More on Brexit
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It won’t make any difference but to the outcome but I thought they had all died or something.
What a sorry useless bunch the ‘Gradualists’ are.
By the way, you have already started a border dispute by annexing the territory currently in England between the Scottish border and Hadrian’s Wall.
I can’t get the damned advertising jingle out of my head,”a deep gloss paint”, for when they started adverts on TV.
Goddamn I’m getting old.
Although this is presented in terms of the lesser evil argument (an evil deal is better than the greater evil of no deal) it is really just rank opportunism — it’s a vote-catching ploy to try to win back the votes of those traditional Labour voters who voted Tory in last year’s general election.
You call them as “a sorry useless bunch”. I can think of other ways of expressing contempt for this bunch of self-serving professional politicians. The Labour Party, shouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.
“But, surely, just as we don’t campaign for reforms even if they do improve things for workers so we don’t campaign against reforms that make things worse — especially as in both the above cases this would involve campaigning and voting for a status quo which is far from satisfactory.
So, basically, we campaign only for socialism and neither for nor against particular reforms, while denouncing some proposed reforms as counter-productive and/or anti- working-class.”
Actually, ALB, I was thinking in terms not of campaigning as such, which of course the WSM wouldn’t do, but of individual members voting, in much the same way as a future socialist MP might be instructed to vote for or against a specific reform without compromising their anti-reformist stance. It’s all water under the bridge now, but when things get made worse and nobody seems to benefit it’s a bit hard trying to tell people to see the bigger picture and that remaining in the EU would have been no big deal.
But that’s the story of our political lives, I suppose.
I see. Actually, whisper it, but some Party members did vote against Brexit, ie vote Remain, in that 2016 referendum. But it is a valid question, given our criticism here of MPs today, how would a minority of Socialist MP, if there were some, vote on Wednesday on the Brexit trade deal?
I would say abstain. We couldn’t go into the voting lobby alongside the motley collection of Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalists and the pathetic LibDems who will be voting
against, could we?Gibraltar remain part of EU’s passport-less, free-travel Schengen Area
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-news-latest-boris-johnson-live-eu-b1780748.htmlI didn’t think the UK government, in its anti rest of Europe mode, would actually agree to a part of the UK joining the Schengen free movement area (which the UK itself never did) and to being subject to EU regulations but I see they have. I wonder if the workers of Gibraltar are going to have to suffer the “tyranny” of the European Court of Justice?
It’s a sign of the weakness of the newly “independent”, “sovereign” UK’s bargaining position. In any event “sovereignty” is a paper right. What counts is economic reality.
As Michael McParland, a QC specialising in international civil and commercial law, put it in a letter writer to the Times yesterday:
“a fundamental point of all free trade agreements: concepts of national sovereignty ultimately count for nothing in such negotiations. The sole determinants are economic interests and muscle and the UK will always be smaller than the EU. We’ll be dancing to its tune for the foreseeable future.”
“We” is of course the UK state representing its capitalist class. Workers have no interest in the “sovereignty” of a capitalist state and the Union Jack is just a rag on the end of a pole. As is the EU flag of course.
National sovereignty and national auto-determination is a bourgeoise fallacy, workers do not own any homeland, the so-called homeland is the private territory of the capitalist class, As Adam wrote: What counts is an economic reality
I see Johnson is saying that he wants the government’s post-Brexit economy policy to be a combination of “state activism” with “free market capitalism”. Poor Labour Party ! He has stolen what was their programme, even under Corbyn and McDonnell.
But of course you can’t believe a word he says. It wouldn’t work as intended anyway. And if it involves too much “state activism” in the form state aids it will come up against the terms of the trade treaty that he has just signed with the EU. Because it restricted state aids (too much state capitalism) was one of the reasons Corbyn,like his mentor Wedgwood Benn, always used to be anti-EU.
According to YouGov a majority who expressed an opinion now think the decision to leave was wrong:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-55416939Coincidentally, as soon as England left the EU, China and the EU signed a large commercial investment
UK V. Ireland fishing rights at Rockall begins
The first signs of the race to the bottom.
A bee-killing pesticide so poisonous that it is banned by the EU may be used on sugar beet in England, the government has announced.
Labour reneges on promises
Starmer said it was not realistic to pretend that the EU would want to negotiate a new Brexit treaty with the UK… conveniently forgetting that Gibraltar agreed free movement of workers.
Further evidence of the race to the bottom. Lower food standards
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