European Union

For a workers’ united Europe!

At the meeting of the European Council — the prime ministers or presidents of the EU countries — on 14-15 December, the Tory government hopes to wrap up the preliminaries of Brexit and get agreement to start discussing post-Brexit transitional periods and trade deals with the EU. As we go to press on 23 November, the Tories are reported to have agreed among themselves to double their “divorce payment” offer to the EU to £40 billion so as to improve their chances. Big business is telling them that it needs definite plans for after the Tories’ scheduled Brexit date of March 2019, because two...

The bankers’ let-out

The big banks — UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays, HSBC, and others — are nearing a deal with the EU over their rigging of foreign-exchange markets. They have already paid American, British and Swiss authorities more than $10 billion for the rigging, and the EU over $2 billion for rigging interest rates. The 2008 crash has been followed by a cascade of investigations and scandals, triggered by resentment built up against the banks by government authorities and non-bank capitalists. The twist, however, is that even when the high powers of bourgeois society are...

Catalonia: rights and unity

Editorial from Solidarity 454 On Saturday 11 November, 750,000 people (on the city police’s count) demonstrated in Barcelona to demand the release of Catalan government ministers and pro-independence association activists jailed by the Madrid regime to await trial on charges such as sedition. A general strike called by a pro-independence union confederation, Intersindical-CSC, under the slogan “Defend Our Rights”, on Wednesday 8 November, also had impact. The reports suggest it was more through demonstrators blocking railway lines and roads than the major concentrations of workers deciding to...

Letters

Paul Vernadsky in his review of my book, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution 1918-21 ( Solidarity 453), is right to highlight the importance of this period for today. And he comes to the heart of our disagreement at the very end of his essay when he refers to the idea that “an impoverished, backward society cannot skip historical stages”. He calls this “Menshevik dogma”. No, Paul, that’s not “Menshevik dogma”. That’s Marxism. But leaving aside whether that’s more Martov or Marx, that phrase has proven to be absolutely true. The last century showed us many examples of attempts by...

Letters

I’m entirely with David Pendletone ( Solidarity 452) that we should seek to win the labour movement and the Labour Party to a programme for a workers’ Europe. But what if we fail to win a majority for that before March 2019? We should assume no “inevitability of gradualness”. But even if we, around Solidarity , increase our forces twenty-fold in the next year — twenty times more activists, twenty times more readers, twenty times more influence — we may not win Labour conference 2018 to that programme. And, even if we do, a workers’ Europe is not a programme that can realised by action in one...

Letters

I agree with the front page and the vast majority of the editorial "Stop Brexit" ( Solidarity 451). However, I disagree that revolutionary socialists should advocate a second referendum. Unlike the situation with the first referendum, I don’t think we should necessarily oppose others who call for a referendum or oppose a referendum if it is called, but we ill serve our politics by championing the demand. As the editorial recognises, referenda are “a poor form of democracy”. In a second referendum our politics: for a workers’ Europe, more democracy within the EU and a levelling up of benefits...

Stop Brexit!

Opinion polling on 10-11 October showed 64% saying that the Tory government is doing “badly” in negotiating Brexit, and only 21% saying it is doing “well”. 47% said that, with hindsight, they thought the vote for Brexit in June 2016 was wrong, 40% that it was right. Only a small minority say that Brexit will make Britain better off economically — only 23% overall, and only 12% of Labour voters. 44% think Brexit will make Britain worse off. 39% expect Brexit to be bad for jobs, 22% bad. 31% expect Britain to be bad for the NHS, 25% bad. Among Labour voters, 51% expect “bad for the NHS”, 17%...

How to get the Tories out

After May’s woeful Party conference speech, the Tories are more divided than ever. But their conference has also left them in an impasse. They can’t easily sack Theresa May because she was the unity candidate for Leader and the Tories who supported her don’t yet have a plan B. There is no sign of an acceptable alternative to May. The underlying struggle for dominance between soft and hard Tory Brexiteers has not resolved itself. At some point, most likely now in the medium term, those divisions will come to head, and May will be ousted. As the Tory internecine struggle becomes more infected by...

Defend freedom of movement

With the Tories in disarray on how to conduct Brexit negotiations with their increasingly frustrated European Union counterparts, the labour movement debate about how to approach Brexit is also hotting up. A welcome recent development is the launch of the Labour Campaign for Free Movement (LCFM) on 4 August with the prominent support of Labour MPs Clive Lewis and David Lammy. More than 2,000 people from across the labour movement have now signed the founding statement, which aims to reshape the immigration debate in the Labour Party and wider working-class communities. At the moment, the upper...

Back workers’ rights to move freely

Jeremy Corbyn has restated a view expressed to ITV in May that Brexit means leaving the single market and an end to freedom of movement across the UK. In his own words, he told BBC journalist Andrew Marr that, “There would be Europeans workers working in Britain and British workers working in Europe as there are at the moment. What there wouldn’t be is the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry.” He went on to say that jobs should be advertised locally and not recruited through agencies who would...

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