This 30 September 2016 video says about itself:
Rebecca Perring for Express UK reports HUNGARY’S tough-talking prime minister has called on the European Union (EU) to build its own MIGRANT CITY [concentration camp] which would be protected by the bloc’s own armed forces.
These European Union armed forces don’t exist officially yet.
As is rather widely known, in the British referendum campaign on whether or not there should be ‘Brexit‘, Britain stopping being a member of the European Union, the Conservative and UKIP politicians who were the leaders of the official pro-Brexit campaign used racism and xenophobia (contrary to leftist groups ‘who wanted a Lexit‘, left exit from ‘Fortress Europe‘).
Did that mean being pro-Remain in the referendum guaranteed one was anti-racist? Probably so for many rank and file pro-Remain voters. However, not so the political leaders of the anti-Brexit campaign.
Who were and are the pro-Remain leaders?
Most prominently, British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Mr Cameron vilified the refugees from his and his colleagues’ bloody wars, living in the ‘jungle’ camp in Calais, as a ‘swarm’.
Only slightly less prominently, David Cameron’s refugee-hating successor Theresa May. She campaigned actively for Remain. And, with even more enthusiasm than in her public appearances, Ms May did a pro-Remain secret speech for Goldman Sachs bankers.
The Blairite right wing in the British Labour party campaigned fanatically for Remain. Labour leader Corbyn advocated a Remain vote as well. However, he refused to campaign jointly with the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat satellites. And he refused to lie to voters that everything about the European Union is fantastic. That way of campaigning by Corbyn may very well have saved Labour in England and Wales from a death-blow like in Scotland. In Scotland, arch-Blairite leader Jim Murphy (an anti-Semite) had campaigned jointly with Cameron’s Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats against independence for Scotland in that Scottish referndum. That destroyed the Labour party’s credibility with its traditional voters so much that it dealt a blow to the party from which it has not recovered yet, and may never ever recover again. The Blairites tried to have a (failed) coup against Corbyn after the referendum, with as pretext that Corbyn should have campaigned jointly with Cameron’s Tories and should have lied to the electorate that the European Union is squeaky clean.
Are Blairites anti-racists? In the 2015 election, they tried to win with mugs attacking immigrants. They did not win. It drove way convinced anti-racists. While racists preferred the Conservative, UKIP or BNP originals to the unoriginal Blairite copy.
After the Brexit referendum, uncritically pro-European Union Blairite Owen Smith tried to win the Labour leadership election from Corbyn by claiming there were supposedly ‘too many immigrants’. Like his Blairite colleagues with their xenophobic mugs in the 2015 election, Smith did not win.
After the Brexit referendum, pro-European Union Blairite politicians demanded that the freedom for workers to immigrate to Britain from European Union countries should be abolished.
Then, the archest arch-Blairite: Tony Blair himself. Guilty of torture and other war crimes killing over a million beige or brown people. Guilty of xenophobic anti-immigration policies, sending refugees back to war zones. Tony Blair was so angry that a majority of the British electorate in the referendum had voted for Brexit, that he proposed there should be another referendum … and yet another one, etc. on European Union membership. Voting again and again, till you drop, until the stupid people would at last agree with ‘intelligent’ Tony Blair that Britain should be a European Union member.
Then, more fat cat pro-European Union campaigners. The fattest of the fattest: the Confederation of British Industry, the Big Business club CBI. Since when is the CBI supposed to be anti-racist? I rather think that Malcolm X was right about capitalism, both in Britain and in other countries: ‘You can’t have capitalism without racism‘.
Outside Britain, Viktor Orban asked the British voters in an open letter to them to vote for remaining in the European Union. Who is Viktor Orban? The prime minister of Hungary, leader of the anti-Semitic Fidesz party, and the most racist head of government in Europe. And, like Tony Blair and others, an advocate of starting a European Union army. One of the tasks of that new European Union army, according to Orban, should be anti-refugee violence.
Then, the European Union itself. How anti-racist is it? With its most powerful government, the German government, sending Afghan refugees en masse back to their deaths in the Afghan war? With its ‘Fortress Europe’ anti-refugee policies, pressuring, eg, the Italian government and the Greek government to be ‘tougher’ on refugees; to put more razor wire on their borders, and to lock refugees from bloody wars up in concentration camps? With its deals with the dictator of Turkey, Erdogan, to send refugees from Europe back to Turkey, which will send them further to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or other war zones? With their European Union-Turkey style deals with Bashir, dictator of Sudan and other African dictators to send refugees from Europe back to Africa?
London pro-EU demonstration: While many of those attending—including a sizable number of young people—took part based on genuine concerns over the economic and political impact of Brexit, including the danger of the growth of nationalism and xenophobia, the platform offered no progressive alternative. Indeed, the fact that the event was overseen by Alastair Campbell serves as a devastating exposure of its right-wing, pro-capitalist credentials. Campbell’s master, Blair, recently launched his Institute for Global Change after calling for the pro-EU movement to “to rise up and fight Brexit at any cost.” He is reportedly sinking £8 million of his vast ill-gotten fortune into the campaign: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Yeah, White nationalists are feeling emboldened in the States too and theres been an uptick…
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Indeed, after a referendum in which the leaders of both sides had a match about who was best at stopping refugees and immigrants. The Trump vote (result of a campaign in which both candidates had a match about who was the toughest militarist) also emboldens racists inside of and outside of the USA:
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Was anti-immigration ‘not central’ for the pro-Remain leaders like Cameron, Theresa May, and Hungary’s Orban?
Cameron vilified refugees as a ‘swarm’ before the *official* start of the referendum campaign. But it was meant to show he was even ‘tougher’ on refugees than UKIP or pro-Brexit Tories. Cameron already had the referendum on his mind before the official start of the campaign.
Just like what Cameron said later, in February 2016:
‘Britain ‘faces influx of 50,000 asylum seekers’ if it leaves the European Union
If Britain leaves the EU, France will stop allowing UK officials to make checks in Calais, David Cameron says ‘
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12145781/David-Cameron-warns-of-migrant-camps-in-southern-England-if-Brexit-vote.html
Dog whistle message by Cameron: stop those horrible refugees (from my wars, but he did not mention that). Not by voting for those Brexit pussies, but for a Remain tough guy like me.
And right up to the referendum, the Cameron government continued their xenophobic policies. The central person in that was pro-Remain Home Secretary Theresa May.
About her xenophobic policies (which in practice hurt immigrants much more than UKIP, in opposition, not in government):
“”Many parents are suffering from anxiety and depression as a result of the separation and the pressure of meeting the financial threshold. This also directly impacts their children,” said the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, who carried out research on the issue with Middlesex University.
The Divided Families Campaign accused May of making family reunification “a privilege for only the wealthy” and “turning the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its head” as it pertains to families and home life.
In April [so, just before the Brexit refendum], the home office introduced hefty new earnings thresholds for non-EU citizens who want to live in Britain. Those living in the country for less than 10 years now need to earn at least £35,000 (46,000) a year if they want to settle permanently in the UK.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/theresa-stand-eu-immigration-160712074543697.html
As for Hungary’s Orban, the most racist head of government in Europe:
Viktor Orbán to lobby against Brexit
Hungarian PM will address the British people directly via newspaper adverts, according to his office.
By Vince Chadwick
6/19/16, 8:05 PM CET
Updated 6/19/16, 8:32 PM CET
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán intends to campaign in the British press for the U.K. to remain in the EU, according to a Hungarian government spokesman.
Orbán will address the British people directly via newspaper adverts, according to a Reuters report citing his office.
“Although we have earned accusations of being anti-EU from many sides on numerous occasions, this is a testament to the fact that Hungary is committed to the European Union,” Zoltán Kovács, a government spokesman, was quoted as saying.
http://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-news-uk-brexit-newspaper-ads/
See Orban’s pro-Remain ad in the Daily Mail:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/20/please-dont-leave-us-this-way—europe-urges-britain-not-to-plum/
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Wednesday 15th February 2017
posted by Morning Star in Editorial
JEREMY CORBYN has often been accused of wanting to lead a party of protest, rather than a party of power.
The vast influx of new members of Labour, with their bewildering enthusiasm for a political project Westminster found incomprehensible, were clearly more interested in feeling good about themselves than in winning elections.
Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s willingness to march in the streets to promote causes they supported, or stand on picket lines next to workers on strike, was most improper. Clearly they had no idea what being a serious politician was about.
These attacks were always nonsensical — the Establishment’s hostility to protest is not because it can’t change the world, but because they don’t want it to.
All the great social and political advances in history have been made by campaigning from below, from votes for women to the civil rights movement in the United States and from the abolition of slavery to the repeal of Section 28.
Corbyn’s recognition of this fact does not make him a “protest” politician, but one who understands that the rules of the political game are stacked in favour of those already ruling — and it takes pressure from outside that gilded circle, from ordinary working people, to win anything worth winning.
There is a world of difference between embracing people power and the whinging we have seen from too many liberal politicians as Britain enters negotiations on leaving the European Union.
Corbyn has attracted opprobrium even from parts of the left for whipping MPs to vote for invoking Article 50, although doing so was right democratically (having backed a referendum on membership, the party was compelled to accept the result), right politically (with two-thirds of Labour MPs representing constituencies that voted to Leave, seeking to block Brexit would be electoral suicide) and right pragmatically (with the government holding an easy majority in Parliament on the question, trying to stop its Bill passing would have been futile, while proposing amendments on protecting immigrants and workers’ rights puts pressure on the government over its negotiating approach).
Unlike his critics, Corbyn does not see a vote in Parliament as the end of the matter and has thrown down the gauntlet to Theresa May on protecting the rights of EU citizens in Britain to remain here.
May — whose distaste for foreigners has extended to making up stories about criminals being immune from deportation if they own a cat, and whose government is now shamefully seeking to shut out thousands of refugee children it had previously agreed to accept — is quite willing to use EU citizens resident here and British citizens resident in the EU as bargaining chips as she haggles with Brussels. She can be stopped from doing so — but only if the left can stop carping among itself and unite to demand that everyone resident here has the right to stay.
Pressure from the left directed at achieving a settlement with the EU which benefits working people — one that means collectively bargained terms and conditions can be applied to all workers, immigrants included; one that allows the state to invest in industry and intervene in the economy; and one that allows us to extend the reach of public ownership in sectors of national or social importance — can make a real difference, especially if we come together with left forces across Europe to push the negotiators from both sides.
It certainly beats sulking at the referendum result, howling with outrage at Parliament for passing a Bill it had no option but to pass and accusing the Labour leader of being a sell-out simply for respecting democracy. That’s just protest politics.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-7473-Back-Corbyn-on-rights-for-immigrants#.WKQN5vKbIdU
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Thursday 16th
posted by Morning Star in Features
Party rebels must embrace Brexit or Labour risks becoming irrelevant, writes FAWZI IBRAHIM
IF LABOUR loses in either of the forthcoming by-elections in Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central, it would not be down to Jeremy Corbyn and his “lack of appeal” but to the infantile behaviour of some Labour MPs — in particular those who defied the three-line whip and voted against invoking Article 50 to start the process of exiting the EU.
It is one thing for the SNP to vote against invoking Article 50; they want nothing less than the break-up of the union.
It is quite another for Labour MPs to join them, given that the motion in front of them wasn’t which part of Britain wishes to leave the EU but whether the whole of Britain should leave, something that was resolved by the referendum.
Basic trade union and working-class discipline demands that once a decision is taken, everyone should work towards making it a success, otherwise how could a strike ever be a success if those on the losing side not only refuse to take part but actively obstruct its implementation?
Time after time, Corbyn’s attempts to reconnect the Labour Party with its working-class base have been frustrated by his MPs who have refused, and some continue to refuse, to accept the result of the EU referendum.
There is a tide in the affairs of nations, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. The EU referendum was just such a tide; a sea change craving for leadership.
Corbyn provided that leadership when he recognised that Article 50 would have to be invoked immediately following the result of the EU referendum on June 24.
At that time, the Tories were in disarray with the resignation of David Cameron and a nasty leadership election in the offing.
Unfortunately, his initiative was quickly thwarted by his shadow cabinet colleagues and most Labour MPs.
Instead of providing leadership, they preferred to moan about the result, question its validity and worst of all, call for a second referendum on the grounds that the riff-raff who voted to leave knew not what they were voting for.
This made time for the Tories to re-group, cut the leadership contest short and install Theresa May as PM who, with the simple words “Brexit means Brexit,” grabbed the initiative to put Labour on the back foot. Ever since, the Labour Party has been playing catch-up.
When, three months later, shadow chancellor John McDonnell attempted to regain some credibility for Labour, telling a meeting in central London that Brexit was an enormous opportunity for the country, he was pounced upon and denounced by several Labour MPs including a “furious” shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer.
Imagine where Labour would be now had Labour MPs been clear-eyed some eight months ago. They would’ve been chasing the government instead of being chased by it.
Corbyn called it right again when he tweeted: “The fight starts now,” following the decisive vote to invoke Article 50 in the House of Commons. He was mocked by some on the left, Corbyn’s own supporters, the purveyors of doom, who obviously thought that sitting back predicting a Brexit disaster is the way to garner support. “Vote for me and I’ll lead you to Armageddon,” seems to be their preferred slogan.
For Labour to regain the support and trust of the working class, it has to do more in terms of policy. It is the song and not the singer that’s holding them back.
It must ditch its disastrous attachment to the free movement of labour, not just because it has been roundly rejected by the British people, but because it is detrimental to the interests of workers, no matter the countries they inhabit.
As for those who scream “scapegoating immigrants,” controlling the number of immigrants crossing the border is as much “scapegoating immigrants” as controlling the number of passenger on a boat is “scapegoating passengers.” Only a reckless captain would allow an unlimited number of passengers to board a ship regardless of its size and the available amenities. A nation is not that different.
Coupled with ditching the freedom of movement of labour must be the abandonment of the other pillar of the EU’s free market ideology, the freedom of movement of capital and bringing back capital controls, the scrapping of which was one of Thatcher’s first acts upon taking office in 1979.
Capital, though privately owned, is essentially a product of workers’ toil, either directly through the pension funds or indirectly through the accumulation of surplus value, the product of social labour over centuries. Society has an obligation to not allow capital to up sticks in tough times to go to pastures new where exploitation is unconstrained and profits are high.
In the process, Labour should look for a post-capitalist form of economy in which commodity production ceases to be the dominant form of production.
Labour can campaign and make some inroads on issues such as the NHS, welfare, housebuilding, transport and care for the elderly.
But the central issue, for the immediate future, remains Brexit and unless Labour embraces Brexit in all its ramifications and project a bright future outside the EU’s single market and customs union, it risks becoming as irrelevant as a party calling for a return of colonial rule would have been in a newly independent India.
It is a bit pointless arguing about the kitchen if you’re not serious about owning the house in the first place.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-47b9-Labours-EU-fanatics-need-to-wake-up#.WKXhAfKbIdV
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Thursday 23rd February 2017
posted by Morning Star in Editorial
LABOUR victories in today’s by-elections in Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central would provide the party with a boost.
Given the alternatives — the Tories in Copeland and Ukip in Stoke — there can be no progressive justification for anything other than a Labour vote in either seat.
But unlike last autumn’s Richmond Park by-election, where the Greens stood aside to help the Liberal Democrats win the seat, there has been no talk of a “progressive alliance” behind Labour this time round.
Both Copeland and Stoke voted heavily to leave the European Union last summer, and the “stop Brexit” fever that has captured some imaginations in southeast England will turn few heads in either seat.
Those who do fear the consequences of Britain leaving the EU — and there are issues of real concern arising in the exit negotiations — should, if they have a vote today, look to Labour, the party that is fighting for a settlement favourable to working people and their interests from the exit process, as the best choice.
Copeland would otherwise elect a Tory who would bolster Theresa May’s bid to shut the labour movement out of the negotiations, and Stoke a Ukipper who would only serve to drive the Tory agenda even further to the right.
But there is a more general lesson too. Swathes of the pro-EU left have made the Labour Party, and especially its leader Jeremy Corbyn, a whipping boy for their anger at Brexit.
They blame the decision to leave for the rise in racism and hate crimes in this country and, though Corbyn campaigned against it, they resent his acceptance of the result.
But racist and anti-immigrant sentiment was whipped up before the referendum — not least by the pro-Remain prime minister David Cameron.
And it is surging too in countries which remain part of the European Union — France, Poland, Hungary, even Germany.
In saying the problem of racism is bigger than Brexit, we are not downplaying it — merely acknowledging that a bolder response from the left is needed than a bid to turn the clock back, which is what the “second referendum” advocates, some from the best of motives, are seeking to do.
That bolder response rests on understanding why people voted against the status quo last June.
They were rejecting an economic and political consensus around privatisation, cuts in public spending, continued mass unemployment, low wages and precarious, short-term jobs.
In Parliament today, only Labour is challenging that consensus.
The Greens once had a lot to say on these issues, but their party has become so fixated on stopping Brexit that it talks of little else. The Liberal Democrats support the status quo.
In government with the Conservatives, they helped privatise our health service, triple tuition fees and took the lead in selling Royal Mail to private investors (who made a killing at our expense).
They backed the Gagging Act, curtailing the right of trade unions and NGOs to speak out when the government is up to no good. And Tim Farron has said he would happily return to coalition with the Conservatives. No progressive should be giving this rotten, two-faced party the time of day.
The SNP might attack May, but in Scotland they have done nothing in office to challenge an agenda of privatisation or redistribute wealth.
The left has to listen to the millions who are worried about their and their children’s futures, about jobs, about pay and about housing.
We have to unite behind a Labour leader who is offering change, or squander the opportunity of a lifetime and let the right wreak havoc while we shake our fists at each other in splendid isolation.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-3ebc-Corbyn-is-no-whipping-boy#.WK64hvKbIdU
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Wednesday 29th March 2017
posted by Morning Star in Editorial
TODAY the Prime Minister is to trigger Article 50 and begin negotiations over leaving the European Union — and that means the left needs to seriously up its game.
The EU question has obviously divided the labour movement.
Early last year the left was on the front foot: Labour had elected a socialist leader for the first time in decades, was seeing swings towards it in by-elections and was forcing government U-turns on everything from personal independence payments and tax credit cuts to dodgy prison deals with Saudi Arabia.
Since the result of the June 23 vote, almost everything has gone wrong, with the significant exception of the left’s success in mobilising even more Labour Party members to re-elect Jeremy Corbyn in 2016 than in the previous year.
To those who see Brexit as a victory for narrow nationalism, this is hardly surprising.
The vote to leave the EU is interpreted as a triumph for the right which has predictably knocked the stuffing out of the left.
But the risk is that assuming people voted to leave the EU for right-wing reasons, and that Britain will therefore lurch to the right in consequence, is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Corbyn has always opposed such a dogmatic approach to the referendum result, pointing out that the decision to leave was a resounding rejection of an economic consensus that marketised our public services, prioritised the rights of business over the rights of workers and failed to invest in our industries or communities.
The European Union does its best to make these neoliberal policies unstoppable, enshrining Thatcherism in law and since 2008 imposing privatisation and cuts on sovereign states and even (in Italy) helping to depose an elected government that was unwilling to collaborate.
The 2016 vote was a bid to take back control from the unfeeling tyranny of the market. It presents a real opportunity for the left if it can articulate that demand from working people to change direction.
A convincing left-wing resurgence requires unity. The labour movement cannot afford to rerun the arguments of the referendum ad nauseam, but should be pursuing a set of economic demands — the new deal for workers agreed at last year’s TUC is a good place to start — and framing any approach to the exit negotiations around how we meet those demands.
Instead, we are allowing the liberal ultras to drive a wedge into our movement, shaming those who voted to leave as either racist or idiots taken in by the lies of the Leave campaign.
This doesn’t compute: polls before and after the referendum show that politics is among the least trusted professions in the country.
Millions who regard the entire political class with (often justified) cynicism will hardly have taken everything said by either referendum campaign at face value.
But the effect of this delusion is to divide us, and as negotiations begin that is a luxury we cannot afford.
“Stop Brexit we want to get off” might win a few southern seats for the Lib Dems, but it’s by definition a minority cause and worse, one which tries to maintain a status quo that has been explicitly rejected.
The rosy view of Brussels being pushed by Remainers is not only belied by the bloc’s anti-democratic nature but fails to acknowledge that the EU is still mired in deep crisis.
It continues to pursue policies which are forcing poverty on its southern member states, causing enormous social unrest and provoking an angry backlash from Portugal to Greece, with bigger fish like France and Poland simmering with resentment.
A determined push from the left to secure a British exit deal that promotes working-class demands and an end to neoliberalism will find an echo across Europe and help shape a progressive future.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-aac6-Now-is-the-time-for-unity#.WNt7lWekIdU
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Tuesday 9th May 2017
posted by Morning Star in Features
May’s claims of EU rigging are farcical. Were we to see a Labour surge, then we’d see real interference, writes KEVIN OVENDEN
THE RUSSIAN embassy in London neatly trolled Theresa May as she stood on the steps of Downing Street last week accusing Jean-Claude Juncker and the EU of interference in the British general election.
It was an extraordinary claim. Though it has to be said, the leaking to Germany’s leading conservative paper by officials on the Juncker side of what seems to have been an illtempered over-dinner meeting with May to discuss Brexit was unusual only in terms of who the target was.
Britain is not Greece. But the behaviour of the “Luxembourgeois” Juncker came as no surprise to anyone in the southern European country that has been ground in the maw of the European institutions over the last eight years.
Not just hostile leaks, but crashing the banking system was the kind of intervention the European Commission and European Central Bank engaged in at the end of June 2015 — directly to interfere through methods of financial terrorism in the Greek referendum.
Those fanatically pro-EU liberal figures praising Juncker in this spat with May would do well to remember that his Bollinger-fuelled bullying continues to be directed at the Greek pensioner, the Spanish unemployed youngster and the French factory worker trying to preserve their workplace rights and job.
Others of us have been reminded that liberal free-market capitalism has only ever had a nodding acquaintance with democracy and popular sovereignty.
And both Juncker and May are wholly committed to the neoliberal, corporate capitalist policies whose failure is measured in widening inequality, mass unemployment across Europe and a permanent class war from above. Both are also of the centre right.
He was the prime minister of Luxembourg who turned it into a tax haven, before moving on to his sinecure in Brussels.
That makes May’s claim about “interference” in the British general election all the more absurd. As the local government elections confirmed this week, the general election on June 8 presents a straight choice — either the return of a May government, or its defeat, with the only alternative being a government led by Jeremy Corbyn.
The very last thing that Juncker, Angela Merkel, the outgoing Francois Hollande or any of the European institutions or mainstream governments wants to see is a victory by a socialistled Labour Party in Britain.
Labour’s plans to renationalise the NHS and rail, to invest and to redistribute wealth are entirely at odds with the rigged-economic orthodoxy and breach the rules that lock it into the EU. Just as European-wide effort went into holding back the surge of Jean-Luc Melenchon in France in favour of promoting the Blairite Emmanuel Macron, so are they all committed to a Tory government in Britain.
So why the heat over that dinner? First, it is a sign of the clashes to come over the Brexit process. Those are perilous — for both sides.
Less remarked upon in this story is who it was that Juncker was speaking to when his entourage leaked that dinner table conversation and his haughty assessment of it.
It was the rest of the EU and its 27 governments. Beneath the proclamations of ironclad unity, the European Commission and Merkel have been working flat out to hold a common front.
Last year Merkel made an astonishing speech to the German equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry. She told big business not to go off seeking sector by sector deals with London — car manufacture, machine tools and so on.
Instead, everything had to go through the German state and in turn through the EU negotiating team, in which Franco-German interests are strongly represented.
The EU is a powerful bureaucratic entity in its own right. But European capitalism is not a singular force with a single state. It is an agglomeration of national capitalisms — with sectional interests — and 27 states semiorganised in a hierarchy.
The primary aim in the Brexit process, say EU officials, is to maintain that arrangement. But if all were well, why would any effort be required to do so? All is not well.
Economic stagnation has produced enormous political strains in one European country after another. France is the latest, where neither of the twin party pillars of the political system made it into last weekend’s second round of the presidential election.
In Italy, the third-biggest economy in the EU, the national carrier Alitalia has just gone bust. EU state aid rules prevent a nationalisation rescue. The anti-EU Five Star Movement is ahead in the polls.
We are often told that all the 27 EU states have a common economic interest in this Brexit process, which means “all the cards are in their hands.”
It is true that the giant German economy could cope with a rupture in trade with Britain if no deal came out of the Brexit negotiations.
Other countries are not so sanguine. The government of the Netherlands is impeccably pro-EU. But the high proportion of Dutch trade with Britain means bosses and politicians there are much more nervous about Brexit.
So one side of this was shoring up the EU 27 members and reinforcing the mantra that Brexit must be painful to ordinary people in Britain “pour decourager les autres” (to discourage others).
The second thing the Brexit dinner revealed was the essential unreality of the Tories’ negotiating position. Labour’s Keir Starmer hit the mark last week when he said a Corbyn-led government would rip up the Tories’ otherworldly plan, and outline a strategy based upon workers’ rights and economic growth — for the many, not the few.
One reason for the mess of the Tory negotiating position is that May is just not very good.
Her lack of competence is attested to in how she was caught flatfooted by these leaks.
But it runs deeper than that. It is rooted in what the May government has been trying to do over the last nine months, which is to square a circle and exit the political mess David Cameron left them with after failing to win his referendum.
Behind all the chauvinistic flagwaving aimed at recuperating votes that went to Ukip in 2015, May wants a big business Brexit. And big business remains of the view it had overwhelmingly this time last year when it campaigned hard for Remain.
It would much prefer Brexit to mean not Brexit. That has been politically impossible in the wake of the referendum.
With a majority of just 13 MPs in the Commons, the May government has been susceptible to the threat of revolt from two minority wings.
The Brexit fantasists — the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who think that waving a Union Jack will restore the British empire — and the ideologically committed pro-EU minority of Kenneth Clarke and Anna Soubry.
The farrago of the government’s position is a product of this basic instability. And it is led by a prime minister who Clarke described on candid camera at the time of the Tory leadership succession last year as lacking in any big ideas and an eternal pragmatist — from reluctant Remainer to apparently hard Brexiteer.
May has surrounded herself with advisers from her time at the Home Office, which she ran with all the narrow-mindedness of a provincial Tory magistrate.
She is now hoping for a big majority through which to assert some control, not to pursue some hard Brexit, but to bury the referendum and return the Tory Party in government to close alignment with the City of London and big business. That centres upon something she has been trailing for some weeks, to the alarm of the Tory Brexiteers.
It is to seek a long transitional arrangement with the EU in which all the strictures of the single market — which is not a trading relationship, but a legal enforcement of big business’s rights — are maintained, possibly renewed every year by vote of Parliament.
It is to buy time and to avoid the kind of clashes that could open ruptures at the top — in Britain and in the EU — through which an insurgent popular anger could break.
As in any negotiation between capitalist interests there is antagonism.
But May and Juncker have much more in common in seeking to control this process and quell what Diane Abbott called “a roar against the Establishment” delivering the Leave vote in the referendum.
There are tensions. But they need each other. Juncker needs a big Tory win on June 8.
And if you want to see what real interference looks like, then if Labour can continue to recover in the polls, it will be in your face in the coming weeks — including from Brussels, from Berlin, from Paris and from Washington.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-7509-Absurdities-abound-in-the-May-Juncker-Brexit-spat#.WRGP4NykIdV
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Thursday 18th May 2017
posted by Morning Star in Editorial
DAILY Politics presenter Andrew Neil had fun yesterday replaying a clip of Nick Clegg addressing the Oxford Union in December 2015, comparing die-hard opponents of Britain’s membership of the EU to Japanese soldiers on isolated Pacific islands who couldn’t accept that the second world was over.
“They’ll carry on arguing and arguing on while the rest of us will just move on and carry on with the rest of our lives,” Clegg scoffed, anticipating that last June’s referendum would reject the campaign to leave.
Clegg and successor Tim Farron have since adopted honorary Japanese soldier status after the electorate failed to accept the Establishment line.
Farron, whose cohort of MPs was all but obliterated in 2015 as reward for five years’ collaboration in government with the Tories, views the 48 per cent who backed Remain as potential Liberal Democrat voters, enthused by his plan to rerun the referendum.
“You should have your say on the Brexit deal in a referendum and, if you don’t like the deal, you should be able to reject it and choose to remain in Europe,” he said.
But that 48 per cent was last June. Almost seven in 10 voters now favour, irrespective of how they voted in the referendum, honouring the electorate’s verdict and concentrating, as Labour does, on proposing policies to underpin a tolerant, welcoming, progressive, prosperous and internationalist country once Britain is no longer in the EU.
Barely one in five voters now wishes to disregard the people’s clearly expressed preference by holding a second referendum that the Liberal Democrat leader asserts will “give the final say to the British people.”
Final? Not if previous consultations with Irish, French and Dutch voters over the EU are anything to go by.
Either voters were ordered to go back and try again until they get the required result or, as with the unwanted EU constitution, its provisions were simply rolled up into a new binding Lisbon treaty to save the electorate from blotting their copybook twice.
Even lonely Japanese soldiers cut off from their units finally had to accept that the war was over. Liberal Democrats might take a bit longer.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c14f-Get-over-the-EU,-Lib-Dems#.WR3EqNykIdU
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Friday 4th July 2017
posted by Morning Star in Britain
THE Tories have been accused by British Communists of preparing to tie up workers and any future Labour government using EU market and competition rules.
CPB international secretary John Foster told the party’s political committee on Wednesday that “big business is putting huge pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May and her negotiating team to reach a settlement with the EU that would prevent any form of democratic intervention in the economy through an alternative economic and political strategy.”
He added that any deal accepting existing single market or customs union rules and institutions would effectively block future policies to support industry, control capital, regulate trade or use public procurement contracts to promote local economic needs.
Mr Foster pointed to the European Free Trade Association court judgement in the Holship Norge case as an example of how EU competition and “right of establishment” law is used to undermine organised labour.
The court ruled last year that a 40-year-old collective pay agreement protecting Norwegian dockworkers was invalid under EU treaty law, despite the views of Norway’s own supreme court.
“More trade union leaders need to speak out about the dangers that the single European market and its super-exploitation of ‘posted’ workers pose to jobs, living standards, local communities and strategic industries,” he suggested.
Mr Foster welcomed a recent decision by the GMB union to oppose continued membership of the European single market.
On “free movement” issues, Mr Foster accused the EU of hypocrisy and racism.
“The main concern of the EU has always been to ensure that businesses can employ desperate workers from one part of Europe on terms that undermine pay, conditions and trade unionism in another,” he declared.
“Free movement has never been extended to people outside “Fortress Europe,” most of them non-white, who have been kept out by ever rising barriers.”
The CPB political committee called on the British government to unilaterally grant residency rights to foreign nationals living here and to repeal all discriminatory immigration and nationality legislation passed since 1980.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-b3a9-Britains-communists-warn-against-Tory-Brexit-plot#.WYQ57FFpwdU
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Monday, 7 August 2017
CARPETBAGGER CABLE INCITES YOUTH AGAINST THE ELDERLY!
LIBERAL leader Cable yesterday launched a vicious attack on the elderly stating that by voting Brexit they had ‘comprehensively shafted the young’. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Cable accused the over-65s of being ‘self-declared martyrs’ who claim leaving the EU is worth the cost.
He said: ‘The martyrdom of the old comes cheap, as fewer have jobs to lose and living standards are protected by the triple lock on pensions.’ He then compared the supporters of Brexit with terrorists declaring: ‘For the Brexit martyrs, paradise beckons.’
He claimed that the austerity measures that his Lib Dem coalition with the Tories had pushed through had largely affected the working population, with pensioners suffering ‘relatively little’ after the financial crisis. Young people, he said, have the added problems of ‘prohibitive housing costs, growing job insecurity and limited career progression’.
‘The old have comprehensively shafted the young,’ added Cable. He again witchhunted the elderly saying: ‘We haven’t yet heard about “Brexit jihadis” but there is an undercurrent of violence in the language which is troubling.’
In fact, millions of young people voted Labour at the last general election, leading to Tory claims that Corbyn had stolen the student vote with his pledge to abolish tuition fees and that some seats had been won by students enthusiastically voting more than once.
In fact, Labour stood on a platform of leaving the EU and also the Single Market and the Customs Union. Cable is a careerist carpetbagging humbug who at various times has been a member of three main parties. At university, he was a member of the Liberal Party but then joined the Labour Party. In 1970, he unsuccessfully contested Glasgow Hillhead for Labour, and later became a Glasgow Councillor. In 1979, he sought the Labour nomination for Hampstead.
In February 1982, he joined the just created Social Democratic Party (SDP) that split the Labour Party to allow Thatcher to win the 1983 general election. He was the SDP-Liberal Alliance parliamentary candidate for his home city of York in both the 1983 and 1987 general elections.
At the 2010 General Election Cable was again returned as MP for Twickenham. The Liberal Democrats entered a coalition agreement with the Conservative Party on 11th May 2010, and Cable was appointed Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills on 12th May.
Young people and students in particular will be interested to know that ‘their ally’ in the alleged struggle against the elderly was in the forefront of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s legislation in 2010 to raise tuition fees to £9,000. The policy was approved by 21 votes, with twenty-one Lib Dem MPs rebelling, along with six Conservatives.
The debate took place while thousands of students staged protests at Westminster. All Lib Dem MPs said before the election that they would oppose any rise in tuition fees. Former Lib Dem leaders Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy were among those who opposed the government, whose Commons majority of 83 was cut to 21.
Coalition Business Secretary Vince Cable voted to raise fees. It is he that shafted the youth, not the pensioners. He said: ‘We are going to be resilient and go forward as a team. There will be no recriminations.’ He added: ‘I think the job now is to try and explain this policy to the country. It is nothing like as threatening to young people going to university as has been portrayed.’
Students are now being screwed, and robbed thanks to Cable and others of the same ilk. The latest figures show that tens of thousands of graduates have overpaid their student loans by a collective £45.4 million.
More than 78,800 graduates who took out what’s known as Income Contingent Repayment (ICR) loans between 1998 and 2011, overpaid by an average of £580 each during the 2013/14 financial year. The data also shows a year-on-year rise in the amount being overpaid by graduates! Cable is deadly silent about this situation which he helped to create. He is a declared enemy of the elderly and now we can see he is also an enemy of the masses of youth.
The response to this attempt to crush the student youth with debt must be the mobilisation of the whole trade union movement to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government. This must expropriate the bosses and bankers and abolish student fees and student debt to bring in socialism.
https://wrp.org.uk/news/13521
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