Back to Front - An occupied country
WORKERS, NOV 2005 ISSUE
Increasingly Britain is being run through Blair from Brussels. Most workers would think that is an overstatement.
Any suggestion that the 'pensions crisis' was dictated by the EU receives blank stares; likewise when campaigners against the EU Constitution said that it would lead to privatisation in key parts of our NHS and education systems. The BMA has revealed how the NHS will be privatised further as a result of EU diktat. Public sector unions have shown how the Bolkestein directive threatens us, and at TUC Congress this year education unions showed how the development of Academy schools was a privateers' charter.
Everything we oppose as trade unionists comes from the EU's drive for privatisation, deindustrialisation and the free movement of capital and labour. Deregulate, denationalise, destroy. We are in the middle of a slow-motion blitzkrieg. Thatcher destroyed the physical bedrock of the country; Blair is knocking over what is left by destroying the vestiges of national political democracy. Hence devolution, hence intense centralisation in Brussels of economic policy, hence Parliament dictated to by the European Central Bank.
Communists seek to link our problems and their causes. The pragmatic, piecemeal thinking of the unions and others puts the blinkers on a more rounded vision. Truth is, Britain is occupied at every level by the EU.
Its objectives deepen every day: the national currency must go, national parliamentary sovereignty must go, capital must go where it pleases, nationally funded health and education must go. Manufacturing and agriculture must be so reduced as to make national economic self-sufficiency impossible. No government or local authority can procure new projects from its own people, they must go out to tender. Fertile fields must be set aside if their productivity threatens high food prices and high profits. If you have nationally based natural reserves like British coal, gas and oil, they must go. With them you can stand on your own two feet and that will never do. From independence to dependence.
But then it gets deeper, your whole nationally based legal system must be taken over by the foreign power.
In Sweden long-established collective bargaining covering nearly all workers is under threat of dismantling by EU decree. The Swedish trade unions are saying if that is the case, they will leave the EU altogether. Such full-frontal attacks should lead to greater trade union clarity.
There is no excuse for the confusion here in Britain, simply because EU control is so spread around. Just look at all the difficulties that we face. Ask why they exist. Plot the causes. This will take you only a few steps back to an EU directive, policy, law or commissioners' free market strategy.
They say the EU is neoliberal. It is fiercely capitalist. That is its only social model. They say it is part of globalisation. That means imperialism.
What we have to wake up to, is the fact that it has invaded us, not like an army but like a plague – and national independence is our first priority.
All roads lead back to Brussels, to a bureaucratic, intensely undemocratic machine that administers the member states of the European Union on behalf of a rampant capitalist class. Blair is one of their biggest henchmen.