Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 1151	22 March 2019

Britain: Corbyn Betrays Working-Class Brexit Voters

Down With Racist, Anti-Worker European Union!

We print below a leaflet produced by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain in defense of Brexit (Britain leaving the European Union). It was distributed at demonstrations in London and Cardiff, Wales, on March 16.

MARCH 15—Last night Westminster voted to delay Brexit beyond the long-anticipated 29 March deadline, although the EU must approve any delay. With the Tory government in disarray, the Labour Party stands solidly behind the interests of the dominant section of the bourgeoisie which opposes Brexit. The decisive leave vote in the 2016 referendum was a stunning defeat for the City of London [financial center], which it has been trying to reverse ever since.

After betraying his working-class supporters by campaigning for remain in 2016, [Labour Party leader Jeremy] Corbyn has spent the last three years touting the EU. Last month, in blatant disregard for the vote of the populace, he came out for binning [trashing] the referendum result and making everyone vote again. The only choice the Labour leader proposes to give voters is remain or the Brexit in name only of a permanent customs union with the EU. While Labour MPs were whipped to abstain on Thursday’s vote to hold a second referendum, Corbyn immediately reiterated his support for such a referendum when he deems the time to be right. Britain out of the EU now!

As the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, Corbyn is demonstrating to the British imperialists that he is fit to govern on their behalf. That includes forcing the EU down the throats of working people who know it has brought them nothing good. Corbyn’s support to the EU has ceded the ground of opposition to that imperialist cartel to racist, right-wing Tories and UKIP, and has put wind in the sails of outright fascists like Tommy Robinson.

Contrary to myths pushed by Corbyn and trade union bureaucrats, EU membership does not mean peaceful integration into a “social Europe.” The EU is a set of treaties the European imperialists use to increase their competitiveness against their imperialist rivals, the U.S. and Japan. At the same time Germany, and to a lesser extent France and Britain, have used the EU to plunder the weaker member states such as Greece, Ireland and Poland. Under the EU’s free market banner, member states bash the unions, slash social services and privatise everything they can get their hands on.

While shutting the gates of Fortress Europe on immigrants from Africa and Asia, the EU boasts of the supposed “freedom of movement.” Intended to provide a supply of low-paid migrant workers lacking the legal protections of the native-born, the right to travel between EU countries is manipulated to suit the needs of the capitalists. A patchwork of national regulations governs exactly who can live and work where. In the face of the bosses’ divide-and-rule, the response of the union movement must be to organise immigrant workers into the unions and insist on equal pay for equal work. No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

If the British ruling class still treat Corbyn as a red menace, it is no fault of his. As Labour leader Corbyn has consistently abandoned his stated political principles in the interests of British imperialism. In addition to dropping his longstanding opposition to the EU, he dodged a vote on [former Labour prime minister Tony] Blair’s responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, came out for support to NATO and Trident [missile system] and has been conciliating the “anti-Semitism” witch hunt in Labour which conflates criticism of the Zionist state of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.

In demonstrating how ready he is to sacrifice the needs of workers and the oppressed to the interests of the capitalist ruling class, Corbyn is expressing the very nature of Labourism. Labour has always defended the interests of the bourgeoisie when the chips are down—from sabotaging the 1926 General Strike to overseeing the 1947 Partition of India to initiating the reign of military terror in Northern Ireland in 1969. Labour is a bourgeois workers party, with a working-class base but a pro-capitalist leadership and programme. A central task of revolutionaries in Britain is to split Labour’s base away from its treacherous leadership in the process of building a Leninist vanguard party that fights for the interests of all the oppressed and exploited.

Labour’s ultimate aim is to form a capitalist government through winning a parliamentary majority. But the crisis confronting working people across Britain—plummeting living standards, factory closures and the decimation of unions—cannot be solved in Parliament. The task of rebuilding the fighting strength of the workers movement is tied to forging a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions as part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party.

To achieve a decent standard of living for every one, good jobs, quality housing and a regeneration of the deindustrialised areas across Britain, it is necessary for the working class to take the productive forces out of the hands of the capitalist profiteers. This requires a proletarian revolution that sweeps away the whole apparatus of capitalist class rule, and establishes workers rule.

Our call for a leave vote in the 2016 referendum explained: “Amid the growing chaos besetting the EU, a British exit would deal a real blow to this imperialist-dominated conglomerate, further destabilising it and creating more favourable conditions for working-class struggle across Europe—including against a weakened and discredited Tory government in Britain” (Workers Hammer No. 234, Spring 2016). Opposition to the EU is integral to our revolutionary Marxist perspective: the overthrow of capitalism worldwide by the working class.

The establishment of an internationally planned and collectivised economy under proletarian rule will allow for a qualitative development of the productive forces and the overcoming of class divisions in society—the starting point for a world communist order. For a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles! For a Socialist United States of Europe!