Democrat January-February 2013 (Number 133)
Demands the
labour movement must makeWhilst Britain is in the EU it has common policies and legislation imposed which have:
- Taken away the sovereign powers from Britain and the right to self-determination and national democracy
- Reduced national, regional and local democracy and accountability which includes all forms of practical, formal and informal democracy
- Provided for the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour where national controls are not permitted
- Has 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. 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 and hours worked
- 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, and mass unemployment: and attacks on the public sector:
- Cease making £ billions payments to the EU Budget
- Place controls on the movement of private capital
- End over-dependence on the financial sector
- 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 it 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.
The above can only be achieved if Britain withdraws from the EU