Vol. 80/No. 45      November 28, 2016

 

Foes of Brexit use courts to challenge referendum vote

 
LONDON — Opponents of the majority vote for Brexit in the June 23 referendum here have decided the courts and the two parliamentary chambers, the House of Commons and House of Lords, should have control of the issue as opposed to the more than 30 million people who took part in the vote.

Taking advantage of a loophole —that the referendum did not contain language specifically denoting the vote as binding — a three-judge panel of the High Court ruled Nov. 3 that the government can’t initiate the process of leaving the EU without parliamentary approval. An appeal by the Conservative Party government, which had planned to trigger Article 50 starting the Brexit process by March 2017, will received an expedited hearing by the Supreme Court next month.

The High Court action was brought by Gina Miller, who describes herself as an “ethical” financial services manager working with hedge funds and asset managers. She has said that the 52 percent referendum majority for Brexit made her “physically sick.” Her legal challenge was joined by other actions against invoking Brexit, including a group called the “People’s Challenge to Article 50,” which is organizing “crowd funding” for the action.

Many liberal meritocratic opponents of Brexit — like their counterparts in the U.S. horrified at Donald Trump’s election — blame working people, saying they’re “stupid” and their votes should count less than those of more educated and enlightened people.

Another legal challenge to aspects of Brexit is one brought by Sinn Fein, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Alliance Party and the Green Party, seeking to give the Northern Ireland Assembly a veto over the break with the EU in the Six Counties. Rejected by the High Court in Belfast, the plaintiffs are appealing to the Supreme Court. And the Scottish National Party is pushing for similar powers for the Scottish Parliament.

“Seventeen million individuals voted for the U.K. to leave the EU and these people have gone to the courts to blunt the vote. And they call that democracy,” painter Jay Silverstone told Communist League member Ólöf Andra Proppé when she knocked on his door in Croydon, south London, to discuss politics and prospects for the working class Nov. 15.

Former Conservative Party leadership contenders and government ministers Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine have said that they will use any parliamentary channels available to try to reverse Brexit, as has Timothy Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats. A number of Labour Party leaders, including former Prime Minister Anthony Blair and Owen Smith, a candidate for party leadership, have called for a second referendum to reverse the decision taken in June.

Current Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said the party will respect the referendum majority. But, he said, it will try and impose restrictions on what the government can do when they negotiate terms of withdrawal from the EU.

In the process of the parliamentary and broader political jockeying different forces are seeking to shape the U.K.’s future relations with their capitalist rivals on the continent. At the heart of the debate among bourgeois political figures is how to break from free immigration and other regulatory features of EU membership while maintaining the widest access for British capital and business to the EU market.

U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage — a nationalist opponent of free immigration who says EU membership made the UK a “groveling junior member of a German-dominated club” — says he will lead 100,000 marchers to protest outside the Supreme Court when it begins hearings on the challenge to the Brexit vote.

“Brexit or no Brexit, ‘soft Brexit’ or ‘hard Brexit,’ whichever way the propertied rulers lean, they will continue in their drive to make workers pay for the crisis of their system,” Proppé told Silverstone. British capitalists and capitalists in other countries advance their national class interests. They’ll jockey for greater profits both at the expense of their competitors and by continuing to press down on wages, conditions, job security, safety and rights.

“Workers have our own independent class interests,” she said. “That means organizing to defend our interests against the bosses and their government and replace capitalist rule with a workers and farmers government.”  
 
 
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