‘Leave’ vote in UK puts nail in coffin of ‘unified’ Europe illusion

BY PAUL DAVIES

LONDON — Millions of workers in the United Kingdom voted June 23 in their large majority to leave the European Union. The vote was another nail in the coffin of the myth of a united Europe.

Some prominent politicians and sections of the bourgeois media in the U.K., the EU and the U.S. immediately slandered working people who had the audacity to vote to leave, saying they were noncosmopolitan, racist, stupid, uneducated, anti-immigrant lowlifes. They charged that older workers and retirees were destroying the future of the youth.

But far from a rise in racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment, the vote showed workers’ determination to oppose being forced to pay for the capitalist economic crisis.

The fear campaign for a Remain vote directed by the capitalist rulers and large sections of both the Conservative and Labour parties — predicting doom in the event of an exit — backfired. In the U.K. as a whole Leave won 52 percent of the vote — with large majorities in England and Wales — while Remain got 48 percent. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland, a majority voted for Remain. This is the first time a member state has voted to leave the European Union, a shifting alliance of rival states dominated by German imperialism.

Real wages in the U.K. have fallen since 2010. The number of workers forced into so-called zero hour contracts, with no guaranteed level of work hours and income, has risen 15 percent in the past two years. None of the capitalist parties from Britain to continental Europe have any solution to the crisis.

Some workers interviewed on TV and radio said that the vote represented “two fingers to the establishment.” Forklift operator Michael Wake, in the working-class town of Sunderland, England, told the New York Times the vote to leave was an opportunity to “poke the eye” of the London establishment.

Ricky Dobson, a factory worker from Basildon in Essex, told the Militant he was angered by the threat by Chancellor George Osborne (the British equivalent of finance minister) to impose a “punishment budget” that included tax hikes on workers’ income if the vote to leave carried.

Rulers blame working people

The capitalist rulers in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States were taken by surprise by the result, blaming working people for the post-referendum plunge in stock market prices around the world. But stocks rapidly recovered. The volatility is nothing new given the wild speculation that marks the market in the midst of the world capitalist economic crisis.

“I don’t have any money in the stock market,” Ken Walker, a retired construction worker in Sunderland, said to the Times. “So what’s it to me?”

“It can’t get worse than what’s been going on already,” Maria Taylor, a florist in Sunderland, told the paper. “The working class is completely hammered. They’ve sold us down the river.”

Workers who voted to Remain face the same conditions. Felicia Hypolite, a care worker from London, said she voted Remain because she thought “the EU would help defend human rights. But the main issue in the U.K. is the low wages companies pay.”

The referendum changes nothing immediately in the U.K.’s legal relations with other EU member states. The U.K. government will eventually open negotiations with the EU that will take years.

Leave campaigner Conservative Boris Johnson raised the banner of “British sovereignty” seeking to convince workers that British bosses are better than foreign bosses. Another section of the Leave campaign, led by Nigel Farage, campaigned in opposition to the EU’s free movement of labor, scapegoating mass immigration from EU member states and refugees entering the UK as the problem.

United capitalist Europe impossible

German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the vote as “a blow to Europe and to the European unification process.” The German rulers as well as rulers in France and elsewhere, promoted the EU as the beginning of a United States of Europe, an impossible dream under capitalism with each nation competing for markets with its rivals. Today, in the face of economic stagnation and the refugee crisis, far from moves to “an ever closer union,” borders are being reinforced across the continent.

The German government, the strongest imperialist power in Europe, has used its domination of the EU and control of the euro to pillage the resources of weaker capitalist competitors from Greece to Spain. They also hoped to use the EU and the euro as a common currency to compete more effectively against their main rival, U.S. imperialism.

In or out of the EU, workers in the U.K. will face a boss class that is determined to off-load the crisis onto their shoulders, as the competition, rivalries and tensions intensify between competing capitalist nations in Europe and around the world.

Paul Davies is a worker at Ford Dagenham and a member of the Unite union and the Communist League.

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