A Workers Revolt

7 Years On And It’s Clear That Workers Made Brexit Happen

Britain has now witnessed a seven year long nervous breakdown of the “progressive” middle class over the issue of Brexit. Ever since the referendum results became known back on June 23rd 2016 the rage that poured forth from all quarters of “respectable” opinion in Britain can only truly be understood as an expression of the hatred and fear that the ruling class have of the working class. This is because, as the results clearly show, the vote to leave the EU was one that was powered by the votes of the working class.

Leaving the European Union was something that was never supposed to happen: It took a combination of an extremely incompetent Tory Prime Minister (David Cameron) who called the referendum to ward off a potential mass defection of his MP’s to Nigel Farage’s UKIP. The simple choice provided, in or out, that was not attached to any political party as such provided the working class to aim a giant kick at the entire political establishment. It cost Cameron his job and sent the political class into years of panic, but now it risks slowly being undone by the relentless pressure of the City of London and their two puppets in charge of the political parties, ex-banker Rishi Sunak and lifetime establishment boot licker Keir Starmer.

The remarkable thing is that the entirety of the institutions that are supposed to represent the British working class both politically, in the form of the Labour Party, and industrially, the TUC affiliated trade unions, were all campaigning very loudly to stay within the European Union. And yet the working class voted by an almost 2:1 margin for leave. What this points to is a chasm between the leaders of the so-called “labour movement” and the lives of most of the working class in Britain. The leadership of the TUC have been wholly in favour of continued membership of the EU ever since the address by European Commission President Jacques Delors in 1988 to the TUC conference of that year. In that speech, Delors portrayed the EU as a guarantor of workers rights, an appealing prospect to a TUC that was led then (as it is now) by people who are terrified of backing meaningful strike action.

To such “leaders”, the idea of another bureaucratic institution they could hide behind was a great idea. Telling workers that there was no need for strikes, that legal changes made via the EU would advance rights at work and that militancy was a thing of the past was exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to Baron Monks of Blackley or Sir Brendan Barber. Both of these former TUC General Secretaries were prominent backers of the campaign to remain in the European Union, and why wouldn’t they be? John Monks became head of wholly bureaucratic European TUC after he left its British equivalent. Brendan Barber has been on the board of the organisation “Britain Stronger In Europe”, together with various businessmen and politicians from all of the major political parties.

Jeremy Corbyn, as the leader of the Labour Party at the time of the referendum, might have been expected to maintain his previous stance of Euroscepticism (following his political mentor Tony Benn), but instead he chose to campaign upon the completely fictional basis of “Remain and Reform”. Corbyn claimed that he, if he were to become Prime Minister, would be able to somehow persuade the EU to reform itself. Given that this is what David Cameron was asking for in some ways back in 2013, and they refused to give an inch to him, why on earth would they give any more to Corbyn?

Jeremy Corbyn knew very well that what he was committing to was next to impossible to achieve – he knew because he spent years sitting next to Tony Benn, who actually explained why it was impossible. The EU as an institution is designed to resist even the changes that capitalist democracy can bring about, it is meant to be an institution that resists democratic pressures and it performs perfectly in that role.  As to the reason why the political establishment’s arguments about the great prosperity brought by the EU did not work, the answer is quite simple and it is that for the great majority of working class people in Britain the time during which we have been members of the EU has seen wages stagnate. In the referendum held in 1975 by the government of Harold Wilson, the entire political, media and intellectual establishments joined together to declare how much better off everyone would be if Britain remained in what was then referred to as the “Common Market”. By 2016 however, that argument could be seen by the working class as being little more than a bad joke. When the trade union leaders endlessly droned on about how the EU was a guarantor of workers rights, the number of people organised within the union movement had halved since 1980, despite the population increasing by eleven million during that time. Since joining the EU, the country has been deindustrialised, losing its coal, ship building, car production and much of its steel industry.

The majority of the working class now work in service sector jobs in non-union workplaces. Without a union organisation, then all these “rights” the trade union leaders kept babbling on about mean absolutely nothing to most of the working class. Try telling a manager who’s just told you that you’re not getting paid overtime that he’s violating an EU directive when you’ve got no union to back you up and no organisation within the workplace: You’ll be laughed at or sacked on the spot.  And yet out of all the unions in the TUC only the RMT consistently made the case for leaving the EU pointing out that it was actually a bosses organisation that was leading the way in making attacks on workers all the way across Europe. As the RMT point out, the so-called “bailouts” of countries like Greece, Italy and Ireland after the crisis of 2008 were accompanied by attacks on workers rights, pensions, public service cutbacks and much more as governments sought to pay the holders of their national debts by increasing misery for the working class.  

So who was benefiting from EU membership then? We just need to consult the data on which class voted for Brexit and which did not to find this out.  The statistics clearly show that the richer you are the more likely you were to take the pro-EU position. This makes complete sense when you consider that the primary benefit to EU membership was the ability of banks and other finance sector companies to move money around Europe without restrictions and for employers to tap into a continent wide labour pool. The service sector economy that Britain operates needs an insecure, transitory workforce and so being able to have workers from across Europe come in and work for minimum wage, often temporarily, was a huge profit boost for the employers. 

So why then was it the case that not only did the Labour Party campaign for the fictional “remain and reform” position, but why did most of its MPs and most trade union leaders attach themselves to the “second referendum” position that sought the immediately overturn Brexit? The answer lies in the fact that neither Corbyn, nor Starmer nor most of the union leaders has any real connection with the working class. At best, they speak for the higher paid workers who are often in management positions in the public sector and who live more middle-class lifestyles, even if they are still working class by dint of the fact that they only have their labour to sell in order to live.

This better off layer of the working class used to consist of higher paid skilled workers who formed the first trade unions in Britain, but as the country has been deindustrialised, the dominant faction in the unions has changed to be those within the public sector. It is their voices who get elevated and are used to justify reversing Brexit, not those of the non-union, casually employed workers who voted overwhelmingly for leaving the EU. It would be false though to ascribe Labour’s position on this as being solely down to them. In truth the Labour Party position is dictated by the ruling class, particularly the City of London bankers, as much as the Tories position is. It is this class who are most opposed to leaving the EU, this class who benefitted from it and this class who had the money and influence to fund the many pro EU campaigns that have sprung into existence since 2016. The Labour Party and the union leaders have been in alliance with these bankers and other financial capitalists in order to cancel out the votes of the workers who revolted against the system in 2016.

When the biggest expression of working class anger in a generation is derided and ignored by the so-called “Labour movement” it is no wonder that workers feel no loyalty to it whatsoever.