Brexit is inevitably anti-working class

Members of Parliament have voted to support Theresa May’s Brexit Bill on its second reading.

This was (and is) an anti-working class measure which threatens, in particular, the rights of those workers who are citizens of other EU nations – but it also threatens all of us who depend upon legal rights rooted in European law.

Which is all of us.

The Labour Party is repeating the mistake which Gordon Brown made with “that bigoted woman” in 2010 but whereas he made the mistake with an individual, we are now making the mistake with millions of voters. He patronised an individual by ignoring her views to her face and then pandering to them when his true feelings became clear. We are doing the same thing by “respecting” leave voters in the referendum.

When Gordon Brown failed to confront a “labour voter” who expressed views with which he disagreed he set a precedent for those Labour parliamentarians who have failed over many years to take issue with anti-migrant feelings (which they have failed to understand because their interaction with low paid workers is more often as employers than as competitors).

It is ironic that so many of these Progress-types are now amongst those “courageously” defying the (ill-judged) whip since it is their fault that our Party has lost touch with those who feel ignored by our Party. Those Labour voters who feel abandoned by our Party were abandoned when the co-thinkers of Hilary Benn and Chukka Umunna were running our Party (and in Government).

Nevertheless, the entire Party is now making the mistake of failing to engage with and confront the mistaken anti-migrant prejudices of many millions of voters. Today this led to Labour Members of Parliament failing to oppose, on the second reading, a Bill which attacks the interests of working class people.

It is really important to be clear. Whilst not all “leave” voters were racist (though many were) the remainder were (objectively) stupid. In particular, working class “leave” voters voted against their own class interests and contributed to the “divide and rule” strategy of the ruling class. (It is worth noting that the increasingly defensive argumentation from those who advocated “Lexit” is an obvious consequence of their recognising that they took the wrong side in a historically important choice).

If Labour wants to be listened to by these “leave” voters we cannot achieve our goal by pandering to misplaced prejudice – we need to do what Gordon Brown should have done in 2010 and take issue with wrongheaded opinions. To those people who believe that immigration has hurt them, we need to say that they are wrong – and in so doing we need to advance persuasive arguments rooted in facts and the real interests of working class people.

We cannot expect that the right-wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party will do this for us (because they cannot hope to have an audience with ordinary people). However, we do need to demand of the current Party leadership that they show the same courage in confronting popular prejudice that they have shown over so many years in fighting the elite within the Westminster bubble.

There is no – and can be no – “Peoples Brexit”. There is only a racist Brexit which attacks the rights of working people.

The reason why this reality creates such a crisis for the Labour Party in particular is that we are now faced with a polity in which the defining distinction is not a class question but, as with the nineteenth century debate over the Corn Laws, a question between liberal and conservative wings of the bourgeoisie.

This is a consequence of our retreats and defeats over the past generation. European social democracy is in (perhaps irreversible) decline because there is no global alternative to capitalism and no persuasive alternative at the national level in any advanced capitalist economy.

Therefore the key questions which are faced in everyday life are not questions between a working class and a ruling class perspective, but questions within an overall ruling class perspective.

We need to rebuild class politics around the rebuilding of a socialist working class politics, but we cannot do this by capitulating to the nationalism which is the expression of the protectionist/isolationist wing of the ruling class.

Socialism has never developed out of conservativism. It has always been a development of a working class perspective going beyond the liberal politics of the bourgeoisie.

Socialists need to win an argument against Brexit within the labour movement – if we fail to do so then we will have lost for decades to come. Nationalism is the antithesis of socialism.

Corbyn is wrong about Article 50

I voted twice for Jeremy Corbyn to be Leader of our Party and support his leadership, but I was disappointed to receive his email seeking to justify the decision to vote in favour of the Bill triggering Article 50 on the spurious grounds that we should respect the Referendum outcome.

I prefer the militant position adopted by Lambeth UNISON at our Annual General Meeting. When we lose a General Election we don’t shut up for the next few years and let a hostile Government attack us – and there is no reason why we should show greater “respect” for the outcome of a consultative referendum than we do for elections.

There is no prospect of a “People’s Brexit” in current political circumstances. The departure from the European Union being planned by this Government will be irredeemably racist and reactionary – the bigots who have been empowered and encouraged by the referendum result know what they achieved (and only the small number of deluded leftwingers who are in denial about having chosen the wrong side in such a critical moment doubt this).

The policy of the Labour Party was agreed at Conference – and it not simply in favour of leaving the European Union come what may.

Labour Party policy is that Conference;

• considers that full access to the single European market for British goods and services is vital for jobs and prosperity in Britain;
• Calls for the rights and workplace protections enshrined in EU law to be maintained in the UK;
• insists that the rights of residence of EU citizens already living in Britain and the rights of British citizens already living in other EU countries should be preserved;
• recognises that many of those who voted to leave the EU were expressing dissatisfaction with EU or national policy and were voting for change, but believes that unless the final settlement proves to be acceptable then the option of retaining EU membership should be retained. The final settlement should therefore be subject to approval, through Parliament and potentially through a general election, or a referendum.

It is difficult to see how this policy is consistent with voting for Theresa May’s “Article 50” Bill on the second or third reading. It would certainly be inconsistent to vote for the bill on the third reading unless amendments had achieved the objectives set out above by Party Conference.

There would be nothing to prevent Labour Parliamentarians opposing the Bill on the Second Reading and then still pursuing amendments – so there is no good reason for the three line whip to oppose the previous position of the Party, the views of the large majority of Labour voters and the policy adopted at Party Conference.

The lamentable nonentities of the Parliamentary Labour Party who seek any excuse to oppose Corbyn may use this episode to attack his leadership but socialists who wish to defend our socialist leadership need not defend the grave error which is being made in supporting Theresa May’s Bill to trigger a process which will attack the rights of workers in general and migrant workers in particular.

So long and thanks for all the fish...

This is what I said to the Lambeth Branch Annual General Meeting on Thursday. If those who were good enough to come to the meeting had to suffer it I don't see why you shouldn't;

Comrades,

I was first elected to a senior branch officer position in our predecessor NALGO branch in October 1990. Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister. Mikhail Gorbachev was President of the Soviet Union – and we had won a national pay dispute the year before.

Here in Lambeth Joan Twelves was Leader of the Council, campaigning against the Poll Tax and Herman Ouseley was our Chief Executive.

After a year as your Branch Chair I was elected as full-time Assistant Branch Secretary, and a further year after that I became Branch Secretary, a position which I have held, with a couple of short breaks, ever since.

If I were to try to say even a fraction of what I might say about the last quarter century of life in Lambeth and the union we would get nothing else done – and for those of you who have been here as long as I have, or even if you haven’t – I think perhaps you may already have suffered enough from listening to me over the years.

I will pick out just a few memories and suggest some of the lessons those memories may offer for our future.

In 1991 we occupied advice centres and youth centres which were threatened with closure – we did not win everything we were aiming for but we did win victories, much as library campaigners forced the Council back in the last year.

As ever, we learned then, as we have over and over again, that if you fight to save jobs and services you may not win all that you hope for – but that if you do not fight you shall win nothing at all.

The following year we took six coaches full of branch members taking unofficial strike action to Hyde Park to show our opposition to pit closures – and were repudiated by our General Secretary Alan Jinkinson.

That had been our first brush with John Major’s anti-union law that required ballots before strike action, a restriction which this Tory Government has made tighter than ever. It was also the first time I was told off by a General Secretary.

In 1994 Labour lost control of Lambeth Council for the first time since the 1970s and a hung Council attacked our trade unions. For two years we had to hold this Annual General Meeting in our own time – and on each occasion more than a hundred members took time off to attend.

Also in the mid 1990s other members of the branch, too numerous to mention, founded and led the campaign which eventually rescued our member Abdul Onibiyo from his unlawful deportation to Nigeria and saw him returned to the job which Lambeth had kept open for him.

That episode is a good illustration of the important lesson that trade unionism is not about individuals. I have done a lot here over the past quarter century, and those who know me will know that I am not modest, but everything that is worthwhile which we achieve as trade unionists we achieve by standing together.

We did the same thing when the racist nail bomber, David Copeland, bombed Brixton in 1999 – and we led and organised a march from Brixton to Trafalgar Square which united local people in opposition to racism and the far right.

In Lambeth we have always understood that trade unionism doesn’t stop when you leave work in the evening, and we have never waited for permission to organise campaigns for justice and against oppression either locally or nationally.

When Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by the police in Stockwell in 2005 we were able to offer his family our help and support at the beginning of their long campaign for justice.

However, the strength of our trade union branch is founded upon our organisation in the workplace – and if we are going to sustain that strength into the future that will have to remain our key priority.

Simply being organised is never enough however, we also need a willingness to fight, or we can never win anything, as well as a willingness and an ability to negotiate so that we can end the disputes we start.

Twenty years ago the Council tried to increase our working week and cut our annual leave and maternity leave. By mobilising our members and uniting with the other trade unions we saw off this threat – and over the ensuing two decades, thousands of workers have had several days a year of extra leisure because of effective local union organisation.

If you have colleagues back in your workplace who are not trade union members because they do not think that trade unions can achieve anything then I suggest that you ask them to give up voluntarily five days of their annual leave, because they only have those days because of you, and people like you over the years, have organised as trade unionists and stood together for better conditions for working people.

As I said, I could go on and on.

I could tell you about how the largest privatisation in the history of English local government in 1997 was a complete and utter failure.

I could tell you chapter and verse about how the idiocy of the cooperative council savaged valuable local services since 2010.

I could tell you more than you want to know about successive Chief Executives and Council Leaders.

And I could tell you all manner of things also about our trade union.

I am and always will be a committed trade unionist.

Trade unions are the only possible guarantee of dignity and justice in the workplace, they are the tool which workers have invented over the past two hundred years in order to even up the balance of power between employers and employees.

However, we must never be starry-eyed about our own trade union and, in particular, we always have to fight for democratic control of our trade union by its members against those within the union who want to tell us what to do.

Our branch has faced repeated attacks over the years from those in the union who find us awkward, militant and troublesome. I myself have faced numerous investigations and at present am under investigation because I have challenged malpractice in the last General Secretary election. I am proud to be judged on the basis of those who oppose me.

There will always be a fight for democracy in our trade unions – and you will need to be vigilant to defend the union as a useful tool to defend your interests.

As I have said, I could go on and on.

But I won’t.

This is the third and final time that I shall stand down as your Branch Secretary and today is the last occasion on which I shall address you as such.

It has been a great honour, and mostly a lot of fun, and I am very grateful to you all.

Thank you.