Πηγή: Morning Star
Oct 23 2011
The peoples of Britain were given no option about joining the European Economic Community in 1973.
Ted Heath's Tory government signed up for membership of what the public was told was merely a European free trade zone with added co-ordination of some basic industries.
The Tories had won the 1970 general election pledging to negotiate EEC membership terms, "nothing more, nothing less."
Public opinion polls put support for Britain's membership as low as 15 per cent.
A secret "dirty tricks" European Community Information Unit inside the Foreign Office colluded with big business and right-wing elements in the Labour Party to peddle misinformation.
Cabinet ministers and top civil servants agreed to downplay the plans already being drawn up to turn the EEC into an economic, monetary and political union with its own foreign policy.
The same deceit helped secure endorsement of Britain's membership in the 1975 referendum, after the Labour Party leadership abandoned its opposition to the European big business club.
Since then, the plans to construct a monopoly capitalist United States of Europe have come closer to fruition.
Every referendum result in France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland against such a trajectory has been brushed aside contemptuously.
Tomorrow in Westminster, MPs will have the opportunity to vote for a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.
Such a vote would go some small way to redeem the broken pledges of Labour, Tory and Lib Dem leaders to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty that set the new powers of EU financial, bureaucratic and military institutions in concrete.
Party leaders today are equally desperate not to allow the peoples of Britain any say about the European Union. David Cameron thinks the issue is a "terrible distraction" from dealing with the eurozone crisis. Ed Miliband offers to save the PM from "barking" Eurosceptics.
In truth, the eurozone crisis confirms the real character of the whole European project and its deep contradictions.
Heads of state representing the common interests of monopoly capital agree that Europe's major banks should be recapitalised and indemnified at public expense, whatever the cost to public services and most people's living standards.
But they also want to maximise the benefit accruing to their own country's monopoly capitalists, while minimising the costs and liabilities.
It's an age-old dilemma, which once prompted Lenin to conclude that a "United States of Europe" would either be reactionary or impossible.
What is "barking" is to continue down the road of austerity programmes across Europe, handing yet more power over national policy-making to an unelected European Commission and the unaccountable European Central Bank.
A referendum campaign in Britain against the EU would be the profoundest act of international solidarity with the workers and peoples of Greece, Portugal, Spain and other countries targeted by the banks and their political champions.
As the sixth biggest economy in the world, Britain does not need to subject itself to diktat from Brussels and Frankfurt.
Breaking free and taking the road to socialism would increase our capacity for international solidarity with workers and peoples across Europe and beyond.
That's why socialist MPs should lead the call for a referendum, not leave it to the Tory Eurosceptics and their preference for Britain to be ruled by the Institute of Directors and the US Pentagon.
No comments:
Post a Comment