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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 6/23/16

The Brexit referendum: A turning point in European politics

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Message Chris Marsden

Reprinted from WSWS

Better Together Brexit -- Farage or Cameron
Better Together Brexit -- Farage or Cameron
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Whatever the result of today's referendum on continued UK membership of the European Union, it marks a watershed in political life in Britain and throughout the continent.

The referendum was called by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to placate the Eurosceptic wing of his own party and stop the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from gaining further ground at Tory expense. His disastrous political miscalculation threatens instead to split the Conservatives in two, hasten the demise of the EU and precipitate a major economic crisis globally.

Economically, the real issues being fought out are over whether the British bourgeoisie is best served by remaining part of the Single European Market or, in the words of the Leave advocates, repositioning itself "out of Europe and into the world" in order to better exploit opportunities in China, India and the Commonwealth countries.

Both sides -- Remain, led by Cameron and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Leave, led by Tory Boris Johnson and UKIP leader Nigel Farage -- shroud their real concerns in lies about defending jobs and vital social services and ensuring prosperity.

In reality, the EU defended by Remain is an instrument for imposing savage austerity, as has been so cruelly demonstrated in Greece. But Leave wants only to free big business and the City of London from what little remains of labour legislation and match the benchmark set by the conditions facing workers in the Far East. Whichever faction wins, the offensive against the working class will resume with a vengeance on June 24.

Never before has there been such a concerted intervention of leading figures from the Armed Forces and the security services MI5 and MI6 into political life. Both sides proclaim their commitment to NATO and its ongoing offensive against Russia and China. The Remain camp argues that British membership of the EU and the EU in general strengthen NATO, while the Leave camp maintains that British membership ties the UK to plans, pushed above all by Germany, to create a European Army, which will undermine NATO and raise the spectre of Germany establishing its unchallenged hegemony over the continent.

To conceal these political realities of class war, trade war and military war, and to sow divisions within the working class, the referendum has increasingly focused on whipping up nationalism and xenophobia.

The many social problems resulting from the savage austerity measures imposed by the ruling elite and its parties are blamed again and again on migrants. Again, Remain and Leave differ only as to whether anti-migrant measures require the EU's "Fortress Europe" -- guarded by razor wire fences, gun boats and concentration camps -- or whether the UK must "take back control" of its borders and end the free movement of European labor into Britain.

The toxic stew this has created -- such that UKIP's campaign material is redolent of Nazi propaganda -- pollutes social and political life and strengthens the forces of the far right.

Last Thursday's murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a fascist is a grave warning to workers and youth of the implications of this descent into nationalist reaction. It marks a new stage in the class struggle in the UK that will take on ever more brutal forms.

Cox's killing was not the action of a disturbed loner, but a political assassination. It was prepared over decades by the incessant scapegoating of immigrants, the whipping up of nationalism and the paralyzing of the working class by the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, which has allowed social reaction to deepen without an effective challenge from below. However, all those who claim that the filthy propaganda of the referendum campaign played no part in triggering this outburst of deadly violence are lying to cover up their own political responsibility.

A particularly criminal role has been played by the pseudo-left groups--whether they are aligned with the pro-EU agenda of Remain or have allowed the Tory right and UKIP to posture as "friends" of the worker by backing the anti-EU camp.

This applies above all to the organizers of the Left Leave campaign, such as the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party. Their insistence that political principle must be subordinated to the hope of the referendum splitting the Tories and hastening the coming to power of a Labour government is used to legitimise a political alliance with the most reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie.

There is nothing accidental in this. When George Galloway, the former Labour MP, declared on a platform with Farage, "Left, right, left right, forward march to victory on the 23rd of June," he gave voice to a political tendency that is emerging not just in the UK, but internationally -- a realignment of ostensibly left figures with right and far-right tendencies on the basis of nationalism.

In Ukraine, this took the form of an alliance with Svoboda and similar fascistic groups in the so-called "Euromaidan" coup engineered by Washington in 2014. In Greece, it was an electoral alliance between Syriza and the Independent Greeks. In the UK, sections of the pseudo-left, together with some Stalinist-led trade unions, insist that Boris Johnson and Farage, with their "millions of voters," must be entrusted with the task of bringing down Cameron. Their stated or unstated goal is for national protectionist measures to be applied by a Labour government, including ending the free movement of European labor.

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Chris Marsden's work can be found on wsws.org, a website dedicated to global awareness of socialist issues & which serves as the forum for the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
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