As we enter the last month of Summer, my January prediction of an Autumn election looks less likely, but still not impossible. Whenever the election comes, the Tories will lose and Blue Labour will win, but, in winning, it will fail, just as Clinton failed, Obama failed, Biden has failed, Hollande failed, and Macron has failed, all of them, not only giving way to their slightly more conservative clones, as happened in the 1950's through to the 1980's, but to parties of reaction. Those parties of reaction, which seek to turn the clock backwards, be it via Brexit, Trumpist protectionism, or other forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism, also, necessarily fail, but their attempts cause misery and chaos, and also spur even more reactionary forces, to promote even more extreme solutions.
Its not impossible that Sunak may still call an Autumn election. There are still four months of the year left for that to happen, though a repeat of the 2019, pre-Christmas election is unlikely. What makes it less likely is the further travails that have beset the Tories in the last few months. Many of the points I raised, back in January, have proved valid. Sunak did manage to distance himself from Johnson and Truss, and he has moved closer to the EU, facilitated by the fact, as the comedian Stephen Fry noted, that everyone now knows that Brexit has been a disaster.
The issue of the NI Protocol has gone quiet, and Britain has re-joined the EU Horizon programme, as well as doing deals with France over the issue of refugees crossing the Channel. As I noted a couple of years ago, the reality is that, economically, Britain would be drawn back towards the EU, or go into even more steep decline and collapse, with behind the scenes deals reintegrating it into the EU's various institutions and programmes, making the superficial appearance of Brexit simply the paper thin cover over a Swiss cheese, peppered with holes. But, what all of that shows is that the idea of “cakism”, whether put forward by Johnson, Corbyn, or Starmer is total nonsense.
The idea that Britain could negotiate a deal with the EU that gives it as good terms as it had inside the EU, let alone better, is a delusional fantasy. As Andrew Marr argued in a New Statesmen video, the reality of that relationship is that, if Britain wants to avoid disaster, and wants to negotiate any closer arrangement with the EU, it will have to do so on the basis of being further subordinated to it, of being reduced to being just a rule taker, rather than a rule maker. That is the reality of imperialism, in which, as Lenin and Trotsky noted, even a century ago, the idea of real national independence, was a reactionary fantasy, and, now, a century later, even sizeable nation states have to subordinate themselves to much larger politico-economic/imperialist blocs. Britain, as Sunak has just discovered, outside the EU, can't even negotiate a beneficial trade deal with its own former colonies, like Australia or India.
Yet, as has also been pointed out, Andrew Marr's argument, promoted by others on the liberal Left, like Owen Jones, that despite the large majority realising that Brexit has been a disaster, and recognising that it will have to move ever closer again to the EU, whilst arguing that Starmer should not promote the idea of taking Britain back into the EU, is itself nonsensical.
It is cowardly, unprincipled tailism, and leads inevitably to a further strengthening of reaction. It is just a version of the same tailism being pursued by Starmer and Blue Labour that means they are already trailing along at an increasing distance behind the working-class itself, so far, still in sight of it, but ever in danger of dropping so far back that workers abandon it as an irrelevance and impediment to their further progress, especially as those workers feel more confident to take matters into their own hands, as the rising strike wave has shown over the last year. Marxists, inside the Labour Party, have to guard against that by redoubling their efforts to turn local branches out to every and any industrial struggle, whatever Starmer and his Blue Labour apparatus may try to impose on them, and, in turn, to explain to those workers that, in the end, a political solution is required to their problems, and, thereby, to draw those workers into the process of developing that political solution.
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