Brexit

Unions: pull Starmer into line!

Through Labour’s National Policy Forum in July and the Labour Party conference, 8-11 October in Liverpool, Solidarity will be pressing for activists to organise in unions and local Labour Parties to call Keir Starmer to account. The Labour leaders’ draft programme, the National Policy Forum report released on 11 May, sets up two barriers against making reality of its bland and blurred talk of social advance. It defines everything as having to be done in concert with or for the benefit of “business”. “We will make Britain the best place in the world to start and grow a business by making the...

The Morning Star, Ireland and Brexit

According to the front page of the Morning Star (8-9 April): “Unions are warning that stability in Ireland could be threatened if workers’ rights are ‘ripped up’ under the Retained EU Law Bill.” The piece continues: “The TUC and NIC-ICTU (Northern Ireland Committee in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions) issued a statement ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement ... warn(ing) that under the Bill workplace rights such as holiday pay, rest breaks, health and safety rules and protections from discrimination will disappear”. TUC general secretary Paul Nowak was quoted, saying...

Carnival of reaction at the Morning Star

The Communist Party of Britain’s international secretary Kevan Nelson gave a report to the party’s political committee last month, published in the Morning Star of 25-26 February. Headed “Signs of Labour collusion with ruling-class attempts to sabotage Britain’s exit from the EU”, it was terrible, even by CPB- Morning Star standards. The statement opens by quoting James Connolly’s famous prediction that the partition of Ireland would mean a “carnival of reaction” and sought to apply it to Sunak’s attempt to ease friction on the British border in Ireland and to Ukraine’s military resistance to...

Tories seek way out of Brexit snarl-up

The Tories are in turmoil, as rumours emerge that a “deal” on the Northern Ireland Protocol is close to being agreed between the UK Government and the EU. The main lines of any deal have been known for weeks. They are likely to involve a system of “red lanes” and “green lanes” at Northern Ireland ports, which would reduce checks on cargo bound only for Northern Ireland, with risks of non-compliance mitigated by the sharing of data and by penalties for breaches of the rules. One Brexiteer and DUP bugbear, however, is the continuing jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over Northern...

Brexit: Labour movement debate, not talk with Tories!

Members of the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, other politicians and officials and representatives of big capital met on 9-10 Feb summit to discuss “the failings of Brexit and how to remedy them in the national interest”, as the Observer put it. But we do not need David Lammy and John Healey sitting down with Michael Gove, senior executives from GlaxoSmithKline and Goldman Sachs, and the assistant secretary general of NATO, with Peter Mandelson in the chair, behind the backs of the labour movement and public. We need to break the silence about Brexit in the trade unions and Labour Party, and...

The Tory elite that has ruled since 2010

Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory minister and ex-chancellor now disgraced for tax evasion, atypically did not go to Oxford University. He went to University College London instead. But his entry to high-level Tory politics was through the entourage of Jeffrey Archer, who did go to Oxford. A small group of Tory men (and a few women here) educated at Oxford and also often at Eton are the base of the current ruling elite in the UK: deeply undemocratic, unaccountable, elitist, corrupt, repulsive, and many of them quite stupid. Simon Kuper’s book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK...

Break Labour from the Brexit cult

Keir Starmer has now at least criticised the "Brexit purity cult ” of the Tory right. Starmer was speaking about the Brexit-related impasse in Northern Ireland. But he still wants to squash discussion within Labour of Brexit, or even of significantly modifying the Tories’ version of it. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan has pushed the other way by calling for “a pragmatic debate about the benefits of re-joining the Customs Union and the Single Market”. He made the call at a posh Mansion House dinner, not in a labour-movement meeting, and was motivated as much by concern for London-based capitalist...

Returning to their Brexit vomit

“ As the dog returns to its vomit, so the fool returns to his folly” (Book of Proverbs) Support for Brexit is collapsing: in November of last year YouGov data was showing only 32% of the public saying it was right to have left the EU and 56% saying it was wrong. Even 19% of leave voters now believe they made a mistake. This plainly came as a serious blow to the fervent Brexiteers at the Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star . Former Corbyn adviser Andrew Murray’s “Eyes Left” column of 30 November sounded the alarm: “Who will stand up for Brexit?” he cried, noting that his beloved...

The politics of the lie-blizzard

According to the New York Times of 13 January, many Republicans had long been suspicious of the stories George Santos told about himself before he was elected to the US House of Representatives on 8 November 2022. They let it go. Now Santos, a pro-Trump Republican, opposed to abortion access and mask mandates and considering police brutality a “made-up concept”, has been found out. He insists he will serve his term in Congress. Kevin McCarthy, whipped by his difficulty in winning the far-right Republican votes he needed to become Speaker of the House of Representatives, backs Santos. Santos...

Letter: The immediate and the fundamental

We’re for Britain rejoining the EU. But Ben Tausz ( Solidarity 656 ) is wrong to say that means we shouldn’t raise the more immediate demands for rejoining the Customs Union and Single Market (thus restoring free movement). Single Market, free movement, Customs Union are lesser demands, but “immediate”, at least this side of the Tories’ mooted bonfire of EU-inherited regulations. A UK decision to return to EU regulations would require less “bourgeois deal-making” than the Tories’ (and Starmer’s) plan to negotiate new trade relations. It would be a step forward in general, and immediately would...

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