Corbyn backs call to ‘shut down the streets’
Labour leader urges followers to defy PM’S plans in biggest protests since Poll Tax
JEREMY CORBYN has endorsed a plot by his hard-left supporters to “shut down the streets” by whipping up the biggest act of civil disobedience in decades in protest at Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans.
The Labour leader urged his MPS to join protesters planning to “occupy bridges and blockade roads” in 10 major cities tomorrow in what some activists have likened to the 1990 Poll Tax riots. The demonstrations have been organised by Momentum, the campaign group that formed to propel Mr Corbyn to the Labour leadership.
It came as John Mcdonnell, the shadow chancellor, compared Mr Johnson to Adolf Hitler, and Sir Philip Pullman, the author, hinted the Prime Minister should be hanged, amid an increasingly hysterical response to Mr Johnson’s move to prorogue Parliament.
The Conservatives described Momentum’s plan as “sinister” and said it was evidence of the lengths to which Mr Corbyn’s supporters were prepared to go to “subvert the democratic decision of the British people to leave the EU”.
Laura Parker, the Momentum national coordinator organising the protests, previously worked as Mr Corbyn’s private secretary. She said: “Our message to Johnson is this: if you steal our democracy, we’ll shut down the streets.” In an email to his MPS yesterday Mr Corbyn said: “I am encouraging MPS to join public protests opposing this shutdown [of Parliament].”
He stated: “This is a Government of the elite … [The Prime Minister] wishes to … open the way for the Tory party to sell off public services and our NHS.”
The language used by Mr Corbyn was strikingly similar to an email earlier sent to Momentum supporters by Ms Parker, who also railed against “Etoneducated millionaire Boris Johnson”, who she said was behind “an establishment coup by a tiny, privileged elite” to “sell off our NHS to big US corporations in a no-deal, Trump-first Brexit”.
Opponents of Brexit last night published on Twitter the home addresses of Jacob Rees-mogg, Leader of the Commons, and Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s chief strategist, in a bid to incite protests outside their front doors.
Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph has learnt that John Bercow, the Speaker, broke off from part of his family holiday to phone Sir Oliver Letwin, the Remainbacking MP, to plan ways to prevent Mr Johnson proroguing Parliament.
Mr Bercow, currently in Turkey with his wife and three children, has discussed with Sir Oliver a plot to fasttrack legislation through Parliament to thwart Mr Johnson’s plans, which were approved by the Queen on Wednesday.
The Speaker, who is required to be impartial, described Mr Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament for five weeks as “a constitutional outrage”.
Separately, a barrister acting for 75 Europhile MPS told a Scottish court that the Queen is not above the law as a judge heard an application to block the “unlawful” suspension of Parliament.
On Wednesday night there were ugly scenes in Westminster with pro and anti-brexit supporters clashing in
did eight years ago by driving Europe into economic depression, causing levels of youth unemployment long thought impossible in a modern civilised society. Nobody has ever been held to account for these failures.
Yes, the EU is a soft empire, but it ceases to be soft when challenged, as became clear during the eurozone crisis when it toppled the noncompliant premier of Greece (George Papandreou had the temerity to call for a vote on the EU austerity package) and replaced him with a technocrat (a former vice-president of the European Central Bank).
It happened again in Italy in 2011 when it toppled Silvio Berlusconi and replaced him with another technocrat (a former EU commissioner) who then delivered drastic and self-defeating austerity as demanded by the German finance ministry.
That episode is revealing. We know from one kiss-and-tell book (Bini Smaghi) that the decision was made after Berlusconi began to talk of leaving the euro.
One former ECB governor told me how these punishment beatings occur: “They threaten governments that misbehave with financial destruction. They cut off refinancing and threaten to kill the banking system. They create a roll-over crisis in the bond market. This what happened to Italy in 2011.”
A variant of this was done to Greece in 2015 when the ECB raised the pressure against the rebel Syriza government by dialing down liquidity to private banks – illegally, since they had done nothing wrong – until the money ran out in the cash machines and Alexis Tsipras capitulated.
There has never been a proper airing of how the ECB was able to write secret letters to the Italian and Spanish leaders ordering detailed changes to labour and social law, and fiscal policy, and even the Spanish constitution, while holding a gun to their head on bond purchases.
We do not know who was responsible for anything because power was exercised through a shadowy interplay of elites in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels and Paris – and still is. These methods smack of
monetary dictatorship. There was never a whisper of protest from Die Zeit or Deutsche Welle at the time. The missionary press corps in Brussels is invariably complicit. When one of their colleagues – a German reporter from Focus magazine investigating EU abuses – was arrested on trumped-up charges and held as the police went through all his notes and computers, and burned all his investigative sources, none rose to his defence.
When the Commission’s chief accountant revealed abuses in the EU’S internal finances, the Brussels press corps closed ranks. It is a curious tribal reflex. Call it what you want but it is not what we in Britain would take for a free press that speaks truth to power.
Ultimately, the logic of monetary union is incompatible with democratic self-government. It can be made to work over time only by moving to fiscal union, giving Brussels control over taxation, spending, and the core economic policies of nation states.
Prof Otmar Issing – the disillusioned founding father of the euro – says fiscal union must eviscerate the budget powers of the Bundestag and fellow parliaments. It goes to the essence of what it means to be a democracy, he says, and forgets the lessons of the English Civil War and the American Revolution.
For me, the line was crossed when the EU smuggled through the Lisbon Treaty, enabled by a Merkel-sarkozy executive stitch-up, after the text had already been rejected by French and Dutch voters in its earlier guise.
It is one thing to advance the European Project by stealth and the Monnet method, it is another to override the outcome of a plebiscite.
And Lisbon matters. It extended the
jurisdiction of the European Court to all areas on Union law for the first time (not just Community law), and arguably over everything by making the Charter of Fundamental Rights justiciable.
Ireland alone held a referendum on Lisbon. When the Irish people voted no, they were made to vote again, just as they were made to vote again when they rejected the Nice Treaty.
This is the EU method. All votes that go its way are conquered ground, Acquis forever. All votes that go against are to be massaged, reworked, and ultimately recast until they go the right way … until Brexit, the referendum that the EU must reckon with.
The past three years have been messy for British democracy but have also been intoxicatingly vibrant. The fights have been conducted through Parliament, the courts, the press, and on the streets through passionate but peaceful civic protest. There has been nothing like the gilets jaunes here. And let us hope that Boris’s rash move does not precipitate it. In short, British democracy is in rude good health.
Die Zeit should peel away the layers of obfuscation and euro-kitsch and look more closely at Europe’s upper level of government: its reflexes and enforcement methods, its accretion of unaccountable power, its co-opted press, and the authoritarian logic of monetary union.
That is where democracy is dying. It is half dead already.
‘It is one thing to advance the EU project by stealth, it is another to override the outcome of a plebiscite’