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EU ‘new deal’ is a swindle

IS ANYONE still fooled by David Cameron’s pretence that he is renegotiating the terms of Britain’s membership of the European Union?

The Prime Minister’s latest dash to Bavaria and Budapest is, in truth, part of a choreographed charade to dig him and the EU itself out of a hole.

At the last general election, the Tories promised electors a referendum on EU membership in the belief that it would stem the haemorrhaging of votes to Ukip. That pledge did the trick, alongside lies about Labour crashing the economy and “Red Ed” Miliband getting into a Downing Street bed with an even redder SNP.

The Tories won the election by a sliver.

Since then, Cameron’s regime has spearheaded a renewed ruling-class offensive against workers and their unions, the poor, the disabled and young people.

But he now has to pretend to be getting tough with the EU, fighting for a new deal for Britain and threatening to campaign for a “Brexit” should negotiations prove fruitless.

It’s all a fraud perpetrated on a public that is rightly sceptical about the EU and all its works.

Neither Cameron nor the Tory mainstream have any intention of supporting British withdrawal from the EU in the forthcoming referendum campaign.

Yes, they will sound off about “standing up for Britain” and driving a hard bargain with hard-nosed Eurocrats. The latter will play ball, pretending that they have made significant concessions to the PM and his team.

But in the end, Cameron will campaign in favour of EU membership because it serves the interests of big business.

His party’s City of London paymasters will be particularly pleased if the settlement weakens already feeble EU proposals to assist Frankfurt and Paris in their financial struggle against an unregulated and even more corrupt London.

Playing up the issue of welfare benefits for migrant workers helps to mask this major but unpopular negotiating aim.

Big business in Europe will want to keep Britain’s lucrative market within the EU framework, where the unelected European Commission and the unaccountable European Central Bank promote policies of austerity, privatisation and monopoly capitalist domination at both continental and global levels.

British political and military power also makes a substantial contribution to the development of a common EU foreign and military policy linked increasingly to Nato and the Pentagon.

True, some supporters of unregulated capitalism in the Tory Party and Ukip will be campaigning for Brexit, believing there is no longer any need for empty prattle about a “social Europe.”

Pro-EU campaigners will hugely exaggerate minor EU reforms, although most social and workers’ rights in Britain have been won by our own efforts and our own labour movement.

But socialists here should understand whose interests are served by the EU and Britain’s membership of it.

We need a government of the left which implements policies of progressive taxation, public investment and public ownership of key industries and services. The basic treaties and institutions of the EU are designed to obstruct and undermine such policies and governments, as workers across Europe are learning from bitter experience.

It will be difficult enough breaking free of the shackles imposed upon us by British state power. Why wear the extra ones being forged by an unreformable EU?

Earlier this week, Dennis Skinner asked the Prime Minister if he would resign should he lose the referendum.

Cameron’s blether could not disguise the reality that a popular vote for Brexit would represent a massive defeat for him, his government and monopoly capital.

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