Current Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson – often compared to Donald Trump –
won a significant victory in the British elections of December 12, achieving an
absolute majority in Parliament. The Labor Party, with Jeremey Corbyn at its
head, obtained its worst result since 1935, even losing seats from historical working
class bastions.
Boris Johnson accomplished his feat. His risky move
of dissolving Parliament to force early elections and unlock his
“hard” Brexit project, ended up coming through. Johnson effectively
transformed the election into a new referendum on Brexit, and achieved the
broadest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher´s 1987 triumph.
The counterpart of the conservative victory was
the collapse of Corbyn´s Labor Party. Despite rising on a wave of radicalized
and mobilized youth, the old left Labor leader positioned himself against the
central concern of most British workers, who correctly see the European Union
as responsible for their hardships and voted for Brexit.
A massive radicalized youth movement
revolutionized the Labor Party in recent years: it increased its membership to
historical levels, defeated the powerful neoliberal Blairite apparatus,
catapulting Corbyn to the leadership of the party and imposed the most left
leaning program and image in long decades. However, in regard to the central
political issue and the axis of the campaign, they took sides with the
Europeanist bourgeoisie in defense of the EU, and British workers punished them
for it.
Corbyn has already announced that he will resign
from the party leadership next year, and has strong pressures to step down even
earlier. The Labor right went on the offensive and, of course, blames Corbyn’s
leftist image for defeat. On the contrary, the defeat is the result of having
ceded ground to that same Labor right wing, especially in its defense of the EU,
though not limited to this point.
The dominant trend in the world under the systemic
capitalist crisis, especially among youth but not limited to it, is a break
with the status quo that most identify as responsible for their problems.
Corbyn ascended as a radical alternative against that status quo. But like
other reformist expressions, as he approached the possibility of governing,
under attack from the political powers against his most radical proposals, he gave
in and moderated many positions.
Left Labor Tribune
magazine wrote: “The criticism that we
made (was that) we were leaning into progressivism,´ a project to build majorities
uniting those with progressive social views´… not because we were critical of
those views, (but) because they are not the basis for class politics”.
Faced with a media campaign that accused Corbyn of
anti-Semitism for his support of the Palestinian people, his campaign
retreated, instead of affirming that anti-Zionism has nothing racist or
anti-Semitic about it, but quite the opposite.
The manifesto “It’s time for a real change”
that Labor published for the election is the most progressive program the party
has had in generations. It proposed creating a million jobs in a “Green
Industrial Revolution”, renationalizing trains, water, mail and energy, a
general increase in salaries, applying higher taxes to corporations,
eliminating university fees, reducing the voting age to 16 and building 150,000
homes per year, among other measures.
But, as Tribune
acknowledges, the manifesto “came across
as a shopping list … simply more and more things, without a unifying vision …
and people, fundamentally, did not believe us.”
But the central problem of Corbyn’s reformism
comes from before. Most of the British left opposed Brexit, tailing behind the
bourgeois sector that seeks to remain in the EU, in defense of that imperialist
project, and allowing the right to capitalize on British workers´ genuine
rejection to the European Union.
Instead of campaigning from the left for a break with the EU, against its
capitalist, imperialist and anti-workers character, Corbyn held an ambiguous
stance in the 2016 binding referendum, in which a majority of the electorate
voted to leave the European Union.
Given the result, Corbyn’s initial position was to
respect the result of the referendum and seek a favorable EU exit for workers,
as opposed to the right´s project. But he ended up yielding to the right wing
of his party and to electoral pressure – since Labor´s electorate voted divided
in the referendum – and took the position of seeking a new postponement and
submitting the issue to a second referendum.
“But this election was taken over ultimately by Brexit and we as a party represent people who vote remain and leave, my whole strategy was to reach out beyornd the Brexit divide to try to bring people together,” explained Corbyn .
In addition to capitulating to the Europeanist bourgeoisie, Corbyn betrayed the popular democratic will that had already clearly expressed itself on the subject. He imagined he had Labor pro-Brexit voters secured, and the result was the opposite. In defiance, many did not go to the polls, or even voted for Johnson to make Brexit finally happen.
This dynamic was also evident in the poor result obtained by the Liberal Democratic Party, whose campaign centered on a second referendum to avoid Brexit.
Boris Johnson achieved an important victory, but he does not have an easy road ahead. He is heading towards a Brexit with the bourgeoisie divided on the subject. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party swept the elction, winning 48 of the 59 seats that correspond to that country, and promises to hold a new independence referendum if Brexit is carried out. The possibility of a unification of Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic, outside the United Kingdom, is also now on the table. And, fundamentally, Johnson prepares to apply a policy of austerity and privatization with a massive mobilized and radicalized youth that, despite its leadership´s failures, is predisposed to put up a fight.
But the British left must draw the correct conclusions from this election for the struggles ahead to not end in new frustrations. There is no possibility of facing Boris Johnson’s in the company of the Europeanist bourgeoisie. You cannot fight for workers´ rights by defending the imperialist EU project. The left needs an alternative independent of all bourgeois sectors, fighting against the EU, for a free federation of socialist states in Europe.
Correspondent