CAEF AGM 2012 Resolution
The alternative to austerity
and EU policies
The alternative to austerity
and EU policies
The European Union has destroyed politics within its Member States. This has had the effect of provincialising politics because it has taken away national independence, so that it is more and more difficult for citizens to influence events.
The EU Constitution, common policies and legislation:
- Take away sovereign powers from nation-states and the right to self-determination
- Reduce national, regional and local democracy and accountability which includes all forms of practical, formal and informal democracy
- Provide for the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour where national controls are not permitted
- Have created mass unemployment across the EU including Britain and especially amongst young people
The EU and its institutions are based on legislation and policies to remove all the controls which have been put on capitalism and to let it rip. The EU seeks to destroy all social safeguards and rights that in some cases have taken centuries to build.
An important part of this deliberate destruction is the austerity policies being carried out which are common across all EU Member States including Britain and blatantly applied in the eurozone – where EU imposed Prime Ministers are now in place in Greece and Italy.
The objectives of these policies are to:
- Provide a pretext to reduce public debt which was largely produced by the financial sector
- Increase exploitation and therefore profits by pressing down incomes and wages
- Privatise what is left of the public sector including the NHS and state education
- Provide a massive transfer of wealth to the rich from the middle and working class sections of society
There is an alternative to the austerity:
- Withdraw from EU to establish the right to self-determination, national independence and democracy to enable Britain to control its own affairs
- Cease making payments to EU Budget
- Place controls on movement of private capital
- End over-dependence on the financial sector
- Retain the nationalised banks and turn them into investment banks
- Encourage investment in manufacturing, hi-tech industries and the infrastructure to include
- Investment in the existing and expanded railway system with a high speed rail network all under public ownership and accountability
- Create a public national water network
- Return to public ownership and accountability the gas and electricity industries
- Conversion of defence industry into socially useful production
- Trade with the world and not primarily with the EU
The key to achieving the alternative is to make clear in the labour and trade union movement and growing young people’s protest movement:
- The necessity to elect a government with policies to leave the EU
- To fully understand the class struggle which includes re-establishing full national independence and democracy and the right to self-determination to enable a rational development for Britain.
This was passed unanimously