November EC Meeting 2019

In the 2000s, unlike France and the Netherlands, the British people were not even offered a referendum on the 2005 EU Constitution or the Lisbon Treaty in 2007 (a rebranded version of the constitution), which centralised powers in the unaccountable EU. In the same period, the EU expanded its borders eastwards, making nomads of whole populations fleeing chaos and poverty and tragically believing that the grass was greener elsewhere. Many migrant workers toil in slave-like conditions. Accession states were told by the EU to break up collective bargaining and tear up their favourable agreements with unions. A bonfire of these agreements took place, culminating recently in the struggles in France and Italy against the assault on their labour codes. Britain’s unique system of negotiated final-salary pensions was kicked into terminal decline by the EU Directive on Pensions. Yet we are still told by some that the EU protects workers’ rights. Over the past few decades, we went from the food mountains of the Common Market to mountains of mass unemployment in the permanently deflationary European Union. The country that gave us the word democracy, Greece, was ravaged and taken over to be ruled by bankers. Despite heavy austerity, money could always be found to pay German arms manufacturers. Britain argued for a rebate on the huge EU membership bill in 1984 and has consistently avoided entry into the Single Currency. Who knows how desperate things would have been if we had succumbed to the Euro. By the time of the EU referendum, the British parliament had become so used to not having any real power that when the people’s voice demanded we leave the EU, some within it thought they could use parliament itself – under the cloak of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ – to oppose the desire of the majority for national self-determination. In the process, a new authoritarianism was born. Some parliamentarians took it as their mission to remove any executive power that would allow the government to follow the mandate of the referendum, including via the Supreme Court. Brexit is about independence from unelected power over our decisions. National independence is an essential condition for democracy and socialism. It is something which millions have sacrificed their lives for throughout the world. Yet any opposition to parliament’s attempts to act against the majority will of the people has been stereotyped as ‘right wing’. In a painful twist, the Fixed Term Parliament Act, passed by the coalition government in 2011, in the hope that it would extend the Liberal Democrats’ moment of glory, did the very illiberal thing it was designed to do – it made it impossible for the people to hold their MPs to account by recalling them. To the very last, the Remainers are undermining democracy and resisting accountability. Remainers made Theresa May’s deal. Remainers opposed the May deal. Remainers opposed No Deal. Remainers will continue to oppose Boris Johnson’s deal. Yet now they face an election, and the people can finally pass their judgement.

Doug Nicholls.