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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

A bridge too far

When Rishi Sunak called the snap election in July some Tories said he did it to ensure that Britain had a leader who could step in to cover Joe Biden as the head of the “free world” during the run-up to the American presidential election in November. We will never know whether Sunak actually believed this nonsense which, in any case, is now academic as both of them will soon depart, somewhat unwillingly, from the political stage this year. It does, however, reflect the delusions of grandeur of the British ruling class who believe that the American sphere of influence across the globe constitutes the ‘free world’ and that Britain is the second-in-command in policing it.

Although this may well have been true when Anglo-American imperialism led the pack against the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War, those days are long gone. The “special relationship” with the USA that Winston Churchill believed went beyond the terms of the NATO alliance largely existed only in the imagination of Tory leaders and right-wing Labour politicians. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair liked to pose as partners of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, but at the end of the day it was always the Americans who called the shots.

Boris Johnson even wanted to establish “a new special relationship” and a trans-Atlantic free trade zone with the Trump administration. But the Treaty of Washington never happened and Johnson is a forgotten man amongst Trump’s milieu – left speaking to an almost empty room at the Republican national convention last month.

The wind of change that led to the break-up of Britain’s vast colonial empire after the Second World War sharpened the divisions amongst the ruling class between those who believed that the future for British capitalism lies in greater European integration, those who thought British imperial interests were best served through the alliance with the USA, and those who believe that British imperialism can extract the maximum benefit by playing-off one against the other by acting as a trans-Atlantic ‘bridge’ between American imperialism and that of France and Germany. And the latter course was the traditional path of all Labour and Conservative governments from the late 1950s to 1997.

The Tories directly represent the ruling class while the right-wing leaders of social-democracy collaborate with whichever section of the ruling class they believe is the dominant one.

After the 1997 Labour victory Blair put all his bets on the Americans – siding with the most reactionary elements within the British ruling class in the belief that victory in Iraq would give British imperialism a significant slice of the spoils when the “new world order” was established. That dream died on the streets of Baghdad whilst Brexit killed off any hopes of Britain having any sway in the corridors of power in Western Europe.

While key elements within Britain’s ruling circles still want to straddle the Atlantic as the arbiter between US and Franco-German imperialism, the only way they can repair that “bridge” is to restore the UK’s relationship with the European Union. Sir Keir Starmer thinks he can do it through a Brexit ‘reset’ but the Remainers will not rest until they secure the second referendum that they believe will take us back down the road to Brussels…