JEREMY CORBYN’S Labour leadership, and its radical 2017 manifesto, mobilised the highest Labour vote this century. When today’s Labour leadership decry this mass mobilisation with the worthless suggestion that “twice the country has given its verdict on Corbynism” it directs attention to its sandcastle parliamentary majority in the most unrepresentative Parliament for more than this century.

Sir Keir Starmer cast away millions of Labour voters as recklessly as his ramshackle regime has driven hundreds of thousands from the party.

Starmer’s destruction of Labour’s credibility began with his treacherous behaviour as Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary, when he launched the idea, contrary to party policy and Corbyn’s explicit undertaking to respect the referendum result, that the party would support a second referendum.

It was around this tactic, alarmed by the success of the 2017 election campaign and fuelled by the highly mediated anti-semitism narrative, that the various tribes of the Labour right wing calculated that losing an election was a price worth paying to destroy the Corbyn leadership.

Recollect that as Theresa May’s parliamentary majority was destroyed by the Labour surge, it was Starmer, as shadow Brexit secretary, who said it was “very difficult” to think of a positive way of leaving the European Union, and he distanced himself from Corbyn’s position that Brexit could function as a “catalyst” to transform the economy.

If the new socialist party wants to erode Reform UK’s attraction to working-class voters, it needs to find the language to transmute progressive sovereignist sentiment into clear support for policies which challenge the free movement of capital and all that goes with it, take enterprises into public ownership and calibrate economic policies for people, not profit.

The idealised picture of the EU that held sway among Labour’s membership — and given organised expression in the Second Vote campaign masterminded by Tony Blair’s liar-in-chief Alastair Campbell — has lost much of its lustre.

The immigration issue in British politics, which is rendered even more toxic by the growth of Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle and weaponised by an increasingly active fascist fringe, has directed more critical minds to look at the EU’s own migration policies.

It is not a pretty picture. In essence, the EU’s migration policy is an extension of its overall strategy to maintain the existing and inequitable power relations between the imperial nations of capitalist Europe and the global South.

Frontex, the EU border protection agency, is the principal instrument in enforcing the exclusion of people seeking refuge on the basis that they constitute a security threat. To the formidable barrier of legal constraints, the EU has reinforced a steel and barbed-wire barrier to those fleeing climate change and imperial wars.

The Mediterranean has become the most dangerous border in the world and a watery graveyard for many, while a successful crossing often ends in unending detention.

To the inevitable dangers of small boat migration, the EU subsidises the ferocious jihadi militias enabled by the Nato states’ bombing of Libya to police its coasts, incarcerate the hopeful and run a slave labour system on the side.

Britain’s migration policy mimics that of the EU. Net migration, subject to all kinds of factors, fell sharply to 431,000 last year — 52 per cent lower than its peak. However, numbers remain substantially higher than the levels seen in the 2010s, while small boat arrivals — around which the parliamentary parties, government, the media and the fascists make the focus of the debate — make up a small proportion of around 3-4 per cent of overall immigration.

Immigration to Britain is similar in character to immigration into the EU, where labour mobility is a function of the relative poverty of some member states and the unequal relationships between them. Like Britain, most migrants who enter the EU come through legal migration channels, such as work, study, family reunification or resettlement.

The total population of the EU is 450 million, and in 2023, 4.3 million immigrants from non-EU countries entered the EU. In both the EU and Britain, the vast bulk of migration is legally sanctioned, planned and organised by employers and governments in collusion with its transactional and transitional nature, buttressed by limitations on migrant workers’ conditions of employment designed to act as a disciplinary feature on the workforce as a whole.

Among the more remarkable features of the post-2008 financial crisis was the persistence of illusions about the role of the EU in dealing with the fallout. Gifting millions to the banks placed on the European public the burden of saving the banking sector from the consequences of capitalism, while the EU’s fiscal regime compels member states to gain approval for expenditure from the commission. Post-2008, austerity was driven by the imperative to comply with the EU’s fiscal rules, which, for all states, is a violation of their sovereignty.

“Austerity” in Britain and the EU failed in its own terms, but all the major institutions of global capital advocate fiscal consolidation (a la Rachel Reeves) and this message is given executive power by the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact.

By constraining government initiatives to direct investment through public incentives, the EU, replicated by our own government, drove down demand. Inevitably, the policies of wage freezes and even wage cuts (coupled with price inflation) have forced workers/consumers to pay for the crisis created by the big banks and finance sector, whose deregulated behaviour was enabled, in Britain, by successive governments both Labour and Tory and, in the EU, by regimes of equally diverse character.

The Eurozone Stability and Growth Pact, which constrains government debt, is designed to compel austerity measures, while the EU’s Fiscal Compact has the power of a binding international treaty to compel fiscal discipline at the inevitable cost to the social wage, health, education, social services and public housing.

Over economic policy, the emotionally charged issues of national sovereignty, which animated the Brexit vote, have a particular resonance. The kind of policies that characterised the 2017 Labour manifesto and today drive support for the Sultana-Corbyn political project cannot be implemented within the EU’s fiscal regime any more than they can be brought into being while Reeves and Starmer remain wedded to the failed capitalist orthodoxy of the last two decades.

A new dimension to this is added by the EU’s deregulation wave — upending the illusory “social Europe” benefits which seduced late 20th century trade unionists into dropping TUC and Labour Party opposition to membership of the European federal project. The European Commission’s “competitiveness agenda” was given heft following the February 2024 Antwerp Declaration, which platformed the concessions to the energy lobby and weakened existing EU rules.

As this process suffuses the structures of the EU and moves from the mystification stage to concrete measures, we see the influence of corporate lobbies morph with the increasing institutional power of the far right to construct an EU more completely the expression of corporate power.

While the most deluded of liberals close their eyes to the EU’s anti-human and failing economic policies, the new dangers encapsulated in its transition to a war-fighting institution are causing concern.

Nato has morphed from a cold war bloc confronting socialism to what CND calls “an ever-expanding interventionist bloc, operating on a global scale.”

There have been decades of full-spectrum Nato anti-communism — on one hand confronting socialism organised as state power in the USSR and the European socialist states and, on the other, subverting the working-class movement in capitalism.

To this is added the new wars intervention dressed up as “liberal intervention.”

From the attack on Yugoslavia to the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, we can add the new escalation of the nuclear threat to peace with the siting of new generations of missiles, including Britain’s (US-controlled and maintained) Trident system.

CND says we are into the second decade of Nato’s expansion into “counterterrorism, cyber-security, and the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons” and the deeper integration of US and European war-fighting capacities.

Donald Trump’s change of imperial style from that of the Biden/Obama era has not changed the essentials, and the sharper confrontation with Russia has become a particular project of the main states in the EU and Britain. The EU’s military partnership with Nato is boosted by our various governments’ enthusiasm for a more active role in ramping up tension.

Prime example was Boris Johnson’s sabotage of the Ukraine-Russia peace deal, while the British intelligence-managed invasion of the Russian Kursk region — which ramped up the most dangerous confrontation on European soil since Nato’s attack on Yugoslavia — is a MI6/Foreign Office project.

As Nato-compelled Trumpian arms expenditure is ramped up at the cost of Britain’s social spending, Starmer makes clear the continuities between austerity economics with the system of global power with the assertion that “Nato is just one part of the rules-based international system that allows for collective action, but it is a vital one.”

These rules are enforced by a constellation of institutions — on a global scale by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and on a continental scale by the EU — with an ideology of economic liberalism, unimpeded capital flow and the exercise of global military power defined as liberal interventionism.

Another Europe is possible, but not another European Union.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.