What is at stake in the
British referendum[1]
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
(01.05.2016)
The struggle in
Britain between those fighting for Brexit and those
fighting against it is a very unequal struggle.
The two
sides in the struggle
On the one side
there are the entire Transnational and British
elites, i.e. the entire network of economic,
political and media elites which run the New World
Order of Neoliberal Globalization: from the Nobel
Laureate Obama,
who managed to bomb 7 countries in the first 6 years
of his presidency,
to the transnational economic and political elites,
such as the business federations of Germany, France,
Spain, the Netherlands and BusinessEurope —
representing organisations in 34 European countries
– which joined the UK’s CBI to argue that EU
membership is an important factor in maintaining and
attracting investment to the UK.
The reason
the elites are fighting so hard against Brexit is
because they know that a victory for Brexit could
set in motion a domino effect that could demolish
the EU. This is particularly the case now that an
anti-EU tsunami is blowing all over Europe, both in
the South and in the North. A Brexit could set in
motion forces that could lead to the dismantling of
the elites’ entire globalization plan, which
involves firstly the effective abolition of economic
and national sovereignty within economic unions like
the EU and, secondly, the unification of such unions
through deals like the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP), which puts at risk
even the NHS – the major social achievement of the
post-war period. The end result of all this may well
be that, soon afterwards, poor Britons suffer the
same fate as that of poor Americans, who now have
the same life expectancy as the Sudanese according
to a very recent study![2]
In fact, the very reason that Obama rushed to London
and then to Berlin was to co-ordinate the fight for
TTIP, so that this agreement would not be put at
risk by a Brexit.
On the other
side, there are the victims of globalization in
Britain and throughout the world: i.e. the millions
of workers all over Europe who have lost their jobs
since globalization began taking effect about 30
years ago, from the miners – after being defeated in
the 80s following a long and heroic struggle – to
the steelworkers who are about to suffer the miners’
fate, as soon as the referendum is out of the way.
That is, on the other side are
all those who are the victims of the opening and
liberalization of markets for capital, labour and
commodities. As even the
Financial
Times admitted a few days ago, “we
are close to the point where
globalization and membership of the Eurozone in
particular have damaged not only certain groups in
society but entire nations”.[3]
In other words, we are talking about all those in
Britain (and beyond!)
who are
forced to work for survival wages and zero contract
hours, not to mention the victims of a continuously
deteriorating social welfare system (health,
education and so on). This system is under the
constant threat of further funding cuts while, at
the same time, having to cover the needs of more and
more people because of the so-called “four freedoms”
of the EU, introduced by the Maastricht Treaty and
those that followed it (i.e. freedom in the movement
of capital, commodities and of course labour).
But it is exactly the imposition
of these so-called “freedoms” that could explain why
Britain – where supposedly there is almost full
employment – is experiencing stagnant real-term
wages at the same time.
The present ‘job miracle’ in Britain, for instance
(which is characterized as “the job creation capital
of the western economies”), hides the fact that, as
an analyst pointed out, “unemployment is low,
largely because British workers have been willing to
stomach the biggest real-terms pay cut since the
Victorian era”.[4]
What is really at stake in the British
referendum
However the elites, including the Blairite Labor
Party (its new leader Jeremy Corbyn has already
shown his true ‘Left’ colors—which remind one of
Tsipras and Varioufakis of whom he is an admirer!––
with his about turn on the EU issue and the
suspension of Ken Livingstone, according to the
demands of the Transnational and Zionist elites) and
the associated trade unions, do not say a word about
the real issue of the plebiscite: namely,
globalization. Instead, they try desperately to
disorient the people to make them believe that the
issue is about worker’s rights, with Alan Johnson
declaring the other day that
“Europe remains the
backstop guarantee for workers’ rights”.[5]
Of course, working people know full well that their
rights have always been won and protected through
their own struggle, while the EU is well known for
continuously passing legislation, ever since
Maastricht, to restrict workers’ rights severely, so
that European labor can compete with that of the US,
if not China and India. This is what people in
Greece, Portugal, Spain and now throughout France as
well, are resisting.
So, what is really at stake
is the economic and national sovereignty of the
European peoples, not the democratization of Europe,
as its “Left” supporters assert in a very
disorienting way.[6]
Democracy presupposes people’s sovereignty, and this
sovereignty cannot be secured at the European level.
The people’s sovereignty can only be secured at the
local level. European sovereignty simply means the
sovereignty of the unelected economic and political
elites running the EU, or at most, the more powerful
countries within it.
Furthermore, democracy presupposes the
economic
sovereignty of the people, i.e. their power to
determine their own monetary and fiscal policy, as
well as control of their country’s resources, in a
sovereign way. But this right disappears as soon as
a country joins the EU, or even worse, the Eurozone.
Towards a Democratic
Community of Sovereign Nations[7]
Finally,
from the point of view of the Left, which is
supposedly fighting for radical social change, such
change is impossible in a globalized world without
economic and national sovereignty. What we therefore
need in Britain, in Europe and in the world as a
whole, is to start building Popular Fronts for
National and Social Liberation (PFNSL), in every
country which is integrated into the New World
Order. Such fronts would
fight for the recovery of national and economic
sovereignty and the self-reliance of each country,
in their struggle for the creation of a new
democratic world order based on the values of
solidarity and mutual aid, rather than the principle
of competitiveness which has led to the present
record level of inequality in the distribution of
wealth and income throughout the world, as well as
to an ecological disaster. Such a process of
recovery would necessarily involve the creation of
an alternative pole of sovereign self-reliant
nations, and Brexit is a precondition for this.
ON TO THE STRUGGLE!
[2]
Will Pavia, “Poor Americans have same life
expectancy as Sudanese”,
The
Times, 13/4/2016
[3]
Wolfgang Munchau,
“The
revenge of globalization’s losers”,
Financial Times, 24/4/2016
[4]
Ed Conway, “The UK is paying the price of
its jobs miracle”,
The
Times, 14/10/2014
[5]
Alan Johnson on the EU referendum: ‘We’ve
got the best lyrics, but we’re still
struggling for a tune’ ,
The
Guardian, 26/2/2016
[7]
see Takis Fotopoulos,
THE NEW WORLD ORDER IN ACTION: MIDDLE EAST,
GREECE, UKRAINE,
Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign
Nations (Progressive Press, May-June,
2016)
source:
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol12/vol12_no1_What_Is_At_Stake_British_Memorendum.html
The
International Journal of Inclusive Democracy: http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/
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