 24 hours, Johnson’s playbook meant he had to do something to throw that off balance. The coup was the result.

The parliamentary options are now limited. Phase one is for MPs to take control of the parliamentary agenda, through something called Standing Order 24. Phase two – being prepared right now – is to publish legislation stopping No Deal. Phase three is preventing Johnson and his allies from filibustering or sabotaging that legislation.

If we get through all these phases by the 14th of September, when parliament is due to be suspended, Johnson has the following options: he can ignore the new law, triggering a total constitutional meltdown that will see my friends and I transfer our protests from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, or he can call a snap general election.

In that case, the opposition parties have 14 days to form a replacement government with a majority in Parliament – and my hopes are growing that they will do so.

But our secret weapon is ourselves. Whether it’s at the Oxford Union or on the wretched PPE course the elite all seemingly have to attend, what I’ve noticed is the total disdain among otherwise clever people for mass action. People in these elite circles regard the spectacle of the streets like dog-dirt on their shoes. As a result, they have no idea of its power – both to change politics and to transform and exhilarate the people taking it.

What we need now is a mass peaceful movement of civil disobedience. Protest theory tells us that if around 4 percent of the population simply refuses to comply with the powers that be, we win.

Authorities can tolerate mass demos, even isolated sit-downs in Whitehall. But Tory MPs live in the real world of high streets, shopping centres, village fetes, private members clubs – the very civil society that Margaret Thatcher once claimed did not exist. There are not enough security guards, police or cameras to prevent every public space – from a football match to Westfield on a Saturday afternoon – becoming the venue for some goodnatured and peaceful symbolic action that starts a conversation and calls people onto the streets.

Add to that the power of networks. The three tools you need for mass online movements are networks of activists, some Twitter “superstars” and a technology platform that can leverage all the power into one place at the right time. By my reckoning we have the first two, and could have the third going by Sunday night.

Another thing we have is the power of laughter; these dour-faced hypocrites in oversize twill suits most certainly don’t.

With all these things – mass action, networks and humour – we can, like the Hong Kong protesters, “be water”. Flow around obstacles in a way that makes their Vietnam-era political combat strategies irrelevant.
At our impromptu meeting last night I heard a refugee from Chechnya, a migrant worker from Poland and a 13-year-old schoolgirl take the mic and call, in simple language, for a radical change. Here’s why that is important: it may be that we can’t stop Brexit. It may be that Johnson crashes us out on the 31st of October, to cheers from Trump and the tabloid press. But we can make the overhead cost of that – and the chaos that follows – politically unbearable for the Tory party.

Even No Deal is not the end of Brexit. In the end, Britain will have to sign a deal with Europe. It will be a straight choice: Trump’s terms or Europe’s terms.

A government of progressive parties, determined to make that deal fair and keep Britain close to Europe, would stop Farage and Johnson’s attempts to hand our economy over to the USA – and leave a pathway for the next generation to re-enter the EU, if they’ll have us. This massive self-own by the Tories makes that much more likely.

But the best case scenario is that we drive Johnson from office, and in the process shatter the tawdry alliance of billionaires and racist pensioners who support No Deal.

I’ve learned – from reporting the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Greek crisis and the Gaza war – that the most important question in a crisis is: “Where am I going to put my body?” By turning this from an issue about Brexit into an issue about democracy, Johnson just gave millions of people a reason to ask themselves that question.

@paulmasonnews

Let me summarise our argument and its relationship to events:

The election of Donald Trump in the US and the Leave victory in Britain’s EU Referendum formed part of a rising global tide of nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and authoritarianism.

In the absence of a strong labour movement with its own armed militias (as in the interwar period), we should not expect paramilitary organisation to feature heavily in modern forms of fascism.

Fascism is a political process, not a done deal. Anyone who takes a tick-box approach to defining it belongs in a sociology seminar. Activists engaged in the class struggle have to grasp that everything is motion: it is the dynamic and trajectory of mass political phenomena that matter.

The principal agent of fascist repression has always been the existing state apparatus. There are no historical examples of fascism overthrowing the liberal-bourgeois state and creating a new fascist-totalitarian state. Without exception, fascism takes over the existing state and, by a process of purge, coercion, and indoctrination, turns it into the main instrument of its dictatorship. Therefore, if fascists can take control of the state by electoral means, they will do so.

Nor does fascism necessarily require its own party form. Just as the state can be transformed and made fascist, so might existing right-wing parties be taken over and made fascist. There are many historical examples, but in this regard we do not need to delve far into the past. The Far Right has now taken over both the Republican Party in the US and the Tory Party in Britain.

The EU Referendum and the Leave Campaign represented the first stage in a slow-motion coup by the Tory Right. The second stage was the election of Boris Johnson as Tory leader and prime minister. Long before his election, we argued that Johnson was the British Trump in waiting.

For anyone on the Left to back Brexit is a catastrophic mistake. It means, at a time when the labour movement and the Left are very weak, supporting the flagship project of the Far Right instead of challenging head-on the nationalism and racism at its core. It means, in practice, abandoning internationalism, anti-racism, and solidarity with the oppressed.

By peddling Lexit, the degenerated sects of the Far Left have cut themselves off from the progressive vanguard of the working class. Far worse, by attempting to ‘triangulate’ between reactionary Leave voters and progressive Remain voters – a policy engineered by backroom Lexiters – the Labour leadership has a) failed to challenge the nationalism and racism of the Far Right, b) split the progressive vote (facilitating, in particular, a massive Liberal-Democrat surge), and c) laid the basis for possible electoral collapse

As soon as Johnson was elected, we made a further prediction: that he would be forced to go for a general election to secure a stable working majority, and that he would fight this on a ‘People versus Elites’ platform. The proroguing of Parliament is preparation for that: for stage three of the slow-motion coup that began in 2016.

Some sort of lash-up with Farage and the Brexit Party remains highly probable, and if this is done, Labour, on current showing, is liable to be smashed. At the moment, we have an unstable Far Right regime. If the Johnson regime crashes out of the EU on 31 October and then wins a general election, we could have a stable regime able to govern for a full term. The implications of that are spelt out in the Public Reading Rooms editorial ‘Defend Democracy: Stop the Coup’ (https://prruk.org/johnsons-coup-fight-for-mass-action-to-re-open-parliament/).

The prospect would be fast tracking towards a low-wage sweatshop and tax-haven in the edge of Europe; becoming a colony of American-based corporate asset-strippers and privatisers; turning into a country where wages stagnate, public services are sold off, the poor are left to rot, and minorities are hounded by the police in a context of moral panics around crime, migration, and terrorism; evolving into a nationalist-racist silo filled with hate, repression, and misery.

Is this what fascism looks like?

Despite the creeping fascism thesis, and the accumulating evidence of its accuracy, I have generally avoided applying the term ‘fascist’ to politicians like Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen, and Salvini. I have tended to assume that they represent stages on a road towards fascism, and that other, harder, nastier, more fully-fledged fascists would in due course emerge. I no longer think this.

Modi, the Hindu chauvinist leader of India, has put mainly-Muslim Kashmir under military occupation. Erdogan, the nationalist-Islamist leader of Turkey, has shut down the independent media and sacked tens of thousands of academics, teachers, and lawyers. Bolsonaro, the racist-misogynist leader of Brazil, is destroying the Amazon rainforest.

Tens of thousands are held in concentration camps on the US-Mexican border. Thousands more are held in detention centres elsewhere. Seven US states have made abortion effectively illegal, and the Far Right is poised to try and extend this to the rest of the country.

Tens of thousands more are held in concentration camps in Libya, Turkey, and Europe. These include detention centres in Britain, where people deemed by the state to be ‘illegal’ are incarcerated by private security firms in deference to a nationalist-racist definition of who is and who is not entitled to their liberty.

These things are happening now. They are being normalised, and then augmented in further attacks, by a global Far Right that is surging, confident, empowered. Creeping fascism is not a matter of moving slowly towards a still-distant destination; it is a matter of gradually implementing the fascist programme in the here and now.

So when Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswomen for Minnesota, says that Trump is a fascist, she is right to do so. This is not casual abuse: it is an accurate description of Trump’s politics, in theory and practice.

To describe the new generation of Far Right politicians as ‘fascist’ is not to describe their power, but a) their intent, b) their base, and c) their trajectory. Their power is not yet absolute. It is not the power of Hitler in 1934, let alone in 1944.

By advancing directly on state power by electoral means, the new fascists find themselves confronting the deeply-embedded liberal parliamentary systems of the post-war era without having the assistance of an activist mass party of hundreds of thousands like the Nazis and the Brownshirts of 1932.

Though they have gathered the ‘human dust’ of capitalist crisis into a electoral base motivated by ‘the shit of ages’ – nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, authoritarianism, militarism – they lack the means to batter their liberal opponents into immediate submission. Events unfold more slowly.

But they are playing a carefully calculated game. It is a new game, with new rules, and they are playing in deadly earnest for the highest stakes. Everything is discussed, planned, thought through. Nothing is left to chance. And in this regard, in relation to their opponents, the new fascists are way ahead of the curve.

What is to be done?

In this sense – in the only sense in which the term becomes meaningful in the early 21^st century – Johnson is a fascist. He is now leading an acceleration in the slow-motion coup that began in 2016. To repeat, it is the process, the dynamic, the trajectory that define the project. To repeat, it is the state that is the main enemy, the main instrument of repression, the main mechanism for increasing authoritarianism, nationalism, and persecution.

The label matters, because if Johnson is, to all intents and purposes, a fascist, then building active mass resistance by any means necessary becomes an immediate and overriding political priority. Before it is too late. Before we are in Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, or Sisi’s Egypt, where resistance is effectively illegal.

The liberal centre will collapse. This is what happened in Germany and everywhere else in the 1930s. The liberals never fight. In Germany, in March 1933, in the Reichstag, they voted for the Enabling Act that made Hitler a dictator.

The Left must lead the resistance. The workers, the renters, the women, the minorities, the whole mass of the exploited and the oppressed, must be organised and mobilised in all-out struggle.

But that requires leadership, and that is so woefully lacking. The leaders of the Labour Party and the TUC should be calling for and organising for mass resistance. But they are not. Corbyn has appealed to the Queen. A modern socialist leader, confronting a Far Right coup, turns to a feudal relic. Others place their faith in legal challenges and constitutional manoeuvres.

What is perhaps most pitiful is the craven submission of the liberal political elite in the face of the prorogation order. It is the act of an unelected prime minister who is a rank political chancer, a serial liar, and a man who owes his position to the votes of 90,000 members of an ageing party of Islamophobic bigots. It has been underwritten by the ludicrous anachronism of the British monarchy, a racket currently run by a family of reactionary toffs with a long record of racism, snobbery, and sleaze. Why does the liberal political elite not do the obvious thing: ignore the prorogation order and continue sitting as the leadership of the popular resistance?

More specifically, why does Labour not propose this, setting itself up as the leadership of a popular, progressive, pro-democracy, anti-Brexit mass movement? The fascists have a plan and a goal. The Left is in desperate need of leadership that is equally serious and determined.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and h

Johnson’s suspension of parliament has revealed the utter cynicism of the Tory leaders. If it suits them, they will trumpet the sovereignty of parliament; if not they will suspend it. Apoplectic anger and stern denunciations by opposition politicians will not stop this coup. Labour has taken legal advice on a judicial review, which will almost certainly fail. Mass anger has to be turned into mass action in communities and on the streets to impose the re-opening of parliament.

Brexit, especially a Tory hard Brexit, is the centre-piece of a programme of super-Thatcherism, that the Johnson government is preparing to implement. Their plan is to turn Britain into a deregulated, cheap labour, low-tax, outpost with minimal workplace and environmental regulations. With no EU deal, Johnson would cleave to a trade deal imposed by the United States – reducing Britain to the status of a vassal state. A cornucopia for ruthless billionaires, exporting cheap labour as its major product.

The huge tax cuts for the rich would be immediately paid for by the working class. Cue soaring prices, stagnant or reduced wages, a collapsing health service and social care sector. Cue a huge extension of zero hours contracts, with a reduction or abolition of the national minimum wage further on down the line. Cue rampant racism and attacks on immigrants. Cue new attacks on trade unions and democratic rights. And cue British servility to American militarism and counter-revolution world wide.

Anti-Brexit Tory Dominic Grieve showed the pathetic response of anti-Johnson Tories when he said: ‘I don’t think parliament can stop prorogation although there may be something that parliament can do to register its deep concern.’ Grieve wants a ‘humble petition’ to the Queen to express parliament’s ‘deep concern’. That will set them quaking in their boots in No 10.

Three days before the 2016 Brexit referendum, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said it was an attempted coup by the right-wing of the Conservative Party. It was – and it succeeded. The next stage is to carry through a no-deal Brexit, followed by a general election in an atmosphere of xenophobic euphoria. Sealing the most spectacular victory for the radical right in Britain since world war 2.

As a first stage to prevent that tragedy, Labour and the unions should call for a million-person march to Westminster to impose the re-opening of parliament. This is a hugely dangerous situation and time is not on our side. The labour and trade union movement has the power to defeat this hard-right government. The leadership of the Labour Party must call mass rallies throughout the country. Now is the time to act.

Turning the tables on Johnson now can help prepare for resisting the Tory onslaught in the general election.

Protest at College Green outside Parliament: 5.30pm this evening – 28 August 2019

Demonstrators outside the Brazilian embassy in London. Top of page anti-G7 demonstrators at the French/Spanish border.

At a global level, two things stand out. First there are strong signs of another world recession. The announcement that the German economy is in negative growth is ominous. A decade of worldwide austerity has virtually ensured another recession. And Donald Trump’s trade war against China, plus Brexit, have thrown fuel on the flames.

Second, the response to the Amazon wildfire crisis in Brazil, with Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macon and now (laughably) Boris Johnson demanding action, is very significant. These capitalist leaders have not suddenly become eco-warriors determined to save the plant. The extent of popular anger can no longer be ignored. An understanding that the wildfire crisis is linked to predatory extractive capitalism, which has zero regard for the lives and well-being of indigenous peoples, is widespread. As is the realisation that the thumbs-up given to loggers by far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is the proximate cause of the crisis. The United States, of course, is the one major Western capitalist power not to have negatively commented on the failures of the Brazilian government.

Donald Trump’s August 23 ‘order’ that US firms had to quit China – something quite impossible – was a petulant response to China’s announcement of new tariffs against US goods. Trump is furious because, unlike Iran, China has the capacity to hit back against American economic aggression, with substantial effect. In fact China has been reluctant to be drawn into a trade war, understanding the negative effects for its own situation and the world economy.

In the present situation, the world slowdown plus trade wars and Brexit could combine to create a new financial crash. While it took untold billions of quantitative easing dollars to stabilise the US and British economies after the 2008 crash, it is far from clear that such an operation could be repeated. Crash could turn into slump, with devastating consequences.

The new Chinese tariffs against US goods are entirely retaliatory. Trump’s initiation of the trade war was a recognition that the United States’ position as the global economic and political leader is under threat, a threat that has been dealt with by ramping up both economic and military pressure against Beijing.

In the first days of the Johnson premiership, the character of this government has been shown by its declarations on Brexit, immigration and crime.

The announcement by Home Secretary Priti Patel that free movement between Britain and the EU would be stopped on day one of Britain crashing out of the EU has caused consternation among European citizens living in Britain. An estimated two million EU citizens have not registered for settled status. Now there is the danger of a ‘Windrush’ situation on a grand scale, with many thousands of people liable to be deported. Many of them have lived here for years or have children born here who are thus UK citizens. At the very least, hundreds of thousands will fear not being re-admitted to Britain if they go abroad.

Stopping free movement, plus a swathe of reactionary proposals on crime, show how the Johnson government is preparing for a general election. The only question is whether it will come before or after a final Commons vote on a no-deal Brexit. In the general election the Tories will go all out to mobilise the most reactionary sections of the population, disproportionately older and white, on a socially backward, xenophobic, anti-immigrant platform. It will be a carnival of reaction that can only be countered by mobilising the most progressive sections of the population on an anti-Hard Brexit platform. It should not be automatically assumed that the Labour defectors who voted Liberal Democrat during the European elections in June can automatically be won back. It needs clear evidence of Labour’s determination to fight against a hard Brexit and in defence of immigrant workers.

Xenophobia and racism at the top have emboldened the fascists. Racist attacks and attacks on other minorities are at significantly higher levels since the 2016 referendum. The violent attack on left-wing journalist Owen Jones was a sign of the times. As Jones himself points out, there is a distinct lack of outrage about the growing tide of extreme right-wing violence. A general election waged by the Tories under the banner of a hard Brexit, attacking immigrant workers’ rights, building more prisons and lengthening sentences, will further generate an atmosphere in which the fascist street thugs and other violent racists will be emboldened.

Boris Johnson’s pre-G7 summit trip around European capitals was mainly for show. There is no serious belief anywhere that Johnson will be able to negotiate a new deal with Europe, in particular because the European Union will not give up the ‘Backstop’ arrangement, designed to prevent a hard border between the Irish Republic and the northern Six Counties.

Any attempt to ditch the backstop would be vetoed by the Irish Republic. As veteran Derry socialist Eamon McCann pointed out on Channel 4 news, if customs posts and check points are put along the Irish border, then within days people will be shooting at them. More likely, as a first step, thousands will be marching from north and south across the border to demonstrate its injustice and uselessness. The shooting will come later.

Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar cannot give way on the Backstop; his government would fall if he did. On the other hand, a temporary Backstop arrangement would presuppose a close alignment of UK and European tariffs, something that is anathema to the dominant Tory right wing. Boris Johnson says he doesn’t want a hard Brexit, but in reality, that is what his government is preparing for.

All the signs are that while Britain hurtles towards a no deal Brexit, preparations for it are chaotic. The government’s own documents reveal likely shortages of food and medicines, and chaos at ports. Food and medicine security is of central importance to the working class, especially the older and poorer sections, who are very vulnerable to supply disruption. Things will play out badly for the vast majority of the population if Britain crashes out of the EU and becomes a vassal state of the United States. Johnson leads a government with no majority and faces defeat in parliament over his drive for a no deal Brexit. His response has been to seek legal advice over closing down parliament. Should he do this he will ignite a political crisis that will be impossible to extinguish. Hundreds of thousands will take to the streets. So at the moment the Tories wait and prepare the ground for such a move. We must prepare too.

The mobilisations in Britain and elsewhere in protest at the Brazil rainforest crisis show the extent of socially progressive forces, especially among the youth, who can be mobilised against the dangers that threaten humanity. Task one is to prevent a hard Brexit in the UK, to begin to drive back extreme right reaction.

As was widely publicised, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was in London last week, having meetings with senior government ministers. According to the UK government, this was all about negotiating a trade deal after Britain leaves the EU on October 31. Simon Tisdall in the Guardian says that it was not really about trade, it was about aligning a post-hard Brexit Britain with US foreign policy imperatives, such as withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and refusing to allow Chinese electronics giant Huawei access to the UK’s 5G infrastructure.

Of course the Bolton visit was about both. There is no divide between economics and politics in the US government; and ever since the Project for a New American Century report in 1997 – the panel that produced it was chaired by John Bolton – the United States has leaned on its military dominance and hence dominant political role, to leverage its economic position.

Hard Brexit is a Godsend for the Trump administration. Boris Johnson, if he wins the upcoming election, will be desperate for a trade deal with the US. Unless that happens, Britain outside the EU will operate with calamitous Word Trade Organisation rules, and giant tariff walls worldwide. And the United States is perfectly well disposed to a trade deal with the UK – on their terms, economically and politically. Britain will have to get into line with US trade demands and also political/military demands. This will involve subordinating the world’s fifth largest economy and its political weight to the needs of Washington; it will amount to a substantial shift to the right in the world relationship of economic and political forces.

Economically the US had made its position crystal clear by publishing in February this year a summary of its trade deal negotiating objectives. This involves detailed demands for full access to the UK for American investment capital, including all state operated or controlled enterprises, with only commercial criteria being used. It contains strictures against ‘unfair’ subsidies for domestic companies, and demands a harmonisation of standards for goods and services, including food and agriculture. In return the UK would be required to accept the US government’s own ‘Buy American’ policy. The document also contains proposals for banning any attempt to discriminate against Israeli goods in trade.

Ironically there is one area where the US position seems more ‘progressive’ than the present practices of the UK government – labour law, which the US says it wants harmonised with ILO conditions on the right to organise unions and decent working conditions. In practice it is unlikely, to say the least, that the US would object to the UK’s anti-unions laws, which would probably be further tightened in the event of a Boris Johnson electoral victory.

There are also numerous proposals for joint oversight and dispute resolution. It amounts to forcing the UK into close alignment with American political and economic needs. It would force a unique subordination to the United States at a level that has not been seen between two major capitalist countries since the Nazi invasion of France, and the American occupation of Japan after the second world war. Any attempt by the UK to pretend to independent foreign policy or trade positions, especially in relation to Iran, the Middle East and China, could be met by immediate trade retaliation. Chlorinated chicken and US firms further enforcing their penetration of the NHS is the least of it; Britain as a 51st state is on the agenda.

This attempt to shore up a Trump-Johnson international hard right axis comes at exactly the same time as Matteo Salvini’s Lega party in Italy has forced a general election, in an attempt to eject his Five Star party coalition allies, leaving the fascists in complete control.

Steve Bannon at Brothers of Italy Rally 2017

The Lega party is likely to win the upcoming election in alliance the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), led by Giorgia Meloni. The Brothers are the re-branded fascist MSI (Italian Social Movement), the historic continuers of the Mussolini tradition. The same people who cheer in bars when the deaths of immigrants in the Mediterranean are reported on TV News, will also cheer the election of an all-fascist government.

The Lega-Five Star government has already resulted in a spike in racist attacks against immigrants and Roma people, as well as the death of hundreds of would-be immigrants who have drowned as a result of their flimsy boats being refused permission to land and driven out to sea.

As Roberto Saviano reported:

“The list of reported racist incidents in Italy from the beginning of this year is shocking. In Lecce province, a young boy from Sierra Leone was battered on the back with a chair as his assailants racially abused him and told him to ‘go home’. In Rome, a 12-year-old Egyptian was verbally abused and beaten up so badly by a group of older boys that he ended up in hospital. A black brother and sister were pilloried by a schoolmaster in Foligno, in central Italy. Women of colour are more and more treated as if they were sex workers – and not only in the street but even in public offices. Many incidents go unreported, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that what is happening in Italy is a sign of a descent into barbarism.”

The election of a Salvini-led fascist government will lead to a new crisis for the EU, with a strong temptation by the Lega-led government to repeat Britain’s exit from the EU and more closely align with the United States. This corresponds of course with the Trump administration’s plan to force European politics to the right and widen its alliance against China.

The news that the German economy is sliding into recession is a confirmation of the warnings of many economists, that there is a danger of a new world slump. A time of new economic turmoil, at a level as big or bigger than 2008, with the far right on the march and the left retreating in many places, highlights major dangers for the world working class.

In these circumstances, the announcement of a new left-wing pro-Brexit campaign is, as Lenin once put it, like wishing people many happy returns of the day at a funeral.

In the current political context, if the United Kingdom leaves the European Union that will represent a significant victory for right-wing forces in Britain. And it is not just in Britain that the Right will experience a lift. A similar effect will be felt across Europe. The debacle of the Brexit process shows up the deep divisions within the Tory Party. However, the one thing that unites them is their common determination to keep the British Labour Party out of government.

Theresa May’s June decision to enter talks with Jeremy Corbyn was but an endeavour to save her hugely unpopular Brexit deal and to remain in office as Tory Prime Minister. Seeking common ground around a demand that originally emerged from the far-right of the British Tory Party will damage the Labour Party and could yet become a major factor in diminishing Labour’s popularity across the country.

Critical Juncture

The European Union is currently a major political issue, not just in European countries but across the world. The Brexit process has wreaked havoc. On a global scale political forces on the right are salivating at the prospect of Britain leaving the EU. Reactionary movements are trying to gain traction amongst an increasingly disenchanted working population, and opposition to the EU is their bridgehead. In France, Le Pen looks to Brexit as an inspiration. Likewise, in Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Germany and other countries, the right is advancing behind an anti-EU banner. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) has joined forces with Lega in Italy, the Law and Justice Party in Poland and the Swedish Democrats in the run-up to the next European elections.

Trump has for a long time proclaimed his wish to see to break-up of the European Union along national lines. Shortly after his inauguration he invited Nigel Farage to a big welcome at the White House. Steve Bannon has spoken at anti-EU meetings in Europe. Nigel Farage addressed a similar meeting in Dublin. Lest there be any lingering doubts about the alignment of the right around hostility to the EU, a recent statement by Trump, where he encouraged Theresa May to get on with the process of Brexit, promising her immediate discussions about a trade deal between the UK and the US, post-Brexit.

It is essential that socialists be principled and consistent in this volatile atmosphere. To underestimate the economic and political damage inherent in the Brexit process would constitute a serious error. The future of the EU has many implications in terms of living standards and working conditions. But in addition, racism, right-wing nationalism and xenophobia are advancing under the cover of the Referendum decision of June 2016.

Today 510 million people live within the EU, 6% of the world’s population, which is more than the combined populations of the United States of America and Japan. The EU stretches from Helsinki to Lisbon and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. Together the 28 countries of the EU represent the largest economy in the world, the biggest importer and exporter, the leading investor and recipient of foreign investment and the biggest aid donor. So, it is no small question if Britain leaves the EU.

Brexit

Brexit is a right-wing reactionary movement in all its aspects. The leadership of the Brexit project are from the Tory Party far-right, and the very demand itself to leave the European Union has long been a badge of identity for them. Countless forlorn has-beens of the British Tory Party have received a fillip of new energy from the Brexit process. The Tory Party has become the new UKIP. The other wing of Toryism, starting with Macmillan who decided in 1961 to apply for entry to the European Economic Community (EEC), then Heath who signed the Accession Treaty in 1973, and their successors including John Major and David Cameron, were no friends of working people either. It is noteworthy that in the run-up to the 2016 Referendum Prime Minister David Cameron used the renegotiation process to try to undermine workers’ rights, such as are contained in the European Union Working Time Directive and the Temporary Agency Workers Directive, as well as to foster division on issues such as migration. All this was part of an attempt to make the EU more supportive of the interests of big business and finance.

For her part, Thatcher used her supposed hostility to Europe as a demagogic prop in her endeavour to atomise the Welfare State, denationalise publicly-owned industries and destroy the trade union movement. None of this attack on workers’ living conditions was in response to EU Directives. On the contrary, Thatcher secured derogations from EU measures that would have improved conditions at work. And, it was Thatcher who attracted the major Japanese car manufacturers to Britain in the 1980s based on the competitive advantages that membership of the Single Market would confer on them. Honda recently announced that it will close its factory in Swindon. This closure will cost thousands of jobs, as it is not just Honda workers themselves that will be affected. Small and medium-sized engineering companies will be devastated by the consequent disruption of supply chains following Brexit. A similar situation will face many other manufacturing companies in Britain.

The EU

For their part the leading bodies of the EU have in recent years been pursuing policies that worsen the position of working people and their families. The institutions of the EU intensified the crisis in Greece by demanding increasing austerity and privatisation, while undermining the policies of Greece’s democratically-elected government. The EU bureaucracy protected the interests of the large banks and insisted that workers pay for the economic crises also in Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Italy. They tried to get a trade agreement with the United States (TTIP) that would have undermined working conditions, as well as previously-established health and safety measures. They advocate a policy of privatisation and facilitating large corporations.

The problems of the EU are the problems of the member States. Decisions by the ruling bodies of the EU should be challenged in the individual countries as well as by democratic and civic bodies across Europe. The European Parliament is directly elected by its citizens. The largest political party in the European Parliament is the conservative European People’s Party (Christian Democrats). Rather than cower in the shadows moaning about the right-ward shift in EU policies trade unionists and socialists should bring all EU decisions to centre stage and campaign forcefully for socialist policies during the EU Parliamentary elections.

In the Member States they should make the various nominees on the EU governing bodies accountable.  The decision of the EU leading bodies to humiliate Greece and its people in the negotiations with SYRIZA’s leaders on the country’s economic crisis was supported by finance ministers from the Member States of the EU.

The European Commission is composed of nominees of the various governments and is headed by Jean-Claude Juncker, candidate of the right-wing European People’s Party (EPP) Group and a past Prime Minister of Luxembourg. The Commission has a lot of power, such as being the executor of the EU budget and the originator of much legislation. But it is not a behemoth. It is essentially a type of civil service with a similar staff to a large local council in one of the member countries. In the often-frenzied attack on the institutions of the EU sometimes the Commission is singled out for opprobrium. The Commission, and other bodies such as the Eurogroup of Finance Ministers, often step beyond the powers conferred on them by the EU Treaties. Yet the Commission can be overthrown by a decision of the European Parliament. In 1999 the entire Commission was forced to resign following allegations of corruption and mismanagement.
The European Council consists of the Heads of State of the member states. Its President is former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

The Treaties

The European Union (EU) is a product of political processes that span a period of more than sixty years. On 25^th March 1957 the founding Treaty of Rome was adopted. Article 2 established ‘a common market….and a harmonious development of economic activities’ among the six countries involved i.e. France, Italy, Belgium, Germany (West), Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Article 3 called for ‘the abolition…. of obstacles to freedom of movement of persons, services and capital.’ An earlier Treaty, agreed in Paris in 1951, merged the management of the coal and steel industries of these six countries in the immediate aftermath of World War II, thereby establishing the European Coal and Steel Community. Britain’s application in 1963 to join the Common Market, as the EU was then known, was rejected as a result of a veto by Charles De Gaulle. Ten years later Britain joined the Common Market following a decision in the Westminster Parliament. An attempt in 1975 to overturn that decision by Referendum was defeated by a vote of two to one. A series of other Treaties modified and developed the EU since its foundation, among them the Single European Act in 1986, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, the Treaty of Nice in 2000 and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. These Treaties, which inform the corpus of EU law, were agreed either by referendum or parliamentary decision within the member States. The European Single Market, which allows citizens to live, study, shop, work and retire in any EU country, was enshrined in the Single European Act, which came into force in 1987. That Treaty similarly allowed for free movement of people, goods, services and money. A legally-binding Charter of Fundamental Rights was proclaimed in Nice in 2000. The European Court of Justice was established to ensure that Member States abide by commitments in the Treaties. The EU is not just a free-trade area, like for example. the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).  The EU encompasses legislation in such areas as health and safety, human rights, working conditions, animal husbandry and environmental protection.

The EU budget is but a small part of total public expenditure in the EU and constitutes about 2% of public expenditure across all Member States. The EU Regional Aid and Cohesion Policy allows for an investment of €325 billion, or 34% of the EU budget, in the regions and cities of the Member States. The European Social Fund is used to finance vocational education and to combat youth unemployment.

The Treaties lay down the objectives and rules of the EU. To that extent the EU is a site for conducting class struggle. In May 2005 the French people in a referendum rejected an EU Constitutional Treaty. The following month the people of the Netherlands made a similar decision and the Treaty was dropped entirely. A referendum in Ireland in 2000 rejected the Nice Treaty, which was then modified somewhat and subsequently adopted in a new referendum. Not all Member States participate in all areas of EU policy. Only nineteen have adopted the Euro, and twenty-two are members of the Schengen area, which allows passport-free movement between countries. EU taxation policy must be agreed by all member states.

Although the EU has incorporated the Western European Union, a close ally of NATO, as a step towards building its military capabilities, military defence remains in the hands of national governments. Under the rules of the EU individual countries can opt out of any military actions. Direct military intervention can only be engaged upon following separate decisions by each member state. Denmark has rejected support for EU militarisation, although it is the only EU country to have done so. But that does not alter the chosen current alignment of the current EU leaders with the United States of America in terms of global political and military activity. Recent calls by the EU for increased military spending under PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation on Security and Defence) aim at 2% of GDP being devoted to military spending.

It is not alone in the area of defence that Europe’s right-wing leaders have asserted their will. The Fiscal Stability Treaty of 2009 placed obstacles in the way of governments wishing to rely on Keynesian-style budgets and borrowing in order to stimulate domestic economic activity.

Opportunities

The EU provides an opportunity for pursuing alternative socialist policies on an international scale. Trade unions and political parties within the EU operate in joint organisations across national boundaries. The primary requirement for any serious political process is to link policies that are being pursued within the EU with what is happening in the member countries. The right-wing political parties understand this. Of course, the EU will not be transformed into a Socialist Federation. But that does not mean that socialists should not pursue within the structures of the EU policies that serve the interests of workers and their families.

Because of the dominance of Conservative Parties within the EU at the present time, disillusionment with the EU is growing apace, and, in the absence of a clear socialist alternative, this facilitates the growth of right-wing forces. The failure of trade union and socialist leaders to seriously confront and oppose policies of austerity has contributed to this process in a significant way. Since the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979 turnout has consistently fallen, such that in the last elections in 2014 only 42.6% of potential voters cast a ballot. Elections to the European Parliament are generally seen as mere harbingers of impending national elections. But these elections should instead be fought around a common international manifesto of socialist measures. Political disenchantment is always a danger for progressive forces. That is why the Right looks to EU elections as their springboard into the political arena.

The European Peoples’ Party, which brings together the CDU of Angela Merkel, Hungary’s Fidesz, Spain’s Partido Popular and other conservative political Parties, is the largest political bloc in the European Parliament. But that was not always the case. For a long period, the mass parties of the labour movement had a majority. Parties on the Left must now unite around a programme of demands that represent the interests of working people and their families. The self-styled bloc of Socialists and Democrats needs to wake up from its long torpor and recognise its responsibility to its electors. Right-wing forces must be confronted not just in the European Parliament but in national Parliaments and in a European-wide movement on the streets also.

Trade unions throughout the EU should present a common programme and mobilise around that programme. The European Trade Union Confederation brings together trade unions from across Europe. The big employers are multinational and exploit divisions amongst workers along national lines. But just as the capitalists are united across national boundaries so too should workers’ organisations be united.  Anything that weakens that unity should be resisted. Britain leaving the EU now is an example of such division and would represent a weakening of solidarity between workers of different countries.

Demands must be advanced for improvements in pay and working conditions, better health and safety provision, environmental protection, improved public services without cost at point of delivery, nationalisation of the banks and finance houses and publicly-owned industries run efficiently under workers’ control and management and defence of migrant workers and of minorities. A universal living wage for all workers in the EU should be fought for. Such an approach could combat the forced economic migration of workers who decide to leave their home countries and their families in order to secure an improved standard of living. A Europe-wide campaign against the capitalist system should have a secure foothold within the institutions of the EU, as much as within individual countries. Countries that are outside the EU should also be part of this campaign. There are forty-eight countries in Europe, twenty-eight are in the EU.

In addition to this action programme, the trade union and labour movement across Europe should also initiate a campaign to examine all the Treaties of the EU with a view to creating conditions for a new Treaty that would protect public services, expand public ownership of key industries and service provision, facilitate public control of banking and finance and expand educational and cultural provision on an equal basis for all. There is no legal provision within the EU that cannot be reversed. No European Treaty is set in stone. An international conference of the organisations of the European labour movement should be convened for the purpose of examining this issue.

Changing balance within the EU

The balance of forces within the countries of the EU has been changing since its foundation. Spain, Greece and Portugal were admitted to membership in the 1980s, having spent decades under dictatorial rule. The EU structural funds that were allocated to these countries assisted them in the growth of their GNP. Ireland for nearly fifty years since the creation of the Free State in 1922 stagnated with mass emigration and underdevelopment. It joined the EEC in 1973 and, while it experienced a collapse in some of its industries, nevertheless through the European Common Agricultural Policy, the Regional Fund and a policy of encouraging foreign investment the country experienced a general improvement in living standards. Smaller countries were attracted towards the EU because of their increasing isolation in the face of the growing, globalised economic power of the multinationals.

A significant change in the composition of the EU occurred after 2003 when individual accession treaties were signed with several countries emerging from the Stalinist Eastern European bloc, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia. The ruling elites of many of these countries were anxious to align themselves with NATO and the United States. Donald Rumsfeld, during the US and British invasion of Iraq sixteen years ago, referred fondly to this group as ‘new Europe’. The balance of forces has shifted rightward for a period. The left across Europe must unite in combat against the right-wing and conservative forces that dominate European institutions at the present time

Nature of the EU

The EU is a construct of the capitalist system and serves the interests of banks and big business. How could it be otherwise! It was founded following agreement between capitalist States – initially six – and was supported and encouraged by the United States, anxious to prevent the growth of socialist movements in the post-War period, such as occurred in 1918. A few European-American organisations came into being following World War Two, such as the Council of Europe, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation and NATO. The European Economic Community (the Common Market) emerged in that context.

In order to facilitate free movement in commodities, services, labour and capital and to prevent as far as possible any one capitalist enterprise from seeking unfair advantage over another, a series of international Treaties was agreed within the EU and its predecessors. Over time the EU Member States voluntarily surrendered aspects of their sovereignty in areas such as environmental protection, food safety, working conditions, agriculture, animal husbandry, consumer rights and health. EU laws in these areas have the same force as national laws in individual states. For example, the prohibition on discrimination, as set out in various EU directives, takes precedence over conflicting national law.

In addition, Regional and Structural Funds were established to assist in such projects as and road and rail construction, particularly in the less developed countries of Europe.

Balance of Class Forces

The predominance of right-wing governments across Europe today does not mean that all progressive measures at EU level are blocked off at source. A Charter of Fundamental Rights was incorporated into the Treaty of Nice in 2000. EU rules prevent discrimination on grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. A series of Regulations, Directives and Decisions, some beneficial to workers and others against the interests of employees, has over the years been enacted by the EU. That is no different from what happens in individual states. These questions are decided on the basis of the balance of forces in society, not by any legal or moral imperative.

Trade union pressure has led to the EU Commission taking action against ‘wage dumping’ which largely affects workers from Eastern Europe who are employed in areas such as construction and harvesting. In the past these workers had been entitled only to the minimum wage in the host country but now they are to be given the right to the same bonuses and allowances as ‘national’ workers. This follows changes to the Posting of Workers’ Directive. The Working Time Directive was adopted in 1993, and since then the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled on more than fifty working-time related cases.

Maximum weekly working time must not exceed forty-eight hours on average according to a Directive in 2003. The Directives also provide for rest breaks and rest periods.  A Directive in 1997 established equal rights for part-time workers and in 2008 equal treatment for temporary workers became the law. The Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that emergency workers fall within the scope of protection of the Working Time Directive. Equal treatment for men and women in employment became the law within in the EEC in 1976.

Europe has high food standards and the EU regulates food labelling, not just in terms of food content, but also in the case of meat country of origin. Water cleanliness and air purity are similarly regulated.

Although the motivation of the executive and policy-making bodies of the EU is not to serve the interests of working people or the ‘ordinary consumer’ nevertheless, political pressure in 2016 led to the European Commission imposing a fine of nearly €3 billion on a lorry cartel involving Daimler, IVECO and VOLVO for price-fixing. Action is currently underway in the European Court of Justice against Apple Corporation over its failure to pay €13 billion owed in taxes. The giant multinational Volkswagen recently had to pay around $24bn in penalties and compensation over its manipulation of figures for diesel emissions following action taken by the European Union. Over the past two years Google has been fined more than €8 billion by the EU for breaching its antitrust rules and for abusing its dominant market position. Fines totalling €824 million were imposed on a number of banks for manipulating interest rates.

The Euro

The Euro was established following agreement on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Twenty-one years earlier US President Nixon broke the link between the dollar and the official price of gold, thus abolishing the international system of fixed exchange rates, that had been in operation since the end of World War Two. The Bretton Woods international monetary system ended in 1972. Prior to the introduction of the Euro the EU made a number of attempts to create currency stability, such as the Snake, the European Monetary System and the Exchange Rate Mechanism. For a variety of reasons none fully succeeded. In a continuing endeavour to underpin the Single European Market and the free movement of capital, people, goods and services, the Euro was launched in 1999 and became fully operational in 2002.

When the Euro was introduced in 1999 there was no accompanying central fund that could be drawn upon to assist members of the new Monetary Union. The banking system remained under national control. There were no bail-out rules. Both Germany and France in 2003 broke the budget deficit rules that had been set by the Stability and Growth Pact, but neither country faced any sanction. It was the economic crisis of 2008 that brought to the fore many of the contradictions of the capitalist system that had been building up. A bail-out fund was established then, with the support of the International Monetary Fund and the so-called European Stability Mechanism. Bail-out measures, involving austerity budgets and cuts in public sector spending, were forced upon Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus. The approach of the leading bodies of the EU was to defend the assets of the big banks and finance houses at the expense of the living standards of working people and their families.

Yet, despite the difficulties inherent in its structural base, the Euro remains the world’s second most-used currency and accounts for one quarter of the world’s foreign currency reserves. Three hundred and forty million Europeans in nineteen Member States use it on a day by day basis. Clearly the use of the Euro greatly facilitates travel and trade.

Class Struggle

The dominant forces that are now arraigned against the EU and that are calling for exit from the Union are of the far-right. There is understandably continuing criticism of EU policies coming from the left. But there is a particular problem amongst the left in Britain. For many years some left-wing leaders, such as Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn, mistakenly argued that opposition to the EU and its predecessors, regardless of context, should be an essential aspect of the socialist movement. There are even some small left groups in Britain today who argue that the current Brexit process should be supported. Such an approach is not only blind to reality, but it discredits socialism.

The principal drive for Brexit constitutes a uniformly reactionary, right-wing process. Campaigns against the EU are leading to an increase in nationalism and division amongst workers. In Britain there is an attempt to re-generate the right-wing Tory Party around xenophobia, racism and illusionary imperial grandeur, using Brexit as the rallying call.

The issue of the European Union today presents an arena where the right-wing must be confronted and defeated. The British Labour Party should avail of every opportunity to highlight the essential nature of this right-wing movement and to build up the opposition in Westminster and throughout the country around an internationalist and socialist alternative to Brexit. The principled class argument is not between a so-called ‘hard Brexit’ or ‘soft Brexit’. That false dichotomy shifts the terms of the debate into right-wing Tory territory. There has to be a new campaign to combat the lies and false propaganda that littered the Referendum of 2016, and there must be a new Popular Vote in which the Right can be confronted and defeated.

The outcome on the issue of the future of the EU is not neutral. However, the socialist approach to the EU must be critical and must be based on class issues and class demands. In this climate, where jobs are being destroyed and living standards are being undermined, and where racism and xenophobia are securing roots, the organised labour movement has an opportunity to present an internationalist and socialist alternative, a Socialist Federation of Socialist States in Europe

Farage endorses far-right theories which have disturbing echoes of fascist propaganda in the 1930s.

According to newspaper reports, Nigel Farage has been featured on the shows six times. Which highlights some disturbing things about the person whose new Brexit party is likely to top the European elections on 23 May.

First is the very decision to appear on the show of a ranting ultra-right wing conspiracy theorist who promotes insane ideas – six times. And second what Farage actually said, namely:

• Left wingers and Islamists have formed an alliance to destroy Western civilisation and promote world government. This is because they both hate Christianity and the Judeo-Christian civilisation which is the foundation of ‘our’ (eg Western capitalist) society.
• Ordinary people are the victims of a conspiracy by ‘globalists’ – notably the European Union leaders and big business – who want to destroy nations and create a world government – a government by them.
• Climate change theories are a ‘scam’ designed to help globalists takes over the world.

An exchange with Alex Jones went like this:

Jones: “Why is the left allied with radical Islam?”
Farage: “Because they hate Christianity. They deny, absolutely, our Judeo-Christian culture, which if you think about it actually are the roots, completely, of our nations and our civilisation. They deny that. They also want to abolish the nation state – they want to get rid of it. They want to replace it with the globalist project, and the European Union is the prototype for the new world order.”

This seems like a repetition of the Islamophobic Bernard Lewis/Samuel Huntington theory of the clash of civilisations, but it has other connotations as well.

On Alex Jones’ show Nigel Farage repeated his attacks on Hungarian philanthropist George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, which promote multiculturalism from a liberal perspective. On Fox News Farage said that Soros was encouraging millions of immigrants to come to Europe and was “the biggest danger to the entire Western world”.

Hungary’s harsh anti-immigrant laws are called ‘the anti-Soros laws’ and Viktor Orban’s use of Soros as a whipping boy is widely seen as encouraging the rampant anti-Semitism in that country.

Farage’s views are a full-on acceptance of the rightist conspiracy theory of the New World Order. The term ‘New World Order’ was the Left’s description of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf war in 1990. Buti it was given a new meaning by American Christian fundamentalists who identified it with the ‘End of Days’, the final conflict with the anti-Christ, and the riding out off the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – a senario of course taken directly from the bible’s final chapter Revelations.

Alex Jones refers in his broadcasts to the Four Horsemen and the sign of the beast (‘666’ – the sign of the Devil). The New World Order theory does what many right-wing theories do, namely takes aspects of capitalist reality and then turn them into a lunatic theory. Jones for example talks about how smart phones are just devices for state surveillance which is going to be used to bump people off Uber and other services; picking up on the reality of surveillance capitalism and then turning it into something weird and exaggerated.

Tom Dispatch explains New World Order theorists in the following way:

“You know the story: The globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They’re hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They’ve burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America’s fragile government institutions. They want to replace the United States with the United Nations, erase national borders, and create one huge, malevolent international order.”

The New World Order run by globalists theory was until the last decade or so mainly the preserve of Christian fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists like David Icke who claimed the world had been hijacked by shape-shifting reptilians called the ‘Babylonian Brotherhood’ or ‘Illuminati’.

Icke’s theories were given an anti-Semitic twist by his endorsement of the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a plan for world domination by the Jews. Theories of a New World Order and Illuminati have long been seen as a cover for anti-Semitism.

Farage endorses the extreme right theories which have disturbing echoes of fascist propaganda in the 1930s, which alleged an alliance between Bolshevism and ‘cosmopolitan’ (ie Jewish) finance capital. The forces he sees as conspiring today to found a New World Order are the alliance of Wall Street bankers and politicians, the Left and Islamic fundamentalists.

Like the Nazi Communist-capitalist conspiracy idea, and like Donald Trump, Farage is attempting to utilise mass anger with big business and the bankers to created a movement which in the end defends them. In domestic politics this takes the form of accusing leftists and liberals of being part of an ‘elite’ defined culturally. Former commodity broker and multi-millionaire Nigel Farage, with strong support from Rupert Murdoch and the Telegraph, is of course a rather typical member of the real elite, the capitalist class. And he and his Brexit party are a major danger to the working class, democracy and multiculturalism.

Phil Hearse is the author of the pamphlet Full Spectrum Mendacity: Social Media and the Far Right, and one of the authors of Creeping Fascism: What It Is And How To Fight It

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

The Labour Party hasn’t escaped this political crisis and it too faces divisions. A section of right-wing Remain MPs have left the party to form a new centrist organisation while the Labour Party itself has now entered into negotiations with the Tory government over the Brexit deal. Although there are no serious expectations that Corbyn and May will come to an agreement, the Labour Party remains committed to delivering Brexit in some form. However, a majority of the membership oppose Brexit altogether. The ambiguities of Labour’s position are driven partially by the need to maintain its position in the post-industrial areas that voted to Leave.

In the run up to and since the referendum, the radical/revolutionary left has also been divided over the question of Brexit. We are part of the radical left that called for a Remain vote in the referendum, not because we harboured illusions in the progressive nature of the EU, but because the Leave campaign was fuelled and dominated by reactionary politics. We believed that a Leave victory would empower the right rather than the left, and that far from providing a solution to any of the fundamental problems facing the working class it would open the way to further defeats. The post-Brexit treaties and legislative settlements would be seized upon by the government as a further opportunity for deregulation and attacks on our rights.

Others on the left argued that the crisis which a leave vote would inflict on the ruling class would open up a greater space for the left. In doing so, the Left Leave (Lexit) Campaign tended to dismiss and downplay what we considered to be real gains for the working class, such as freedom of movement referring to it in their campaign literature as ‘so-called freedom of movement’, and ignored the increasingly apparent rise in support for the far right, fed by the racist narrative on which the official Leave campaign was built. The Socialist Workers’ Party was part of the Left Leave Campaign but has subsequently kept its distance from the successor organisation – the Full Brexit Campaign. This new campaign is travelling politically in the slipstream of English nationalism with some founding members being prepared to speak on platforms organised by Nigel Farage or even to stand as candidates for Farage’s new Brexit Party in the European elections.

Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the SWP, has recently attempted to theorise the modification of his party’s previous position, writing on Brexit[1] in International Socialism Journal [ISJ]. One would hope that this would constitute the beginning of a timely re-assessment of the untenable Lexit position.

Callinicos recognises that opposition to free movement and a capitulation to nationalism are at the heart of the Full Brexit campaign but he still seeks to defend the core Lexit position. We believe he does this by attempting to construct a protective belt of subsidiary propositions which are as untenable as the central position itself.

To start with, Callinicos explains the problems for the ruling class, which make Brexit a disaster for British capitalism. The problem for the British bourgeoisie is that access to the European market is absolutely vital for the 80% of exports that are services. The issue of the import and export of goods is secondary. The propositions of the Tory Brexiteers about WTO rules bringing a new special relationship with Trump’s America are daydreams. There is no realistic position for British capitalism other than significant integration with the economies of the EU.

This seems a realistic assessment, but there is little explanation of the conundrum which it demonstrates – why, if this assessment is true, has a significant section of the main party of the ruling class come out with a strident anti-EU position if it is so damaging to capitalist interests? The key to understanding the situation is to recognise that there is a split in the ruling class; this results from neoliberalism being ‘visibly in crisis’, and is responsible for what Callinicos describes as the ‘crisis of the political system’. The split is being played out through the Tory Party, thanks to David Cameron’s attempt to defeat the hard right in his party by calling the Brexit referendum, but no section of British society is left untouched. In their struggle to take British capitalism to the extremes of free-marketism, the far-right in the Tory Party – along with their ideological allies in UKIP and elsewhere – has whipped up and deployed racism and xenophobia to generate strident anti-Europeanism. As we saw during the referendum campaign, this was used as a mobilising banner to secure a Leave vote, with the stage then set for the hard right to take control of the Conservative Party. This is what is currently being fought over – and the stakes could scarcely be higher. A hard right Tory victory will result, in government, in an utterly reactionary programme aimed at crushing the last remnants of the 1945 welfare state settlement and further attacking workplace rights and the rights of migrant workers.

Callinicos’s three main political conclusions are the following:

1. The debate on Brexit is essentially a debate within the ruling class; it is important for the radical and revolutionary left not to get stuck in this debate.
2. Some remainers who advocate a second referendum are prioritising the fight to retain EU membership over the fight against racism, because a new referendum will inevitably unleash an avalanche of xenophobia and racism.
3. The fight against racism and its cutting edge Islamophobia requires maximum unity on the left, and differences on Brexit must not be allowed to disrupt that unity.

The argument that Brexit is mainly a debate within the ruling class cannot be sustained. It is a division, not a debate, which has life and death consequences for the working class, and migrant workers in particular. The imposition of Trump-style capitalism will be the outcome if the hard right wins. This is not a situation in which the working class movement can be bystanders.  Take for example the situation of immigrant workers after Brexit which is insufficiently addressed here by Callinicos. He rightly states that ‘a left that opposes free movement sets itself against workers in the rest of Europe’. But he argues:

‘The difficulty confronting May and Corbyn is all the more acute because both have interpreted the referendum result as a rejection of free movement for European citizens. This—dictated in May’s case by her own core prejudices, but a pragmatic move on Corbyn’s part in large degree in response to pressure from trade union leaders and Labour right-wingers—has made striking a deal with the EU harder, because free movement is one of the “four freedoms” that have hardened into a legalistic dogma that Brussels seeks to impose on its neighbours. But it also panders to the anti-migrant racism played on by the Tory right and UKIP during the referendum campaign.’

But it is not that May and Corbyn have interpreted the Leave referendum vote as being opposed to free movement, it was all about immigration and free movement. Callinicos concedes that it is ‘partially’ right to say there was an upsurge of racism after the Brexit vote, but false to say that the Brexit vote itself was mainly a racist or xenophobic vote. The question of who actually voted Leave has been answered by former SWP member Charlie Hoare in the US Socialist Worker[2], looking at the Ashcroft survey of referendum voters which found that two-thirds of Leave voters had voted Tory or UK Independence Party (UKIP) at the 2015 general election. He writes:

‘The survey also found that Black and minority ethnic voters and young voters — two groups hit particularly hard by both unemployment and austerity — decisively rejected Leave, with Muslims voting 70 percent Remain.

‘Ashcroft didn’t ask about trade union membership, but at the 2018 Trades Union Congress (TUC) congress, Steve Turner of the trade union Unite said that 60 percent of trade unionists voted to remain.

‘Of course, responses to unemployment and austerity played a part in determining how some workers voted, just as some white workers responded in the U.S. by voting for Trump….Similarly, as I noted in an article written immediately after the referendum: “It’s an odd ‘working-class revolt’ that doesn’t include Scotland, West Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, London, most union members, most Black and minority ethnic voters, and three-quarters of young voters”.’

This argument, which coincides with positions outlined by Wayne Asher in International Socialism, seems to us to be irrefutable. Brexit is not just a ruling class issue that can be parked on one side while we get on with the fight against racism. It is the mechanism by which hard right forces use and increase racism to push themselves forward and get into power.

On the question of a second referendum, Alex Callinicos says:

‘Advocates of a “People’s Vote” are indeed in a contradictory position. They argue (falsely) that the vote to leave on 23 June 2016 was a racist vote, and also argue (with partial truth) that the result encouraged racism. But they advocate another referendum, even though the Tory right, UKIP (now remodelled under Gerard Batten’s leadership in alliance with the alt-right and Tommy Robinson) and open Nazis will rely on anti-migrant racism even more than the first time round. But Remainer ultras seem happy to pay the price in heightened racism in order to keep Britain in the EU.’

Callinicos doesn’t seem aware that the fairly unambiguous SWP position that the first referendum was not based on racism is slipping. On the one hand he says that remainers ‘falsely’ claim the Brexit referendum Yes vote was based on racism, but then talks about  ‘the anti-migrant racism played on by the Tory right and UKIP during the referendum campaign’ and says that in a new referendum the hard right ‘will rely on anti-migrant racism even more than the first time round.’

As explained by Charlie Hoare and Wayne Asher[3], there is strong empirical evidence that the Leave vote was won by mobilising the most reactionary sections of the population, especially huge reactionary sections of the petty bourgeoisie. It was a massive exercise in pushing politics as a whole to the right.

On his third point, on unity irrespective of a Brexit position, Alex Callinicos says: ‘This is the issue—combating racism and the far right. By comparison, where you stand on the EU is a secondary question’. He argues:

‘By refusing to accept this logic, some left Remainers are putting support for the EU ahead of fighting racism and fascism. Maybe the stress of the past few years has turned some of them into left liberals who have bought into the ideology of “Europeanism” and sincerely believe the EU to be a motor of progress. Others may hope that campaigning against Brexit will give them the edge against other sections of the radical and revolutionary left. But many left Remainers are much better than this—accepting the left critique of the EU but opposing Brexit in the mistaken belief that in current conditions it is impossible to campaign against the EU on a socialist basis. We disagree about this. But there is no reason that we can’t stand together against the main enemy—the bosses and the racist far right that the crisis of their system is strengthening.’

We agree with unity against the racists and fascists. The authors of this article were amongst the organisers of the recent successful No Pasaran! conference in London, which drew together participants from across the movements in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Such unity is essential but it is also essential to organise politically against the dynamic forces behind the rise of the far right.

The real situation is that most left Remainers perfectly well understand the nature of the EU, but think that in this concrete situation Brexit anti-Europeanism is being used to advance the hard right inside and outside of the Conservative Party, and indeed is a deadly threat to the working class and immigrant workers in particular. And far from alleviating the racist and right-wing nationalist threat, a hard Brexit will actually accentuate it.

There is a curious insouciance in the Callinicos approach. Fighting racism and the far right is not something that goes on irrespective of the political situation and the new forces that have emerged – with no connection to Brexit. In the present situation there is a real danger of a hard-right Conservative government, backed up by the Brexit party. This would be an absolute disaster for the working class, and for millions of migrant workers and long-term immigrants in particular. This is not just a ruling class debate.

Apart from the impact of a hard right government on workers’ and migrant rights, a hard Brexit would have an enormously detrimental effect on working class living standards, as explained by Sabby Sagall writing in the current  issue of International Socialism[4]:

‘A hard Brexit will undoubtedly result in a significant deterioration of levels of employment and income. This is apart from the likelihood of an economic downturn in the event that there is no deal with the EU on the terms of Brexit. The resulting chaos could double food prices and plunge Britain into a recession that could last 30 years, worse than the 1930s. The government’s own statistics estimate that under the worst scenario, in 15 years GDP would be 10.7 percent lower than if the UK stays in the EU. According to barrister Anneli Howard of Monckton Chambers: “the anticipated recession will be worse than the 1930s, let alone 2008”.’

The SWP and other Lexiteers, in attacking those campaigning against Brexit – for example the hundreds of thousands who marched on March 9 – have cut themselves off from influencing the progressive forces in the debate, as well as from the many tens of thousands of migrant workers and young people who were on that march. The likes of Alistair Campbell and Vince Cable are only able to pose themselves as the leaders of the anti-Brexit movement because Jeremy Corbyn and other key Labour leaders are absent and have ceded leadership to the Labour right and Liberals.

So Alex Callinicos’s main conclusion that we can forget about the issue of Brexit and get on with unity against the racists and bosses doesn’t work. At least not in the way that he poses it. In a situation where there are unfortunately a small number of people in the workers’ movement who want a ‘full Brexit’ and are prepared to speak on the same platform as Nigel Farage, parking the Brexit question won’t work.

The hard right and the fascists have to be opposed at every turn. But socialists cannot abstain from opposing the threat posed by the Brexiteer hard right of the Conservative Party, and their flank guards in the Brexit Party and UKIP. Anti-immigrant racism and Islamophobia did not originate with Brexit but it is Brexit that has enabled the hard right to make huge advances and opened up the path for a Boris Johnson Trumpian-style premiership.

We believe that Brexit must be recognised not just as a problem for the ruling class, but as central to the crisis that is unfolding to the detriment of the working class across Europe. Brexit must also be understood as the British expression of deeper shifts within capitalism internationally, and the British manifestation of the far-right turn, afflicting Europe and beyond.

The delusions of the Tory Brexiteers with their empty rhetoric of a ‘Global Britain’ are mirrored on the left by those Lexiteers who wish to build a Socialist Britain while cutting economic ties with its biggest trading partners, ending freedom of movement and operating the economy under World Trade Organisation rules.

The importance of Europe for the radical left is that it is the arena in which it is possible to seek the solution to the reality that the productive forces have outstripped their national framework. The working class in Britain is increasingly part of a pan-European working class and needs to develop the forms of transitional organisation that will enable it to operate on a European-wide basis. One of the central problems of the Eurozone crisis in Greece was that the working class there was isolated from the wider European labour and trade union movement despite the best efforts of the solidarity movements. It is by consciously attempting to raise the level of struggle above the national that will provide the framework for proletarian internationalism to cease being an abstract slogan and become part of the living reality of the struggles of the class.

Andrew Burgin
Phil Hearse
Kate Hudson

[1]http://isj.org.uk/brexit-blues/; http://isj.org.uk/shambling-towards-the-precipice/
[2]https://socialistworker.org/2019/01/08/building-the-left-in-the-face-of-brexit
[3] [3]http://isj.org.uk/the-left-and-brexit/
[4]http://isj.org.uk/remain-and-replace-a-socialist-case/

Inside the Conservative Party and beyond a longer and more important game continues to pose a massive threat to the working class.

Martin Kettle claims:

“It is now nearly five months since May signed the EU-UK agreement on Brexit. Since then, the Conservative party’s rightwing nationalists have repeatedly tried to defeat the deal and to oust May. They have dominated the airwaves and won some famous victories along the way, but in the end, they have decisively lost the war.”

What Martin Kettle means is that the latest extension from the EU – certainly to June, maybe to October – has scuppered the hopes of the Tory right for a short-term ‘no deal’  Brexit. But the nationalist right inside the Conservative Party and beyond is playing a longer and more important game. And it continues to pose a massive threat to the working class, the oppressed and the labour movement.

Martin Kettle too easily dismisses the longer-term and more fundamental nationalist threat. He says:

“They [the Tory right]talk as if they will still capture the party leadership over breakfast, rewrite the Brexit deal at lunchtime, abolish the Northern Ireland backstop at tea, and win a general election on a populist English nationalist and deregulatory platform in the evening. It is all a fantasy. They have lost. Their strategy is bust.”

The key phrase here is “it is all fantasy”. What is the evidence for this claim? Simply that:

“Their bravado comes from a failure to understand the subtle change in mood that is happening in parliament and, to a degree, in the country. Even if they capture the leadership, which is not certain, their other triumphs are wholly imaginary. There is no majority for no deal among Tories, let alone among MPs more generally. On the contrary, the majority against the go-it-aloners is growing. Their bluff has been called, and they are too foolish and too dogmatic to realise it.”

This much too easily conflates the medium-term danger of a hard-right Tory government with support now for a hard Brexit, and is much too sanguine about the ‘mood in the country’.

Three days before the 2016 referendum SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon claimed it was an attempted coup by the Tory right[1]. That it was, and much more – an attempt to push British politics sharply to the right.

To see how Brexit has affected the political climate, consider two things. In the summer of 2012, the EDL led by Tommy Robinson, went to Walthamstow and suffered a humiliating defeat. Routed around the back streets by the police, and outnumbered by the anti-fascists, the EDL suffered a humiliation. Vice magazine wrote an article entitled ‘Walthamstow, where fascists go to die’ and said that the EDL had grunted to a halt. Robinson was visibly upset by the fiasco. And yet seven years later he has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, and speaks to thousands at rallies in London and elsewhere. At the same time Sunny Handal wrote in the Guardian that multiculturalism had won the day in Britain, period. Now we are in the midst of a tidal wave of Islamophobia and xenophobic racism.

Obviously the background to this change is the sharp turn to the right internationally, of which the election of Donald Trump is just the most dramatic example. And the more general background is fallout from the 2008 crash and the damage done to working class communities and the labour movement by all the defeats since the 1980s.

Lexiteers will point out that countries inside the EU suffered equally from a rise in racism and the far right, but its British form has been crystallised by the referendum and Brexit. There’s no question that Brexit provided a focus and a linchpin anchoring all the xenophobic arguments about immigration, enabling the radical right to reach out to new audiences. It wasn’t so long ago that British leftists and liberals would look askance at the rise of the Front National in France, and be grateful that the extreme right wasn’t such a threat in the UK. No longer.

What has Brerxit achieved for the hard right? First, it has focussed political attention on immigration and away from austerity, grinding poverty, and social exclusion. Labour canvassers in Greater Manchester preparing for May’s council elections report that there’s only one issue on the doorsteps: Brexit. Like anti-Semitism for the Labour right, this is an issue that keeps on giving for the Tory right, UKIP and Nigel Farage and his new party.

Multiculturalism, deeply embedded in ethnically diverse communities[2] and among young people, has not been crushed. But its opponents are on the offensive. And it is deeply shocking that many working-class people in former labour movement bastions take xenophobic anti-EU nationalism as straightforward common sense. Helped of course by the mass media’s incessant Islamophobia, campaigns against EU migrant workers and rantings against Jeremy Corbyn.

More than just focussing attention on immigration, Brexit has enabled a giant political scam, one typical of the fascists and extreme right for the last hundred years, the claim that they stand with ordinary people against the ‘elite’, which is frustrating their interests. Brexit has given the entire right wing a cause, a banner and a goal to mobilise millions.

The Brexit campaign has succeeding in pushing the Conservative Party further to the right, and their de facto candidate Boris Johnson seems likely to become the next Tory leader. If the Conservatives win the next general election, Johnson (or someone like him) would lead a brutally right-wing Tory government that would threaten many of the residual gains of the post-1945 settlement – for example an NHS free at the point of need.

The prospectus for a hard-right Tory government was published in 2012 by five MPs – Dominic Raab, Elizabeth Truss, Chris Skidmore, Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng – in their book Britannia Unchained, Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity. The core of their argument is simple – people in Britain don’t work hard enough:

“The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”[3]

In 2012 the book was widely derided and denounced as the rantings of young Tories who have read too much Ayn Rand[4]. Its prescription is that the economy and the labour market must be further deregulated. In the epoch of Trump and with Boris Johnson at the head of a right-wing Tory government, this programme would be an imminent threat.

Like Martin Kettle, The Economist reckons the Tory hard Brexiteers have lost the immediate battle. Accusing them of tactical incompetence, it compares them with ‘ravening crocodiles’ and finds them guilty of ‘foaming intransigence’[5]. However:

“Does this mean that the headbangers have finally had their day? They are undoubtedly at risk of losing the Brexit war… But that does not mean that they have lost the battle for the future of the Conservative Party…The Brexiteers have numbers on their side. …more than 170 Tory MPs wrote to Mrs May demanding that Britain should leave the EU on April 12th, deal or no-deal…The numbers are even more lopsided in the constituencies: more than 70% of Tory party members support a no-deal Brexit. MPs who have peddled a softer line on Brexit, such as Sir Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, have faced deselection threats from their local parties.”

In consequence the Economist thinks that the Tory party is done for as a mainstream party of the British ruling class:

“…competing theories about what is happening to Britain’s ruling party—that it is undergoing a process of collective nervous breakdown; that it is splitting asunder; or that it is being misled by UKIP infiltrators—are wrong. The truth is more dramatic than this. The party that was once the instrument of the British establishment is in the process of metamorphosing into a full-scale nationalist-populist party. That may involve a certain amount of splintering as the likes of Mr [recently resigned MP Nick]Boles decide that they cannot stand it any longer, but that is rather different from a split down the middle.”

Some recent polls show Labour doing well in any upcoming European elections, given Tory disarray. Don’t bank on it. These polls were taken before the public launch of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. European elections, if they happen, could result in massive defeats for both main parties and a boost for Farage. The experience of the 1980s shows how third (and fourth and fifth) parties can be used together with an enormous media anti-Labour campaign to stop Tory disarray turning into Labour victories.

Any type of Brexit includes a core element that is common to all shades of Tory opinion, and to which Labour has largely surrendered – the end of free movement of workers. That is the irreducible element of ‘taking back control’ and the symbol of its xenophobia.

Outside the Conservative Party the xenophobic right and the fascists await the prospect of further advances. In a previous period, in the years following Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, the hitherto growing National Front was marginalised by the Thatcher government. A right-wing Tory government might similarly marginalise UKIP and Tommy Robinson, but again don’t count on it. We are living in a different period, and the examples of Hungary, Italy and Poland show that a huge right-wing political space can encompass a strengthening variety of hard right and fascist movements.

Martin Kettle’s apparent minimising of the risk of the Tory hard right probably reflects a yearning for the golden years – not Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘golden age’ of the post-Second World War boom and its mixed economy, welfare state, settlement[6] – but the Blairite years, the neoliberal equivalent in which the Tories were marginalised,  and poverty and inequality were papered over by tax credits and public-private partnerships. Only mass disaffection with Blair’s participation in American wars discomfited the post-social democratic right in government and its media supporters. This Blairite idyll was blown up by the 2008 crash, and its demise was heralded by the huge vote for UKIP at the 2009 Euro elections, as I commented at the time.

There is no use pretending that the Blairite version of the golden years can be recaptured. It is as kaput as Michael Palin’s parrot.

For Blairites it’s not just Brexit, but Jeremy Corbyn that symbolise these changes. And the massive polarisation that has occurred in British politics, which cut the ground from under them.

How it pans out depends, in part, on what the Labour leadership does. But also on what the rest of the Left does. There is no way forward that gives an inch to racism and Islamophobia, or which fails to champion multiculturalism, or which doesn’t appeal to the youth, migrant workers and ethnic minorities.

[1] https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14556787.nicola-sturgeon-leave-campaign-is-an-attempted-coup-by-right-wing-tories/

[2] But not in some ethnically divided communities like Oldham and Bolton.

[3] Palgrave, 2012

[4] See: Rand, A., Branden, N., Greenspan, A. and Hessen, R. (1946). Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: Signet. Ayn Rand is the author of Thatcher’s phrase ‘that there is no such thing as society’.

[5] https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/04/04/the-tories-are-transforming-into-a-party-of-populist-nationalism

[6] The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Eric J. Hobsbawm, London, Michael Joseph, 1994, ISBN: 9780718133078; 640pp.