KEIR STARMER’S tearful resignation on the steps of Downing Street on the tenth anniversary of the referendum which took Britain out of the European Union underlines the popular vote for Brexit as the most consequential, not to say revolutionary moment in British politics since the 1984-5 miners’ strike.

The miners, and indeed the entire working-class movement, were defeated by the state onslaught planned and executed by the Thatcher government. The EU referendum on June 23 2016 was a catastrophic defeat for the principal strategy of British state monopoly capitalism, from which a decade later it has not recovered and shows little sign of being able to do so.

Class power in Britain’s unwritten constitution is wielded by an incredibly small network of leading bankers, corporate executives, senior mandarins, intelligence and military-industrial chiefs.

Britain’s two governing political parties have taken turns to act as temporary tribunes for the interests of British capital and US imperialism for 70 years. This pact proved both stable and durable during the cold war between the rival superpower blocs — the US and Nato, and socialist countries led by the Soviet Union.

Britain’s ruling class did not adopt its subservient position to US imperialism willingly. In 1956, Britain, France and Israel lost their joint military attack aimed at punishing Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, for his temerity in nationalising the Suez Canal.

Ever since that chastening experience, Britain’s political Establishment has been dedicated to shoring up its so-called “special relationship” with the United States, a relationship frequently likened to that between a dog and a lamppost.

In 1956, US president Dwight D Eisenhower intervened to halt the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt using political pressure and financial coercion to force a humiliating retreat by Europe’s declining imperial powers. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden suffered a complete physical and nervous breakdown.

As a new cold war global hegemon, the US wanted to block Britain and France from flexing their declining imperial might to control the world’s most strategic waterway.

The Suez debacle was the moment when Britain’s ruling class was forced abruptly to come to terms with its subaltern role in the new cold war world order.

France continued to fight and lose bloody and disastrous colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Britain’s rulers opted to become the US poodle.

A core element of the US geopolitical strategy was to use Britain’s ruling class as an agent inside the European Economic Community (later the European Union), founded with the 1957 Treaty of Rome, one year after the Suez crisis.

Britain’s integration into the EEC had been a strategic aim of US cold war policy since the CIA formed the American Committee on United Europe in February 1949.

ACUE was a front organisation to channel funds to the European Movement and European federalist campaigns promoting a Europe modelled on the US. Britain’s adherence confirmed US leadership and Britain’s subordinate role to US imperialism.

In February 1957, Rajani Palme Dutt identified the moment a wing of the Tory Party pivoted towards the European Common Market, writing: “‘Europe Limited’ – “The new vision of the Macmillan-Thorneycroft-Eccles team is to turn to the project of the so-called ‘European Common Market’.”

In December 1962, US secretary of state Dean Acheson told the US Military Academy at West Point: “Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘Commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength … this role is about played out.”

For US imperialism, Britain’s application to join the European Common Market was in Acheson’s words, a “decisive turning point.” If Britain joined, “another step forward of vast importance will have been taken.”

US pressure first led the British government to apply to join the EEC in 1961. Successive applications were vetoed by French president Charles de Gaulle.

Britain eventually joined the EEC on January 1 1973 with a mission to promote US banking, commercial and strategic interests. The outcome was the Single European Act signed in February 1986.

In October 1986, Thatcher’s “Big Bang” liberalised London’s financial markets as a prelude to her European policy for a full European single market without borders or regulatory obstacles for free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

A young Thatcherite, John Bercow, recalled: “Margaret Thatcher was herself a driving force behind the Act and some of her ministers positively fizzed with enthusiasm about the single market which it spawned. She and they believed that the Act achieved the Thatcherisation of Europe through the furtherance of free trade.”

The influx of US finance capital into the City of London drove EU political developments through EU treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2007), which mandated aggressive neoliberal policies opening energy, water, post, rail, docks, shipping and air transport to private capital.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the contradictions in EU enlargement to include central, eastern and south-eastern Europe and the Baltic meant the agreement between Anglo-US capital and Franco-German capital began to break down.

The latter required a more centralised, federal political structure to consolidate industrial capital, while the former demanded a less regulated, finance-led structure subordinate to Nato’s expansion into former Soviet space.

These contradictions have only deepened since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016. Those EU-nostalgics today who dream of Britain rejoining the EU have consistently failed to explain how British firms, which are now massively subject to US ownership through mergers and acquisitions, would reconcile those interests with EU regulations.

More pertinently, the mantra of “dynamic alignment” with EU rules prevents any British government nationalising rail, mail, utilities and essential public services, let alone practising “Manchesterism,” as espoused by Andy Burnham.

The democratic vote to leave the EU in 2016 has disoriented Britain’s ruling class who can no longer rule in the old way. The question is whether the working class and those who are crushed by the interests of the financial oligarchs of the City of London will choose to live in a new way.

Alex Gordon is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.