Support The National Rejoin The EU March In Liverpool Today

Socialists should support the National Rejoin The EU March, taking place in Liverpool, today.

 

We have a Tory Party that is in melt down, as a result of its take-over by its reactionary, petty-bourgeois base, and the contradictions that have flowed from that, as it tried to implement those policies, most obvious in the case of the failure of Truss/Kwarteng.  Much as with the Tories in the 19th century, and their split over The Repeal of The Corn Laws, the Tories are splitting again, as they, are now caught between the impossibility of Brexit nationalism, and the continued demands for it from that petty-bourgeois base.  They now face destruction at the hands of Reform, as the continuation of the Brexit Party.

At the same time, Blue Labour has also collapsed into the same reactionary nationalism, as it assumes that anti-Toryism is enough to ensure that progressive voters will suck it up, and vote for their equally reactionary, nationalist agenda, whilst that agenda is designed to appeal to those same racists, bigots and generally unsavoury elements that voted for Brexit, even though all the evidence shows that many of those, now, recognise it was a huge mistake, and they were lied to.  This is a reflection of the extent to which British capitalism is in decline, and the main bourgeois parties - Tory and Labour - which used to represent the interests of large-scale industrial capital, have now become, merely mouthpieces of the small business class that has increased in its social weight since the 1980's.

The Liberals, have themselves, sunk beneath the waves at the very time that their USP, of support for the EU, might have been thought to have led them to be shouting it from the rooftops.  My guess is that, after the election, as the Tories split, with the hard right, moving over to Reform, the Tories will return to their former position of being the advocates of large-scale capital, and will merge with the Liberals in some form.  That will leave Blue Labour and Reform fighting over which bunch of reactionary nationalists can grab that vote.

At the moment, anti-Toryism does, indeed, drown out everything else, but that cannot last for long.  Blue Labour will immediately have to begin attacking workers' pay, conditions and rights, and the totalitarian, Bonapartist regime of Starmer, will inevitably, lead to political confrontations, at a class-wide level with workers.  That is inextricable from the petty-bourgeois nationalist agenda of Blue Labour.  A merged Tory-Liberal party, returning to its natural position as advocate for large-scale capital, which requires a return to the EU, will retrieve the support from the ruling-class.

That will set it up as an alternative to Blue Labour, which will find itself, as the Tories are now, dragged further Right, as it competes with Reform, and other populist/fascistic forces that develop to take advantage of the rapid disillusion with Blue Labour, as it attacks workers, and its empty aspirations disappear into the air.  Socialists, therefore, need to intervene in the current mobilisations to re-join the EU-despite their, current domination by liberal, bourgeois ideas.  We need to do so to mobilise a progressive, internationalist alternative to the nationalism of the Tories and Blue Labour, and to guard against a future false prospectus offered by Tories and Liberals, as Blue Labour inevitably collapses, itself.