By Cillian Gillespie

The 52% vote in favour of Brexit is historic and has already had profound political and economic ramifications. Since the morning of the result David Cameron has announced his resignation as Prime Minister, the value of Sterling and stock market prices have plummeted drastically, the likelihood of a second referendum on Scottish independence has increased dramatically and moves are afoot by the Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

The decision is a major blow to the capitalist class in Britain, their political representatives and the media who lined up to support the “Remain” campaign. It is also a blow to the capitalist classes in Europe and further afield; the European Union, the IMF, NATO, Barack Obama and financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs were all adamantly opposed to the UK leaving the EU.

Why the EU should be opposed 

Events of the last six years have exposed the deeply undemocratic, anti-worker, racist and regressive nature of the EU. The unelected European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB), as two central components of the Troika, have brutally foisted a diet of austerity on the working classes of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland, including programmes that have slashed and privatised public services. One infamous incident that illustrates plainly the pro-banker and anti-democratic nature of the EU, was the ECB President Jean Claude Trichet’s phone call to Finance Minister Michael Noonan before a Dáil debate in March 2011, telling him that “a financial bomb would go off” if any attempt was made to burn bondholders.

Various EU Treaties have undermined workers’ rights and written the pro-banker and corporate policies of neo-liberalism into law. They have placed severe constraints on government expenditure on public services and investment. This is in large part the reason why all of the main parties in the South at the last election, including Sinn Féin, argued that only an additional €8-10 billion could be spent in the lifetime of this Dáil. Of course this is far short of what is required to tackle the mounting housing crisis, for example, or to even begin to reverse the devastating austerity measures of the last eight years, through public investment.

The Socialist Party stands for movements of the working class in Ireland and across Europe to bring Left governments to power; that refuse to abide by these rules drawn up in the interests of the bankers and corporations. Such governments would implement policies based on human need not profit. This means public investment in services and infrastructure, taxing big business and the super-rich and implementing socialist policies that take key industries and banks out of the hands of the 1% and into democratic public ownership.

The EU’s racist and oppressive policies known as “Fortress Europe”, have denied poor and vulnerable refugees fleeing wars (created by imperialist intervention in the Middle East and North Africa), poverty and oppression, the right to asylum and sanctuary on the continent. Blocked from entering Europe legally and safely, they have been forced to make the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean Sea in overcrowded lifeboats that have resulted in the deaths of thousands.

In 2016 alone, an estimated 2,861 people have needlessly perished in the Mediterranean. Médicines Sans Frontieres (the NGO, Doctors Without Borders) have rejected all funding from the EU in protest against its despicable deal with the authoritarian Erdogan regime in Turkey, that will see refugees who arrive in Europe deported to Turkey, where they are likely to remain in what are effectively open prison camps.

The EU is run in the interest of Europe’s bosses and bankers. This has been the case since its inception as the Common Market in the period following the Second World War. It was for this reason, and those outlined above, that the Socialist Party in Britain and in the North supported a “Leave” vote in last Thursday’s referendum. We reject an institution that has shown itself to be the enemy of the 99%. We stand for unity of the working class across the borders of Europe against this club of the 1%. We argued for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to stick by his own views of the EU and use his enormous authority to make the case for a “Lexit”, an exit from the EU on a left basis. He could have explained how his enormously popular policies that resulted in him being elected as Labour leader last Summer, such as the nationalisation of the rail and steel industries (where jobs are currently being shed), are incompatible with EU membership because of its various pro-big business directives.

Leading a Leave campaign on an internationalist basis, promoting workers’ unity and opposing racism and division, could have seen Corbyn winning over those sections of young people – repulsed by the “Little Englander” racism of Nigel Farage and his ilk – who voted to remain. Such a campaign would have explained the capitalist nature of the EU and how it is not the force for progress that many genuinely believe it is. Their positive global outlook could have been channelled into a campaign that argued for a Europe run in the interests in the millions, not the millionaires; free from racism, austerity and oppression.

In failing to do this, Corbyn allowed the official campaign to be dominated by UKIP and the Euro-sceptic wing of the Tories, who shamelessly and disgustingly stirred up racist prejudices in the course of the campaign. Of course it should be noted that many sections of the Remain campaign, including David Cameron, are also complicit in stoking a dangerous fire of xenophobic sentiments in British society.

The Socialist Party will be to the fore in opposing the coup being mounted by the Blairite MPs against Jeremy Corbyn. Linked with this we have argued that he should call for an immediate general election to kick out the hated Tory government. He should stand on anti-capitalist programme, that challenges the logic of a system that breeds austerity, poverty and division, and in doing so he could give an alternative for workers and young people to the racist, right-populism of UKIP.

Why was there a Brexit vote?

The key factor in bringing about the vote for Brexit was the enormous inchoate anger on the part of working class people, and many middle class people, against austerity, bank bailouts, attacks on workers’ rights and the de-industrialisation that has affected many areas, including much of the North of England, in the last number of decades. It was a revolt against the establishment in the form of the current Tory government, the CBI (the British equivalent of IBEC), the bankers of the City of London, the Blairites of the Labour Party and large sections of the media who backed a Remain vote.

In the immediate hours after the referendum, many capitalist commentators who were in favour of Remain were forced to belatedly acknowledge this.

Clearly immigration was an important factor in propelling many to vote for Brexit. According to one survey by Lord Ashcroft, a third of those polled cited this issue as their primary reason for doing so. This, along with the reactionary nature of the official Leave campaign, has led some on the Left to conclude that the outcome of the referendum was anti-immigrant and racist in nature and ultimately reactionary in character.

There is a fundamental assumption being made here, that all of those who voted in favour of Leave and had concerns over immigration are simply racist. Undoubtedly there are many working class people with backward racist views and attitudes, who have been swayed by the vicious propaganda of far-right forces in Britain. But this false generalisation fails to recognise that there are many others who are not racist, whose concerns come from the fact that vulnerable migrant workers have been used by the bosses in Britain to undercut wages and conditions. This “race to the bottom”, combined with the policies of austerity, have fueled a discontent in areas that have undergone decades of economic decline as a result of the malaise of British capitalism. The neo-liberal policies of successive Tory and New Labour governments, of cuts and privatisations, have resulted in a real strain on public services, with little investment in council housing or facilities. And the increase in the population of deprived working class communities, as a result of immigration, has only added to this strain.

This is not an argument to restrict immigration. The Left and workers’ movement must take a principled stand against racism and in defending the right of migrants in Britain. This means opposing racist immigration controls and laws; and defending the right of migrants to stay and the right to asylum. Any attempts by far-right forces to organise and attack migrants must be strenuously resisted.

However if UKIP and the racist right are to be defeated, their suppport base must be eroded, which means that the real concerns over the effects of immigration, that many workers in Britain have, must be addressed by the Left. This means challenging mistaken views about immigration held by those influenced by the right-wing press and crucially calling for a united struggle for jobs with decent wages and conditions for all workers, regardless of their nationality. It means arguing for policies based on investment for need not profit.

A recent report from Oxfam found that the richest 1% in Britain have increased their fortunes by an obscene £1 trillion since the turn of this century. This wealth needs to be taken out of their hands and productively invested in wealth producing industries and services, as opposed to being gambled on the markets. Austerity’s destruction can be reversed and a plan can be devised for properly funding decent public services and council homes that can provide for the needs everyone in society.

The absence of a strong left alternative that can argue for such a programme in Britain and Europe has worked to the advantage of right-wing populist forces, as illustrated recently by the Presidential campaign in Austria, where the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party came within a whisker of being elected.

Here in Ireland, there will be attempts to stir up racism in the wake of the Brexit vote. This was already shown by the shameful comments made by Michael Healy Rae, who cynically warned that the vote would lead to an increase in immigration to Ireland from other European countries, and would in turn aggravate the housing crisis and depress wages. Similarly, it was thoroughly hypocritical for Micheál Martin to talk of the racist nature of the Brexit vote in a Dáil debate, given that Fianna Fáil TD, Eamon Scanlon, recently put down a question in that very same chamber asking how many Muslims have applied to come to Ireland.

The Anti-Austerity Alliance and the Socialist Party will fight any attempts to incite racism against migrants in Ireland.

Sinn Féin and border poll

Sinn Féin in the North campaigned for a Remain vote in the referendum, despite having opposed Ireland’s entry into the then EEC (forerunner of the EU) in 1973 and opposing a variety of EU Treaties in referendums in the South since. During the course of the debate they were largely uncritical of the EU project and have basically argued that it can be reformed in our interests, despite the evidence to the contrary, which the experience of Syriza in Greece – whose considerable, but futile efforts to do just that – demonstrated all too well. This is yet another example of Sinn Féin’s further rightward shift and accommodation to the capitalist establishment.

The result of the referendum has resulted in them calling for a “border poll” on whether or not there should be a united Ireland. Their justification for doing so is that the majority of people in the North voted to remain in the EU. However, this ignores the fact the Remain vote only won by a relatively small majority (56-44%) and that turnout in Catholic areas was low, less than 50% of electorate voted in Sinn Féin’s historic heartland of West Belfast, for example, illustrating a lack of enthusiasm for supporting the EU project.

The Socialist Party has always argued for the right of Catholic working class people not to live in a state where they have suffered systematic discrimination and repression. We also recognise that the Protestant working class have a legitimate fear of becoming part of a southern Irish capitalist state, in which they feel they would be a discriminated against minority.

We oppose the coercion of either side into accepting the status quo, or a capitalist united Ireland. A 50%-plus-one referendum based on a sectarian headcount will only help fuel division amongst Protestant and Catholic working class people, and amounts to coercion by formal “democratic” means. The partition of this island by British imperialism almost 100 years ago, created two capitalist sectarian states, both of which must be dismantled if there is to be a just and democratic solution to the national question in Ireland.

Only through the unity of working class people in the struggle for socialist change can such a solution can be found. This means fighting for a socialist Ireland, where the rights of all minorities are guaranteed as part of a voluntary, democratic and socialist confederation of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, and the rest of Europe. A proposal for a border poll will not help the necessary breaking down of sectarian divisions between working class people in the North, rather it can only help to deepen them. This is why it must be rejected.

Oppose attacks on workers’ rights

The bosses in Ireland will attempt to go on the offensive against the pay and conditions of workers in an attempt to make Irish exports more “competitive”, in the context of Sterling devaluing against the Euro. In short it is workers in Ireland, both public and private sector, who will be hit by the economic fallout of Brexit. Already the ESRI have talked of wage cuts taking place of between 4-5% for up to 60,000 workers. There have also been reports that the government may seek to attack to pay of public sector workers.

Not for the first time our living standards are to be sacrificed as a result of the anarchy of the market system. The trade union movement must resist any potential onslaught on the rights of workers by the bosses in this country. We paid the price for their last crisis and we have seen precious little of their much vaunted recovery. The Luas drivers have shown that decisive industrial action can defeat the race to the bottom in pay and conditions. This example should be followed.

For workers unity and socialism

It was James Connolly who wrote that “the day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go”. Over 100 years on, we cannot mend a system that is based on economic crisis, inequality, racism and austerity. Nor can we hope to reform and make good an institution such as the EU that embodies the most ruthless aspects of that system. In short, both must go.

We need to build new parties of the 99% in Europe that can inspire the working class, young people and the most downtrodden with the vision of a truly democratic and socialist society. A society that is organised for need not profit, where decisions are made democratically, where solidarity replaces division and there is full equality for all. Join the Socialist Party and help us make that message a living force in the struggle to change society.

The post Ireland, Brexit and why the EU must be opposed appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Conor Payne

The campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party has led to new attacks from the media and the Blairites on ‘Trotskyism” and the Militant, forerunners of the Socialist Party. Deputy Leader Tom Watson produced a ‘dossier’ on Trotskyist infiltration of the party, claiming that Labour was being taken over by “Trotsky entryists” who are “twisting the arms” of young members to support Corbyn!

The press has been full of scare stories, repeating and embellishing these allegations. The Telegraph went as far as to complain that Corbyn (in 1988!) supported a parliamentary motion calling for the complete rehabilitation of Trotsky and “all those innocent people murdered by the Stalin regime”.

Influx into Labour

Obviously, these allegations are designed to disappear the reality that hundreds of thousands of working class and, particularly, young people have joined the Labour Party to defend Corbyn’s leadership. This is not a result of manipulation by the ‘hard left’ but of the mass support which exists for left, anti-austerity politics and a party of that represents the interests of working class people.

The reality is that as a result of this influx, the Blairites have lost their own ability to control and manipulate what happens in the Labour Party, and are trying now to re-establish that control, including by purging as many members as possible. But the Blairites’ fear of Trotskyism is real. It is significant that the current coup against Corbyn has seen the re-publication of Michael Crick’s 1980s witch-hunting book ”Militant”. In the 1980s, a key step in the Blairite takeover of the Labour Party was the expulsion of Militant supporters, who stood unapologetically for genuine socialist ideas within the Labour Party and who advocated a fighting approach to taking on Thatcher.

Corbyn has correctly dismissed the allegations of Tom Watson as nonsense. He should go further and advocate that Labour to be organised on a federal basis so that different socialist groups, including the Socialist Party, can be allowed to openly organise and put forward their ideas for democratic debate and discussion.

Fighter for genuine socialism

Leon Trotsky was the outstanding co-leader of the Russian Revolution, where working people for the first time in history on a national scale took power and wealth from the hands of the super-rich minority and established a society based on democratic control of wealth and resources. He went on to fight implacably against the rise of Stalinism, which represented the defeat of workers’ democracy and the establishment of a bureaucratic dictatorship in Russia. For this, he was exiled and ultimately assassinated on the orders of the Stalinist regime.

The ideas of Trotskyism are in reality the ideas of workers’ democracy and socialism. As more and more people are looking for an alternative to capitalist austerity, those ideas are more relevant than ever and will be investigated by increasing numbers of those who are looking for a way forward in taking on the Blairites and the Tories. This is what the right-wing and the capitalist press are really afraid of.

Who were Militant?

Militant were the forerunners of the Socialist Party, both in Ireland and in Britain. Within the Labour Party, they stood for a socialist programme that meant a decisive break with capitalism and a fighting approach that meant the mobilisation of working class power against the Thatcher regime. Their stance resulted in a witch-hunt by the right-wing and the expulsion of Militant’s supporters.

Militant in Britain won huge support for its ideas. From 1983 to 1987 the Liverpool Labour City Council- led by Militant supporters- refused to implement austerity, successfully took on Thatcher and created thousands of jobs and homes in Liverpool.

They achieved this by mobilising tens of thousands of working class people and succeeded in increasing the Labour vote where elsewhere the Tories were winning. Militant also led the mass non-payment movement against the hated poll tax which brought down both the tax and ultimately Thatcher herself. Militant’s successes against the Tories hold important lessons for Corbyn and the Left today.

The post Blairite hysteria over “Trotskyist infiltrators” appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

Article from “The Socialist” , paper of the Socialist Party in England and Wales on our approach towards the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in Britain.

Socialist Party members have received widespread support from trade unionists, anti-cuts activists and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn both inside and outside the Labour Party for our calls for democratising the Labour Party, restoring the collective voice of trade unionists within it, reintroducing mandatory reselection for parliamentary candidates, readmitting expelled socialists, and other steps towards Labour becoming a socialist, anti-austerity workers’ party. Unsurprisingly our positions and proposals are regularly attacked by Labour’s right wing, including using unfounded accusations. Here, in brief, we set the record straight on six distortions.

“The Socialist Party got it wrong when its members left the Labour Party in the 1990s – it should live with the consequences”

As the Labour Party’s leaders moved the party to the right in the 1980s and 1990s, they set out to drive out the Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party). In 1982 they drew up a ‘register’ of groups that would be allowed in the party, and excluded Militant from it. The editorial board of the Militant newspaper (which later became the Socialist) was then expelled in 1983 and more expulsions followed – including in 1986 of some of the leaders of the magnificent Militant-led Liverpool council struggle. This was a political witch-hunt orchestrated by the ascendant right wing.

To mask the fact that it was a witch-hunt of ideas, Militant was accused of being ‘organised’ inside the Labour Party. But other sections and groups in the party were allowed to remain organised! And the party had in fact originally been founded as a federal party of trade unions and different strands of socialist opinion across the labour movement.

For those who weren’t expelled in the 1980s, the anti-poll tax struggle of 1989-90, led by Militant supporters, became a turning point. This was because as well as being against the Thatcher-led Tory government, that 18-million strong movement had to oppose Labour-led councils that were pushing ahead with collecting the hated tax, even jailing non-payers, while at the same time Labour was preparing to expel anti-poll tax activists from its ranks.

The Labour Party had increasingly come under the stranglehold of the right wing, which was determined to make the party a safe vehicle for capitalist interests. The anti-poll tax struggle had to be conducted almost completely outside the Labour Party, which showed how difficult it had become by that time to defend the interests of working class people from within Labour – a crucial experience on Militant’s route to working more independently.

Also, discussion and debate on socialist ideas at all levels of the Labour Party was being stifled, so that Labour’s annual conference and other bodies could become politically sanitised forums that would only echo pro-big business interests. The right wing – buoyed up by the period of capitalist triumphalism after the fall of Stalinism – dramatically reduced influence on policy from the party’s rank and file and affiliated trade unions.

Labour’s change into a completely capitalist party, part of an international trend that impacted on all social-democratic parties, made it impossible for socialists in Militant to remain active in its ranks. Our ideas remained consistent – it wasn’t us who moved away from Labour’s historic commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” as Clause Four of the party’s rules put it, but the right wing that wrested control and eventually erased that clause as part of its agenda.

Only through working independently were we able to continue to be principled fighters fully supporting workers’ struggles against neoliberal attacks, strongly opposing New Labour’s acceptance of capitalist-driven austerity, and always arguing for socialist ideas no matter how difficult the period.
Dave Nellist and Jeremy Corbyn at the Burston rally, 4.9.16, photo Teresa Mackay

“The recent letter sent to the Labour Party to readmit expelled socialists is just a publicity stunt”

On the contrary, the Socialist Party-initiated letter calling for the readmittance of expelled socialists is entirely genuine in its intentions. It is not surprising that it’s dismissed as a stunt by those who think it has no chance of succeeding and who don’t want it to succeed – and who make that allegation as another way of attacking the Socialist Party.

We make the call for admittance because Labour is at a critical conjuncture. It is effectively two parties in one. As a result of the impressive surges that propelled Jeremy Corbyn into the leadership, there is a real and very important opportunity to reverse the Blairite policies and attacks on democracy, and transform Labour into a party capable of implementing Corbyn’s anti-austerity proposals.

To aid this, in addition to the many thousands of new party members who support Corbyn, the party’s left wing would be strengthened by socialists who have a long, tried-and-tested history of leadership in workers’ struggles – both from inside and outside the Labour Party – and who play a leading role on the left in a number of trade unions.

The Socialist Party campaigned for Corbyn’s victory throughout both of his leadership election campaigns. We call for maximum unity across the workers’ movement to provide a politically and organisationally firm, mass base for Corbyn that can enable the movement around him to democratically defeat the Blairites and successfully pursue the programme that its hundreds of thousands of supporters want to see implemented.
“The involvement of Socialist Party members in the Labour Party only damages Jeremy Corbyn’s cause”

Our presence in Labour would damage the cause of the Blairites and not Jeremy Corbyn! Pro-capitalists in the media, in the parliamentary political parties and the right wing of the trade unions were all part of pushing the Labour Party to the right. From those circles comes the chorus of keeping out of Labour what they call the ‘hard left’.

The agenda of which wing of the Labour Party should be satisfied? That of the pro-capitalists in the labour movement? Or those who want to see a working class-based, socialist, vibrant mass party where the best ways of advancing the interests of the majority in society are debated and adopted?

By the mid-1980s, Militant had become the most influential and well-known Marxist organisation in the Labour Party nationally, playing a key role in building the left and reinforcing that wing’s drive for socialist policies. Militant also played an indispensable role in attracting young people to Labour, as shown when it democratically won the leadership of the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) at the start of the 1970s and went on to build the LPYS to new heights.

An editorial against the 1982 witch-hunt in one of the Labour Party’s own publications, the New Socialist (September 1982), pointed out: “The Labour Party always has been a broad collection that includes Marxists among its ranks. The Militant Tendency, drawing as it does upon Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, belongs to this Marxist tradition, and has a legitimate place within the Labour Party… The very existence of Militant and other groups within the Labour Party is a source of strength rather than a weakness. By working for the adoption of alternative policies and candidates, they assist the democratic functioning of the party.”

Now, with Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s leader, the party has the chance to again become a party that has healthy, democratic debate, in which different strands of opinion can be discussed and voted on. To exclude socialists who have a history of leading successful mass movements and who have participated in a great many local and national workers’ struggles in the years since then, would be to weaken the prospect of developing a strong, organised, political resistance to the Tories and the building of a socialist political alternative.
Liverpool city council’s struggle in 1983-87 for more funding from the Thatcher government was an inspriation to workers, photo Dave Sinclair

What about the argument from some that we would be an electoral liability for Labour? History has shown the opposite: Liverpool in 1983 saw a swing to Labour that was against the national trend, and in the 1987 general election Labour achieved its best ever vote in the city – a 57% share – higher even than in the 1945 election that was a landslide victory for Labour nationally.

Labour was made attractive by that council’s creation of thousands of new jobs and homes. Likewise today Labour will only win votes if it firmly rejects austerity and instead delivers improvements to the lives of the majority in society; an outcome the Socialist Party would gladly help to achieve.

“The Socialist Party should dissolve itself to allow its members to join the Labour Party”

Why should the Socialist Party dissolve itself when right-wing and other organisations inside the Labour Party are allowed to exist and fully organise? Labour’s Blairites are happy to allow the existence of right-wing organisations like Labour First and Progress that support their own pro-austerity ideology. They also tolerate left-leaning organisations like the Labour Representation Committee and Momentum, providing these groupings keep within what the right wing views as acceptable political parameters.

Regarding affiliates, there are large independent organisations affiliated to Labour: the trade union affiliates, and also a number of smaller independent organisations, including the Fabian Society, the Co-operative Party and Labour Business. The Co-operative Party reported last year that it has 8,640 individual members and on its website makes clear the extent of its own organisation: “The Co-operative Party is an independent party. It maintains its own membership, staff, national executive committee (NEC) and policy platform, all of which are independent of Labour’s.”

There are no demands for the Co-operative Party to dissolve because it acts to bolster the right’s position, as the Financial Times touched on when it recently reported: “Unions such as Usdaw and Community, as well as the Co-operative Party, are setting up local branches in the constituencies of MPs who are at risk of deselection by Mr Corbyn”. The report went on to explain that these ‘branches’ would try to prevent trigger ballots for deselection.

So the real underlying reason of those who argue that the Socialist Party should dissolve is not that we’re organised, as all the affiliated organisations and other groups clearly are. It is because of our utterly determined opposition to the Blairites’ pro-big business policies and their resulting fear of our ideas and the echo that we could again receive for them within Labour.

There are rightly demands for openness and honesty as well as democracy from the new layers of workers and young people who are looking towards Labour. We have no interest in hiding our meetings and activities – we welcome new participants to our discussions – and we believe that the Labour Party can only gain by allowing different groups to argue for their ideas and then sink or swim depending on the support they attract.

“It’s hypocritical to argue that the Socialist Party should be allowed to affiliate while arguing against trade unions affiliating”

We haven’t argued against trade unions entering into discussion with Labour’s leaders about the possibility of affiliating or reaffiliating. Rather, we’ve warned against them affiliating prematurely to the existing, still undemocratic Labour Party machine – as we argued that the FBU did – because there is much that could potentially be gained from a discussion on how the collective voice of trade unionists can be restored in the party. Under John Smith and Tony Blair through to Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, the influence the trade unions had in the party (originally founded by the trade unions) was cut away piece by piece. To reaffiliate and hand over to the Labour right-wing machine tens of thousands of pounds of trade union members’ money without even a start to this process being reversed is what we oppose .

There is also the crucial issue of the job cuts and attacks on terms and conditions being meted out to firefighters and other public sector workers by Labour-led local authorities. Resisting the demands of the Tory government and stopping these cuts needs to be another vital element of pre-affiliation discussions – the results of which should be made transparent in the workers’ movement.

We’ve had no duplicity on this; our call for the Socialist Party to have the right to affiliate does not mean that we would prematurely affiliate without discussion with Jeremy Corbyn’s office and being satisfied with the outcome. In particular it’s essential to discuss how the ‘surge’ that elected Corbyn can be built on to defeat the right wing at local and national level and propel forward a transformation to a workers’ anti-austerity and socialist party.

“Changing Labour won’t happen overnight. It’s important to keep within the rules and ‘play the long game'”

The Blairite wing has built up a formidable amount of control – both through the anti-democratic, structural changes they have engineered over decades, and having the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of Labour’s councillors, MPs, MEPs and officials. This won’t be changed ‘overnight’, but the important question is: is a process of change underway that can succeed?

After Corbyn’s first election as leader, we called for a conference to take place of the trade unions, Labour Party bodies and other organisations that supported him, open also to individuals inside and outside the Labour Party, to discuss and debate what would be the most effective strategy for transforming the party.

Unfortunately such an event wasn’t organised and neither has a strategy – or deeds – yet emerged from the leading lefts in the party to decisively shift the balance of power to the Corbyn-led wing. Nor have Jeremy Corbyn and those around him gone on a political offensive to voice workers’ interests, for example by calling on Labour councillors to set legal no-cuts budgets, or by clearly supporting the recent walk-out by the POA union of prison officers and allied workers.

The danger inherent in a ‘long game’ is that it will be so long that the opportunity to transform the party will be missed. The right wing will seize the first chance it has to re-take the leadership, and the new influx into the party could melt away until a new prospect for challenging capitalism presents itself.

In the meantime, also at stake are the jobs, pay, homes, services and benefits of millions of people, who are suffering at the hands of the Tory government’s policies and the council cuts being made by all the main parties. So we are right to place urgency on measures to counter and defeat the Blairites – there is much at stake to win or lose.

The post The Socialist Party and support for the Corbyn movement appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

Theresa May has called a general election for one reason – not the reason she gave – but because of the government’s weakness in face of a rising tide of anger in British society.

Workers are suffering the most prolonged squeeze on wages since the start of the nineteenth century. Benefits cuts are leaving millions without enough money to feed themselves and their families. Last year a record 200,000 people were admitted to hospital suffering from malnutrition. Education and the NHS are facing life-threatening cuts. The housing crisis is acute. The new ultra-draconian anti-trade union laws are creating bitterness and frustration among trade unionists.

Far from being a strong government, May fears that, given the Tories’ wafer-thin majority in parliament, she could be overwhelmed by forced u-turns. In the first year of the government alone there were eleven, now – in order to try to prevent more – May has made the biggest u-turn yet. Having pledged not to call a snap election she has gone ahead and done so. This shows how capitalist politicians change the rules whenever it suits them.

Cameron and Clegg introduced the Fixed Term Parliament Act in order to try to shore up the Coalition government for five years, now May is over-riding it to try to strengthen a weak Tory government. She is gambling, based on current opinion polls, that she will win the general election with an increased majority and will then be more able to carry out her real programme – not the warm words about helping the ‘just managing’, but vicious austerity.

High risk for Tories

Her gamble is high-risk. The real poll will take place on 8 June, and a lot can happen between now and then. She is partly posing the election as a referendum on Brexit, hoping that the third of Tory voters who supported ‘remain’ will reluctantly continue to support her government. This is not guaranteed however – some may well switch to the pro-remain Liberal Democrats.

Moreover, the hated Tories are very unlikely to make significant inroads in Scotland. The Scottish National Party is not yet fully exposed as an austerity making party and is likely to largely maintain its electoral base. Winning the Copeland byelection has probably given May hope that the Tories can improve their position in the North of England. However, in both the Copeland and Stoke by-elections the Tory vote actually fell in absolute terms. The Tories only scraped victory in Copeland because the Tory vote held up better than the Labour vote.

Globally the lesson of recent elections – from the US, to France, to the Netherlands – is that voters want to punish the capitalist establishment; and those parties and candidates that claim to be anti-establishment can have a mass appeal. Look at Melenchon in France, who by standing on a left programme, has soared to 19% in the opinion polls with a possibility that he will even go through to the second round. Jeremy Corbyn has already stated that Labour will not oppose the general election going ahead. Now he needs to launch an election campaign based on socialist policies that are relevant to working class people’s lives.

Policies for socialist change

It is clear that much of the pro-capitalist cabal at the top of the Labour Party will be secretly welcoming this election because they think Corbyn will be defeated and they can then replace him with some pro-capitalist, pro-austerity leader. However, they could rue the day this election was called. If Corbyn fights on a clear socialist programme – for a Brexit in the interests of the working and middle-class – he could win the general election.
The policies that first thrust him into the leadership of the Labour Party would be a good beginning – an immediate introduction of a £10 an hour minimum wage, free education for all, mass council house building and nationalisation of the rail and energy companies. These should be combined with policies such as an immediate end to all cuts in public services and a pledge to immediately renationalise Royal Mail.

Jeremy should make clear that he would kick the privateers out of public services and education. He should pledge to introduce a real socialist NHS – a well-funded, comprehensive, high quality NHS, under democratic control, with care to be free at the point of use. These demands should be linked to the need for fundamental socialist change – for a society run in the interests of the majority instead of for the profits of a few.
Such an election campaign should not be limited to speeches and election broadcasts. The campaign to defend the NHS should be linked to the mass movement which began with the national demonstration on 4 March. Jeremy Corbyn spoke at that demonstration. Now he, together with the trade union movement and health campaigners, should call a second demonstration, during the election campaign, mobilising millions onto the streets against the Tories and in defence of the NHS.

The post Britain: Corbyn must fight election with socialist policies appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Alistair Tice, Socialist Party (England and Wales)

Theresa May-hem attacks Jeremy Corbyn for his “nonsensical economic… mismanagement.” This is a bit rich after Tory work and pensions secretary Damian Green admitted: “Our manifesto is not un-costed, we just haven’t costed it yet”! Seven-times Tory treasury secretary David Gauke failed to say how they would fund the NHS!

But if the Tories get back in again, millions of pensioners will know the cost of the ‘dementia tax’, cuts in winter fuel allowance and the removal of the pensions ‘triple lock’ guarantee. 900,000 children from poorer families will know the cost of stopping free school dinners. And students will know the cost of thousands more pounds of debt due to tuition fee hikes.

Despite the human cost of the Tory “manifesto of chaos,” Labour started the general election campaign up to 39 points behind in the polls on economic competence. Theresa May has posed the choice as her or Jeremy Corbyn and co who “want to take us back to the economic chaos of the past.” Launching a new election poster, Tory chancellor Philip Hammond claimed there is a £58 billion black hole in Labour’s manifesto. The Daily Mail headlined “Corbyn’s class war manifesto would take tax burden to SEVENTY-YEAR [their capitals] high.”

So it was politically necessary for Labour to show where the money will come from. And the manifesto costings do show that the money is there. Labour’s public spending plans of an extra £48.6 billion a year would fund significant reforms and popular policies such as the abolition of university fees, universal childcare, NHS investment, free school dinners, restoration of the education maintenance allowance and scrapping the bedroom tax.

Taxes

These would be paid for in the main by reversing the Tory cuts to corporation tax, income tax rises on the top 5% of earners, a ‘fat-cat’ tax on excessive pay, clamping down on tax avoidance and a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on City transactions. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has made clear that no-one earning less than £80,000 a year will face any tax or National Insurance increases or VAT rises.

These modest tax increases on the rich and corporations’ profits are predicted to bring in an extra £52.5 billion a year which would be more than enough to cover Labour’s proposed spending promises. What scares the Tories and the capitalists is that Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity policies reverse the neoliberal consensus between the main parties that has existed for the last 20 years. In exposing the huge inequality in society they point the finger at the greedy bankers and bosses who are really responsible for the economic crisis.

Because, as the recent Sunday Times 2017 Rich List showed, there are vast amounts of wealth in Britain – but it’s all with the top 1%. There are now 134 billionaires based in Britain. The richest 1,000 individuals and families have a total wealth of £658 billion, up by 14% on last year.

Many of the biggest companies like Google, Starbucks and Amazon don’t even pay the very low taxes that they are supposed to. In Tax Research economist Richard Murphy’s most recent report for PCS, the union which represents tax office staff, he estimates a £122 billion “tax gap” for 2013-14. This shortfall on the taxes that should be collected is made up of £85 billion illegal tax evasion, £19 billion tax avoidance and £18 billion uncollected taxes.

HM Revenue and Customs staffing levels have nearly halved in the last ten years making it even easier for big business and the super-rich to avoid paying taxes. And even when they are caught, they negotiate sweetheart deals worth a fraction of what they owe. So it is welcome that the Labour manifesto promises more powers and staff to pursue companies and individuals who avoid tax.

But will this be enough? Labour’s figures calculate getting in only an extra £6.5 billion from tax avoidance, only a fraction of the “tax gap”. In the manifesto, they say that they have built nearly £4 billion ‘headroom’ into their calculations to allow for “additional behavioural change and uncertainty”. What this means is that John McDonnell knows that the 1% will do everything they can to not pay higher taxes, including off-shoring of companies to tax havens abroad.

Blair government

When Tony Blair was New Labour prime minister, he always argued against taxing the rich because they wouldn’t pay it (apart from the fact that they were all his friends and he’s become one of them).

Blair shared the economic theory of supply-side economist Arthur Laffer who argued that at a certain point higher taxes lead to reduced revenue due to ‘behavioural change’ such as tax avoidance. This is what the capitalist economists and Tory press are now screaming about Jeremy Corbyn’s modest tax increases on the rich – that they won’t pay them, so Labour’s budget will be £20-30 billion short. According to them, the rich should pay less taxes to encourage them to pay at all – while the poor who can’t afford to pay the bedroom tax or council tax are dragged through court and threatened with jail!

But it’s not just behavioural change that a Corbyn-McDonnell government would face. The capitalists and money markets would resort to a new ‘project fear’ of economic threats and sabotage. This would not be new for Labour governments.

Harold Wilson, a Labour prime minister in the 1960s and 70s, revealed in his memoirs that in 1965 Lord Cromer, the governor of the Bank of England, demanded severe cuts in public spending and fundamental changes in Labour’s election promises. In 1976, the currency markets led a run on the value of the pound which led Labour chancellor Denis Healey to agree public spending cuts in return for an IMF loan. In both cases, Wilson and Healey acquiesced to the capitalist threats and carried out orthodox capitalist policies, a forerunner to Thatcherism.

Only two years ago, we saw how the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras in Greece capitulated in the face of the Troika’s “fiscal waterboarding” and has ended up carrying out huge spending cuts, undermining its working class support.

The Socialist Party advocates radical measures to resist the inevitable capitalist sabotage. The big banks and major financial institutions should be nationalised, consolidated into a national ‘people’s bank’ and their assets put at the disposal of public investment, as well as providing cheap mortgages to homeowners and loans to small businesses.

Assets of the super-rich

More than that, a socialist government would freeze the assets of the super-rich and biggest companies to stop them taking their loot out of the country. This has even been done by capitalist governments when it suits them. For example, after the Western imperialist-friendly dictators in North Africa were overthrown in the Arab Spring in 2011, the Swiss government ordered its banks and financial institutions to freeze $1 billion of assets of Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi.

Workers and the trade unions in the finance sector, alongside the wider workers’ movement, should be given the powers to oversee financial transactions to prevent tax evasion and avoidance, off-shoring and hiding of accounts. This has happened before as well.

When reactionary army officers attempted a coup in Portugal a year after the 1974 revolution, bank workers occupied the banks and physically prevented the bosses from removing incriminating documents or transferring funds abroad. They forced the government to nationalise the banks and then the insurance companies.

Through nationalisation of the banks and workers’ control of the financial institutions, controls could be placed on financial transactions to prevent flights of capital as has taken place in Greece and is always threatened by capitalists faced with radical economic policies.

Such measures, by opening the capitalist accounts to democratic scrutiny, would enable a Corbyn-led government to show exactly what is possible, far beyond the set amount of money that Tory and Blairite governments tell us is available.

One area where Labour’s manifesto policies are not costed is their proposal for renationalisation of utilities. John McDonnell has proposed a £250 billion capital borrowing programme, a ‘national transformation fund,’ for the buyout – compensation and bond-for-shares swap – to fund taking rail, mail, water and the national grid back into public ownership, as well as other infrastructure developments.

Asked to specify the cost of the nationalisations, Jeremy Corbyn answered: “We don’t know what the share price would be at the time we do it.” This strongly implies that in the case of Royal Mail, the water companies and the national grid, all shareholders would be fully compensated at the then market price.

Past Labour governments’ state-capitalist nationalisations paid generous compensation to the former owners, which saddled those state industries with enormous debts from the start. The more money a Labour government has to raise from bonds and the money markets, the more they are at the mercy of the financial speculators.

While it is not a principle whether compensation is paid or not, the Socialist Party advocates that it should only be paid in the case of proven need.

In other words, not a penny to the fat-cats who have fleeced taxpayers’ money for years, but protection for any small shareholders or workers’ pensions funds which are financially dependent on their dividends.

Renationalisation

It’s true that renationalising the rail companies will be cheap because Labour is proposing to take lines back into public ownership as each private contract expires. But that means that after five years of a Labour government 12 of the current 23 train operating companies of franchised passenger services would still be in private hands, one until 2030!

Likewise, Labour’s energy industry proposals of nationalising the electricity and transmission networks and setting up regional public energy companies will still leave the ‘big six’ energy multinationals in private hands.

The danger is that, while proposing welcome and popular re-nationalisation policies, Labour’s “radical and responsible” manifesto – in its efforts to be ‘fiscally responsible’ – ends up being half-way measures that will still leave these industries at the mercy of the private sector and the money markets.

The only way to make sure that the economy does not face an investment strike, stock market and currency speculation, or even more direct acts of capitalist destabilisation and sabotage, would be for a socialist government to not only nationalise the banks and public utilities, but to take all the biggest corporations into public ownership.

With the FTSE 100 top companies accounting for 81% of market capitalisation, nationalising just those would allow a socialist government to begin to manage the economy in a planned way under democratic workers’ control and management – that really would be “for the many, not the few.”

The post Britain: How can Corbyn’s programme be implemented? appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

The closing of the opinion polls, even after the horrific Manchester bombing, has confounded all wings of the capitalist establishment. The Blairites in Labour are a key part of this coalition and they are just as terrified of the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn being declared prime minister on 9 June.

The Socialist Party has been an active participant in the campaign to elect a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government, elected on his manifesto that gives a real choice to voters for the first time – from one of the main parties – in decades. But the Labour right has seen its role as consciously making the party look divided. Labour MP John Woodcock has made this clear: “I will not countenance ever voting to make Jeremy Corbyn Britain’s prime minister.”

This was said when that prospect seemed remote. But in two weeks, the Tory lead has been slashed from 22 points to at least one poll showing just a five-point gap [todays You Gov poll puts it as close as 3%). That raises the possibility, even if the trend freezes there, of a hung parliament, which would be a defeat for May and the capitalist establishment. Many Tory MPs would then see the calling of the election as having unnecessarily threatened their careers three years early

Social crisis

The Tories and the Blairites cannot comprehend why Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto has made such a difference to the election. The social crisis that has affected the majority in society, including an ever-increasing layer of the middle-class, is not part of their privileged experience. Corbyn’s policies give workers hope of ending the ‘lost decade’ where the average worker will be earning less in 2021 than they did when the financial crisis struck in 2007 while housing costs have soared and inflation is rising.

Ordinary people can now see the difference the policies would make in their pocket. If Corbyn wins and delivers on his commitments, tuition fees will be scrapped from September and a £10 an hour minimum wage will be implemented. Millions of public sector workers will see the 1% pay cap lifted. Many workers in the NHS could pocket a pay increase of up to £50 a month purely from the scrapping of car parking charges in hospitals. The renationalisation of the railways poses cheaper fares and an improved service for millions of commuters, many of them in Tory constituencies.

The Socialist Party welcomes Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto, although it does not offer the full socialist programme necessary to transform society. It is a mistake that these policies, which Corbyn won huge support for in his leadership campaigns, haven’t been made official party policy until this manifesto. It would have cut across much of the doubts about his leadership. But he and his team have had the strategy of too often trying and failing to appease the Blairites and losing time to get his policies out.

Corbyn victory

The capitalist establishment fears a Corbyn victory because of his policies, but even more because of the expectations it could unleash. Jeremy’s promise is to renationalise each rail operator when the franchise expires. But would rail workers and commuters be happy to wait years for this date to arrive? If the steelworks in Port Talbot is again threatened by its owner Tata, there would be huge pressure to immediately take it into public ownership. In the same vein, council workers would expect Labour councils to immediately stop cuts. The Socialist Party will certainly be in the forefront of demanding this.

No wonder that the Tory media has stepped up its attack on the Labour leadership as the election nears its end. The Manchester bombing has given the opportunity to attempt to skirt around the disastrous May u-turn on the ‘dementia tax,’ which risked her campaign unravelling just hours before the terrorist attack. Ex-Murdoch editor Andrew Neil mentioned the IRA nine times in his half-hour grilling of Corbyn.

Notwithstanding Corbyn’s incorrect position on the conflict in Northern Ireland, he made it clear that he opposed terrorism from all sides there and elsewhere. We have always argued that workers’ unity is necessary to cut across terrorism.

Jeremy Corbyn must continue to go on the offensive and step it up. Like us, he was prominent in the mass campaign against the imperialist wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while May voted with Blair. Ordinary people know that these conflicts and many others have alienated many and made some vulnerable to be recruited to the blind alley of terrorism.

Corbyn is accused of speaking to IRA leaders. So did Thatcher and Blair. But they, along with Cameron and May, have at different times supported Pinochet and many other brutal dictators – including those in Saudi Arabia, who they sell billions of pounds worth of arms to.

At the end of his interview with Neil, Jeremy correctly pointed to his manifesto as giving voters a real choice. It is the only way to undermine the media onslaught that will only ratchet up as 8 June nears.

When May tries to act tough on security, he should counter by saying that her government of inequality, austerity and war is totally unable to keep people safe. She is putting ‘soldiers on the streets’ but we’ve long grown used to the scandal of homeless and hungry ex-squaddies in many town and city centres – casualties of imperialist adventures abroad and slashed public services and housing at home.

This campaign has at last given radical policies a mass audience. The ideas of public ownership, free education and a restored NHS, among others, are proving incredibly popular. Whatever the result, there should be no going back. Jeremy must stand firm against any attempt by the Blairites to use a defeat to topple him and take the party back to the right. But as Woodcock’s comments show, they will be just as determined to act against him if he wins outright or becomes the biggest party in a hung parliament.

The Labour right will be acting in concert with the Tories and Lib Dems to try and prevent a Corbyn-led government. Mass pressure would have to be mobilised through demonstrations and even strikes to ensure that it is his programme that is implemented. In 2010, there were ten days before Cameron walked into Downing Street to lead the Con-Dem coalition with Nick Clegg. The labour and trade union movement would have to act to ensure that a political vacuum couldn’t be created. It couldn’t be ruled out that under the direction of the establishment, the Queen calls for a Labour government led by the likes of Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper.

Trade union action

At the conference of the PCS civil servants’ union, its general secretary Mark Serwotka stated that the Trade Union Congress has organised a meeting of public sector unions on 14 June to discuss resurrecting the public sector pay campaign. Correctly, Mark called for that to be a ‘council of war’ in the event of a Tory victory to prepare seriously for coordinated strike action. But the meeting should also be utilised in the case of a Labour victory. For example, if there is any attempt to derail a Corbyn government, whether from inside or outside Labour, the meeting has to call immediate action to ensure the implementation of the policies that challenge the pro-market consensus of the last 38 years, from Thatcher and Blair to Cameron and May.

Whatever the outcome, all those who support Jeremy’s campaign must prepare for the struggle to come. The Tories and the media have the illusion that a May victory would bring in social peace. This is echoed by the pessimism of some on the left. But on the contrary, the volatility of the election campaign is a reflection of the instability to come. Almost unheard of, there have been significant strikes during the election. A new Tory government could provoke an explosive movement as workers and young people are forced to fight. But such a movement would also be necessary if Corbyn wins.

And the battle within Labour between the ‘two parties’ must be brought to its conclusion. To carry that out effectively, Jeremy must open up Labour to all socialist fighters, such as the Socialist Party, to help remove the Blairite pro-capitalist agents from the party.

With a week to go, all is still to play for. Jeremy is leading among young people because they see his manifesto commitments of the scrapping of tuition fees, a £10 minimum wage and ending of zero-hour contracts as making a massive difference to their lives. In the remaining days, he should especially campaign boldly for these policies in order to get their vote out, which could make all the difference.

The post Britain: Mobilise for a mass movement after general election appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

Less than two weeks after the horrific Manchester bombing another atrocity has taken place, this time on London Bridge and in Borough Market. Seven people, out enjoying a summer Saturday night in London, were killed, with at least 48 more injured.

The Socialist Party completely condemns this terrible attack. Like Manchester and so many other similar incidents in Britain and worldwide, such as the car bombing in Baghdad on 19 May, the London attack was designed to maximise the completely indiscriminate random slaughter of ordinary people. While it has not yet been confirmed it seems that this attack was again inspired by the completely reactionary, barbaric ideology of ISIS.

Again, just as in Manchester, the people of London responded – not least workers in the NHS and emergency services – with a wave of solidarity, offering every possible kind of assistance to those affected. It has been reported that some present during the incident heroically tried to take on the attackers, armed only with the chairs they had been sitting on enjoying a drink moments earlier. The huge wave of solidarity from people in Britain and around the world has nothing in common with the hypocritical reaction of Tory government ministers who have implemented policies that create the conditions for these atrocities and are now cynically attempting to use them to boost their election chances.

Election campaigning has been officially suspended for the day, but Theresa May immediately broke this, blatantly attempting to use this horror to try and rebuild her claim to be ‘strong and stable’ after showing herself to be completely ‘weak and wobbly’ in the course of the election campaign. She has already suggested the need for new ‘anti-terror’ legislation. However, there have been numerous new ‘anti-terror’ laws introduced in recent decades and none have stopped new attacks.

May also outrageously declared that “there is far too much tolerance of extremism” in Britain. This is completely untrue. The vast majority of the population of Britain, including the overwhelming majority of Muslims, are completely opposed to terrorism. Unless of course she means the Tory government’s continued support for arms sales to the brutal regime in Saudi Arabia, regardless of the funding of ISIS and other jihadists that wealthy Saudis have engaged in. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly declared his government would stop such sales.

Arms sales

May’s use of the blanket term ‘extremism’ rather than terrorism in her speech was not accidental. It is an entirely cynical attempt to smear anyone who she considers extreme; that is anyone who opposes the capitalist system – with its brutal austerity, poverty and war – of which she is an arch defender.

She also had a scurrilous sideswipe at the ‘public sector’ – suggesting that supposed ‘extremism’ within it needed ‘stamping out’. Jeremy Corbyn responded to these lies well, pointing out that public services, including the police, have been cut to breaking point under Tory rule.

The continued surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn after the Manchester atrocity shows that millions of people are not fooled by her smears. On the contrary, they recognise that the Tories’ savage cuts to public services – including the threatened closure of at least one of the South London hospitals treating the victims of last night’s attack – make it increasingly difficult to prevent, and deal with the consequences of, terrorist attacks.

They also recognise, as the Socialist Party has consistently explained, as has Jeremy Corbyn, that alongside opposing the right-wing reactionaries of ISIS and their ilk, which use fascistic methods to try and create extremely repressive semi-feudal regimes, with no rights for the working class, it is also necessary to oppose the imperialist wars and interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan which have created a nightmare for the peoples of the Middle East and inevitably increased the likelihood of terrorist atrocities worldwide.

In just a few days’ time, we will have a chance to kick the Tories out. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister would be a big step forward for the workers’ movement in Britain.

Of course, it would be a beginning, not an end. It is clear that the Blairites in the Labour Party, themselves responsible for Britain’s participation in the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would continue in their attempts to sabotage Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, backed to the hilt by the capitalist class. Nonetheless, his election would give confidence to millions of working people, both in Britain and to some extent internationally, that it is possible to fight for a society free from the austerity, poverty, terrorism and racism that capitalism creates.

The post Britain: London terror attack appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

Theresa May’s failed election gamble is a nightmare for the capitalist class in Britain. Seven weeks ago most of Britain’s elite were hopeful that May would succeed in dramatically increasing the number of Tory MPs, thereby buttressing her government to be able to weather the storms of economic crisis, to carry out vicious austerity against the majority in society and to implement a Brexit in the interests of the 1%.

Instead she is now a ‘dead prime minister walking’, only able to temporarily cling to power by leaning on the reactionary, sectarian Democratic Unionist (DUP) MPs, describing them as her ‘friends’ on the steps of Downing Street.

The DUP, founded by Ian Paisley, are anti-abortion, anti-LGBT rights and deniers of climate change. However, it will not only be the Tories who are dirtied by this new ‘coalition of chaos’.

The DUP’s base is mainly among a section of the Northern Irish Protestant working class who are badly affected by Tory austerity.

It seems that the DUP have already demanded the dropping of May’s plans to abolish the winter fuel allowance for the majority of pensioners as a condition of co-operation.

Tories Out! There is no mandate for May

The Tories are split down the middle and now have a leader with no authority inside or outside the party.

She is only remaining in place because the Tories can find no other alternative for now, and fear falling apart if they attempt a leadership contest.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have rightly called on May to resign and pledged to put their programme to parliament and challenge MPs to support it.

Now we need to build a movement for the implementation of their policies, whatever the parliamentary arithmetic.

The general election result was a complete vindication of Jeremy’s anti-austerity stance. On 18 April, the day the election was called, the Socialist Party declared that: “If Corbyn fights on a clear socialist programme – for a Brexit in the interests of the working and middle-class – he could win the general election.” At the time that was met with derision by many including the right wing of the Labour Party: who wrongly thought a general election would give them the opportunity to unseat Corbyn.

Let’s not forget that just last September arch-Blairite Peter Mandelson told the press that he ‘prayed every day for a snap general election’ as it would mean the end of Corbyn’s leadership.

Corbyn strengthened

Instead this general election has enormously strengthened Jeremy Corbyn’s position in the Labour Party and potentially in society.

Labour got over 40% of the vote compared to just over 30% in 2015, the biggest increase in the vote share for any party since the Attlee government in 1945.

This was against the background of a phenomenal increase in the popular vote of 3.5 million, from 9.3 million in 2015, to 12.8 million this time.

This was almost entirely accounted for by the streams of young people that flooded to the polls. The very opposite of apathetic young people participated in a mass electoral revolt to demand a future.

Some estimates suggest that as many as 72% of young people on the electoral register voted, compared to 43% in 2015.

Two thirds of them voted for Corbyn. The Liberal Democrat’s hope of winning young, middle class voters by claiming to be the ‘true remainers’ largely fell flat.

Instead Nick Clegg finally got his just deserts for increasing tuition fees in 2010. Corbyn’s programme of a £10 an hour minimum wage, abolition of tuition fees, rent controls, and council house building inspired young people to take a stand.

The resulting politicisation of young people will not be reversed, and lays the basis for the development of mass support for socialist ideas.

The support for Corbyn among young people was widespread among both the working and middle class; demonstrated by Labour’s victory in Canterbury, which didn’t elect a Tory for the first time since 1918.

This reflects the increasing radicalisation of middle class young people who, as a result of low pay and astronomical housing costs, are increasingly being pushed down into working class living conditions.

It is wrong and scandalous, however, as some in the capitalist media have done, to paint this election as ‘young versus old’. This is a conscious attempt to divide the working class which both generations should consciously attempt to overcome by standing in solidarity with each other, whether over tuition fees or winter fuel allowance.

Many older workers, disillusioned with Blair’s Labour, put a cross next to a Labour candidate for the first time in decades in order to support Jeremy Corbyn. In Wales, despite the Tories dreaming of gains at the start of the election, Labour made significant gains.

The figures are not yet fully clear, but the UKIP vote did not simply collapse into the Tories as May had hoped.

Among some who voted UKIP in 2015 (undoubtedly including some ex-Labour voters) May’s false posturing as being ‘tough on Brexit’ meant that they voted for her this time.

Had Jeremy Corbyn not made an early concession to the Blairites by reluctantly agreeing to campaign for ‘Remain’, and instead stuck to his own historic position (and that of the Socialist Party) of calling for exit from the EU bosses’ club, on an anti-racist, internationalist basis, May would never have been able to make the gains she did among working class voters.

Nonetheless, the position Jeremy adopted during the election campaign – of explaining he would fight for a Brexit in the interests of working class people – was able to win over a section of workers including some who had previously voted UKIP.

Even Nigel Farage had to admit that Corbyn had ‘pulled off’ winning the support of both young ‘remainers’ and working class UKIP voters.

The fundamental reason that Jeremy Corbyn started the election campaign so far behind was that the majority of the population had not heard what he stood for.

Of course, this was partly because of the inevitable hostility of the big-business media, but that was – if anything – stepped up in the course of the election campaign, yet support for him soared.

The difference was that, instead of staying quiet in a vain attempt to appease the Blairites, the Corbyn wing of the party took their programme to the country.

The right tacitly accepted this, hoping that Jeremy would then ‘own’ the defeat – instead he ‘owns’ the highest Labour vote since 1997.

This would have been even higher if Jeremy had earlier and more clearly stated he supported the right of self-determination for the people of Scotland, including a new independence referendum if they so wished.

As it was, increasing disillusionment with the SNP’s implementation of austerity in Scotland, meant that Corbyn was able to win increased votes in some working class Scottish heartlands, but it was far less than could have potentially been achieved.

At the same time the Tories made considerable gains in more affluent areas of Scotland, largely by mobilising a certain ‘anti-independence’ vote. (For more information see Socialist Party Scotland article: May Must Go! – Build mass struggle to drive out the Tories).

Trade union mobilisation needed

Jeremy Corbyn’s success now needs to be urgently built on. The trade union movement should call an immediate national ‘Tories Out’ demonstration against austerity – calling for the scrapping of the Tory attacks on the NHS and schools, and for the abolition of tuition fees.

Such a demonstration could be millions strong and the springboard for a 24 hour general strike. This in turn could force May to call a new general election.

At the same time Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left should make a clear call for Labour councils to stop implementing Tory cuts.

In a short campaign very impressive numbers were convinced to vote for Corbyn despite their initial scepticism about whether he would implement his programme.

This scepticism is a result of the betrayals of New Labour in office, and the experience of Labour councils at local level that have presided over 40% cuts in services since 2010.

To consolidate the enthusiasm that was generated for Corbyn in the election it is necessary to now make clear that he opposes any more council cuts, and that this Tory government is too weak to force Labour councils to implement them.

This is particularly important in urban areas, where the surge to Corbyn was strongest, and where every council in England has elections next year.

Transform the Labour Party

“Big up Jezza for reviving so many ppls hope in politics. If Labour was united behind Corbyn this past year he coulda won this outright!” said Riz Ahmed of the hip-hop trio Swet Shop Boys (one of the many musicians who supported Corbyn) – stating what is obvious to many Corbyn supporters.

Jeremy has not only faced the relentless hostility and sabotage of the capitalist elite, but also from the Blairites – the representatives of capitalism inside the Labour Party.

In the immediate aftermath of this election they will not dare to try and launch another coup against him, but we can’t be fooled into thinking that they are reconciled to his leadership. Labour remains two parties in one.

For the capitalist class Jeremy Corbyn’s policies, and even more the hope they are creating for millions, are a real threat.

Therefore their representatives in the Labour Party will search for a new way to defeat Corbyn. Even in the week of the election right-wing Labour MP Joan Ryan openly attacked Corbyn and banned Labour canvassers from using leaflets which mentioned him! Now in the aftermath of the election Blairite Hilary Benn has poked his head above the parapet to mutter about how ‘Labour must learn from its third electoral defeat’.

Even those Blairites who temporarily make statements supportive of Jeremy cannot be trusted. They will do so in order to try and surround him and force him to retreat from his radical programme.

What else does the ultimate Blairite and would-be assassin of Corbyn, Peter Mandelson, mean when he talks about Corbyn needing to ‘show respect’ to all wings of the party? It was the rights attempts to gag Jeremy which were largely responsible for most people not knowing what he stood for before the election.

We cannot allow this to happen again. Instead a campaign needs to be immediately launched to transform the Labour Party into a genuinely anti-austerity, democratic party of workers and young people.

This requires the introduction of compulsory reselection of MPs. The next general election could be at any time and Labour must not face another election with the majority of its own candidates opposing Jeremy Corbyn.

This should be combined with the democratisation of the party, including restoring the rights of trade unions, and welcoming all genuine socialists in a democratic federation.

These measures could create a party which was genuinely able to bring together all the young people, socialists, workers and community campaigners who are inspired by Jeremy Corbyn into a powerful mass force.

Fight for Socialism

This general election campaign has introduced socialist ideas to a new generation. That is enormously positive.

It has also given a glimpse, however, of how far the capitalists would go to try and sabotage any attempts to introduce policies in the interests of the many not the few.

The hostility Jeremy Corbyn faces in opposition is only a pale shadow of how they would attempt to derail a Jeremy Corbyn led government.

To prevent this will pose the need for far-going socialist measures including nationalising the 100 or so major corporations and banks that dominate Britain’s economy, in order to be able to introduce a democratic socialist plan.

This would allow a socialist government to begin to manage the economy in a planned way under democratic workers’ control and management – that really would be “for the many, not the few.”

The post Britain: After elections, May and the Tories must go! appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

From the editorial of “The Socialist”, newspaper of the Socialist Party in England and Wales

As more details emerge and the death toll rises, it becomes clearer and clearer what a terrible disaster this is. The fire spread with horrifying speed and witnesses describe heart-breaking scenes as people desperately tried to escape.

It is a huge tragedy for the immediate community. Children have died; three generations of the same family have died. But rather than being torn apart, the community has come together in a remarkable display of human solidarity, supporting each other, collecting donations of goods and money, organising emergency accommodation, coordinating relief.

The heroism, the courage, the self-sacrifice of the emergency services and of local residents is incredible. Who can fail to be moved by the scenes of the firefighters being applauded as they drove away from the scene?

And there has naturally been a much wider outpouring of sympathy with the residents and families affected, with overwhelming donations of money, clothes, bedding, toys, nappies, etc. The true face of humanity has been shown in this solidarity.

But at the same time there is massive anger. Anger at the council, at the housing management company, at the contractors who did the refurbishment, at the government and at the system as a whole. Many residents are sure that the death toll will be far higher than currently stated and that facts are being hidden.
It is not only the Socialist Party or other activists that say it, the residents in the local area say it themselves: this is about rich and poor, an arrogant disregard for the lives of working class people. This is a diverse community, many of whom are black or Asian, living in a poor working class area alongside immense wealth of the super-rich.

After years of being ignored by the council, some of the tenants who campaigned for fire safety in the block have been killed. Two women who were threatened with legal action by the council are missing, presumed dead. They faced obstacles in their campaign for safety, including cuts to legal aid which meant they could not afford legal representation. But they have left a legacy in writing.

Council’s failings

Anger is huge at the council’s apparent arrogance and ineptitude in response to the crisis. For two days after the disaster the council and government were barely present, everything was organised by the community.

Over £5 million has been donated, which is amazing, but it is dwarfed by the reserves held by Kensington and Chelsea council. According to their accounts, they sit on £300 million in usable reserves. They have been running a £15 million annual surplus on housing – taking £54 million in rent and service charges and spending £40 million on housing – adding to reserves. Yet they scrimped to save £5,000 on the cladding and £200,000 on sprinklers.

This is from a council whose deputy leader and cabinet member for housing, Rock Feilding-Mellen, comes from a family estate in Gloucestershire of 5,000 acres with a 300-foot single jet fountain, the tallest gravity fountain in the world!

The emergency re-housing situation is a scandal, with survivors scattered in hotels. In World War Two, bombed out families were rehoused in 24 hours!
Staggeringly, it is now emerging, according to David Lammy MP, that survivors who do not want to be rehoused around the country, eg in Preston, are being threatened with being declared intentionally homeless!

If this continues, local fury will rightly grow. The council and government are being advised to rip up housing policy, so that no resident is at risk of losing their right to be housed if they refuse accommodation that is unsuitable.

Face of the Tories

The true face of the Tories, as representatives of the profit-seeking capitalist class, has been laid bare. Theresa May’s own empathy-free response is just one element. People are sharing widely the video of Boris Johnson sat in City Hall scoffing at complaints about fire service cuts.

Similarly the article and speech by David Cameron bragging he was going to “kill off the safety culture” – “I want 2012 to go down in history not just as the Olympics year or Diamond Jubilee year, but the year we got a lot of this pointless timewasting out of the British economy”. As our articles expose, Tory housing minister Gavin Barwell, now Theresa May’s chief of staff, scandalously sat on recommendations from the Lakanal fire in Southwark in 2009.

It cannot be clearer that austerity kills. But this is more than the last seven years of Tory austerity. It is decades of cuts, privatisation, deregulation, relaxation of planning, lack of democratic accountability. It is money-grubbing cost-cutting, scrimping, short-cuts in the pursuit of ‘savings’ and profit. The Times reports that senior Grenfell managers shared £650,000 in pay. From Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to David Cameron, this is rampant neoliberalism.

Council homes

The development of council housing was a huge step forward for working class people; but working class people only have what they have fought for.
As the Socialist has explained previously, the post-World War One government subsidy for council housing was in response to mass rent strikes and the Russian Revolution. The parliamentary secretary to the Local Government Board said: “The money we are going to spend on housing is an insurance against Bolshevism and revolution”. The 1945 Labour government created the welfare state, including large scale council house building.

But the rich have never accepted a social responsibility for housing and their political representatives have spent the last 35 years dismantling it. Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation in 1980 forced councils to sell off homes at a massive discount to tenants.

One million houses were sold within ten years. At the same time, spending restrictions reduced new council house building. Then in 1988, Large Scale Voluntary Transfer enabled the moving of housing stock from council ownership into housing association control, which was then massively accelerated under Tony Blair.
It was New Labour who ran with bringing profit into public housing through the Private Finance Initiative and who vigorously pushed ‘arm’s-length management organisations’ (Almos), stripping out democratic control of social housing and handing it over to the private sector. In 2000 New Labour deputy PM John Prescott predicted “the end of council housing”. Jeremy Corbyn was one of a tiny number of Labour MPs who opposed these measures.

It results in a lack of accountability and control by tenants or elected councillors over management organisations. They can try to defend themselves by saying there are tenants on the boards, but they have no power. Housing campaigners believe there is a concerted attempt now to derecognise Tenants’ and Residents’ Associations across London.

Now the Tories want to effectively end social housing altogether, including deregulating housing associations, and to reduce planning controls even further.
The net result is that the conditions of a hundred years ago, of overcrowding in dangerous conditions, in which working class lives are sacrificed for profit, are back.

Tory cuts

In the same week as the Grenfell fire, it was leaked to the Guardian that Charing Cross hospital, currently treating survivors, faces devastating cuts that would reduce it to 13% of its current size, effectively a clinic.

And as with the recent terrorist attacks, this horrendous event also brings into sharp focus the fact that the number of firefighters has been cut in London by 550, with ten stations closed and others with appliances reduced. London mayor Sadiq Khan should reverse all cuts to the London fire service.

All this is having a profound effect on consciousness – about housing, but also about the way society is organised. The anger is expressed in terms of ‘the rich and the working class’. No wonder Jeremy Corbyn has been so popular in the area – not just because of his human response, but because of the break he potentially offers from brutal austerity policies.

Theresa May and the Tories were already in crisis, which this fire and the fury of the local community and working class more widely could deepen and bring to a head.

As well as offering our deepest sympathy and solidarity with the residents of Grenfell and the local area, Socialist Party members are also raising ideas about what could be done. We argue that tenant organisation and action, and decisive action by the trade unions, could bring not only speedy justice to the survivors of Grenfell and the community, but win the immediate safety for all residents of tower blocks and mass housing.

The call for a million on the streets on 1st July, for the trade unions to lead a mass demonstration and coordinated strike action, could be decisive in piling on the pressure on the Tories for another general election.

The Socialist Party backs Corbyn’s housing plans but they could go much further. As well as abolishing the bedroom tax it is essential to end the benefit cap too.
A socialist housing policy would mean massive investment in council housing, including rebuilding many existing estates; rent controls that control the actual level of rents, not just increases; and democratic nationalisation of the banks, land and building companies to provide safe, secure, and genuinely affordable homes for all.

The post Britain: Grenfell Tower fire – Whole Establishment exposed appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Cillian Gillespie

The failure of the economic recovery in Ireland to deliver for the needs of working-class people is becoming increasingly clear, if anything living standards are worsening. The past number of weeks and months has seen the publication of reports with ample proof of this.

There are now a record 687,000 people waiting for treatment in public hospitals, the vast bulk of whom are waiting to see a consultant as outpatients for the first time. On the census night in 2016, 7,000 people were classed as homeless, rising by 81% since the census of 2011. Today it is estimated that there are 8,000 living in homeless accommodation, including nearly 3,000 children. Many are now being threatened with eviction from their homes by vulture funds with an alarming rise in the number of summary judgements.

Workers’ rights and conditions continue to be undermined. A recent report by Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI) found that one out of every five workers under the age 30 are on temporary contracts, a rise of 40% since 2004. The new public sector pay deal will ensure that two-tier pay for new entrants will continue.

While profits for the top 1,000 companies in Ireland have risen from €22.4 billion in 2015 to €34 billion in 2017, real wages in Ireland, like those in other capitalist economies, have continued to stagnate. This obscene disparity in wealth distribution can also be seen by the fact that the richest 300 have seen their wealth double from €50 billion to €100 billion in the period from 2010 to 2016, while the rest of us were forced to live under a regime of austerity.

Inequality, attacks on workers rights’, the housing crisis and public services starved of investment are the norm of capitalism in Ireland today. Housing policy is geared towards the interests of developers and speculators, we have a tax regime based on maintaining and boosting the profits of big business and the wealth of the super-rich and ultimately our needs and rights are being sacrificed in the interests of an economy run for the 1%.

Even when the interests of the ruling class are not directly economically affected in an obvious way, the establishment is still conservative and unwilling to grant rights for ordinary people. This is clearly evident when it comes to the question of abortion rights. Notwithstanding the outcome of the Citizens’ Assembly, it is clear that the establishment are determined that abortion will only be legislated for in the most limited circumstances. They are also clearly opposed to bringing about the separation of church and state.

We need real and meaningful change if our rights and needs are to be met. If we are to have affordable homes for all, the necessary and substantial increase in public investment, decent jobs with proper wages and conditions, the right to choose for women and pregnant people and the full separation of church and state we need a struggle to end the rule of capitalism. We need a left government that will break with this rotten, backward and regressive system by taking the key wealth producing sectors of the economy into democratic public ownership and directing its resources so that we can provide for all.

Sinn Féin and coalition

Sinn Féin is one of the parties that have benefited from the growing disenchantment from the establishment parties in the last number of years. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that they have rejected the kind of policies outlined above which are necessary to bring about real change for the majority. Recent statements by their leading figures regarding coalition are illustrative of their acceptance of the economic and political status quo.

Mary Lou McDonald and Gerry Adams have reiterated Sinn Féin’s willingness to go into coalition with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in the aftermath of the next general election. Like the Green Party and Labour before them, they are prepared to coalesce with one of the two traditional parties of Irish capitalism.

Both the Fianna Fáil-Green Party (2007-2011) and Fine Gael-Labour (2011-2016) coalition governments were ones that saw the brutal implementation of neoliberal austerity measures, the bailout of the banking system to the tune of €64 billion and the shameful denial of women’s bodily autonomy. The fact that Sinn Féin is willing to take this course of action will no doubt disappoint many who support them or who were open to the possibility that they may represent an alternative to the status quo. It’s an unfortunate truth, but this illustrates that their claim to be a party of the left is a hollow one.

Combined with its broader political trajectory, the collapse of the Northern Executive in the early part of this year acted as a catalyst for Sinn Féin to publicly alter its position on coalition in the South. The party hopes that being in such a government can strengthen its hands in future negotiations with the DUP regarding the re-establishment of the power sharing structures. Their desire to be in government will only be added to given that the DUP has done a deal with the Tories to support the weakened May administration.

The statements of Adams and McDonald are indicative of Sinn Féin’s actual political position and cannot be divorced from its rightward political shift in the last number of years. If it didn’t before, Sinn Féin now fully accepts the logic of capitalism where the ruthless drive for profit by big business, bankers and the super-rich is put before the needs of the workers and young people. This was clearly evident in last year’s general election.

Accepting Capitalism

In their election manifesto, Sinn Féin said that if it was in government it would only reverse a small portion of the vicious austerity measures implemented in the period from 2008-2015. Sinn Féin wanted to emphasise their “responsibility” to Irish and European capitalism, by accepting the concept that there was a limited “fiscal space” for increased public expenditure as a result of the neo-liberal straitjacket imposed by both over the course of the crisis.

The manifesto only called a 50c increase in the minimum wage, bringing it up to €9.65 and falling far below the “living wage” proposal put forward by some in the trade unions that was calculated at the time to be €11.50. Despite the fact there were 130,000 on housing waiting lists, their proposal was for only 100,000 homes to be built in the period from 2016 to 2030.

Ultimately, by accepting the limits of what capitalism could afford, Sinn Féin were unwilling to put forward the measures to bring about the real change that working-class people fundamentally aspire to. A government based on their programme would not change conditions for most people. At best they would have to act as a judge and jury and would discriminate on the basis of not challenging the profits of the super-rich. For each person that might gain an affordable home, many others wouldn’t, or likewise for those who would benefit from the limited investment in schools and hospitals, many more wouldn’t.

The Syriza government

A key factor in determining Sinn Féin’s rightward shift in the run-up to the 2016 election was the experience of the Syriza government in Greece and the conclusions they drew from this. This was a government that shamefully capitulated to the diktats of the European Union and Greek capitalism by accepting a deal based on austerity and privatisation, a few months after its election. They did so because they were unwilling to implement radical socialist policies; namely capital controls and nationalisation of the banks and the key sectors of the economy under workers’ control and management.

Clearly the Sinn Féin leadership drew the conclusion from this experience that it was simply not possible to challenge the economic orthodoxy of austerity, neo-liberalism, the EU and capitalism. They were completely uncritical of the approach taken by Alexis Tsipras and Syriza, and in fact Gerry Adams publicly congratulated them after their re-election in September 2015, months after Syriza concluded its rotten deal with the Troika. Syriza quickly abandoned their opposition to austerity and implemented a whole new series of new attacks on the working class and the poor.

Sinn Féin’s positivity towards Syriza after its sellout – of the historic 61% Oxi (No) vote by the Greek working class rejecting the Troika’s terms in the referendum in July 2015 – is hardly a good indication of what they are prepared to do in power. In fact, their acceptance of the EU’s undemocratic and neo-liberal fiscal rules became much more publically explicit after Syriza’s capitulation.

The acceptance of the capitalist market, including its inherent attacks on workers’ pay and conditions was also illustrated in a speech given by Gerry Adams to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce in September 2015. He implicitly supported the idea that workers in Ireland should pay the price for the failure of the capitalist system and the crisis:

“We know that businesses across this state have faced unprecedented challenges over the last seven years… Irish businesses are resilient and have understood the need to adapt and reinvent. Wage bills were cut, investment plans scaled back and operations downsized.”

During the period in which they participated in the Northern Executive, they showed no apprehension in implementing anti-working class austerity measures. In late 2015, they signed up to the “Fresh Start Agreement” that would see the shedding 20,000 public sector jobs and a slashing of the corporate tax rate. In doing so they embraced the right-wing argument that enticing big business with a form of “corporate welfare” is key to developing the economy and that this must be done at the expense of public sector jobs and services. Like the rest of the establishment in the South, they doggedly defend the pitifully low corporation tax arangement and have dropped their demand for a wealth tax in recent budget statements.

Abortion rights

While an entire generation of young people has been politicised by the battle for abortion rights, the leadership of Sinn Féin are extremely uncomfortable with the demand for a women’s right to choose and bodily autonomy for women and pregnant people. It wasn’t until 2015 that the party came out in favour of repealing the 8^th amendment. Their representatives have made it explicitly clear the party only favours legislating for abortion rights in limited circumstances, namely fatal foetal abnormalities, rape and mental health / suicide (the latter is the status quo).

This does not even cover where there is a threat to a person’s physical health posed by pregnancy. Sinn Féin opposes the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to the North which could legalise abortion. During the last decade, in which Sinn Féin has been in power in the North, thousands of women have had to travel to access an abortion, and the Northern state has criminalised a young woman for using the abortion pill.

Why Sinn Féin support coalition

Ultimately, Sinn Féin’s embrace of coalition with parties of the traditional right is based on the fact that they themselves have moved significantly to the right over the last number of years. There is now less and less of a divergence between their political positions and policies and those of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. There are no indications of opposition from within Sinn Féin to either the coalition policy of the leadership or to the more general shift to the right.

The key issues regarding Sinn Féin’s openness to coalition with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil isn’t just that Sinn Féin would be prepared to bring these discredited parties back into power. Fundamentally, it illustrates that Sinn Féin’s own political position and policies are incapable of achieving the type of real change that working-class people urgently require.

In response to the criticisms of Adams and McDonald’s statements regarding coalition, Sinn Féin will undoubtedly argue that they want to maximise their own vote and seek to ensure that they are the larger party in a potential coalition government. Along with the fact that they will still be in government with the traditional parties of capitalism, a government based on Sinn Féin’s own stated policies will one that will disappoint its supporters and will attack the rights and conditions of the working class as, just like Syriza, it will accept the same logic of the capitalist market and neo-liberalism. It would be against legislating for the right to choose for women and pregnant people.

It is also important to note that a government dominated by Sinn Féin would play a role in aggravating sectarian tension in the North, given its own sectarian approach and positions.

Build the socialist left

Workers, young people, women and LGBTQ people need a party of the Left that represents their real interests. Such a party should not only stand independently against the parties of capitalism in terms of refusing to go into coalition with such parties, it must also stand for a break with the system of capitalism and the implementation of radical socialist policies. Sinn Féin does not constitute such a party.

This is why we need to build an independent and powerful socialist left based on a programme for anti-capitalist and socialist change. This is something the Socialist Party has committed itself to doing.

The post Why capitalism must be challenged: Coalition & Sinn Féin’s shift to the right appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Cillian Gillespie

In December a question mark still hung over the future of the Brexit negotiations between the EU and Britain. This indicates the problems that will lie ahead for these negotiations in the coming months. The most important and contentious question was: What will be nature of the border between Northern Ireland and the South in the context of Britain leaving the Single Market and Customs Union? This constitutes the only land border between the EU and the UK.

For now, a wording has been put in place that has allowed the negotiations to proceed, with the government of Theresa May giving a commitment that there will be no “hard border” on the island of Ireland. While David Davis, Tory Minister responsible for Brexit, has more recently backed this stance, his initial pronouncement cast doubt on it. After the “deal” was concluded Davis said that it was only a “statement of intent” rather than being something “legally enforceable,” which is illustrative of its precarious nature.

It is clear that the European Commission wanted to use a sensitive issue, such as this, as a means to water down the impact of Brexit and to ensure that Britain does not leave the Single Market and Customs Union. They want to make it as difficult as possible for the latter to exit the EU in order to send a message to all others: that you cannot attempt to leave the EU – and if you do, you’ll be punished.

Brexit and Ireland

The Brexit referendum has resulted in a 13% fall in the value of sterling against the euro since June 2016. If Britain leaves the Single Market, this could potentially see the introduction of tariff barriers between Britain and Ireland. This, alongside the currency fluctuations, could have an impact on indigenous Irish companies, such as those in agri-business, which accounts for 12% of the workforce in the South.

Irish-owned companies, such as those in food and drinks, are very much reliant on exports to Britain, with 37% of what is produced in Ireland being exported across the Irish Sea. The fall in the value of sterling and the introduction of tariffs will make their produce more expensive and in turn less competitive on the British market. Of course, those extolling the virtues of capitalism proclaim that it is a dynamic system driven by entrepreneurial “risk takers.” Capitalist companies are supposed to be able to weather economic difficulties that come with events like Brexit. There is therefore a notable hypocrisy in Irish capitalism bemoaning the economic consequences of Britain leaving the EU, rather than being willing to “compete” on the capitalist market.

Since 2008, we have seen how working-class people are forced to pay the price for the various crises under capitalism, and the economic fallout from Brexit will be no different. Ultimately this fallout shows how the ruthless drive for profit that lies at the heart of capitalism will result in cuts to pay, the laying-off of workers and attacks on labour rights. There is no-one present at the Brexit negotiations who will represent or take up these vital questions for working-class people. This is because the European Commission and the various governments comprising it, including the Varadkar government and the Tories, are entirely devoted to the interests of their own capitalist classes.

Ultimately the bosses will choose to make the working class pay in order to maintain their economic position. Potential economic difficulties surrounding Brexit will be used in a sort of “shock doctrine” strategy to enhance neoliberal policies, such as lowering wages, casualisation in the workplace and cuts to public expenditure. We saw such an approach when the Troika imposed its draconian austerity programme on Ireland in 2010. This was implemented in the interests of the major European banks and the financial markets. More recently, the government has used the supposed threat of multinationals withdrawing their investments to justify Ireland’s status as a tax haven for big business. These cynical scare tactics – used as a battering ram for the bosses against working class people – must be rejected.

The trade union movement needs to firmly demand that workers pay no price for whatever arrangement comes out of the Brexit negotiations. Representatives from the trade union movement on both sides of the border in Ireland, and from Britain, should immediately come together in a special conference of workers’ representatives to coordinate action to ensure that there are no cuts to pay, attacks on conditions or shedding of jobs flowing from Brexit. Such a conference must prepare workers on these islands to take whatever industrial action is necessary against any attempt to deepen neoliberal policies. It was the willingness to take this kind of action that forced Ryanair recently to do what seemed unthinkable for many, by allowing pilots and cabin crew to organise in a trade union. It is important to note that a key part in ensuring this victory was coordinated industrial action by Ryanair pilots across Europe.

The unity of working-class people is decisive in ensuring that they cannot be played off against one another by the bosses in Ireland and Britain, and that their living standards are not once again put on the capitalist chopping board. The trade unions need to adopt an action programme to ensure this does not take place. If there is any economic fallout from Brexit it is the profits of the multinationals that must be hit, not workers’ pay and conditions. Any company threatening workers with job losses in the months and years ahead needs to be taken into public ownership to ensure the livelihoods of working class people are maintained.

Clash between two capitalist powers

The dispute over whether or not there will be a hard border on the island of Ireland (or potentially on the Irish Sea), in the form of custom posts, ultimately reflects the growing tensions and conflict between two neoliberal capitalist powers. Neither side represents the interests of the working class in Ireland, Britain or throughout Europe. It is the interests of big business and financial markets that are being represented at the Brexit negotiations. In Ireland we are being “represented” by the Varadkar government which is overseeing a housing crisis, a sharp rise in precarious work and economic growth that is overwhelmingly benefiting developers, vulture funds and multinational corporations. Naturally the media and mainstream capitalist commentators are ignoring the class interests that lie behind these negotiations.
Both the EU and the Tory Government are determined to bring about a situation where big business and banks in their respective countries gain, and profit is maximised at the expense of workers’ rights and conditions, public services and our environment. The pernicious role that both the EU and the Tories have played in brutally enforcing neoliberal policies should not be forgotten.

The Tories are the traditional party of British capitalism which led the Thatcherite counter-revolution that decimated Britain’s manufacturing base, privatised public utilities and drastically undermined public services. Since coming to power in 2010, they have implemented a vicious programme of austerity which, according to a recent landmark study, has resulted in 120,000 extra deaths due primarily to cuts in health and social care.

For its part the EU notably proved its neoliberal credentials in its war on the living standards of the Greek working class from 2010 onwards, particularly when the latter elected the government of Syriza in January 2015. Here in Ireland we face a situation where public services are starved of investment and there is a dearth of public housing being built due to the fiscal straitjacket that has been foisted upon us. These fiscal spending rules and the Austerity Treaty it introduced, with the connivance with the Irish government, have effectively written neoliberalism and austerity into law.

Capitalism in Ireland and Europe, and its representatives in the form of the Irish government and the EU, can only offer working-class and young people a future where there is a consistent undermining of our rights and conditions through neoliberal policies. We need to build a new party for working-class people in this country based on an anti-capitalist, socialist programme that delivers for the needs of the majority not the profits of the 1%.

This means fighting for a left, socialist government that stands for a massive increase in public investment to ensure we have the public services we need, and for the building of social and affordable houses for those that need them. Such a government will invariably have to challenge the model of Ireland being a tax haven for the super-rich, and break with the draconian fiscal rules of the EU and with this capitalist institution itself. It will need to break with capitalism in Ireland by taking the key wealth-producing sectors of the economy into democratic public ownership.

The nature of the Single Market

In the last number of weeks the virtues of the Europe’s Single Market have been proclaimed by the right-wing media in the context of the Tory government outlining its clear intent to leave it. The Socialist Party understands that there is an internationalist consciousness and an aspiration for cooperation and trade between countries amongst working-class people; this is particularly true of young people. This in turn may result in support for institutions such as the EU and a desire to maintain the Single Market. However such co-operation on a capitalist basis can only serve the interest of the respective capitalist classes of Europe as the experience of the Single Market itself has shown.

Founded in 1986, the Single Market is by its very nature rigged in the interests of big business at the expenses of workers’ rights and conditions. Various EU directives and regulations linked with the Single Market (drawn up by the unelected European Commission) mean that all the state-owned companies should be opened up to “competition” within the capitalist free market. These directives are designed to undermine widespread state ownership of the economy and in fact ensure the privatisation of state-owned companies.

Linked with the drive to “liberalisation” are limitations on state investment and rules banning state aid to companies. For example, these rules would prohibit a state-owned rail company investing in better infrastructure, more staff and cheaper fares on the state routes as it would undermine the competitiveness of privately run routes. As workers in Bus Éireann have discovered, opening up public transport to private competition has resulted in a race to the bottom in the transport industry, as non-unionised and privately-owned firms have sought to drive wages and conditions down in the industry to maximise profits.

In the last decade there have been notable examples of how the Single Market has been used to attack workers’ rights and conditions and the ability of workers to fight back through collective bargaining. In 2007, the Viking shipping line sought to reflag its Finland-to-Estonia route to take advantage of the lower wage rates of Estonian workers, mimicking the actions of Irish Ferries in December 2005. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling not only endorsed this scheme, but effectively sought to limit the right of Finnish trade unions to strike against these actions.

A similar situation unfolded in the Laval case in 2009. Here a Latvian company won a contract to renovate schools in Sweden and in turn refused to sign a collective agreement with the building workers’ union in Sweden, as it wanted to hire workers at Latvian wage rates. After the union organised effective industrial and blockading of its sites the company was unable to do business in Sweden. Consequently, Laval claimed that the blockade was infringing on its “corporate rights” and took a case against the union to the ECJ. Again the ECJ ruled that the industrial action must not obstruct the company from carrying out its business, and actually forced the union to pay damages to Laval.

Other measures such as the Posted Workers’ Directive and the Temporary Agency Work Directive, which is used to promote precarious work, have been used to undermine workers’ rights in a similar way. The Single Market reflects the true nature and purpose of the European Union. Both were brought into being as an attempt by Europe’s ruling classes to try and effectively compete on the global capitalist market. Of course within this framework of cooperation between various nations there lies a mutual hostility. Whatever cooperation has taken place has come at the expense of the working class, as our living standards are slowly being decimated in order for European capitalism to compete more effectively and boost its profits. The experience of the Syriza government, which shamefully capitulated to the austerity programme of the Troika, illustrates how as an institution the EU can be used as a further attempt to block left governments from implementing anti-capitalist and socialist policies.

While many are rightly disgusted by the anti-migrant and racist nature of the Tory party and the May government, the EU’s own racist and vile policies of “Fortress Europe” need to be called out. In the last few weeks Amnesty International have exposed the fact that EU governments are complicit in “…actively supporting a sophisticated system of abuse and exploitation of refugees and migrants by the Libyan Coast Guard, detention authorities and smugglers in order to prevent people from crossing the Mediterranean.” Last year, Medecins Sans Frontieres announced it would refuse to accept money from the EU or any EU government because of their wretched Fortress Europe policies.

The European Union is a capitalist institution, wedded to banks and big business through lobbies such as the European Round Table of Industrialists. Far from bringing peace, Europe is becoming increasingly militarised as a result of the EU. The EU is inherently racist and the tragedy of the refugee crisis belies the myth that it stands for the free movement of people and breaking down divisions between them. The EU must be rejected.

What kind of Brexit?

The May government is hoping to conclude what Jeremy Corbyn has correctly termed a “bargain basement Brexit” in the interests of British capitalism. It is clear that big business and the bankers and speculators in the City of London are eyeing up the advantages of such a Brexit, notwithstanding that much of big business was opposed to Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in the first place. Big agri-business companies want to introduce even lower standards in food production in the UK, such as chickens washed in chlorine, beef pumped with hormones and genetically modified wheat. Big business generally wants the Tory government to negotiate new trade agreements that will further erode workers’ rights and conditions.

It is not an accident that between October 2016 and March of this year, 46 meetings took place between representatives of Goldman Sachs and HSBC and those of David Davis’ Department for Exiting the EU. This intense lobbying reflects their desire to be able have new and less regulated financial products for the super-rich to invest in.

The Socialist Party in Ireland and our sister parties in England, Wales and Scotland want to see the Tory party kicked out of office. We want to see the election of government led by Jeremy Corbyn based on a socialist programme. Combined with ridding the Labour Party of its Blairite faction, this means rejecting the Tories’ austerity policies, their bargain basement Brexit and the Single Market. A decisive factor that led working-class people to vote for Brexit was precisely a rejection of these pro-big business and neo-liberal policies that British capitalism wants to deepen.

Corbyn has said up until recently that he wishes Britain to remain within the Single Market in the context of a Labour government coming to power. However, there is a real contradiction between this position and the policies that won Corbyn massive support in the election last June. Policies such as the nationalisation or part-nationalisation of energy, rail and mail companies, as well as the creation of a state investment bank, are forbidden by the rules of the Single Market. None of the problems facing working-class people in Britain will be resolved without breaking with the capitalist EU and the Single Market and capitalism in Britain itself. It means implementing radical socialist policies that take the top 125 companies and financial institutions that dominate the British economy into democratic public ownership.

The election of a Corbyn government in Britain is a distinct possibility within the next year. If it is willing to adopt a bold stance against capitalism and the bosses’ EU as outlined above, it could be an enormous impetus to movements of working-class people across Europe. This in turn would pose the question of building new parties of the working class across the continent and the election of left socialist governments that could challenge the rule of the bankers and big business.

The question of a hard border

The question of Brexit has helped to exacerbate sectarian tension and polarisation in the North, particularly on the question of the coming into existence of a “hard border” on the island of Ireland or between Ireland and Britain. There is no desire amongst Protestants or Catholics for the creation of such a border. However, in the case of the latter a physical border in Ireland in the form of custom posts would be seen as a step backwards and a reinforcement of partition. For Protestants, the existence of an economic border between Northern Ireland and Britain would be seen as a further push towards a united Ireland.

In the Brexit vote itself, a majority of Catholics voted to remain in the European Union while a majority of Protestants voted to leave. Many working-class Catholics feel that the EU can act to defend their rights given the systematic discrimination and repression they have faced since the foundation of the Northern Ireland state in 1922. Sinn Féin have said that any Brexit deal needs to ensure that North is subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, implying that this body will defend the rights of Catholics in the North. In line with their general rightward trajectory, they have decisively altered their opposition to the EU and are now peddling the myth that the EU will uphold the democratic rights and national aspirations of Catholics in the North, and more generally that it is a progressive institution.

The EU and other institutions of European capitalism which are not part of the EU such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are not forces that are capable or willing to defend the democratic rights of any section of the working class. In 1978, a case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by the “hooded men,” 14 men who were subject to horrific and degrading treatment by the British army and the RUC in 1971 while being interned without trial. Despite all the evidence to the contrary the ECHR ruled that the British government had not engaged in torture. Another salient example of this is the endorsement by the EU and its respective member states of the repression by Spanish State in Catalonia late last year.

The issue of a hard border reflects the clash of two valid national aspirations and national identities that lie of the heart of the sectarian division in the North. Working-class Catholics aspire to a united Ireland and rightly reject the Northern State that has given them nothing but poverty, systematic discrimination and repression. Working-class Protestants oppose a united Ireland, rightly fearing that that if they were to become part of the southern capitalist state they would become discriminated-against second-class citizens. The hardening of either border symbolises for both communities a denial of these legitimate national aspirations.

The Socialist Party opposes any hardening of any border on this island as a result of the Brexit negotiations, whether it be between the North and South or between Northern Ireland and Britain. We take this view because a hardening of the border will only accentuate alienation and increase tensions among the communities. For us the rights of working-class people, Catholic and Protestant, to live without the threat or the actuality of sectarian conflict and violence, and in a society where there is a chance of a decent future, is more important than the battle between economic vested interests. The Brexit negotiations and the controversy over soft or hard borders is really about just such a conflict. We say that whatever way the different capitalist vested interests resolve their business dispute, it must be done without any physical or repressive borders. Further, we also say that they must take whatever measures necessary against business interests to ensure there is no reduction in food safety standards, no trafficking and no serious criminal black-market smuggling.

Working-class people in Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, North and South, and in Britain and throughout Europe, have shared common class interests. These interests stand in direct contradiction to the various political actors involved in the Brexit negotiations. James Connolly wrote over 100 years ago: “The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go!” The last ten years of economic crisis and a “recovery” that is deepening neoliberalism and inequality, alongside the destruction of our environment, are proof of the relevance of these words.

Capitalism must go, as must the EU and the governments that represent this system. On this basis we can break down the borders and divisions created by capitalism. We call for a socialist Ireland based on no coercion and with the right of minorities guaranteed, as part of a voluntary socialist federation of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales as a step towards a socialist Europe. This can be based on the harmonious integration of different economies where the needs of the majority can be met.

The post Ireland, the EU and the Brexit divorce deal- a socialist analysis appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Peter Taaffe, General Secretary, Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)

Jeremy Corbyn is broadly right and his pro-capitalist critics both within the Tory government and their Labour fifth column in the Parliamentary Labour Party are wrong and lying in their responses to the recent use of nerve agents in Britain.

Of course, it is reprehensible for any human being – whether it is in Syria or London – to be subject to these fiendish and torturous weapons.

But they are a reality of the barbarism of modern warfare.

But Jeremy has correctly cautioned against the rush to judgement to blame Russia for the poisoning – if it is true – of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

He pointed out that not even Theresa May in the first instance apportioned blame to Putin’s government but conceded that the Russian state had allowed the possibility for “these deadly toxins to slip out of the control” of the government.

However, why should anyone accept May and the Labour right’s version of events after their dirty record in situations like this? The same people joined hands in accepting the lies of the Blair government and its ‘dirty dossier’ that led to the Iraq war, arguing that cast-iron existence of weapons of mass destruction existed.

This was then used to justify the destruction and mayhem in Iraq through a devastating and unsuccessful war and later in the wider Middle East as well. The inevitable consequences were terrorism both in the region and the rest of the world.

No wonder a writer in the Financial Times, which also supported the Iraq war, wrote recently that Tony Blair was the most hated public figure in Britain!

But any opposition to the government’s case is swept away by the childish ‘Defence’ Secretary Gavin Williamson, who declared that Russia should “go away and shut up”. One wag answered him on Twitter: “Russia better take heed. If they are not careful Gavin won’t let them play on his Play Station either”!

Formerly, Western capitalism opposed the Soviet Union until 1991 because it represented at bottom a different and antagonistic social system to capitalism. It was based upon nationalisation of industry and planning, albeit controlled by a privileged bureaucratic elite.

Moreover, right from the outset, with the creation of a democratic workers’ state following the Russian Revolution, the capitalists ganged up to try and crush the workers and peasants of Russia.

Winston Churchill was prominent in this campaign which involved the “use of the chemical weapon diphenylaminechloroarsine [a riot control agent also known as Adamsite or DM], dropped by British planes fighting the Bolsheviks in north Russia during the summer of 1919”. [Letter in The Guardian, 12 March 2018.]

Later, world capitalism and the Stalinist states were locked into merciless and destructive competition to outdo each other in the acquisition of nuclear and other weapons, such as nerve agents, for possible use against the other side. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the return to capitalism of Russia and its former satellites was enthusiastically welcomed. Putin, who was one of the agents of this change, was subsequently fulsomely praised by Blair and Bush. He was no longer just ‘Putin’ but ‘our friend Vladimir’, along with his oligarch friends.

This new capitalist regime and its state in Russia handed over industry, treasure of the Russian people, to a gang of kleptocrats, the oligarchs. Putin himself became one of them and is reputed to be now the richest man in Russia.

Cosy relationship given way to conflict

This cosy relationship has now given way to conflict, which is no longer between two social systems but rival capitalist/imperialist powers and blocs fighting for influence and control throughout the world. In other words, a new inter-imperialist rivalry exists. The struggle for economic and military domination which existed in the pre-1914 period and then again before 1939 culminated eventually in a world war.

Today a world war is effectively ruled out because of the existence of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD) although Trump in the US and his counterpart Kim Jong-un in North Korea with their nuclear sabre rattling seem to be ignoring this danger!

As the conflict in the Middle East has demonstrated, Russia has now re-emerged if not yet with the full economic and weight of the past, nevertheless as an energy superpower and effective military machine. These proved to be decisive alongside Iranian military forces in the outcome of the Syrian war which saw Iran emerge as the ‘regional winner’.

It is these factors which explains the intensified hostility, not just of May and the British capitalists but of other capitalist powers who belatedly joined with her in condemning the Russian state in the alleged use in Britain of the nerve agent Novichok.

But a number of authoritative writers and commentators, such as the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray and journalist Seamus Martin, have undermined the veracity of May’s case and Russia’s use of this nerve agent in Britain.

Murray points out: “As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly [who committed suicide over the dossier on Iraq], published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.”

Black wrote: “There has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s” but no hard evidence and no “structures of all the properties” of these had been published.

Murray comments: “Yet now, the British Government is claiming to be able instantly to identify a substance which its only biological weapons research centre has never seen before and was unsure of its existence. Worse, it claims to be able not only to identify it, but to pinpoint its origin…It is plain that claim cannot be true.”

He also points out: “Porton Down has acknowledged in publications it has never seen any Russian ‘novichoks’. The UK government has absolutely no ‘fingerprint’ information such as impurities that can safely attribute this substance to Russia.”

Originally, May refused to provide a sample to the international body dealing with these kinds of weapons – the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Now Foreign Minister Boris Johnson has belatedly promised to grant the request Russia to do so. We await the outcome!

But Murray also points out that the programme for this weapon “was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan.” He had “visited the Nukus chemical weapon site… It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any ‘novichok’ ever existed in Russia itself”.

Of course, there may be some factors which Murray was not aware of and will subsequently come to light. But there is enough doubt cast by this and by an equally sceptical article in the Irish Times by Seamus Martin, the paper’s former Moscow correspondent, which backs up and reinforces Murray’s argumentation.

He writes that: “Those who became extremely rich by selling natural resources, military equipment or anything they could get their hands on became known as the Russian oligarchs, but not all the oligarchs were Russian. The main production plant for Novichok was in Uzbekistan.”

Oligarchs

And it was oligarchs who stole from the Russian people their wealth who have filled the coffers of the Tory party with huge financial donations estimated at £820,000. Now Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond has refused to return the money because he did not want to tar the oligarchs “with Putin’s brush”.

Putin is flesh of the flesh to these gangster capitalists and we have opposed him and his regime from the outset. Notwithstanding his likely victory in the election on Sunday, colossal forces of opposition are developing amongst the working class and the youth in Russia and in all the states which were originally part of the Soviet Union.

The purpose of this campaign by Britain and its temporary ‘allies’ against Russia now, which has taken on a sharp character, is to further undermine Russia through sanctions. This probably will amount to merely trimming the fingernails of the oligarchs in London and Europe but little else.

The labour movement should propose effective workers’ sanctions against this obscene plutocracy in London and elsewhere. To begin with, all property – estimated by the think tank IPPR, to be 216,000 homes in England empty for six months – should be immediately taken over to house the Grenfell and other homeless tenants. And not just those of the Russian super-rich but also the Chinese, Asian and other oligarchs who control great chunks of London and others European capitals.

However, the sanctions already in place as ‘punishment’ for Russia’s military interventions in the Ukraine and Crimea by Germany and the EU have proved to be ineffective. Before this latest conflict there were proposals for them to be scaled down and eventually dismantled. A further round of measures is likely to amount to slap on the wrist for Russia.

In answer to the European and US ruling class, Putin has taken retaliatory measures, with his latest nuclear tests – which he boasted would provide Russia with military- installed nuclear weapons in the enclave of Kaliningrad. This is a warning to the European and other capitalist powers.

This points towards an intensified clash between the rival capitalist powers and blocs. The European labour movement and working class in general should take an independent class position – rejecting all proposals for the governments of the rich to ratchet up tensions that already exist and particularly oppose increased arms expenditure, which the Tories are openly canvassing for in Britain, is one of the reasons for this latest campaign.

As if enfeebled British capitalism with its puny military forces in comparison to other major military powers could seriously challenge Russia! It is like a pitting a peashooter against a tank!

In answer to Britain’s military bluster, the late Tony Benn pointed out that Britain’s reduced military prowess would not even allow them to occupy the Isle of Wight, never mind launch another Falklands adventure!

Labour Party divisions

Alongside this propaganda war and nerve agents, another war is taking place in Britain – within the Labour Party. This is a consequence of the incomplete Corbyn revolution – the toleration of unreconstructed Blairites and the refusal of part of the left, in Momentum, to fight for and implement mandatory reselection together with a drive against the right.

This conflict reveals once more and very starkly Labour’s continuing divisions, the two parties in one – with the right openly sabotaging Corbyn in debates in the House of Commons on this issue. This came from the usual suspects: defeated leadership candidates Yvette Cooper and Owen Smith, John Woodcock, Stella Creasy and Chuka Umunna.

Umunna famously declared in 2014, when he was still comfortably ensconced as a Blairite: “We’re all capitalists now”. When applied to himself, this was very accurate but not to the leftward-moving ranks of labour.

In the House of Commons, their espousing of the ‘national interest’ instead of the internationalist interests of the working class gave warning of their future treacherous role. In the same ‘national interest’, they could do as Ramsay MacDonald did in 1931 and split a Labour government, led by Corbyn, and form a new ‘national’ one with Labour’s opponents in the ranks of the Tories and Liberals.

Their position and those on the right who share their approach is part of the campaign to picture Jeremy Corbyn and Labour as ‘untrustworthy’ of office and ‘unpatriotic’. They hope they can restore support for May and the Tories through a new patriotic campaign. Jeremy Corbyn and the left will be featured as the ‘enemy within’ and Corbyn, following the attempt to suggest he was a Czech spy, as the ‘spy who came in from the allotment’!

Denunciations of the Russian government and assassination are completely hypocritical on the part of the British and other capitalists. Yes, the Russian government of oligarchs and Putin himself has not been squeamish about eliminating his opponents. Nor has the British government, as shown by the targeted assassination in Gibraltar of IRA suspects, and the elimination of opponents through unmanned drones.

The labour movement can only free itself from these horrors – including the use of nerve gas, targeted killings, new conflicts and wars – by helping capitalism off the stage of history and establishing a new democratic socialist society.

The post Britain: Russia, spies and nerve agents appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By reporters from the Socialist Party in England and Wales

A human tide swept central London on 13 July in a historic mobilisation against the racist, sexist billionaire president of the US, Donald Trump, who was visiting the UK.

It is estimated that more than 250,000 people took to the streets – an enormous figure, especially considering that this took place on a normal working weekday.

Homemade banners, huge Trump marionettes, whistles, vuvuzelas, drums and megaphones – as well as the incredibly large turn-out – all made for one of the most lively and energetic demonstrations in years, in spite of the marches’ snail’s pace due to over-packed streets.

The day started with a protest led by Socialist Students and Young Socialists. Students at a number of London schools responded to the call we had put out to walk out of classes and join protests against Trump.

Similar school student actions also took place around the country.

Gathering in Trafalgar square at 10 am, school students who had taken the brave step of striking, in spite of intimidation that included police intervention, marched down Whitehall, around the giant Trump baby balloon, and up to Portland place to join the main demonstration.

Chants led by the students including “Trump, May, hear us say, how many kids have you caged today?” and “Trump out, Tories out” were taken up by other demonstrators as well as passers-by.

As well as being a protest against Trump, for the vast majority of those taking part, this was also a mobilisation against Theresa May and her ailing Tory government.

It is an indication of the depth of the crisis faced by the Conservatives that Trump’s visit, along with the mass protests it has provoked, has opened up a fresh nightmare for May.

Trump’s attacks on the prime minister over Brexit, which came at a time when her party’s civil war has been brought out into the open, have served to heighten the crisis she faces.

The massive mobilisation which took place on 13 July gives a glimpse of the potential that exists – to build a mass movement to kick out the Tories.

Among those taking part in the protest, there was a strong understanding that it was necessary to protest not just Trump, but Trumpism.

That means challenging divide-and-rule politics on behalf of the super-rich 1% wherever it is found, including in Britain.

It is essential that this mass protest is not a ‘one off’. The leadership of the trade unions has a responsibility to act now to mobilise working class people to see off this Tory government once and for all.

This demonstration with all its determination and energy can act as an important launchpad for building such a movement.

Along with the Socialist Party, Socialists Students and Young Socialists will continue to organise over the summer, building the fight against racism and sexism, for a £10 an hour minimum wage, for free education and for the socialist alternative to capitalist society for the billionaires. Join us and get involved.

The post Britain- Mass demonstrations greet Trump appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Socialist Party reporter 

On March 29th 2019 the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union. For seventeen months the British government and the EU negotiators have been struggling to reach a legally binding “withdrawal agreement” to govern the terms of UK withdrawal, including the “divorce bill” or the sum the UK pays to settle its obligations to the EU, and a “political declaration” outlining the basic shape of a final deal after further negotiations.

On November 13th a draft deal was finally agreed and immediately a storm broke around Tory Prime Minister Teresa May. Her proposed way forward seems to please almost no-one. She pushed the deal through her cabinet without taking a formal vote and within hours three ministers had resigned, including Brexit Minister Dominic Rabb. When she defended the draft deal in the House of Commons it was a full hour before a single MP stood up to endorse her position. Both the hard Brexiteers and the Remainers in her own party declared their intention to vote against, as did the Labour Party, the SNP, and the DUP, effectively her partners in coalition.

The Brexiteers went further than verbal opposition to the deal. The leader of the European Research Group, Jabob Rees Mogg, launched a bid to remove her from the Tory party leadership by declaring his own intention to submit a letter calling for a vote of no confidence. Within 48 hours of the publication of the draft deal it appeared to be all but dead, and Teresa May appeared to be finished.

Yet May survives, at the time of writing, and the draft deal will almost certainly be put to a parliamentary vote in the coming weeks. Whether she does survive, and what the consequences of the last week’s tumultuous events are remain to be determined. Meanwhile the draft deal has come under intense scrutiny and has been criticised from every angle.

A draft which pleases no-one

The draft Brexit agreement accepts that the UK will remain in the EU until at least December 2020. It outlines how the UK and the EU will “use their best endeavours” to have a future trade agreement concluded six months before the end of the transition period in December 2020, but that if this is not achieved the EU and the UK could “jointly extend the transition period” for a as yet unspecified period. If a free trade deal is not agreed, or an extension is not put in place, than a backstop solution for Ireland and Northern Ireland aimed at preventing the creation of a hard border would come into force.

The backstop, consisting of “a single customs territory between the Union and the United Kingdom”, would apply from the end of the transition period “unless and until … a subsequent agreement becomes applicable”. The single customs territory would cover all goods except fishery products, and would “include the corresponding level playing field commitments and appropriate enforcement mechanisms to ensure fair competition between the EU27 and the UK”.

Crucially in this scenario there would be extra non-customs checks on some types of goods passing between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK: in other words an ’East-West” border could begin to emerge as early as December 2020. This is what the DUP are objecting to so vehemently-a set of circumstances in which a border between Northern Ireland and England, Scotland and Wales would be put in place and would harden over time. And even worse in their view, the Southern government would have more say over these developments that the UK government. There is an element of truth in this as under the draft agreement clauses the EU will continue to make new rules which may apply to the North but over which the UK government has no say. All this will be unfolding as unionists mark the 100th anniversary of the creation of Northern Ireland after partition. The symbolism for unionism is profound.

It is suggested that inspections of goods do not necessarily have to take place at Irish Sea ports or airports but all such suggestions are doing little to “sugar-coat he pill” for the DUP. Any separate status for Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK is anathema to the DUP. The DUP, have repeatedly said they would not accept any additional Northern Ireland-only checks no matter where or how they take place.

Tory Brexiteers are raising the same issues as the DUP, in part for cynical, tactical reasons, but focus their opposition on other aspects of the draft agreement. For example, the agreement says that if “either side considers the backstop is no longer necessary, it can notify the other” setting out its reasons. A joint committee must then meet within six months, and both sides must agree jointly to end the backstop. This means that the UK cannot unilaterally pull out of the backstop. This has enraged Brexiteers who demand the right for the UK to exit any all-UK customs union as and when it wants in order to be able to pursue free-trade deals around the world.

Brexiteers are also opposed to the backstop arrangements which state that the UK must observe “level playing field” commitments on competition, state aid, employment and environmental standards and tax. All of this is designed to ensure that UK businesses are not able to undercut EU industry. Brussels has also demanded “dynamic alignment” on state aid, which would oblige the UK parliament to simply cut and paste EU regulations as they are issued. “Non-regression clauses” will prevent the UK from bringing in lower standards on social, environmental and labour regulations such as working hours. These requirements are anathema to Tory Brexiteers, for whom leaving the EU represents an opportunity to head towards a low-tax, light-regulation economy such as that seen in Singapore.

Socialists oppose these clauses for the opposite reasons. The EU is trying to severely limit the room for manoeuvre of a Corbyn-lead Labour government, especially with regards to its ability to nationalise industry or banks. This is nothing to do with the EU seeking to protect workers’ rights after Brexit must be exposed. Workers’ rights have been won through struggle, and will be defended through struggle. The EU cares nothing for workers’ rights, as the people of Greece know to their cost.

Fears of a “Hard Brexit”

The crisis of the last few days has dramatically increased the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, in which the UK simply crashes out. Many millions of working class people across Ireland and Britain, are fearful of the consequences of such a chaotic outcome. Whilst there is exaggeration on both sides of the debate, with “Remainers” predicting Armageddon and “Brexiteers” looking forward to the sunny uplands of a UK “freed from the shackles of Europe”, not all the fears regarding the possibility of a no-deal Brexit are irrational. A sudden and sharp economic shock would result. There would be real impediments to trade, probably most visible where long queues of lorries build up at the Channel ports.

An economic recession would almost certainly follow. The Bank of England has signalled its intentions in advance to lower interest rates again and pour money into the economy in order to ward of recession but it is widely accepted that its room for manoeuvre is very limited as interest rates are already so low and the economy is awash with the colossal sums injected since the 2007-2008 financial crisis. A fall in living standards would be most likely, as inflation would rise and wages fall in real terms. If the hard-right Brexiteers are by then the dominant force in the Tory government workers are right to fear a race to the bottom and attempts to create a low-tax, low-wage, unregulated economy.

If there is a chaotic Brexit the EU and the Irish government will have to decide what happens at the border. At present goods and services are traded between North and South with few restrictions. As the UK and Ireland are currently part of the EU single market and customs union. After a hard Brexit the logic of the workings of the EU is that a hard border would have to be put in place, and even this possibility is causing anger in the Catholic community.

Teresa May is arguing forcibly that the only way to avoid such a calamitous scenario is her way. She has the backing of most business organisations and most of the big corporations. Since last week she has had the backing of most of the right-wing and pro-Brexit press. She is the ‘safe pair of hands’ for British capitalism. On the other side of the negotiating table were her equivalents, acting in the interests of the dominant business interests of the EU 27. It is not as simple as that of course. The negotiators of the ruling class will seek in the first instance to protect trade and profit but are hamstrung by other considerations, of national interest, and of political pressure and electoral arithmetic.

The UK Tory government has been weak and fractured since the 2017 General Election. Teresa May is in an extremely precarious position- her government is on a political cleft stick. She feared a rebellion from her hard-right pro-Brexit MPs and an open attempt to remove her if she conceded too much to the EU and was not seen to deliver on a clean break with Europe. Boris Johnston and other are as sharks circling her in the water, waiting for the first scent of blood before striking. Her negotiating strategy was shaped by this consideration. She also had to look over her other shoulder however. There are a small but not insignificant number of anti-Brexit Tory MPs who also threatened to withhold their votes if they thought a proposed deal was too hard. And she knew that she would lose ten DUP votes if she in any way was seen to weaken the link between Northern Ireland and Britain. She must have thought that she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, potentially losing votes on either flank, and sought to chart a middle course and please both wings. It hasn’t worked.

In part this is because the EU drove a hard bargain. The EU is concerned to allow May wriggle-room, as it would much prefer her government to survive and deliver an orderly withdrawal. It fears the alternative scenarios of a hard Brexiteer- led government or a Corbyn-led government. The EU negotiators wanted a deal which kept May in power but above all it is concerned to protect the European project. It cannot concede on the core “four freedoms”-free movement of people, capital, goods and services –without inviting EU-sceptic parties in a host of European countries to seek to take advantage. If the UK is allowed the benefits of free trade, but without free movement of people, there will be a revolt. It will open a Pandora ’s Box as both existing governments, such as the ultra-right Hungarian regime, and rising right-populist movements in most European countries, demand the right to opt out of whatever aspect of EU rules they wish to.

What next?

The draft agreement will be put to the Westminster parliament for ratification in December. Achieving a majority in favour will be extremely difficult. May probably initially calculated that she would lose the 10 DUP votes and a swathe of hard Brexiteer votes but at the same time gain votes from a layer of Labour party MPs and squeeze through. It now appears as if she has lost the DUP, more Brexiteers beyond the hard core, Tory MPs who are firmly in favour of the softest possible Brexit, and all Labour votes.

Despite this May’s preferred way forward has not changed-all the indications are that she will push ahead and put the draft agreement before MPs, even in the expectation of losing first time around. She then might be hoping for a successful second vote if a period of political chaos and developing economic crisis (as the pound and shares fall) opens up, and this then forces a re-think by a sufficient number of MPs. In this context the EU27 might come forward with minor concessions, and this might just see the deal over the line. The possibility of such concessions has been hinted at, even when EU negotiators are stating in the same breath that no further change to the draft agreement is possible.

This scenario-the draft agreement winning parliamentary approval, and May surviving as leader for a period-is possible but far from assured. For now it does not seem likely that the required 48 Tory MPs will write to the chair of the 1922 Committee to force a leadership contest, but this may yet happen. Five Tory pro-Brexit cabinet ministers have formed an alliance and are pushing for changes in the draft agreement. If they are unsuccessful they could then pull the rug from under May and resign from the cabinet, her position would become untenable and it is most likely that she would resign. In such a scenario and then Boris Johnston or another Brexiteer will challenge for the leadership. Alternatively a compromise candidate may emerge-an “anyone but Boris” candidate. For now however, the cabinet are “united” and the five pro-Brexit ministers are concentrating their efforts on achieving changes in the draft agreement.

A second option for May is that she accepts that no deal is possible. This could occur before the first parliamentary vote, but is more likely after an attempt has failed. May might simply then throw her hands up and prepare for a no-deal Brexit. If she does the EU27 will most likely cooperate, pull it all together and seek to avoid chaos that would hurt both sides.

A third way forward is a general election. May could choose this option, posing as the only figure who can “deliver the country from chaos” and appealing for votes “in the national interest.” The purpose of an election from May’s perspective would be to return to power with a sufficiently large majority to be in a position to ignore the Brexiteers and the DUP, and such an outcome is extremely difficult to envisage. Labour are ahead in the polls and in this time of tumult and uncertainty the Tories will avoid an election at all costs, fearing a Corbyn victory. An election thus remains less likely, but such is the turmoil inherent in the situation this could change quickly.

A Labour victory, and the return of a Corbyn-lead Labour government, would open up an entirely new vista and would be a hugely positive development. A Labour government should seek to re-open negotiations and demand an entirely different relationship with the EU, based on the interests of working-class people, not the 1%.

If no agreement is voted through, and an election is not called, a fourth option for May is to call a second referendum. For now she has ruled this option out completely, but it may yet emerge as the “only alternative” as she struggles to find any way forward. When all other options have failed the unthinkable becomes unthinkable.

The problem of the backstop

The reasons why May and the EU are stuck at this point on the journey are many, but key is the question of the border on the island of Ireland. For weeks Teresa May and the EU have both been declaring with confidence that “95%” of the contentious issues were agreed. They admitted that they were stuck on the other 5%-the need to agree a backstop to avoid a hard border in Ireland. The backstop is a position of last resort, to protect an open border on the island of Ireland in the event that the UK leaves the EU without securing an all-encompassing deal.

The complicated clauses of the draft agreement have much in common with the methods applied in the peace process. The peace process has been characterised by what has become known as “creative ambiguity”, as every difficult issue has been fudged, layered over with obfuscation or “kicked down the road”. This process initially disguised the truth about the peace process but it is now apparent to most that every major “agreement” is in fact an agreement to disagree. The injection of a large dose of “creative ambiguity” into the Brexit process has been designed to allow the May government to survive and enter the next phase of negotiations.

There is widespread disbelief that such a seemingly “minor” issue could be preventing an agreement which would allow a solution which would satisfy all sides to emerge. In order to “explain” the lack of an agreement many commentators argue that the Tory government is being “held to ransom” by the DUP. There is some truth in this of course, but it is an argument which ignores or downplays the difficulties which would have come into play in any case. Focusing on the DUP-Tory arrangement is a way of avoiding the real issues. It is not just an accident of electoral history which is the problem. Even if the parliamentary arithmetic had been different after the last general election, and the DUP and the Tories had not entered into a “confidence and supply” arrangement, the ruling class would have still have to weigh up the opposition of Northern Ireland Protestants to any perception of an East-West border being created.

The real reasons for the difficulties in reaching agreement on Brexit are not because of the accident of political history which has left the DUP holding the balance of power at Westminster but are a fundamentally a consequence of the inability of capitalism to achieve a lasting solution to the national question in Ireland. In the 1980’s the “Economist” magazine wrote that the Troubles in Northern Ireland were “a problem without a solution”. This seemed a rational conclusion at the time but then the 1998 Good Friday Agreement gave the appearance of falsifying this prognosis. In fact the Good Friday Agreement did not represent a solution then or now. This has become more than apparent in the nearly two years since the collapse of the power-sharing Executive in January 2017. Northern Ireland now holds the world record for the longest period of time any political entity has stumbled on in the absence of an elected government (though its status as a devolved region within the UK means that it is not without any form of decision-making process).

Today the national question in Ireland is not just a headache for the British ruling class but a thumping migraine for the EU 27. One hundred years ago the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill (February 16, 1922) pointed wearily to the seemingly unsolvable problem of the national question in Ireland: “The whole map of Europe has been changed … but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.” Churchill and his ilk caused the “quarrel” in the first place, through a policy of colonial exploitation and deliberate “divide and rule”. Now the “dreary steeples” are haunting his political heirs, and they are visible across Europe. Negotiating Brexit was never going to be easy, but with the addition of the Gordian knot of the border has become to seem close to an impossible task.

Brexit as a sectarian issue

Both the DUP and Sinn Fein deliberately inflame sectarian tensions every day of the week-it is their political DNA. Both parties are using Brexit in order to widen divisions: the Brexit debate has become inextricably entwined with the ongoing war of attrition between sectarian forces in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Fein has become the champion of the EU and fierce opponents of Brexit. The fact that Sinn Fein was an opponent of the EU until a few years ago is now largely forgotten (until 1998 Sinn Fein was in favour of EU withdrawal). Today of course Sinn Fein has overturned many of its previous positions. Any veneer of socialist radicalism has long worn off. It is not only in favour of remaining in the capitalist EU but it is a proponent of a dramatic cut in corporation tax rates for big business. In order to deliver this cut it moved to cut over 20,000 public sector jobs in the North alongside its then coalition partners in the DUP.

Northern Ireland voted against withdrawing from Europe in the 2016 referendum by 56% to 44%. There was a clear difference in attitudes between Catholics and Protestants: Catholics voted overwhelmingly voted to stay by a proportion of 85% to 15% while Protestants voted to leave by a proportion of 60% to 40%. As in Britain there was a class divide evident in the vote-almost 80 percent of those classed as “professionals” voted to remain while approximately half of manual workers and those on state benefits did so.

The Catholic vote for “remain” requires analysis and explanation. Many Catholics, in particular the young, voted for the EU because for them it represents their outward-looking and internationalist approach to the world. This is a positive impulse, shared by many of the young Protestants who voted remain. Catholics are often convinced that the EU has brought real material benefits to their lives, through new roads and other infrastructure, and that it has granted rights which otherwise would not be available. It is important to state clearly that the EU is not the guarantor of anyone’s rights in any real sense (unless we count the right of bankers to be bailed out at any cost). Nor is a body which acts in the interests of ordinary people. Perceptions are important however, and now many Catholics consider the EU to act as a bulwark “protecting” their rights. Furthermore the EU has become associated with the disappearance of the border as a physical barrier for many Catholics, and by extension now belonging to the EU has an important expression of their national aspirations.

The extent to which the peace process diminished the reality of the border has been exaggerated. The border still exists, with different currencies, laws and regulations on each sides and some border checks still occur, not just on agricultural products, but also on people. Nevertheless the border has disappeared in the sense of an everyday impediment, and this has had an impact on the consciousness of Catholics over the last twenty years. There is thus real opposition in the Catholic community to any hardening of the border between North and South. The degree to which the border will be “hardened” in the context of a no-deal scenario has been exaggerated but for Catholics, especially those living along the border, the memory of army watchtowers and listening posts is raw, and even the possibility of border checks is causing intense anger and real fear.

Paradoxically the disappearance of the border as a physical barrier has been one factor in allowing many Catholics to become more reconciled to the existence of the Northern Ireland state-that is, to the reality of the border. The possibility of the hardening of the border is now having the opposite effect, and is contributing to the rapid stripping away of the acceptance of no change in Northern Ireland’s status which Catholics largely acquiesced to for a period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Brexit is injecting new instability into an unstable situation.

If a withdrawal agreement which is seen to be detrimental to the rights of Catholics is pushed through there will be genuine anger in Catholic areas. Threats to pull down any new border infrastructure are not empty threats. Even in the context of a chaotic Brexit the prospects of any actual border checkpoints are very slight, so actual conflict or violence on the border is unlikely, but even the perception of a hardening of the border will alienate Catholics. Dissident republicans would seek to exploit any border infrastructure, targeting buildings and border staff with bomb and bullet.

The equal and opposite process is at work in the Protestant community. Protestants recognise the benefits of the absence of a visible border they would prefer no hardening of the border in the future too. They are however utterly opposed to anything which suggests the creation of an East-West border down the Irish Sea. This opposition is very real, despite the fact of an already existing “border” of sorts-there are East-West checks on agricultural products.

Any East-West border, no matter how minor, has come to represent a threat to the union between Northern Ireland and Britain. If an agreement is voted through at Westminster which allows for East-West checks after December 2020 against the opposition of the DUP, there will be widespread anger in the Protestant community. In 1985 the Anglo-Irish Agreement was agreed between the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Garrett Fitzgerald without the involvement of unionist political parties. As far as most Protestants were concerned cross-border institutions had been undemocratically imposed on them and mass protests and an upsurge in violence resulted. In December 2012 widespread disorder broke out when a mere emblem of the “Britishness” of Northern Ireland-the union flag over the City Hall in Belfast-was removed. If there is a perception in the coming months and years that the British identity of Northern Ireland is being diminished street protests and street violence cannot be ruled out. All of Europe may look on in astonishment and confusion as anti-EU and anti-British government riots break out in Protestant areas of the North. In this context a marriage of convenience between the Brexiteer wing of the Tories and the DUP would act to magnify political crisis and increase tensions.

The draft agreement outlines a scenario in which there will be a developing East-West border. This will inflame opinion in Protestant working class areas. The opposite scenario, in which there is a hardening of the North-South border, will cause anger in Catholic areas. Either “solution” is no solution, and will cause harm to the cause of working class unity.

The socialist position on the draft agreement

This is the context in which the Socialist Party has considered the draft agreement. It is first and foremost a question of weighing up the impact of any political development on divisions in the North and across the island of Ireland. The Socialist Party strives to build support in working class communities across Ireland, including in both Protestant and Catholic areas of the North. We base our party on the organic unity of the working-class: Catholics and Protestants have more in common than divides them. This unity is strengthened through the shared struggle for a better life-in industrial disputes in the workplaces, in campaigns in local communities to defend our services, and in the struggles for abortion rights and the right to an equal marriage. This unity has to be fought for and cannot be taken for granted. Sectarian forces consciously strive to increase division and must be countered at all times. The unity of working class people is our over-riding priority and we oppose any moves which tend to weaken that unity.

The draft agreement outlines a scenario in which there will be a developing East-West border. We oppose any hardening of borders, either North-South or East-West. Any hardening of borders is unnecessary and will increase sectarian tension. We are thus opposed to the draft agreement on the basis of the threat it poses to the unity of working class people.

The Socialist Party will always oppose any deal which is agreed in the interests of capitalism. The draft agreement has been negotiated and agreed in the interests of big business. The Socialist Party is opposed to the EU, which is an institution created in the interests of capitalism. It is no friend of any worker in Ireland, North or South, or of any worker in England, Scotland or Wales, or across Europe. Working class people cannot and should not rely on the EU to deliver a brighter future, any more than they should rely on the anti-working class governments of Leo Varadkar, of Teresa May, or on the DUP-Sinn Fein Executive if and when it returns to power.

We thus oppose this draft agreement for a second reason: it acts against the economic and social interests of the working class and is designed to protect profit and the interests of the 1%.

A programme for the workers’ movement

We do not take an abstentionist position and we believe that it is vitally important that the workers’ movement-the trade unions and genuine left political forces-intervenes at this time with an independent and left programme. The workers movement should draw its own “red lines” on the key issues.

For years the Socialist Party has stood with workers in opposition to all attacks on jobs, wages, and conditions, whether these attacks result from the directives of the EU, or from governments North or South. We do not recognise any hierarchy of bosses or capitalist governments, in which some are “less bad” than others. The Socialist Party will now stand with workers resisting any attacks resulting from the process of the UK withdrawal from the EU.

Trade unionists in Ireland are organised together in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and are linked with their fellow trade unionists across England, Scotland and Wales in the TUC. The workers movement must mobilise to defend the wider interest of working class people across these islands.

• The trade unions must defend the economic interests of the working class in Ireland North and South, and in Britain, and resolutely oppose any “race to the bottom” with regards to workers’ rights or standards (of food production, for example). The workers movement must prepare for industrial action to defend workers’ jobs, wages, conditions, and rights.
• The workers movement must also act to defend the unity of the working class, and must not come down in favour of any agreement which widens divisions. It is also necessary to counter any increase in sectarian tension and sectarian conflict, and to prepare for protests and demonstrations, and industrial action to challenge sectarian forces.
• An emergency conference, with the widest participation of workers representatives from workplaces across Ireland, North and South, must be convened, in order to allow a full democratic discussion on how to best oppose both the EU and the attacks of the Fine Gael and Tory governments. If the ICTU will not convene such a conference those trade union bodies who are prepared to do so much take the lead. Trade unionists in England, Scotland and Wales should be asked to send representatives to this conference. The workers movement must also link out to trade unionists across Europe who also facing attacks originating from the EU.
• Socialists in Ireland would welcome the return of a Labour government in Britain. If such a government were to adopt a position of socialist opposition to the EU this would transform the situation. A Labour government should seek to re-open negotiations and demand an entirely different relationship with the EU, including new trade and customs arrangements, based on the interests of working-class people, not the 1%. This means a rejection of any EU restrictions on the ability of a Labour government to reverse privatisation or nationalise key sectors of the economy.
• Corbyn should speak over the heads of the Commission, reaching out to working class people across Europe in rejecting neo-liberal rules, calling for co-ordinated action for Green Energy on a Europe wide basis, and popularising a socialist vision of Europe. A left Labour government would be able to call on workers throughout the continent to fight the ‘race to the bottom’ in their own countries and mobilise against attempts by their own governments or the EU to pursue punitive measures against other workers whether in Britain or elsewhere. The workers’ movement in Ireland should mobilise its resources to build a cross-Europe fight back. A Labour victory, and the return of a Corbyn-lead Labour government, would open up an entirely new vista and would be a hugely positive development. If Brexit threatens workers’ jobs or pay taking enterprises into public ownership, under working class democratic control and management, should be the reaction of a left-led government. In that way, all jobs can be safeguarded and, if necessary, production changed to more socially needed products.
• Workers in Northern Ireland have no political voice. We need a new, mass political party which represents the interests of working class people and fights for a socialist future and the election of a Labour government would add great momentum to the struggle for such a party.
• Socialists are in favour of a genuinely united Europe. This will only possible when the socialist transformation of society allows the coming together of nations of Europe in a democratic, European-wide confederation. We fight for a Socialist Ireland, with full democratic rights for the Protestant community. We are in favour of a socialist federation of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales in a free and voluntary federation and a Socialist United States of Europe.

The post Brexit and the border: A warning to the workers movement appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

The scale of the defeat in Westminster of Theresa May’s UK/EU withdrawal deal, by 432 votes to 202, was devastating. According to the Daily Telegraph it was a “complete humiliation”. The Guardian referred to it as a “historic defeat”, while the Mirror summed it up with “No deal; no hope; no clue; no confidence”. The deal was only supported by 13% of people in Britain.

Yet, the following day, the “zombie administration”, as Jeremy Corbyn dubbed it, survived a vote of no confidence by 325 to 306 votes, with the support of 117 Tory MPs who had backed a challenge to May’s leadership in December. Importantly, the DUP also lined up behind the government.

However, rather than coming together, the Tories are more divided than ever, as seen in the various shots fired in the mainstream press. On one side, Jacob Rees-Mogg wrote that May’s approach to Brexit was like a Carry On film and “absurd.” Meanwhile, Philip Hammond has described his own party colleagues as “extremists who are trying to advance a particular agenda which would really not be in the interests of the British people.”

The EU establishment are not sympathetic to the UK government’s plight, with Michel Barnier asserting that the deal was the “best compromise” on offer. It is possible that, in order to avert a serious crisis, Article 50 is extended, i.e. the Brexit can is kicked a little down the road in order to allow further negotiation. It is also possible that the government – particularly given the hard-nosed approach of the EU – will go for a softer Brexit, with all of the UK staying in the customs union and the single market (known as the Norway option), something for which a section of pro-remain Tory MPs and Blairite Labour MPs have been pushing. Even the DUP are open to this.

Corbyn must fight for a general election

Despite Labour MPs voting ‘no confidence’ in the government, the real attitude of the Blairites can be seen in the comments of John Woodcock, an MP who lost the whip due to allegations of sexual harassment and who abstained on the vote of no confidence. He stated that Corbyn “is as unfit to lead the country” as May.

The civil war inside the Labour Party hasn’t gone away. The focus of the Blairites is to push, not for a general election, but a so-called “people’s vote”. This is a very risky option for the capitalist class. It would be seen as an attempt to reverse a decision they didn’t like. It would be highly divisive and would risk a further undermining of the already diminished authority of the political establishment. Socialists do not back this option because none of the options on the ballot would be in the interests of the working class.

Instead, Corbyn and the Labour movement must take advantage of the Tories’ weakness and organise mass, working-class action to demand a general election, and fight for a left government which can negotiate a new deal in the interests of the 99%. Alongside this, ‘trigger ballot’ processes must urgently be begun to allow local Labour parties to democratically remove the Blairites and select candidates of the left who will back Corbyn’s leadership and anti-austerity policies.

It is crucial to avoid “the false choice of a bad deal versus no deal,” as Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey put it. This should be the starting position of the movement as a whole. The Brexit deal on the table is not in the interests of working-class people but of the capitalist class in Britain and Europe. The deal would mean that the neo-liberal straight-jacket of EU rules would continue to apply. These rules effectively rule out many of Corbyn’s policies by, for example, putting limits on state aid for postal services, for broadband, for railways and for airports. The deal also rubber stamps attacks on migrant and refugee rights by both the EU and UK governments. On this basis alone, socialists must oppose the current deal.

Unite against sectarianism

There is another reason, however. Socialists have a responsibility to oppose any measure which would heighten sectarianism in Northern Ireland. The deal that was rejected in Westminster contains a backstop which, if no alternative trade deal can be negotiated, allows for extra non-customs checks between Northern Ireland and Britain in two years time. In other words, an “East-West” border could begin to emerge as early as December 2020.

This would add to the insecurities felt about the future by many ordinary Protestants. If there is a perception over time that their identity and the integrity of the Union is being diminished, it could provoke a serious reaction, as we have seen in the past. It is not simply a question of the DUP, but the concerns and fears of ordinary, working-class Protestants.

Equally and conversely, the rejection of this deal does put the issue of a “no-deal” Brexit on the table. In that situation, the EU and the Irish government will have to decide what happens at the border. After a no-deal Brexit, the logic of the workings of the EU is that a hard border would have to be put in place, and even the possibility of this is causing anger in the Catholic community. Border posts, customs posts, any physical manifestation of a hard border would become symbols of a denial of the national aspirations of the Catholic population and would not be accepted in any way.

Both the DUP and Sinn Féin see Brexit through the prism of their sectarian politics. While the DUP have opposed the deal because of the backstop, Sinn Féin have been among the greatest defenders of May’s deal. Now the deal has been voted down, they denounce the DUP as living in a “fairy tale world.” Working-class people can have no faith that these parties stand in their interests or that, when it comes to Brexit, they have anything to offer except solutions that inflame sectarianism

Trade unions must organise emergency conference

In this situation, the trade union movement – with its 800,000 members in Ireland and six million members in Britain – has a historic responsibility to take up the gauntlet and offer an alternative. In an article in the Newsletter, Owen Reidy of NIC-ICTU (the co-ordinating body of trade unions in Northern Ireland) calls for the establishment of a “Northern Ireland Brexit Stakeholder Forum” involving unions, farmer organisations, the community and voluntary sector and “key business groups.” The interests of workers and these “key business groups” are not compatible.

For example, a former spokesperson of IBEC (the Irish bosses’ union) called for the “imposition of pay freezes as an emergency measure” because of Brexit. Why should trade unionists form a stakeholder forum with them? Instead, the labour movement should organise its own conference, representing workers across Ireland and Britain.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) should take responsibility for the convening of a conference along these lines. If ICTU doesn’t face up to its responsibility, then a coalition of the trade union bodies prepared to do so should take the initiative. Such a conference should discuss how the economic interests of the working class in Ireland and Britain could be defended against those who wish to use Brexit to attack workers’ rights and conditions, including the possibility of coordinated industrial action. It would also have to discuss how we can defend the unity of the working class in the context of Brexit, preparing to counter any increase in sectarian tension and conflict with protests, demonstrations and industrial action to challenge the sectarian forces.

Build a socialist alternative

A conference of this kind should discuss how trade unionists and socialists could support the fight for a Corbyn-led government in Britain and the need to build mass, left parties of the working class in Ireland, North and South.

A Corbyn-led government should seek to re-open negotiations and demand an entirely different relationship with the EU, including new trade arrangements which avoid any hardening of borders, based on the interests of working-class people, not the 1%. This means a rejection of any EU restrictions on the ability of a Labour government to reverse privatisation or nationalise key sectors of the economy.

Such a government would have to speak over the heads of the European Commission and European governments, reaching out to working-class people across Europe in rejecting neo-liberal rules and popularising a socialist vision of Europe. The workers’ movement in Britain and Ireland should mobilise its resources to build a cross-Europe fight back. If Brexit threatens workers’ jobs or pay, taking enterprises into public ownership, under democratic workers’ control and management, should be the reaction of a left-led government. In that way, all jobs can be safeguarded and, if necessary, production changed to more socially needed products.

Ultimately, what is needed is a united struggle by working-class Catholics and Protestants for a socialist Ireland – with the full, democratic rights of both communities guaranteed – as part of a free and voluntary socialist federation with Scotland, England and Wales and a wider united, socialist Europe – a Europe run in the interests of the 99% not the billionaires.

The post Britain & Northern Ireland: Tory Brexit crisis & the role of the labour movement appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

 The prolonged countdown to the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union has thrown the Conservative government into a profound crisis. Ciaran Mulholland explains that the chaos is such that an anonymous European source has compared the UK to a “failed state”, and that the EU was able to impose its own terms when May came cap in hand seeking an extension of the original withdrawal date of 29 March.

At the time of writing Theresa May has tried three times to win a parliamentary majority for her draft withdrawal agreement, and has three times failed. The withdrawal agreement has been rejected on each occasion by a wide margin. The third defeat plunged the government into a mood of despair, and May even hinted at a general election if no way forward can be found. As things stand the UK will leave the EU without a deal on 12 April unless the draft withdrawal agreement is accepted by Parliament in the coming days, a long extension of months or even years is granted, or Article 50 is revoked and Brexit is “cancelled”. If the withdrawal agreement is passed 22 May will be the new withdrawal date.

A state of chaos

The indications are that May is hoping that one final vote, coming at the eleventh hour, will put immense pressure on MPs and sufficient numbers will switch sides rather than risk a “no-deal” exit. Some Tory MPs have indicated that they will indeed switch in such a scenario, and behind the scenes talks with the DUP are continuing in an attempt to win its 10 MPs over, but it is still most likely that May will lose again.

In normal circumstances, a government defeat on its key policy would bring it crashing down, or the Prime Minister would resign, but these are not normal times. What happens after another failed vote (or if there is no vote) is a matter of intense speculation. May has set her face against revoking Brexit. A long extension would mean that European elections would be necessary in the UK and this is regarded as a toxic option by the Tories. A second referendum is also anathema, not just for most Tory MPs but also for many Labour MPs from leave-voting areas.

The Conservative Party is in a state of chaos. May has signalled her intention to step down if her deal is agreed and her opponents within the Conservative Party are jockeying for position in the hope of succeeding her. A desperate May might consider appealing to the public above the heads of MPs by calling a general election, but Tory MPs are very unlikely to agree this as they fear that this would result in the election of a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn. Predicting exactly what will happen next is incredibly difficult. There is a real danger of a no-deal Brexit, with all the chaos this would produce, unfolding in mid-April, but it is more likely that a long delay will be agreed at an EU summit on 10 April.

Brexit and the Border

May cannot obtain a parliamentary majority for a number of interlocked reasons but the crunch issue is the “backstop”. This is the proposed arrangement, which is claimed to be necessary to avoid the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland, an eventuality that would “put the peace process at risk”. The EU is insisting that if the UK leaves the customs union and single market then there must be new border checks somewhere in order to protect its trade interests. If the Irish border is to remain open, then there must be new checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea instead. In other words the EU is presenting a rigid binary choice: either a hardened North-South border or an East-West border.

This all must have seemed “obvious” and a matter for calm discussion when the politicians and senior officials of the EU and the UK sat down across the negotiation table two years ago. They were in for a rude awakening as the reality of a sharp divergence of views between the two communities in Northern Ireland became apparent. The majority of Protestants are opposed to new checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea. An East-West border, no matter how soft, has come to represent a threat to the union between Northern Ireland and Britain.

Simultaneously, any hardening of the North-South border, no matter how minor, is seen as a threat to the national aspirations of Catholics, and any imposition of new border checks will be met with fierce resistance, including the physical tearing down of any infrastructure. In any circumstance the different positions of the Protestant and Catholic communities would have been problematic, but the accidental fact that the DUP hold the balance of power at Westminster has precipitated a full-blown crisis and has in effect blocked the UK’s planned departure.

A deal for the bosses

This is the context in which the Socialist Party has considered the draft withdrawal agreement. The key to determining the position of socialists is always to consider what is in the interests of the working class. The Socialist Party is opposed to the EU, an institution created in the interests of the various capitalist classes of Europe. We oppose the Tory government that unashamedly represents the interests of British capitalism. Any deal that is negotiated between these two players is bound to undermine the rights and conditions of the working class.

The referendum vote for European withdrawal in 2016 was a manifestation of a profound sense of alienation from the neoliberal “political centre”, and the majority of those who voted for Brexit did so to express their anger at the years of austerity and de-industrialisation.

The Socialist Party opposes the draft agreement because it acts against the economic and social interests of the working class. As Socialist Party member and Solidarity TD Mick Barry pointed out in November when speaking about the deal:

“…the politics of neoliberalism runs through this document like the stitching on a jacket.”

And that under a potential Corbyn government:

“None of [Corbyn’s policies of state aid and nationalisation] will be permitted. If this is a deal for Brexit, it is clearly a deal for a Tory Brexit. It is pro-market, pro-privatisation and pro-rich. It is against nationalisation, public services and the interests of the working class.”

Danger of sectarianism

It is essential that the workers’ movement also considers the potential impact of the withdrawal agreement on sectarian divisions in the North. The draft agreement outlines a scenario in which there will be a developing East-West border. This will increase sectarian tension and weaken workers’ unity, and we are opposed to the agreement on this basis. The trade union movement should reverse its current position and come out against the draft agreement.

We have been warned that if the agreement is not voted through the UK will crash out of the EU, and a hardening of the North-South border will then be “inevitable”. If this were to happen it will increase sectarian tension and weaken workers’ unity. We are resolutely opposed to this scenario too. We do not accept that border checks or controls on the North-South border are in fact inevitable. The trade union movement must oppose, and refuse to implement when possible, such measures.

Opposition must be clearly expressed on the basis of the interests of all working class people, Protestant and Catholic, North and South. This is not possible if the trade union movement backs the withdrawal agreement, which explicitly points in the direction of a hardened East-West border. The trade union movement unites working-class Catholics and Protestants in a shared struggle for a better life. This unity has to be fought for, and is put at risk by support for the withdrawal agreement.

Workers’ Movement Must Act Now

The only way in which the rights of both communities can be respected is to keep both borders open. The logic of capitalism dictates that this is not possible but we reject this logic. Ultimately, increased border checks can be avoided by the EU and the UK governments taking the political decisions necessary to keep the North-South border open and to not allow an East-West border to develop, whatever the supposed impact on trade.

As such an approach will hit big business profits we have no faith that they will do so, unless under immense pressure from below. In order to protect the wider interests of the working class it is vitally important that the workers’ movement intervenes at this time with an independent, socialist programme on Brexit. The workers’ movement should draw its own “red lines” on the key issues.

Trade unionists in Ireland, North and South, are united in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and have strong links with their fellow trade unionists across England, Scotland and Wales. If the trade unions were to bring their combined weight behind a movement for a new Europe, organised in the interests of the 99%, then millions could be mobilised across these islands and across Europe in opposition to any form of Brexit which favours the capitalist class. The trade unions must mobilise to defend the wider interests of working-class people and preparations should be made for industrial action to defend workers’ jobs, wages, conditions, and rights. Preparations must also be made in the North to counter any increase in sectarian tension and conflict, including preparations for protests, demonstrations, and if necessary, industrial action.

Workers’ struggle & socialism

An emergency conference, with the widest participation of workers’ representatives from workplaces across Ireland, North and South, must be convened, in order to allow a full democratic discussion on how to best oppose both the EU and the attacks of the Fine Gael and Tory governments. Trade unionists in England, Scotland and Wales should be asked to send representatives to this conference and links should be forged with trade unionists across Europe who are also facing attacks originating from the EU. From this conference a clear action programme of strikes, protests and occupations could be brought forward in the event of cutbacks, job losses and attempts to undermine workers’ rights.

Socialists in Ireland would welcome the return of a Corbyn-led government in Britain. If such a government were to adopt a position of socialist opposition to the EU this would transform the situation. It should seek to re-open negotiations and demand an entirely different relationship with the EU, including new trade and customs arrangements, based on the interests of working-class people, not those of the bosses and the bankers in the city of London. It would make an appeal to the working class across Europe, over the heads of their capitalist rulers, to join workers in Britain in a struggle against a common enemy; the EU and the capitalist system it represents.

Socialists are in favour of a genuinely united Europe. This will only be possible when the socialist transformation of society allows the voluntary coming together of all the people of Europe in a democratic, Europe-wide confederation. We fight for a socialist Ireland, with full democratic rights for all communities. We favour a voluntary socialist federation of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, as part of a socialist Europe, and will raise these demands throughout the workers’ movement in the months ahead.

The post The Brexit Calamity & the Role of the Workers Movement appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

By Daniel Waldron

The European election in Britain – which was never meant to have taken place – saw the two main parties take a battering as voters largely used the poll to voice their opinion on Brexit. The Tories were punished for the ongoing chaos and the deep divisions within the party which finally forced Theresa May from office. They were pushed into fifth place with only 9.1% of the vote. Labour, too, suffered because of its lack of a clear message on the way forward, ending up in third position.

Voters opted instead for parties with clear positions on Brexit. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party were the winners, topping the poll in Wales and in every English region except London. Between the Brexit Party and UKIP, over a third of voters backed parties who favour leaving the EU without a trade deal. On the other side of the debate, the Liberal Democrats saw a surge in their support, finishing second. In total, the parties which back a second referendum and remaining in the EU took over 40% of the vote. Such a result would not necessarily translate directly into a general election, where the question of national government is posed, but it clearly poses a stark warning for the two main parties.

Splits and realignments posed

The divisions within the Conservatives are only going to deepen with May’s departure and the leadership contest. May was only able to cling on as Tory leader for so long because of fears of a Corbyn-led government and recognition that no other leading figure could do a better (or less bad) job of holding together the party’s warring factions. Her successor is likely to be a ‘hard’ Brexiteer, with Boris Johnson the current favourite. Regardless of who emerges as the new leader, there is real potential for splits within the party.

Labour, however, is also in turmoil. In the wake of the election, Jeremy Corbyn has come under renewed pressure from the pro-capitalist Blairites within Labour – including Deputy Leader Tom Watson – to commit clearly to a referendum on a final withdrawal deal with the EU, with the option of remaining in the EU on the ballot paper. They want to stay in the EU as this reflects the interests of the dominant wing of the capitalist class which they represent, but they also seek to use the issue as a way to undermine support for Corbyn’s left, anti-austerity policies.

The pro-‘remain’ Change UK group – launched by defectors from both Labour and the Tories – failed to make a major impact in the election, winning only 3.4% of the vote and no MEPs. However, further defections from the two main parties are highly likely and could lead to a regrouping of the pro-EU, neo-liberal ‘centre ground’, potentially involving the Liberal Democrats.

Corbyn must give clear, socialist message

Historically, Corbyn has correctly opposed the EU as an inherently pro-capitalist and undemocratic bosses’ club. Unfortunately, under pressure from the right of the party, he backed a ‘remain and reform’ position in the EU referendum. Since then, he has rightly focused on demanding a general election to negotiate a withdrawal deal in the interests of the working class, but has allowed pro-EU Blairites like Keir Starmer to make much of the running on the issue, leading to confusion on the party’s position.

While a large majority of Labour members and current voters backed remaining in the EU, Corbyn is correct in recognising that the party must also reach out to working-class ‘leave’ voters if it is to be able to form a government. The potential to achieve this was seen when a third of former UKIP voters switched to Labour in the 2017 general election because of Corbyn’s anti-austerity policies.

The Brexit vote, in large part, represented working-class opposition to the impact of decades of de-industrialisation, privatisation and austerity. By hiding their viciously anti-working-class policies, the billionaire-backed Brexit Party was able to tap into this anger and the perception of being betrayed by the establishment once again.

Corbyn must put forward a clear vision for a socialist exit from the EU, removing restrictions on state intervention into the economy while also extending workers’ rights, environmental safeguards and defending the rights of migrants. Combined with a socialist programme to end austerity, raise living standards and tackle the climate crisis by taking on the super-rich and bringing the key sectors of the economy into democratic public ownership, this could pave the way for a Corbyn-led government.

Such a programme will be viciously resisted by the Blairites, who continue to dominate the Parliamentary Labour Party. Corbyn and his supporters should move immediately to give Labour members an automatic right to democratically deselect these ‘Tories with red ties’ ahead of a general election, to head off the threat of them undermining a future government under his leadership. Trade union activists should campaign in support of this demand but also for the movement to lea

The post Britain: EU election leaves main parties reeling appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

The post Britain & North: Kick out Boris Johnson & the Tories! Fight for a general election! appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

The post Britain: Parliament suspended – fight for a general election now! appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).

The seemingly intractable problem of Brexit continues. After MPs rejected Boris Johnson’s plans to rush his deal with the EU through in three days, a further extension requested by Parliament against the wishes of the government was granted. Now, voters are set to go to the polls on 12th December after Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour backed the call, assured that a ‘no deal’ Brexit is effectively off the table.

It is no wonder that many people are fed up with this saga. Nonetheless, Johnson’s plan for a ‘bargain basement’ Brexit has important implications for workers, particularly in Northern Ireland, and should be opposed.

For socialists, Brexit is symptomatic of a broader crisis for capitalism globally. This is reflected in the escalation of a trade war between the US and China, the two largest capitalist powers in the world, alongside elements of a process of “de-globalisation”, with the emergence of protectionism and inter-imperialist rivalry more generally. Politically, it also reflects a crisis of the “extreme centre”, the neo-liberal consensus of cuts, privatisation and an unfettered ‘free market’ which has dominated for decades. This has resulted in the rise of left-wing, reformist leaders like Corbyn and Sanders, but also right-populists like Johnson and Trump.

No race to the bottom

There are two main differences between Johnson’s deal and that negotiated by Theresa May. It removes legally binding commitments to ensure workers’ rights and environmental standards are aligned with the EU in order to provide a ‘level playing field’. This is aimed at winning over the Tory hard right, who dream of a “Singapore-on-Thames” and  plan to recast Britain as a low-tax and low-regulation economy.

Despite assurances from Johnson, in order to gain support from some Labour MPs, these issues will ultimately be dealt with in future trade negotiations – not just between the EU and UK, but also between the UK and US. The Trump administration has already set out its stall for such negotiations, including the removal of food standards which block the import of chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-pumped beef and so on. A future trade deal could also threaten the cherry-picking of the NHS for privatisation, similar to the defeated EU-US free trade agreement TTIP, as well as increases in the cost of medicines by US pharmaceutical giants.

At the same time, the Johnson-EU deal includes a commitment that, “The Parties should in particular maintain a robust and comprehensive framework for competition and state aid control that prevents undue distortion of trade and competition.” In other words, the British government would still be bound by EU rules which block socialist measures such as nationalisation, despite no longer being in the single market. This, in part, is to mark the cards of a potential Corbyn government, creating barriers to implementing popular measures like bringing the railways and other sectors of the economy into public ownership.

The border problem

The second related change is the removal of May’s proposed ‘Irish backstop’. The new arrangement would mean that Northern Ireland will leave the customs union with Britain but will remain closely aligned to the single market regulations. There would be customs checks on goods travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland, and potentially regulatory checks as Britain diverges from EU standards. This would effectively mean a hardening of an east-west border.

Stormont – if functioning – would have a say on how long alignment to the single market would last, but the mechanism would be very different from the “time-limited backstop” the DUP were prepared to accept. If a majority of MLAs designated as Unionist and nationalist both vote in favour, then the next vote would take place in eight years. If it is passed by a simple majority, then the next vote would take place in four years. This is an important shift in how contentious issues are dealt with at Stormont, and would effectively mean that the question of whether there should be a harder border between North and South or between Britain and Northern Ireland will be a looming issue to be regularly returned to.

This deal only adds to the legitimate feeling of insecurity felt about the future by many ordinary Protestants. If there is a perception over time that their identity and the integrity of the Union is being further diminished and that Northern Ireland is being forced into an “economic united ireland”, it could provoke a serious reaction, as we have seen in the past. A very large recent public meeting involving prominent figures associated with  loyalist paramilitaries heard talk of protests against this “betrayal” gives an indication that protests similar to those against the removal of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall are possible.

This is not simply a question of the attitudes of the DUP or other Unionist/loyalist organisations, but the concerns and fears of working-class Protestants. This is reflected in a recent LucidTalk poll, which showed that 53% of Unionists would prefer a ‘no deal’ Brexit over Johnson’s agreement, while only a third said they preferred the deal. Similarly, in a choice between remaining in the EU and Johnson’s deal, 43% chose to remain while 37% opted for the deal. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin have welcomed the deal as a “halfway house”, as have representatives of other pro-remain parties.

Workers’ movement must act

Socialists have a responsibility to oppose any measure which would heighten sectarianism in Northern Ireland. That includes any hardening of borders, be it east/west – as with Johnson’s deal – or north/south, which would not be tolerated, particularly by Catholics who would see it as copper-fastening partition. As the Socialist Party has consistently argued throughout the Brexit negotiations, the trade union movement – which unites almost 250,000 workers in Northern Ireland, from across the sectarian divide – must be prepared to take action against any moves which will inflame tensions.

The General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), Patricia King, said Brexit was an emergency situation facing workers, North and South. We agree. It is clear that capitalist governments and employers will attempt to use Brexit as an excuse to attack workers’ jobs, pay and conditions. Unfortunately, the response of the ICTU leadership to date has been limited to demands like calling for the use of the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund to assist workers who lose their jobs in the context of Brexit. This is entirely insufficient. The movement must prepare for a fight to defend jobs and conditions. The recent struggles of the Harland & Wolff and Wrightbus workers show what is needed: militant trade unionism.  These workers also raised an essential demand to safeguard jobs in the long run – nationalisation.

This agreement – like any which could be negotiated between the Tories and the EU – is a deal between two capitalist blocs and is not in the interests of working-class people. Socialists and the labour movement must reject the false choice between a Tory-led Brexit – with or without a deal – or remaining in the institutionally neo-liberal EU. The Labour Party conference’s rejection of a hard ‘remain’ position is a partial defeat for the Blairites, who represent the interests of British capitalism and who seek to use confusion around Brexit to undermine Corbyn. The leadership’s resolution, which passed, is for a Labour government to re-negotiate a deal with the EU and then put it to a confirmatory referendum with the option of remaining in the EU on the ballot paper.

Fight general election with socialist policies 

With a general election looming, Corbyn must put forward a clear programme which can speak to working-class voters, whether they backed ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ in 2016. Against the right-wing populism of Boris Johnson – who will attempt to present himself as the defender of the people against an out-of-touch Parliament and committed to “getting Brexit done” – a combative, socialist message is more necessary than ever. Corbyn should articulate and campaign for a socialist exit from the EU which would free a future government under his leadership from the restrictions on nationalisation, public spending and state intervention into the economy – which would act as a barrier to his policies – while guaranteeing workers’ rights, migrants’ rights, environmental safeguards and so on. Combined with demands for free education, reducing the working week, massive investment in social housing and renewable energy, democratic public ownership of key sectors of the economy and other pro-working class measures, it is possible for him to secure a majority in Parliament.

To actually implement these policies in the face of the opposition of the capitalist establishment, Corbyn would have to mobilise the British working class and make an appeal to workers and young people across Europe. He would also have to finish the civil war within Labour and decisively drive out the Blairites, who seek to undermine his leadership and block his policies at every turn. Corbyn and those around him have sought conciliation with the right for too long, and it has increased the confidence of their implacable enemies. Corbyn supporters within Labour should immediately move to unseat sitting Blairite MPs through trigger ballots, allowing the membership to democratically replace them with working-class fighters for socialist policies.

NI – Workers need an anti-sectarian political voice

In Northern Ireland, working-class people will once again be faced with a sectarian headcount. General elections, given the close margins in some constituencies, can particularly take on this character. The Brexit crisis and the current deal will significantly add to that. ‘Unity’ candidates – whether openly in a communal guise or in a disguised form around Brexit – would not provide any solutions but will further sectarianise the election.

This underlines the urgent need to build an anti-sectarian, working-class alternative that can seek to unite people around our common interests. The recent and ongoing industrial disputes here clearly demonstrate that workers have no friends among the main parties, whether Orange, Green or neither. Similarly, the battle for abortion rights and marriage equality was only won through struggle which forced the main parties, some times kicking and screaming, to shift their positions. A mass working-class party could not only take up the issues that clearly unite working-class and young people, but also find solutions to those that divides us, on the basis of mutual respect and solidarity, rather than through conflict and coercion, which is all any capitalist arrangement can offer.

For a socialist Europe

Capitalism today means crises – economic, political and environmental. It’s a system destroying our planet, undermining our living standards and creating the basis for the emergence of reactionary, bigoted figures such as Johnson, Trump and Bolsonaro. The capitalist governments of Europe and the EU, who represent this system, are part of the problem, not the solution.

We need to break with this system, which pits worker against worker, and fight for socialist change. This requires a break with the bosses’ EU, where cooperation between the ruling classes is based on maximising profit at the expense of the working class. Instead, we need to fight for a socialist confederation of Europe – free, voluntary and equal – based on solidarity and cooperation between workers across the continent, using society’s wealth and resources in a planned and democratic way to raise living standards and tackle climate change.

The post Brexit: Johnson deal threatens division and race to the bottom appeared first on Socialist Party (Ireland).