The idea of “national independence”, “national sovereignty”, or “national self-determination”, in the age of imperialism, is a petty-bourgeois, reactionary and utopian delusion. Rather than gaining “sovereignty”, Britain has lost it since Brexit. In pushing ahead with its actions in conjunction with NATO, Ukraine has also lost, rather than gained, sovereignty, not only having lost 20% of its territory, but, now, also, made itself the vassal, the debt slave of US imperialism, a debt that Trump intends to have honoured in Ukrainian minerals and resources.
In the case of Brexit Britain, yes, it can pass its own laws, set its own regulations and standards and so on, but only at the expense that it, then, finds it comes into conflict with its biggest and closest trading partner, the EU, on which it depends for its economic survival. That was soon manifest in relation to the fishing industry, which was persuaded to back Brexit to “get back control”, of the fishing grounds off Britain's coast. Not only did it fail to achieve that, in the negotiations with the EU, before leaving, because the EU is far more powerful than Britain, but, more significantly, it soon found that, outside the EU, it, now, had a load of fish that it could not sell, because the main markets for that fish were in the EU, and Brexit meant that they, now, had to jump through a whole series of bureaucratic hoops that were both costly, and time consuming.
That was not, as the Brexiters tried to present it, as a result of the EU trying to punish Britain for leaving, but was simply the inevitable consequence of Brexit, as Britain put itself outside the single market. It reduced Britain to the status of any other country seeking to trade with the EU. That's not to say that, as with the US and Cuba, or Russia and Ukraine, or China and Taiwan, if Britain acts in a way that brings it into conflict with the EU, the EU couldn't act in ways to actually punish Britain. Its only to say that, currently, it isn't, which shows just how much Brexit's damage to Britain is self-inflicted, and how much Britain has lost sovereignty from it.
That experience has been replicated in every other area of trade, and also in simple things like British people seeking to travel to go on holiday in the EU. Ordinary British citizens can see that every day, which is why there is a large majority that seek to re-join the EU, but their wishes are being denied by the petty-bourgeois, nationalists of Reform, the Tories and Blue Labour. Support for the Tories collapsed, as the reality of Brexit became manifest, although a large part of it simply moved to Reform, which repackaged the old Brexit nonsense, to claim that the Tories had not really implemented it – true, but only because the reality was that it never could have been implemented in the way Farage etc. claimed – and who have, now, focused on the real basis of support for Brexit, which is a hostility to immigration and immigrants.
Part of the collapse of support for the Conservative Party, also went to the Liberals, but, they too have failed to capitalise on that dynamic by emphasising their anti-Brexit position, which could also win them progressive Labour voters. If they do adopt that stance, then, expect Labour to see an even greater loss of support, as the desire to kick out the Tories, which existed at the General Election, is no longer a factor, working for it. Meanwhile, Blue Labour, which won the 2024 General Election, did so only as a result of the fraudulent nature of the electoral system, which amounts to ballot-rigging. Having shouted from the roof tops, in 2019, that Corbyn's Labour had had the worst result since the 1930's – not actually true, and conveniently ignoring the 2017 result, which was the best since 1945 – the reality of 2024, was that Starmer's Blue Labour did even worse! It got fewer votes than Corbyn's Labour in 2019, and where Corbyn's Labour, in 2017, had obtained 40% of the vote, Starmer's Blue Labour obtained only 32% of the vote in 2024, no better than in 2019. Since then, its vote has collapsed even further, down to around 20%, taking it down to a rump, and around the same level of support for Labour that it had when it was first created at the start of the last century, when it, basically, split from the Liberals.
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