Marching for Brexit, London, 29 March 2019. Photo Workers
Prime minister Andy Burnham is cuddling up to the European Union, trying to find a way back in – and showing his true anti-democratic colours. He is trying to de-legitimise the people’s vote in many ways, to smear the people’s democratic decision.
He insults the British people’s intelligence and denies its democratic agency when he implies that Russia won it (without offering evidence, of course). Those who voted to leave the European Union did so because they thought that decisions about Britain should be made in Britain. They were the least likely to be swayed by voices from afar.
He says that Britain will be better off returning to the EU. That’s the opposite of the truth. He says that Brexit has done more harm than good – but also boasts that Britain has the “fastest growth in the G7” (which includes EU members France, Germany and Italy).
Blaming Brexit for the unacceptable levels of legal and illegal immigration is a similar distortion. Successive governments have deliberately increased immigration for two decades or more. They wanted to drive down wages and to overload our communities and services, and still do.
Any harm is due to capitalism, not to Brexit. For example, chemical exports to the EU have been falling steadily, but this is nothing to do with Brexit. It is entirely due to Britain’s high energy costs, emissions trading schemes, the failure to invest in new production facilities, and a shortage of raw materials because so many of British oil refineries have been closed.
A total of 17,410,742 people voted for leave, more people than have ever voted for anything in British history. More voted for Leave than voted for Thatcher in her 1979 victory or for Blair in his 1997 victory (fewer than 14 million in each case). Fewer than 10 million voted for Starmer in 2024.
Burnham has no mandate whatever to overturn the 2016 decision for independence. Given the manner in which he slid into office, he has no mandate for anything. Yet he wants to “dynamically align” Britain with the EU across the board – starting with the UK–EU “reset” summit in November.
But choosing to obey the EU’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary regulations, for example, would only bind Britain to buying imported food from EU producers rather than from cheaper and more efficient non-EU sources. This would only increase the country’s agrifood deficit with the EU.
As capitalism fails to meet our needs, it increasingly resorts to its ultimate solution – war, the mass destruction of people and productive forces. The EU is boosting NATO’s hardening drive to ramp up the ever more destructive war against Russia.
The EU is also using northern Ireland to disrupt Ireland’s struggle for independence. Ireland’s future is for the Irish people to decide, without any outside interference.
Re-opening the debate over EU membership opens the door to separatists seeking to overturn the result of the 2014 unity referendum in Scotland. And Burnham’s fixation with the EU’s favourite device of devolution plays into the separatists’ hands, validating their endless demands for ever more powers.
Labour’s Emily Thornberry blurts out what almost all Labour MPs believe – that Brexit is “not a sacred cow”, that we should just “get over it”.
Rebuilding requires that a country truly runs its own affairs. The country cannot rely on the EU, or on foreign inflows, to rebuild industry. Britain can’t reindustrialise when key decisions about the economy are made in foreign boardrooms which optimise returns for their shareholders.
Workers cannot look to any parliamentary party to serve their interests. Burnham has already given away vital national interests, even before the November summit. This government is a serious threat to us all.