Showing posts with label @labourleave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label @labourleave. Show all posts

Friday 23 August 2019

It is the EU, not Brexit, that is the Right Wing Plot OR Combating Climate Change & other Left Wing reasons for Brexit

It is called "The Big Lie". If you repeat a lie often enough, society will eventually, despite all the evidence to the contrary, regard it as the Truth. Or as a certain German dictator put it, no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".

The Big Lie that the main stream media, New Labour, the Yellow Tories and the Establishment would have you believe is that Brexit is somehow a Right wing Coup.

These siren voices of the Establishment want you to forget that we had a "once in a lifetime" (Prime Minister David Cameron) referendum that produced a clear result. The biggest single vote for anything in UK electoral history. The UK voted to Leave the European Union (EU), including most of the constituencies represented in Parliament by Remain MPs who got elected in 2017 by promising to honour the referendum result, but who are now breaking that promise. Another Big Lie.

These siren voices want you to forget that there are many left wing reasons for leaving the EU and that many of the giants of British socialism like Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, Bob Crow and Peter Shore campaigned for the UK to leave the EU. Indeed as Union Leader Bob Crow, said in 2013:
"The EU is largely a Tory neoliberal project. Not only did the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath take Britain into the common market in 1973, but Margaret Thatcher campaigned to stay in it in the 1975 referendum, and was one of the architects of the Single European Act – which gave us the single market, EU militarisation and eventually the struggling Euro.
After the Tories dumped the born-again Eurosceptic Thatcher, John Major rammed through the Maastricht treaty and embarked on the disastrous privatisation of our railways using EU directives – a model now set to be rolled out across the continent."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/17/exit-europe-from-the-left

Supporters of Extinction Rebellion should note that it is the EU neo-liberal economics that makes it impossible to make the required changes to combat climate change in the UK. As was noted as early as the 2013 climate change conference in Warsaw (COP19):
"If the world wishes to avoid exceeding the two degrees rise in global temperatures that will trigger non-reversible climate change, then the wealthiest countries, including the UK, have to adopt a de-growth strategy."
Also at the Climate Change conference in Warsaw in 2013 we were told that: "continuing with economic growth over the coming two decades is incompatible with meeting our international obligations on climate change".

But the UK cannot change this as the EU dictates UK economic policy. The EU is a neoliberal economy committed to economic growth; designed to make the rich richer and the rest of us to pay for it. It shows it's true form when you see the EU put austerity into action; in Greece, in Ireland, in Portugal, in Spain, in Italy and even in relatively rich countries like Denmark. In Greece for instance, EU diktat has meant a 42 year plan of austerity, which the Greeks cannot get out of until the year 2060.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/26/greece-was-never-bailed-out---it-remains-a-debtors-prison-and-the-eu-still-holds-the-keys

Measures taken by the EU in Greece include:
1. Right to evict families from their home.
2. Privatisation of all saleable state assets and a ban on re-nationalisation in the future.
3. Reductions in pensions and pension funds.
4. Curtail rights to trade union representation.
5. Further cuts to wages.
6. Right to overrule Greek court decisions.
7. EU control of Greek central bank and economics ministry.

As Green Baroness Jenny Jones once said, before she was seduced by the dark side: "the EU has become a dictatorial imposer of austerity and deregulation, uncaring about its impacts on the wellbeing of people and planet, and determined to derail any elected government that dares to dissent from its neoliberal ideology."

The four pillars of the EU, ironically called its "freedoms" actually mean the freedom of multi-national corporations to move people, capital, goods and services to wherever makes them the most money. Invest your capital in sweat shops where the labour is cheapest to make the goods, move people to ensure wages are kept low and ensure contracts are kept short and temporary to avoid giving labour rights. Provide your services from tax havens and allow profits (as capital) to freely flow back to those tax havens, whilst paying as little tax as possible.

The European Commission currently dictates Britain’s trade policy with the world.
Despite the internationalist rhetoric of the EU’s proponents, its trade agreements with some of the poorest nations on earth have a modernist colonialism at heart, imposing free market dogma (i.e. "Free Trade") to extract natural resources in the 21st century from the same countries colonised with military force up until the 20th.
After the UK leaves the EU, we could help the developing world to develop their own economies with bilateral fair trade, thereby reducing in part the push factor that is forcing so many developing world citizens to swell the migrant crisis.

Achieving this is unlikely whilst we follow the European Commission in imposing programmes such as the Raw Materials Initiative, which prevents developing nations such as Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo from raising investment through export taxes or regulating conditions in their dangerous raw minerals sectors.
This is yet another humanist left wing policy that will become available to the UK after we leave the imperialist EU. It would create a new model of fair trading that could then be followed by other countries in Europe and other developed economies, without the need for "Free Trade" agreements.
(See article by Fraser Watt "Left Wing Reasons for Brexit").

Because here is the crux of the matter. Brexit is simply a means to an end, not the end in itself.

After Brexit we don't have to have a Boris Johnson led Tory Government.

After Brexit, the British people will be free to choose an alternative Government that puts forward left wing priorities like re-nationalisation of utilities and transport, currently illegal under EU's competition rules.

Be free to reverse the privatisation of the NHS introduced by New Labour using EU competition rules and developed by the Tories and their yellow running dogs, the Lib Dems.

Be free to favour local producers and not have to put everything out to tender under EU procurement rules.

Be free to support and encourage UK manufacturing in exciting new industries like electric vehicles and put tariffs on gas guzzling automobiles from Germany.

Be free to develop a more highly skilled labour force, by investing in training for UK citizens, not poaching talent from abroad.

Or to put it another way, like another left wing hero of mine (Martin Luther King), "Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we will be free at last."

Monday 24 June 2019

Brexit Party must not become a new Tory Party

As Brendan Chilton of Labour Leave said so eloquently this week, leaving the European Union is not a “hard-right Tory project”. It is just a decision made in a democratic and free referendum in which a majority of people, 17.4 million, voted to leave the EU. This is not an expression of hard-right politics, however convenient it is for left wing Remainers to smear it in this way.

( https://labourlist.org/2019/06/brexit-is-not-an-expression-of-hard-right-politics/ )

This is why it is imperative that the Brexit Party keeps the broad church of supporters it attracted when it was launched. In particular, the more than five million Labour, Green and other left wing supporters who voted Leave at the 2016 referendum and the many more who formerly voted Remain, but now respect the democratic result of the referendum.

As a former leadership candidate for the Green Party, I thought long and hard about supporting the Brexit Party. It seems to me to be the last best hope for getting the will of the people, the decision to leave the EU, enacted in the face of the near hysterical antipathy of the establishment towards Brexit.

Just look at the massive campaign to undermine Boris Johnson as potential leader of the Conservative Party by the main stream media, this week. Look at the supporters of Brexit, both big and small, who have been subject to vilification and in some cases, prosecution, by organs of the establishment such as the Electoral Commission. Look at the bending of the rules by the Speaker of the House of Commons, unprecedented in recent Parliamentary history.

Anyone and I mean anyone, who could potentially deliver the 2016 peoples' vote for Brexit is hunted down by the establishment pack and savagely attacked. Which is why we the believers in democracy need to stick together in the face of this extraordinary denial of our rights.

On June 30th the Brexit Party are having a rally to announce new policies to support their General election campaign. For me, the Brexit Party only needs one policy: to facilitate the UK leaving, permanently, the dictatorship that is the European Union.

Personally, I admire Nigel Farage's tenacity at sticking to his views on the European Union and his leadership skills in helping to create the effective campaigning organisation that is the Brexit Party. Anyone who helped during the Peterborough by-election could not have been more impressed with the efficiency of the organisation put together at such short notice. I fully expect that professionalism to be repeated at the Brecon and Radnor by-election and I expect and hope that the Brexit candidate there wins the seat.

However, I am not a supporter of everything that Nigel Farage has said in the past, particularly on economic issues. As a Green Socialist, I want the freedom to challenge the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that the unelected Eurogroup have imposed on the EU with such devastating effect in countries like Greece. Brexit can and should give me and other socialists like me the opportunity to argue our case to the British electorate after Brexit.

So it is vitally important that the Brexit Party does not do or say anything now that will alienate their left wing supporters before we leave the EU. To do so will inevitably lead to a damaging split and calls for a new Lexit Party. In my opinion, to create such a party at this time would undermine the solidarity of Leave voters and play into the hands of the Remain establishment.

So far the Brexit Party appears to be favouring members of the business community and their negotiating abilities when picking candidates (although there are exceptions such as left wing MEP Claire Fox). Fair enough, perhaps, when you are picking MEPs to try to negotiate our way out of the EU. But candidates to be Brexit Party MPs should reflect the broad sweep of political opinion across the Leave spectrum. Candidates in former Labour seats need to appeal to left wing voters. The Brexit Party can do that if its focus is on leaving the EU. It cannot if it starts developing new business friendly polices outside of its brief to deliver Brexit and unpopular with left wing voters.

After the mess made of Brexit by the Conservative Government over the last three years, the last thing the UK needs now is another Tory Party. I urge the leadership of the Brexit Party to focus on the main task in hand, which is leaving the EU and creating an independent country that can decide for itself its future path. Whether that be to the Left or to the Right is for future generations of the British people to decide. That is what democracy is about, after all.

Tuesday 14 May 2019

Remember the Liberal Democrats?

Remember the Liberal Democrats? The bastards who promised to abolish student fees then more than tripled them when they got a sniff of power? The ones who betrayed the NHS by voting for the NHS Privatisation bill in 2012?

Well suddenly they have come into money. Where from is an interesting question, but they have been using it to send out more leaflets than any other party, spreading more of their lies about the EU.

Being an erudite and thoughtful party their EU manifesto is called #BollockstoBrexit".
This follows their successful 2010 campaign #BollockstoStudents and their 2012 sell-out called #BollockstotheNHS

In one of their many election leaflets they claim that being in the EU under the LibDems will mean "A country with a growing economy fit for the future." This after 46 years in the EU has left us with an unsustainable trade deficit of £95 billion with the EU27, financed by debt and selling off the country's assets.
If we continue to be in the EU with this level of trade deficit, the country will be in the same austerity measures imposed by the EU, as Greece is now, within 10 years.

"A country where everyone can afford somewhere to live" the LibDems claim, just when the report by Sir Angus Deaton appears, showing massive inequality in wealth in the UK and record post war levels of child poverty. Just look at the graphs in the Lib Dem loving Guardian below and just look when that inequality started to rise, given that the UK joined what is now the EU in 1973.

Whilst in the EU, the UK is POWERLESS to change the neo-liberal economic policies that have caused this inequality, as these are written into the EU treaties and controlled by the unelected Eurogroup, consisting of bankers and headed by the German finance minister.

"Democracy had indeed died the moment the Eurogroup acquired the authority to dictate economic policy to member states..." (Yanis Varoufakis "Adults in the Room").

If we are to stop the slide into poverty of the country and its citizens, WE NEED BREXIT. Only then can we have the debate to decide what economic policy is right for the UK and its people.
So please, ignore the billionaire funded claptrap of the LibDems and VOTE FOR THE BREXIT PARTY ON MAY 23rd.

Monday 25 March 2019

My Resignation letter to Green Party

Dear Green Party,
It is with great sadness that I tender my resignation from the Green Party. This is not because I have changed my mind on the need for a strong ecologically based political party in UK politics, quite the opposite. It is because the current leadership of the Green Party has taken the Party away from its guiding principles of democracy and fighting for a sustainable society and embraced the undemocratic autocracy and neo-liberal economics of the EU.

For several decades the policy of the Green Party on Europe has been
"to replace the unsustainable economics of free trade and unrestricted growth with the ecological alternative of local self reliance and resource conservation, within a context of wider diversity. We want to foster co-operation on issues of common interest, not establish international institutions for their own sake." (Policy EU100) and

"EU101 We recognise the value of the original goal of the founders of the European Communities, who sought to remove the threat of another war between European states. This has been distorted by vested political and economic interests into a union dominated by economic interests, which lacks democratic control, and promotes the goals of multinational corporations which are interested in profit not people, and which runs counter to the professed core values of the Union."

However, now the leadership is actively campaigning to overturn the democratic will of the British people that it promised to uphold. Prior to the referendum, in our 2015 manifesto, the Green Party promised the British people to respect the outcome of an in-out EU referendum. The Green Party said:

"The biggest lesson of the Scottish referendum was that when people are given the responsibility for making big decisions, they grab it with both hands." (Section 11)

"We support the proposal to have an in-out referendum so that the British people can have their say. This is because much has changed since the UK joined the Common Market in 1974. Endless debate on membership is a diversion from more important matters, such as ending inequality and adapting our economy to one-planet living."

The Green Party is now encouraging that endless debate in a concerted attempt, (funded by the same big business interested only in profit not people that the Green Party previously condemned), to overturn democracy and frustrate the British people from their choice to leave the European Union. This endless debate is frustrating the fight against global extinction by diverting the attention of the media away from the climate change crisis towards a campaign to reverse the decision on leaving the EU that the Green Party had previously promised to honour. (This was clearly demonstrated this weekend when climate change demonstrations in Newcastle and elsewhere were over shadowed by the rally to overturn the referendum result in London.)

Indeed, the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales knows that the long term EU neo-liberal economic policies, which recently forced Greece into 42 years of austerity, make effective action on climate change, like promoting de-growth, impossible in the time the UN says we have left to attempt to reverse climate change. And yet they continue to sacrifice our planet so that they can continue to get their thirty pieces of silver from the EU.

This is cynical, self-centred hypocrisy and I can no longer be a party to it. Therefore, I resign my membership of the Green Party.
Yours Faithfully,


Leslie A Rowe
Richmond Green Party Parliamentary candidate 2005, 2010 & 2015