Monday, 1 May 2017

The Tories Intend To Take Britain Out of The EU In Six Months

Its becoming clear that the Tories reason for calling the General Election now is that they know that all of the lies they have told about Brexit are quickly being exposed, and they now intend to take Britain out of the EU within six months, by doing what UKIP and the Tory right have always proposed, which is to simply walk away from negotiations and to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act.

The Tory line on Brexit was always a fantasy grounded on a fairytale about Britain's Colonial past, and the idea that Britain is still some dominant5 world power, able to call the shots with Johnny foreigner over there on the Continent.  Bojo's original idea was to propose voting to leave, so as to get the EU to make Britain an offer it could not refuse, so desperate would they be not to have us leave, and then to hold a further referendum where he would campaign to stay in, before launching his campaign to be the new Tory leader.  That idea has disappeared down the toilet, as its become clear that the Europeans are just not that into us after all, and have other things to be dealing with rather than worrying about a declining island nation off its coast.

The reports of Junker's meeting with May, give a flavour of what is going on.  The EU is presenting the Tories with the cold reality, and the Tories are burying their head in the sand, as they go cold turkey.  What May really needs to become a "strong and stable leader" for is to deal with the backlash from the British people when they realise that they have been sold a pup, and systematically lied to for decades about Britain and the EU, by Tories, UKIP and the gutter press.  May knows that all the guff she has been peddling about Britain getting a good Brexit deal is turning to shit in her hands, and although you can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, you can't fool all the people all of the time.

Whether May ever did think that she might be able to negotiate some kind of deal with the EU, and was setting up the three Brexiteers to take a fall, as I originally thought, I don't know.  It could be that she did but has become captive herself of the Tory party's rabid right-wing, especially as she now sees that the EU will give Britain absolutely nothing.  Or it could be that she really was not that bright all along.

After the Brexit vote last year, the Tory right obviously saw their chance, which is also why those sections of the Left that fantasised over Lexit, also showed their bankruptcy, and that they too are not that bright.  The referendum showed that around 30% of the British public are soft racists, and a smaller proportion of those are hard racists.  The Tory right have orientated to it, for their own ideological reasons, and for their own self-preservation.  They have followed the experience of Trump in the US, of Le Pen in France, and of Wilders in the Netherlands, of seeing that their long-term political future can only reside in mobilising these right-wing, nationalist, and populist sentiments.  That requires that the political leader, like Hitler and Mussolini in the past, like Putin today in Russia, or Erdogan in Turkey, is a "strong and stable" authoritarian, prepared to act against any political opposition, and where they can to act against any resistance from the state apparatus, be it the courts, or the permanent state bureaucracy.

Its for that reason that the Tories are seeking a larger majority in Parliament.  It has nothing to do with being in a better position to negotiate with the EU, who really don't give a tinker's for what majority May might or might not have, and it certainly has nothing to do with opposition in Parliament to their Brexit plans, as they have got through their legislation with large majorities, and the only future parliamentary opposition discussed has been normal democratic scrutiny.  If the Tories now see even that normal democratic scrutiny of their proposals as being the action of "saboteurs", then its clear what kind of authoritarian regime they are actually planning to establish.

The Tories are currently in a position that the other hard-right authoritarians across Europe do not enjoy.  Wilders lost badly in the Netherlands, the hard right lost before that in Austria, and Le Pen is set to loose in France.  Only with Trump in the US, or Putin in Russia, or Erdogan in Turkey are such right-wing populists actually in government, and Trump in the US is already facing opposition from the permanent state.

The Tories know that as the Brexit talks progress all their lies will be exposed.  The consequences for the British economy are already becoming manifest as it heads for stagflation, but that has only just begun.  As inflation rises, and the economy stalls, interest rates will rise, and the only things that have kept the economy looking as though it had any life, large amounts of credit, and the associated hyper inflated house prices, and stock market, will begin to collapse.  The Tories have already opened the curtain on what is to come.  The pensioners Triple Lock is to go, taxes are to go up, the country is to be turned into a version of Batista's Cuba of the 1950's, open to every money launderer, and global ne'er do well, with the odd billion or to to spend, attracted by lower taxes on the rich, and an abundance of unemployed, low paid workers, ready to be employed as domestic servants on zero hours contracts.

May like every tinpot dictator of the past, who has had to resist the rising anger of populations faced with such conditions, wants to be a "strong and stable" leader, in order to beat down mercilessly any resistance from the population, much as may's idol Thatcher did against workers in the 1980's.  May does not want to be a "strong and stable leader" on behalf of the British people against her opponents in the negotiating tables from the EU, she wants to be a "strong and stable leader" on behalf of all those small private capitalists, who want to throw workers conditions back to those of the 19th century, and against the vast majority of the population who will thereby suffer from it.

Its clear that the Tories are trying to hide the real state of their relations with the EU, as may's idiotic denial of what happened in her meeting with Junker has shown.  Its now clear that the Three Brexiteers and May will announce shortly after the election, were they to win, that they were being obstructed in the negotiations with the EU, and that there is no point in further talks.  May's refusal to deal with the reality that they will have to settle the terms of Britain leaving the EU before any trade negotiations could take place, indicates that they are setting themselves up to appeal to that 30% of the population that has fallen in behind their xenophobic and ultra-nationalist agenda, and is pushing them further and further to the right.

The only solution is to prevent the Tories being elected, and the only force capable of doing that is Labour.  The Liberals must be smoking some of that substance they have previously proposed legalising, if they really believe the nonsense spoken by Farron about becoming the opposition.  Even if we set aside his previous statements about forming a coalition with the Tories, even if we forget about the reactionary policies they pushed through between 2010 and 2015, in government with the Tories, even if we forget about the reactionary politics of the Liberals in Council Chambers across the country, the fact is that they have 9 MP's!  You have to be living on the Mothership, to be so delusional as to think that this 9 MP's is somehow magically going to be turned into an effective opposition!  And that is even more true in relation to the Greens to Plaid, and even to the SNP.

Anyone wanting to stop the coming to power of the most right-wing, authoritarian regime possibly ever seen in Britain, whose main message is blatantly based around the idea of Theresa May as a strong and stable leader, squashing any opposition, in other words, as a Mussolini in skirt, has to mobilise to get a Labour victory at this election.  But, more than that, the French election has also showed the emptiness of the idea of electing some Blairite candidate as a lesser evil.  Macron's failed Blairite agenda is a recipe for creating disillusion and further anger amongst French workers, and opening the door to something even more sinister than what Marine Le Pen currently represents.  It was the failed policies of the Blairites after 1997, that saw Labour's core vote wither and die, and led to the election of Cameron and now May.

If Labour lose this election it will be down to all those Blairites and soft lefts that have from Day One sought to undermine Corbyn, and the vast majority of party members, standing behind him.  Blair himself is trying to make a comeback, but, the truth is, and one that is not often quoted, for all of the opponents of Corbyn talking about his unpopularity, he is more popular than Saint Blair!  No matter how much the Kings Horses and Kings Men like Lance Price, McTiernan, and others try to put the Blairite egg back together again, it is well and truly poached.  Win or lose, after the election, its time to deal with those forces once and for all, and to begin to put the party on a proper footing to deal with the serious challenges that workers now face.

2 comments:

  1. To the Liberals, Corbyn is a Lexiter himself, because he actually whipped Labour MPs to vote in support of Article 50!

    While that thought won't affect my vote (as my area voted heavily Leave and the Lib Dems clearly stand no chance there, the most I can do is support the Labour MP to prevent the seat falling to the Tories, however unlikely that may be) it probably affects the calculus more in areas where the majority vote was for Remain and the Lib Dems still have a reasonable following.

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  2. I don't think he is, but some of those in the back room, like Milne, I think are, unfortunately. And unfortunately, none of them inside or outside the corridors of power seem to have learned anything from the experience. The membership need to deal with those elements as well as the right and soft left, in a process of democratising the party further, which is now urgently needed after the election.

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