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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

No choice but Labour

THE TORIES say they are the only ones who can get us out of the European Union. But are they and is what they offer really Brexit?

Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party thinks not. And they’re not the only ones. Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement is, of course, a form of Brexit. But it’s only a variation on the Chequers Plan of his ill-fated predecessor, Mrs May.

Sadly Labour’s plan, such as it is, is only another version of the May plan with a pledge to hold a second referendum that the Remainer wing of the ruling class have wanted for the past three years.

The Prime Minister brushed aside the objections of his onetime Democratic Unionist allies in northern Ireland to settle the “backstop” problem with Brussels and Dublin. But the longer term relationship with the EU is left to future negotiations during the transitional period.

Johnson seeks to replace the Brussels straitjacket with a one-sided agreement with the United States which opens the door to the sell-off of the health service to the big pharmaceutical companies in return for cheap food imports that we could get from America anytime on World Trade Organisation terms.

At the same time Tory grandees are telling their followers that Britain could become a “second Singapore” after Brexit — an even more deregulated haven for the money-launderers, drug-lords, oil sheikhs and oligarchs who have already turned London into a millionaires’ playground. While the pundits speculate on the outcome of the December vote two things are certain. The first is that the next government will either be led by the Conservatives or the Labour Party. The second is that the bourgeois dream of selling off the NHS and making Britain a spivs’ paradise will come to pass under Johnson. But the ruling class want much more than that. They want us to remain in the EU.

There’s plenty in the Labour Party who dance to their tune. The hidden hand of the Remainers in the corridors of power is working for a hung parliament to pave the way for the second referendum they need to keep us in the EU forever while the fake left and the social-democratic sell-outs tell us to “Remain and Reform” and that “Another Europe is Possible”.

But mass mobilisation of the labour movement can stop the Tories in their tracks and ensure that a new Labour government honours the historic decision to leave the European Union in 2016.

We don’t want a Labour administration that’s been pawned to the Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats. We don’t want a “people’ vote. We want a people’s government for social justice and an end to austerity. What we need is a majority Labour government that relies on the unions and the street for its support.

Empty words

During the 2015 election the Tories pledged to build 200,000 “affordable” homes by 2020. Needless to say not one of these “starter homes” has actually been built because the Government has not budgeted for them or activated all the necessary legislation. No-one should be surprised at this. Which one of their promises have they ever kept?

Well they keep all the vows they make to the rich. Repressive labour laws, tax breaks and the privatisation of the public sector at knock-down prices — soon to be applied to the health service if the Tories win in December — have all been granted to the bourgeoisie that use the Tories as their major political instrument in Britain.

In return the workers get austerity, pay curbs and bread-line benefits to ensure that the rich can continue to live their worthless lives in the manner they’ve long been accustomed to. Labour says that if they win the election they will build a million more genuinely “affordable” homes within the next ten years.

It’s a very modest proposal but it’s a start. But the first step in tackling the housing problem must be ending the “right to buy” and lifting the restrictions on council borrowing, imposed during the Thatcher era, to enable local authorities to finance the building of new estates throughout the country.