Brexit

Johnson’s tattered “Orange card”

The Tories have set a course for a major confrontation with the EU, as the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill threatens to rip up large parts of the Brexit deal agreed between the UK and Europe. Long-awaited, the Bill, if passed, would remove the direct effect of parts of the Withdrawal Agreement in domestic law. This would prevent it from having supremacy over UK law, allowing the UK to override parts of the Protocol. UK authorities, including Parliament, ministers and the civil service, would therefore no longer have to comply with parts of the Protocol which have been disapplied. The Clause...

Starmer to lurch on tuition fees and Europe

“Support the abolition of tuition fees” was part of one of Keir Starmer’s “Ten pledges” in the 2020 leadership election. Back then Starmer said: “Labour must stand by its commitment to end the national scandal of spiralling student debt and abolish tuition fees. We lost the election, but we did not lose our values or determination to tackle the injustice facing young people going to university.” Now the Financial Times reports the “desire to sound more fiscally responsible is also likely to lead to Labour dropping one of its signature policies from the 2019 general election — the scrapping of...

Yes, rejoin the Single Market!

Bournemouth Tory MP Tobias Ellwood has outraged his comrades and the right-wing press by calling for the UK to rejoin the EU’s Single Market ( in quasi-official parliamentary magazine The House , on 1 June). Ellwood obviously wants to rejoin the Single Market because it will benefit British capitalists. In fact rejoining would mitigate the economic damage and the price surges that are hurting workers. If we organise well, it would give us better terrain for fighting back; Ellwood takes working-class passivity for granted. For Ellwood, the free movement of people between the EU-27 and Britain...

Morning Star’s international editor breaks cover

The Morning Star and its political masters at the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) continue with their formal opposition to the invasion of Ukraine. But is becoming more and more obvious that this “opposition” has nothing to do with defending Ukraine’s right to self-determination. It is just a calculation that the invasion was an “error of judgement” on Putin’s part. In an editorial on Friday 13 May, the Morning Star repeats its refrain that the invasion was an ill-judged but understandable response to Nato’s expansion. Finland and (probably) Sweden joining Nato “illustrates just how the...

For a federal united Ireland! Rewind Brexit!

Boris Johnson visited Northern Ireland on 16 May. He spoke out of both sides of his mouth, offering a conciliatory message that he does not wish to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol, while at the same time signing off Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to prepare legislation unilaterally disapplying parts of the Protocol in UK domestic law The UK Government is, it seems, split on the issue. Truss, angling for the position as a future Tory leader, is signalling a “tough” approach in introducing the legislation. Other senior figures, such as Gove and Sunak, are concerned about the possible economic...

This climate-denier and friend of Farage should not be a Labour MP

Manchester Labour MP Graham Stringer is a climate change-denier. That is long-established. Stringer, once seen as being on the Labour left, is a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). GWPF is a climate change-denying lobby group which has very few members and hides its funders, but is known to received a lot of money from at least one major Tory donor, hedge fund boss Michael Hintze. That in itself is or should be a scandal. But Stringer's climate denialism has jumped into the news because he has agreed to speak at the Bolton launch, on 26 March, of the “Vote Power Not Poverty...

New Tory push for "Singapore-on-Thames"

In 2017 the media and right-wing Brexiteers began to talk about “Singapore-on-Thames”, in response to an interview by Tory chancellor Philip Hammond (who in fact had not mentioned Singapore). Following the appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg to the new position of “Secretary of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency”, the phrase is circulating again. Hammond’s idea was that if the UK was not able to gain adequate access to the EU market, it would need to become “something different” from the “European social model”. He said wanted to avoid that. The Tory right, long eager to evade...

Squaring anti-racist instinct with pro-Brexit policy

To be fair to the Morning Star , the fact that it had no coverage of the Wednesday 24 November tragedy in the Channel until its Friday edition (26 November), a day later than the rest of the media, was probably due to its limited resources and inability to extend deadlines. When it did come, the Morning Star ’s coverage was mainly pretty good: a front page headline “Give Safe Routes To Refugees” and a lead story quoting refugee rights groups blaming racist border fortification policies by both the British and French governments. The editorial on Friday 26 November was headed “Britain’s...

We can wind back Brexit!

Brexit is already contributing heavily to economic chaos. That contribution may get bigger. In UK-EU negotiations over trade arrangements between Britain and Northern Ireland, the EU has now offered sweeping removal of checks on animal and plant products entering NI. The UK’s negotiator David Frost has told them to get lost. The Tories are letting talk circulate that they will kick over the table and unilaterally suspend the Northern Ireland protocol, the deal they themselves signed less than two years ago to avoid a hard border within Ireland. EU states including France, Germany, Spain and...

Disorder at the border: Lexiters backing Johnson

During the EU referendum, the “leave” side almost entirely ignored the implications for Northern Ireland, and when concerns were raised, dismissed them as part of “project fear.” When it became clear that Brexit would have a seriously destabilising effect on Northern Ireland, Johnson and the hard-line Brexiteers (including the DUP) opposed the May government’s “backstop” which, for all its faults, was an attempt to mitigate the problem and avoid a hard border. Now, together with his Brexit tsar, the malevolent clown David Frost, Johnson is deliberately using Northern Ireland and agitation...

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