| Who Supports The EU And Why People think the left support the EU. They don't. The middle-class who have colonised the left, - they support the EU, not because they are the left, but because they aren't, they support it because they are middle class. No wonder they support it, it's a middle class autocracy. But they should consider if it is right or wise to exclude the working classes from politics, by voting to remain in a system of government without electorate. They can ask; is the EU building a safe and certain future, or is it attempting a coup? The EU is part of the global movement to remove democratic resistance to capitalism. The project is to govern without having to face elections;That is fascism. Propaganda by the big capitalist interests, the IMF, the OECD, the American President, the World Bank, threatens economic disaster while the middle class social democrat media, namely The Guardian, and the BBC has tried to characterise the choices falsely by identifying the opposition to the EU as right-wing or as nationalism. This is a deliberate lie. At stake is the very foundation of all workers rights, and of all freedoms, throughout Europe, not just in Britain. This couldn't be a more clear choice for the left. An obsession with Tory-bashing makes the left talk of “a bonfire of workers rights” if we left the EU, as if all social welfare comes from the EU - it doesn't. What world do they live in? The fire is already burning, but it's no bonfire, it's a Europe-sized wipe out. In defence, the working classes are demanding democracy, power, a say in how their own countries are governed, control over their communities. In Britain we have 8 million (including immigrants) on low pay who would rather like to be allowed a decent life. These are people who do need democracy. The EU wants to drive their wages down still further. --- Delours in 1988, offered the TUC the 'social chapter' instead of democracy, and everybody fell for it. He bribed us with something we already had, or were going to get anyway. Meanwhile inequality is at least as bad as it was in 1988. Middle class left wingers have always rather liked the EU, because it delivered just the right degree of social democracy to suit them without disrupting their wealth advantage over the poor - the EU and the middle-classes being resolutely devoted to the idea of cheap labour. And because it neatly by-passed the electorate, defeated the man with a white van, whom they hate and don't understand. It allowed them to take left wing politics that used to be about getting higher wages for the less well off, and turn it into a game about middle class identity. Central to that is the new middle-class religion, of so called non-racism. It became “racist” for the working classes to ask why white European cheap labour was allowed to come and drive wages down. It takes a real middle-class invasion of labour politics to put that trick across. What do they really care about the plight of black families living in Peckham in poverty, whose children are afraid to leave their flats unarmed? These are the low paid or unemployed whose job chances are threatened by EU immigration. And what do they care about the plight of the new migrants once they get here? What do they say about them after they have settled in and want higher wages? ---“ British workers (and this must include settled immigrants and sons of immigrants) won't do the jobs....so we have to get immigrants to do it” By which they mean new immigrants, cheap immigrants. And the bit they leave out is …..for the low wages offered. They won't do the jobs for the low wages offered. This is the crux of the EU intentions on labour. Just as the Victorians tried to make trade-unionism immoral, so the present middle classes brand any worker who complains of non-union or cheap labour. It was immoral to protect your job or wages in Victorian times, it is immoral now. Morality often co-incides with middle class economic interests. The EU supports the low wage economy, and tries to create it where it didn't already exist, for example in Sweden where it prosecuted the unions, and sequestrated their funds (like the Tories did to the miners) when they tried to get union rates for migrant workers. Where should the left stand in all this? It's pretty clear where the left would stand if it was working class. History will surely condemn the attempt to govern 500 million people without elections. Talk of uncertainty! This wild attempt does violence, once again, to the very values which many Europeans have fought and died to maintain. There is scant opposition to it because the left has virtually ceased to exist, spun off into various issues unrelated to working class pay and conditions of living. Because the prosperous class who now control it equate their self interest with politics that is left wing in name only. The wolf has eaten grandma and wears her clothes. How else can it be considered to be left wing to support something as openly capitalist as the EU? Some people suggest that we should stay in the EU and “reform it”, a fine example of arrogant (little Englander?) self importance, a mis-calculation of our weight. The EU project is federalism, everyone knows it except us, and they will pursue it. The EU is not changeable, that's the point of it being non-democratic. A vote for the EU is a vote for the status quo. That's why the well-off support it. The purpose of the EU, Barosso's “antidote to democracy”, is to remove the opportunity to change anything. Imagine a near future when we have an elected left-ish government, under Corbyn, whose policies clash with the austerity measures the EU likes to impose on its members (witness it's effective direct rule over-riding Greek electorates). Remember EU law is supreme and over-rules our own. Then will they realise what democracy means? This is not about saving British democracy alone, the whole of Europe is in the grip of an autocratic coup by a too powerful governing class who view people only as the functions of an economic system, whose dictates they are made to follow, no matter what the cost. Theirs is a quietly, but determinedly repressive hegemony that creates chaos beneath it. When the EU is hopefully off our backs we can get on with the vital work of re- building the left on working class foundations. A bright future doesn't come from vague glossy impressions, it's about power and who controls what. Given the aggressive nature of global corporate capitalism it would be suicide to give up political power. |