UK: Brexit was no “working class revolt”

The British vote of 52% to 48% to leave the European Union left the future of the economic bloc uncertain, financial markets in freefall and the British political establishment in complete turmoil.

The outcome has been depicted by politicians and media on both sides of the debate as a “working class revolt” against the “elite”. It was nothing of the kind. While it is true that many working class people took the opportunity to turn the vote on the European Union into a protest against austerity, the government, globalism and international finance, and to register their sense of hopelessness, this protest was channelled by the pro-Brexit camp in one direction: against migrant workers, not only from the EU but beyond. The rallying cry of the Brexit camp was “We want our country back”. As if we, the working class, ever owned it! The Bremain camp conceded to this argument, blaming the 5 Labour Party for failing to “listen to its core voters” on immigration while issuing warnings of job losses and cuts in wages in the event of exit from the EU.

As if the working class had not already suffered year after year of austerity! But the Bremainers had no choice: the alternative to a phony “working class revolt” was, from their perspective, far worse: a real one! In fact, far from being a “working class revolt” the whole issue originated as an attempt to heal a festering wound within the ruling Tory Party which goes back decades, and resulted in the fall of two previous Tory Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The divisions erupted into open civil war over the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which began the process of ever-greater political and economic union.

The British bourgeoisie generally regarded these developments as broadly positive: they provided free access on equal terms to an increasingly large market and the ability to recruit workers and professionals from a bigger pool. Tories who opposed Maastricht – euphemistically called “Eurosceptics” wanted the EU limited to a free trade area with minimal or no political interference from EU institutions, in particular the European Commission, whom they portrayed as “unelected bureaucrats” intent on destroying British sovereignty. As it became clear that they were fighting a losing battle, they demanded Britain’s complete withdrawal from the European project – “Brexit”.

Those who were frustrated with the lack of progress within the Tory Party set up a new one, first named the Referendum Party, to demand a plebiscite on the issue. However the party’s leadership was captured by the nativist supporters of Nigel Farage, who put the party’s entire focus on immigration. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) gained in popularity and influence following the financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse or near-collapse of the economies of Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland that ensued.

The rise of UKIP

Brexit has always been a revolt of the petty-bourgeois foot soldiers of the Tory Party. These are the utter dregs of British society, the kind of people who begin every sentence with “I am not a racist but … ” and then say something racist. Many of them, having become frustrated with the Tories, now characterized the three main ruling parties – “LibLab- Con” in UKIP parlance – as an anti-patriotic bloc.

Like most petty bourgeois movements, it was essentially a desperate and ultimately doomed revolt against modernism by a class that has no future in a globalized economy in which the divisions between capital and labour are ever-sharpening. The people who for years stuffed envelopes and canvassed on doorsteps on behalf of their “betters” in the Tory Party hierarchy, the people who put out bunting for royal weddings, the people who believe everything they read about the European Union in The Daily Mail and The Sun – they wanted the glory days of the British Empire back and they did not want to hear foreign languages being spoken on “their” streets.

As this was too narrow a social base to achieve a political breakthrough, and UKIP failed to gain any representation in the British parliament, it became clear to the circle around Nigel Farage that in order to make progress, UKIP had to broaden its appeal by turning working class voters against migrants.

This demagoguery succeeded in winning support in those areas of the United Kingdom that have seen the decline of heavy industry, such as the North East of England and South Wales, although ironically, for the most part these regions have experienced low levels of immigration.

UKIP also gained ground in rural areas such as Lincolnshire where farmers have taken advantage of agricultural labourers arriving in large numbers from Eastern Europe: UKIP claimed that these workers were making access to schools and the health service more difficult for the indigenous population.

While this may be superficially true, the reality is that it is the UK’s mounting debt burden and the consequent lack of funds for public investment that are the true cause of tensions. The taxes paid by migrants to the British Exchequer were just paying off interest on debt and bailing out failed banks rather than building new hospitals and schools, while Britain’s transport and sanitation infrastructure sank into ever greater disrepair.

LibLabCon and the “political correctness” of the “liberal elite”, it was argued, made it impossible for “ordinary people” to get a hearing. Their concerns about immigration, UKIP argued, were being ignored by the elite. Liberal Britain responded by giving ground to this argument. Prime Minister David Cameron promised to cut immigration to tens of thousands – a promise he could not possibly keep, because the EU’s single market guarantees freedom of movement, and because many sectors of the British economy, especially in London and the South East, were suffering a labour shortage. It was easier to recruit skilled workers from Poland, or experienced agricultural labourers from Bulgaria, than to retrain workers from England’s North East and West Midlands.

Confident of winning a majority, David Cameron therefore took a massive gamble by declaring in the Tory Party’s 2014 General Election that he would renegotiate the UK’s terms of membership of the EU and put the issue to the country. He believed he would get a majority remain vote and thereby heal the rift within his own party. As we now know, he failed.

Ranged against him in the Brexit camp were not only UKIP and the grassroots supporters of the Tory Party, but several prominent Tory Ministers of State such as erstwhile ally Michael Gove and, 6 most prominently of all, his old chum from Eton and the ultra-privileged Oxford University Bullingdon Club, former Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

Johnson had left it to the last moment to lead the Brexit campaign: clearly an unprincipled and opportunistic bid to oust David Cameron and capture the leadership of the Tory Party. Until relatively recently, he had been singing the praises of the EU, claiming that Britain had the best of both worlds being a member while outside the Euro bloc and the Schengen area, which allows travel between countries without border checks.

Opportunism aside, politicians such as Johnson and Gove were giving expression to sections of the British bourgeoisie who were hoping for “Brexit Lite”: not a complete exit from the EU, but a further weakening of the regulatory environment that Brussels is imposing on Britain. Under this heading fall medium and large sized enterprises that are not export- oriented (an example of which is the Wetherspoons chain of pubs, which employs 35,000 low-paid people, many of whom, ironically, come from Eastern Europe); sections of the financial services industry that find the costs of regulation already imposed, or to be imposed at some future date, too onerous to bear; enterprises whose bosses feel that have been put at a competitive disadvantage by Brussels legislation on issues such as environmental standards (a prominent example being Dyson, the manufacturer of energy-inefficient vacuum cleaners) and finally but most decisively, some large enterprises based in non-EU countries, most notably media empires, which exercise huge influence over the public through their control of the yellow press and TV.

Being more closely tied to American than European capitalism, advocates of both Brexit and “Brexit Lite”, and even some in the Bremain camp, tend to see Britain’s future as more closely aligned to US imperialism than that of Europe. They are especially hostile to the idea of a European army. On the international stage, therefore, Russia sees the political crisis in Britain as an opportunity: its role in strengthening the anti-Russian faction in Berlin will be diminished. Poland and the Baltic States have every reason to be worried.

Racism for dividing the oppressed

In the course of the campaign, the promises made by the Brexit camp became increasingly outlandish.

Grossly exaggerating Britain’s economic clout and political influence in the wider world, they asserted that capitalists in countries like China and “our Commonwealth” would beat a path to Britain’s door once it threw off the shackles of Brussels.

They claimed that the £350 million “sent to Brussels” every week could be spent on the NHS (in reality, Britain’s net contribution is half that amount).

The same money was promised time and time again for myriad other projects. They said that immigration would be cut to a trickle, and wages would rise for indigenous workers. Naturally, they have since backtracked on these and other commitments, though the speed with which they did so shocked many who were conned into voting for Brexit. For its part, the Bremain side, dominated by the Tory hierarchy with vocal support from business and financial leaders, as well as foreign potentates such as IMF President Christine Lagarde and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, showed just how divorced they are from everyday reality.

The entire Bremain campaign was dominated by threats of economic Armageddon in the event of Brexit: yet for huge numbers of British workers who have lost their jobs or seen their pay and conditions worsen over eight years of austerity, economic Armageddon has already happened.

In the last few days the campaigns got increasingly heated on both sides. Many on the Bremain side believed that the killing of Jo Cox by a pro- Brexit fascist, and UKIP’s overtly racist poster campaign, together with claims that 75 million Turks were about to descend on Britain, might fill enough people with revulsion to win the day. But it was not to be.

Britain votes out

You need to listen carefully to what bourgeois politicians say, and equally important, what they don’t say. Thus while Nigel Farage and UKIP were declaring that 23 June was Britain’s “independence day”, there were no celebrations or popping of champagne corks at the morning-after press conference given by Johnson and Gove. If you did not know better, you would think they had lost.

What they said was pure waffle; there were no specifics on what should or would happen next.

Johnson even laughably claimed that the Brexit vote made Britain “more European than ever”. Significantly, they made no mention of next steps to get out of the EU.

Johnson and many of his business supporters were clearly hoping for a narrow Bremain majority: a vote to stay in, but a big enough to weaken Cameron’s credibility, allowing Johnson to make a leadership, and big enough to give the UK further leverage over Brussels in order to further roll back regulation.

The plain fact is, the bourgeoisie as a whole does not want Brexit and woke up on 24 June in a state of shock. The genie was out of the bottle and could not very easily be put back. The value of sterling tumbled, with the Governor of the Bank of England needing to set aside £250 billion in foreign reserves to prop up the currency. Billions were wiped off share valuations. The reverberations were felt worldwide: with share prices falling as far afield as Singapore and Hong Kong. The biggest impact, however, was felt in the weaker members of the Eurozone such as Spain.

What happens next ?

The simple answer to that is we don’t know what will happen in the short term; but it is unlikely that Brexit will actually happen at all It is clear that the UK’s political establishment is trying to kick the referendum result into the long grass. Whether the other EU leaders are prepared to tolerate prolonged uncertainty to get David Cameron off the hook is quite another matter. UKIP will go on the offensive, stirring up even greater resentment against migrant workers. We will see violent attacks against them – of that there is no doubt, in fact it is already starting.

Britain is in no position to negotiate

Soon after the Brexit vote Britain’s most senior diplomat, the EU Commissioner Jonathan Hill, tended his resignation. Hardly surprising: the task of renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU will be Gargantuan. Austerity measures have meant that the British civil service has been pared to the bone and the EU could drag out withdrawal discussions interminably over the detail if it so chose.

While some EU leaders, including Angela Merkel, might take a relatively soft line on the negotiations, others will want to play hardball in order to stop the Brexit contagion spreading and giving encouragement to their own “Eurosceptic” populist movements: most notably two core EU countries, France and The Netherlands.

This, however, cannot be done just yet because the bourgeoisie needs to give some credibility to the fairytale that “the people have spoken” and that the referendum really matters: otherwise the myth of “democracy” will be once again exposedTherefore the “get on with it” message issued by Martin Schulz, Donald Tusk and others in the immediate aftermath.

The Disunited Kingdom

With the Labour Party disintegrating after the Brexit vote (more than half the Shadow Cabinet resigned) and Plaid Cymru’s call for Bremain rejected in Wales, the only bourgeois political parties that have emerged from this whole affair with a sense of victory have been the Scottish Nationalist Party and Sinn Fein. The SNP signalled its intention to hold a second referendum on independence, while Sinn Fein demanded an all-Ireland referendum on unification.

The threat of dissolution of the UK will provide a further incentive for the government to ignore the Brexit vote. On the other hand, it is likely that the EU will reject any application from Scotland for a fast-track admission: many countries (such as Spain) with strong separatist movements will veto such a move. In any case, the admission of Scotland will also take several years’ negotiation. As to Ireland, leaders in the Republic intervened on the Bremain side as Irish capital is inextricably linked to the UK and politicians in the South fear the growing populist appeal of Sinn Fein.

In short, there will be a period of intense volatility and realignment within the ruling class as they try to grapple with the situation on multiple fronts.

For a number of reasons we therefore predict that a future British Prime Minister, whoever that is, will find some reason to avoid Article 50 notification and perhaps call a second referendum (though this is not necessary with 80% of parliament pro-EU).

If there is a second referendum, the Remain side will win 60-40% at minimum. Alternatively, there could be a General Election.

Brexit and the working class

We can take some comfort from the fact that democracy has been revealed as a sham. But we cannot celebrate until we see a genuine working class response.

Whatever the outcome of this period of turmoil, one thing is certain: the working class will not get any of the “rewards” promised by either the Brexit or the Bremain side. While the working class has an interest in following events and responding to the outcome should events prove favourable, it has absolutely no interest in taking sides in a bourgeois dispute. It is not the task of the working class to sort out the mess that the ruling class has made for itself! This has been true in all Western European countries since the late nineteenth century, and in Britain, the first industrialized capitalist country, at least since 1848 when Karl Marx and Frederick observed the scene across Europe and declared that “The workers have no country”.

Therefore, those who have fallen for the lie that “we have taken back control of our country” or that there will be some dividend from Brexit for the NHS will be sadly disillusioned. Those who think that immigration policy is determined by “the people” rather than business interests likewise. Those who think that wages will rise as a result of curtailing immigration are also in for a shock. The working class is never more vulnerable than when bourgeois politicians, of any party or current, succeed in persuading workers that the enemy is “foreign” workers rather than the capitalist system itself.

It goes without saying, therefore, that the Bremain side, and especially Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, never once put a positive case for working class unity. The best Corbyn could come up with was a lukewarm defence of the EU’s legislation such as the Working Time Directive, which is largely ignored and at best only imposes uniform misery on the entire European working class. His role was otherwise to ensure that a class position never emerged among traditional Labour voters, and to attribute their economic difficulties to “Tory” austerity, as though austerity is an act of nastiness by a particular political party rather than a necessity 8 for capitalism regardless of who is in government.

(Over the past 20 years it has been the job of political parties to focus on symptoms of economic malaise and offer phony solutions to capitalism’s problems without identifying the root cause: Farage blames Europe, the Tories blame Labour incompetence, Labour blames Tory austerity, the SNP blames the Westminster establishment, George Galloway blames defence spending and wars, and so it goes on. Just don’t, under any circumstances mention the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system: that is strictly forbidden.) A “working class revolt” only has any meaning when the working class embarks on its own struggles against that capitalist system, autonomously of other classes, in its own interests, and most importantly, as a class, not as atomized individuals in a bourgeois election or plebiscite. This cannot be achieved without unity across national, ethnic and other artificial divisions, including “traditional loyalty” to bourgeois and opportunist parties. The fragmentation of the working class can only be overcome by class-wide forms of organization, uniting workers on the shop-floor, in offices and services, and not allowing their struggles to be diverted by the Labour Party and trade union officials, who have a stake in the capitalist system. The working class can only protect its interests by means of its own organization – the international communist party – and by opposing attacks wherever they originate.

While the world’s attention was fixed on the EU referendum, workers were waging such struggles across Europe: rail workers, junior doctors and teachers in Britain, at fuel depots, ports and power plants in France, and in the Italian logistics sector, to name but a few. A true “working class revolt” consists not in casting a vote at the ballot box, but in extending and uniting such struggles across industrial sectors and across national borders. For this not only to happen but to be sustained right through to the final assault on the bastions of capital, an international class party is indispensible.

In or out of the EU, Britain is part of a global economic system that is overloaded with debt and on the brink of another crisis. Economic crisis is not, as the Leave campaign would have us believe, the result of “Brussels bureaucrats” or “over-regulation” or even the weakness of the Euro. Nor can an economic crisis be put off indefinitely by more political and economic integration within Europe or free trade deals between the EU and other economic blocs, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) supported by the Bremainers.

No, the coming economic crisis is, like those that went before, inseparable from the inescapable contradictions of the capitalist system. Every country in the world is increasingly affected, even those that have until recently enjoyed rapid growth, such as the so-called BRIC countries.

In order to take these struggles forward, the working class must utterly reject the bourgeois idea of “popular sovereignty” or “the sovereignty of parliament”.

The argument of the Brexiters that “we need to take back control” is meaningless as the working class cannot exercise control over the capitalist economy – its only option is to break the capitalist system and replace it with a new society. The argument of the Bremainers that “we have greater control by being at the EU negotiating table” is equally meaningless: the EU negotiating table is only there to regulate capitalism on across the continent, in the interests of European capital. In so doing, it can perhaps delay the next economic calamity, only to see it reappear worse than ever.

The simple reality is that there is no “we” – the idea of popular sovereignty is a fiction to masquerade the fact that there are only opposing class interests.

The workers have no country – we cannot lose what we have never had. We will only ever exercise “sovereignty” as an international class, through the dictatorship of the proletariat.