Given that the EU has recently ratified the Lisbon Treaty and presuming the Conservative Party carry out their declaration not to present the British people with a referendum on whether to accept the terms of the treaty, workers here need to consider the implications for our nation.
The nation state of Britain has been established a long time: the formation of the English component took place well over a thousand years ago; Wales had merged by late medieval times and Scotland was effectively integrated from 1603, though the actual act of political union came a century later. The Lisbon Treaty proclaims the transference of powers to the EU and away from the nation states combined within it. The traditions and interests of Britain stretch back over centuries and in a certain sense over a millennium, while the EU has merely a few decades.
At what point does a nation cease to exist? Britain is still a distinct network of political, economic and social interconnections. In the future, the EU wants to finish off its agenda by completely undermining and destroying our national identity and burying our sovereignty. Britain as a nation can only truly disappear if its people condone rule from unaccountable EU rulers.
A nation state is where workers are organised; it is where people come together to protect their interests. The defence of Britain as an entity remains our lifeblood. The EU acts for and represents a capitalist class huddling together to enforce their capitalist interests. The interests of workers and capitalists across the EU are diametrically opposed.
If the British people are clear on the class aims of the EU and continue to press their class interests, then the sovereignty of Britain will remain intact within the actions of our working people. We shall gather strength until such time as we can formally leave the EU and press ahead in the rebuilding of an independent Britain.
If the political establishment here will not allow us a referendum, then the Lisbon Treaty lacks political acceptance and is effectively an unlawful imposition of a foreign power over our country. The Westminster parliament and government have betrayed Britain; they are a group of EU lickspittles and quislings who will be ignored as a costly irrelevance because bourgeois power lies elsewhere.
Obviously there will come a time in the progress of history where nation states will wither away and be superseded by supranational, perhaps even world political organisation, but we are light-years away from such a situation. That could only work properly with a mutual regard in the merger for the political and economic interests of each national state, only conceivable in a situation where socialism has succeeded in a number of coterminous states, that is, with common boundaries and regional cohesion.
The EU is not embarked on such a programme. It has capitalist aims, primarily of raising private profit to the status of a god to be worshipped in every sphere of economic and social activity.
It is not only crystal ball gazers who predict a rocky road for the EU and question whether it can remain united when it sits on a volcano of 27 different national interests and only has privatisation as the glue to keep it together.
We must keep our national and class unity!
We must get out of the EU.
For an independent Britain based on a thriving industry and a skilled people.