This article is taken from a speech delivered at the May Day rally of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist–Leninist) in Conway Hall.
Capitalism isn't working. We the British working class can do better. Our problem is that we don't want to. We'd rather leave it up to capitalism than take the responsibility ourselves.
We're like the 30–year–old who won't leave home. We've got to face the fact that we'll have to do our own washing and learn to sew. We can't keep putting this growing up business off forever. It has its painful side but we can't afford to be nostalgic about capitalism just because it's all we know.
So here we are, awash with anniversaries. 300 years today since the Act of Union. 50 years since the establishment of what is now the EU. 200 years since the Act of Parliament abolishing that ruling–class excrescence slavery, which had up to that point been sanctioned by that same parliament, let's not forget.
We were told to celebrate the role of one William Wilberforce in securing the passage of the legislation which eventually outlawed the Atlantic slave trade.
But there's another side to Wilberforce; he it was who piloted other legislation through the Westminster talking shop some eight years before the abolition of slavery.
It was the Combination Acts, introduced to make trade unions illegal. It was the vicious and cruel legislation which led to the branding, incarceration and transportation of our forebears.
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1984: Scotland, South East England – the whole of Britain in struggle. No wonder the employers want to break up Britain.
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Wage slavery
Slavery, the actual trafficking of people as commodities, had been replaced as the most efficient form of exploitation by the exploitation of workers' labour power – the replacement of slavery by wage slavery. It's rather neat that the same man was responsible for laws making this transition possible. Let's hope Wilberforce's true role in history is taught in schools.
Like charity and internationalism, progress begins at home, and our home is Britain. Not England, not Europe, but Britain – a uniquely working class construction. Before there was a working class, there was barely a Britain. Although the Crowns of England and Scotland were brought together in 1603, it was not until there was a working class throughout Scotland, Wales and England that Britain became something real.
The Act of Union that created the legal entity of Britain was enacted exactly 300 years ago today. But there was no such place as Britain in reality until the industrial revolution created unified industries and industrial workers. National unions and eventually political parties were formed. Modernity had arrived. No more narrow arguments over where Wales stopped and Worcestershire started; no more battles over Berwick. We could now get on with the real business – sort the employers out. Work out how to take things away from those only interested in profit and into the hands of those only interested in life.
That Britain is a construction of the working class and industry might be a contentious view. But if Britain isn't the product of industry why, when the industrial base on which our working class rests has been all but removed, is it precisely now that we are infested with the petty nationalist vermin we had shaken off hundreds of years ago?
Who do we mean by petty nationalist vermin? There are those in Scotland who want their own time zone, the euro to replace the pound, and to do these things without consulting the people of Britain, without a referendum. Or, if there is to be a referendum, they only want to ask those they think will be in favour, in Scotland.
A bit like the so–called referendum on devolution itself nearly ten years ago. The proposal was to affect Britain as a whole, so why didn't Britain as a whole get a vote? Why can't I, whose grandmother was Scottish, have a say about whether England, the part of Britain in which I live, has to become a country? Because apart from a few nutters who only really want 23 April to be an extra bank holiday, no one in England wants England to be a country separate from the rest of Britain. But England is being forced to become one.
The Yugoslavia principle
It's exactly the same principle as the EU operated in Yugoslavia – there was no referendum there across that sovereign member of the UN about whether it should split apart. There was just formal recognition by Germany of Hitler's former client state of Croatia. That was enough – that separation led to war. And there was no referendum in Czechoslovakia, another sovereign UN member. Just a velvet counter–revolution, again to do what Hitler did, divide and rule, break up the country even though there was no call to do so from within Czechoslovakia. All of this strengthened Germany.
In fact perhaps the best way to think of this is to put yourself in the shoes of the manager of the West German national football team in 1990. There you were, in charge of a team drawn from a large country, some 60 million souls. You'd just won the World Cup. In fact only Brazil, with three times your population, had won it more times than you had.
You usually beat France, you usually beat the hated enemy England, and you also usually beat the enemy that hated you even more than the British did – the Dutch.
You did sometimes lose to these teams, and you also lost to Czechoslovakia and to Yugoslavia, two countries that always punched above their weight compared to the size of their populations.
You also lost occasionally, increasingly often in fact, to your most dangerous opponent, the nation who had destroyed your fathers' hero, Hitler – the Soviet Union.
Oh, and you sometimes very, very annoyingly lost to what you thought of as the wretched German Democratic Republic, whose very existence was a living example of the fact that you don't always get your own way, that you can't even control all of your own country.
You were good, but you would love to be even better. Then a remarkable series of events took place. First this conqueror of yours, the USSR, collapsed. Then it split up, so there was no Soviet football team that was beating you ever more frequently. There was Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and a host of other places you'd never heard of but which would have been familiar to your father from his Wehrmacht invasion maps.
Then it just kept getting better. Yugoslavia, arguably just about to become European champions, was ripped apart by your clever government's idea of giving Hitler's allies the Ustashe what they'd always wanted, a separate Croatia, and vicious civil war ensued. So no Yugoslavia, only part of Yugoslavia, Croatia, because UEFA had listened to your government and banned the majority of the population of Yugoslavia from having a football team at all! Then eventually, when they were let back in to play football, you only had to play Serbia, Montenegro and Slovenia. Then just Serbia and Montenegro. Then just each one separately.
Then, guess what? You didn't have to play Czechoslovakia any more, only the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Oh yes, you also annexed the team from the other bit of Germany in the east, the German Democratic Republic, so you could choose from all their players too! Hardly surprising you don't seem to lose to any of these teams any more.
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Flashback to 2004: with a statue of Julius Caesar symbolically dominating the proceedings, the leaders of the European Union met in Rome to agree the ill-fated and reviled constitution. Now they are at it again.
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No small Germany
Everybody got weaker, but Germany got stronger. When there are clarion calls to stand up for the rights of small nations nobody ever seems to be suggesting that this applies to Germany. Nobody wants devolution for Germany – which let's remember is a nation newer than many in Europe – its reversion to being Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia and so on. No, you break up, sorry, offer devolution, only to your enemies.
And that's how we should see it here, an attempt to break up Britain to make our enemies abroad and at home stronger. The most sensible suggestion ever made by a Sports Minister was Tony Banks' proposal to create a British football team, bringing together the teams of Wales, Scotland and England. Who was first to oppose this rational idea? Scotland? Wales? No – it was the governing body of European football, UEFA, with Germany as its largest member, led by its President the German–Swiss Sepp Blatter, that immediately blocked the plan before even a debate could take place.
So Germany plays teams that get smaller and smaller, and prevents the establishment of teams that could get bigger and bigger, while getting bigger and bigger itself. If you were that West German football manager, you'd be pretty pleased at political developments over the last 20 years. So a West German politician will be too.
The whole of Europe now uses the Deutschmark, otherwise known as the euro. Germany now sits on the UN Security Council pretty much as a permanent member, again, with no actual voting ever taking place to put it there, and the enemies so brutalised a couple of generations ago and who eventually defeated you, divided and therefore ruled. Countries broken into regions are then subsumed into the EU under the German umbrella.
Much as the Roman church continued the work of the Roman Empire when the latter was militarily defeated, the EU carries on the work of the Third Reich after its military defeat. British Regional Development Agencies have the same boundaries as the EU regions. What we don't often recognise is that these EU regions are themselves almost exactly the diocesan boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church, which in turn were based on the military regions of the late Roman Empire. So Britain's geography is to be based on a 2,000–year–old, not a 50–year–old, treaty of Rome.
We are clear in identifying our permanent enemy as capitalism, the system of exploitation and theft which was pioneered in Britain. And we are equally clear that this enemy's creation, the European Union, is what we must destroy before we can destroy capitalism.
Just as it was workers' entry onto the economic then political stage that effectively created Britain, it is when workers are organised to leave that stage that Britain breaks up. Or rather, Britain breaks down. I say dividing, rather than seeking to divide, because it almost seems as though it's beginning to work, at least north of the so–called border.
So we say – no more moves to break up Britain. If we have to have a referendum it must be of the whole of Britain. You must ask everyone, not just those you think might be in favour. So not just a referendum in Scotland. The euro constitution repelled by the people of France and the Netherlands is now being revamped by their old enemy Germany, and Scottish separatists want to smuggle it into their part of Britain without a vote.
Petty nationalists everywhere, including in Britain, should beware.
First you get devolution, the apparently harmless establishment of the trappings of break up, street signs in two languages, spending half–a–billion pounds on a so–called parliament.
Then you want separation, a different currency, police force, domestic and foreign policies and perhaps even alliances – let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time in history that Scotland has had a foreign policy inimical to the interests of Britain.
What follows from devolution and separation? Freedom and happiness?
No. What follows is annexation. You'll be taken over by a foreign power.
Then you adopt someone else's currency – the Deutschmark, sorry, the euro, and you'd sit in someone else's parliament – in Strasbourg, which if my geography doesn't let me down, is even further from Edinburgh than London is!
Finally you find yourselves a minor region in the New Order of the German–run European Union.
So we say, Workers for Britain – Britain for Workers. Out of the European Union.