EU Ballot - D-Day Minus One

By Tony Mulhearn, ARMS Merseyside committee member.

When you cast your vote remember this:

1. The institutions of the EU are controlled by unelected people with extremely dodgy political connections. EU President Junker, for instance, presided over Luxembourg which was a haven for every tax-dodging fat cat on the planet.
2. He was the bloke who patted Tsipras and Varoufakis on the head, ignored their pleas for a more caring capitalism, and chased them back to Greece to inflict the most appalling cuts in working class living standards in Greece’s history while that country’s fat cats who caused the crisis continue to live in opulent splendour and plunder state-owned institutions.
3. The EU blocked Portugal from implementing a no-cuts budget
4. It was the EU that ordered an increase in women’s retirement age from 60 to 65.
5. EU treaties protect freedoms for Business to move labour from member state to another and to ensure there is ‘no distortion of competition’. That means freedom for unscrupulous employers to pay the lowest rate of any EU country.
6. A condition of receiving EU ‘bale-outs’ is also that the recipient countries degrade the ability of trade unions to defend their members. National wage bargaining in Greece has all but disappeared.
7. Remaining will ensure that a more confident EU will act as an obstacle to a future Labour government from bringing back into public ownership the NHS, Rail, and the other public utilities that have been flogged off with the poisoned brew of TTIP as an additional weapon in their hands.
8. Unity of the international working class will not be achieved via this reactionary institution but via the struggle against austerity organised on a European basis.