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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

A French lesson

If anyone had any doubts about leaving the European Union a brief glance at the news from France would soon put them straight. Million-strong student-led protests; rampaging riot police; tear gas and stun grenades; looting; cars and buildings torched; curfews and talk of a state of emergency and martial law. Now it’s spreading to Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal as workers join students campaigning for an end to the dismal regimes of their schools and colleges to demand an end to bread-line wages and austerity.

This is the EU that the Remainers say millions of young people in the UK want to rejoin. This is the Common Market they say is the answer to all our woes. It may be for the British bourgeoisie – but it’s not for us. Nor is it for the millions upon millions of European workers who are now taking to the streets in mass protests against the whole capitalist system that the EU upholds.

The French ruling class and the Brussels bureaucrats often say that anger on the street is largely down to anti-immigrant feelings stoked up by far-right racist and fascist movements while painting the current protests as the work of deranged communist and anarchist “agitators”. But it’s austerity that has crippled the education system and it’s the cost-of-living crisis that’s inflamed working people.

The Remainers are preparing the ground for returning to the European fold. All sorts of nonsense is being peddled about the EU, not least from the union bureaucrats who sold out to Brussels a long, long time ago.

The Remainers say Brexit has failed. But it was never tried. The Tory Brexiteers didn’t want the independent free trade opportunities that leaving the EU provided. They didn’t want more trade with China or the rest of the Global South. They only wanted to swap the Treaty of Rome with a ‘Treaty of Washington’ to create a ‘North Atlantic Free Trade Area’ that only existed in their dreams.

There were many good reasons for leaving the EU. It’s a common market for the capitalist class to help them better exploit the working people of Europe. The ‘social contract’ the social-democrats say justifies membership is a farce – a cover to abolish free collective bargaining and incorporate careerists and opportunists into the European bourgeois consensus.

Unfortunately the Brexit case has largely been left to the enemies of the working class – the Faragists and the racist gangs that strut around the south coast in their Black Shorts pretending to hunt “bogus asylum seekers”.

There are very good reasons for staying out of the EU. It isn’t a social-democratic haven. It’s not some sort of proto-world government. It’s just a capitalist club. When the going is good the workers get some crumbs. When it gets tough, out comes the mailed fist…