Five days after the largest raid in German history, it is becoming increasingly clear how extensive the right-wing terrorist network is against which it was directed.
On December 7, some 3,000 special police force officers searched 150 properties across Germany. Since then, 25 people have been held in pre-trial detention, and 29 others are under investigation. The attorney general accuses them of being members or supporters of a terrorist organization. But they are only the tip of the iceberg.
Querdenker and anti-vaxxer demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, March 2022 [Photo by Ostendfaxpost / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]
The right-wing terrorist network, which draws on the milieu of Reichsbürger, QAnon supporters, self-styled “lateral thinkers” (Querdenken) and coronavirus deniers, is estimated to number in the tens of thousands. It includes members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other far-right parties and reaches deep into the state security apparatus and social elites.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (as Germany’s domestic secret service is called) numbers the supporters of the monarchist and anti-democratic Reichsbürger at 23,000 alone, 2,000 more than a year ago. It considers 10 percent to be prepared to use violence.
Reichsbürger (literally, Citizens of the Reich) dispute the legitimacy of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany and believe that the German Reich (Empire), founded in 1871, continues to exist. Acts of violence repeatedly come from their ranks, 239 being registered in the last year alone. In the spring, for example, a Reichsbürger supporter in Baden-Württemberg deliberately ran over a police officer during a traffic check. Another fired an automatic rifle at approaching officers who wanted to confiscate the illegal weapon. Nevertheless, the judiciary and police handle Reichsbürger, who also have numerous supporters in the state security apparatus, with kid gloves.
Last week’s raid was apparently carried out because the Interior Ministry and Attorney General feared imminent attacks against state institutions, which would also have endangered the lives of high-ranking government officials and politicians.
The German parliament Bundestag building, the Reichstag Building photographed through a slit in a blind at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022. Officials say thousands of police have carried out a series of raids across much of Germany against suspected far-right extremists who allegedly sought to overthrow the state in an armed coup. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber]
Those arrested are said to have planned to invade the Bundestag along the lines of the American coup plotters of January 6, 2021, capture members of parliament and government, trigger riots across the country and then carry out a coup.
Attorney General Peter Frank said the group was pursuing the goal of eliminating democracy in Germany “by using violence and military means.” Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democratic Party, SPD) said the investigations provided “a glimpse into an abyss of terrorist threats from the Reichsbürger milieu.”
In the meantime, numerous details have been released to the public about those arrested, whose names the attorney general only disclosed in the form of initials. Many of them have been known for their right-wing extremist views and activities for years or decades. A striking number were or are members of the military or the state security apparatus. In any case, it soon became clear that the authorities were by no means as surprised about the “abyss of terrorist threats” as Interior Minister Faeser now claims.
In the mid-1990s, the 69-year-old Rüdiger von Pescatore, who is said to have led the “military arm” of the group, was the commander of a paratrooper battalion of the 25th Airborne Brigade, a predecessor of the KSK special forces unit. He left the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) in 1999 because he had taken weapons from old East German stocks, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on probation. Of the 165 pistols and rifles that disappeared at the time, only 11 have ever turned up again.
The 54-year-old Peter Wörner is a trained elite soldier in the KSK. On Instagram, there are also photos showing him with American special forces in the US. He was a member of the same battalion as Pescatore in the 1990s. He is part of the “prepper” scene and has recently worked as a survivalist trainer. In April this year, officers found firearms, ammunition, magazines and other weapons in his home.
Wörner is also said to have had contact with the group that planned to kidnap Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and then organize a coup. This group blew apart in the summer, with the media reporting about it.
Maximilian Eder, 63, was a colonel in the Bundeswehr and led an armoured infantry battalion in Kosovo in 1999. Before retiring in the autumn of 2016, he served for a time in the KSK. With the onset of the pandemic, he became a leading figure in protests against anti-COVID measures.
During the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley, the retired colonel showed up in uniform, set up a “command centre” and authorised deployment orders. His “chief of staff” was Peter Wörner. Eder eventually had to pay a €3,500 fine for the unauthorized wearing of a uniform. Shortly before his arrest, in a video, Eder called for a coup before Christmas.
Andreas Meyer, 58, an active KSK soldier, is also among the accused. The staff sergeant was deployed several times as a logistician in Afghanistan and has published a book about his experience. He is said to have smuggled members of the group into barracks using his military ID.
Several police officers are also among the accused. Chief Inspector Ivonne G. works as a criminal investigator in the Minden-Lübbecke district police department in North Rhine-Westphalia, according to information from news weekly Der Spiegel. She is said to have attracted attention in the past as a coronavirus denier. A state security officer from Lower Saxony, who is also accused, is said to have been on sick leave for some time. Michael Fritsch, a chief detective in Lower Saxony, has already been removed from his position. He is a Reichsbürger and was the lead candidate of the Querdenken party dieBasis for the 2021 federal election.
During the raids, police found a substantial arsenal of weapons: nine-millimetre pistols, swords, knives, stun guns, combat helmets, night-vision equipment and the service weapons of a female and male police officer who are among the suspects. In addition, the group is said to possess a dozen Iridium satellite phones at a cost of €1,500 each, which work even if the cell phone network breaks down.
Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, who is considered the ringleader of the group, has long been known for his anti-Semitic statements and his support of Reichsbürger ideology. At a digital fair in Zurich, Switzerland, for example, he agitated against the power of “Jewish big capitalists” and declared that the Federal Republic was not a sovereign state but was dominated by the Allies to this day. The speech was published on YouTube.
His strange name comes from the fact that in the noble family of Reuss, all male descendants are called Heinrich. To avoid confusion, they are numbered with Roman numerals—starting anew with each century.
The family has distanced itself from Heinrich XIII, calling him a “bitter old man” who subscribes to “conspiracy-theory misconceptions.” But his role is no accident. Old aristocrats who—as Reuss did for 30 years—litigate for the return of expropriated Juncker property and dream of the restoration of the German Reich and old Prussian glory are to be found in abundance in the right-wing extremist milieu.
Long before Beatrix von Storch, born Duchess of Oldenburg, became a member of the AfD, she campaigned for the restitution of the large aristocratic estates expropriated after the war.
An example of the arrested group’s close ties to the AfD is Berlin judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who represented the far-right party in the Bundestag for four years. Her judicial appointment was confirmed by the Berlin Administrative Court as recently as October, even though the police had long been investigating her for forming a terrorist organization and her contacts with the AfD’s ultra-nationalist “Flügel” (“wing”) grouping, her racist statements against refugees and her participation in a Querdenken demonstration in Berlin were well known.
However, Malsack-Winkemann is only one link between the terrorist cell and the AfD. Among the accused are at least two others who are or were active at regional level in the AfD.
In addition, Alexander Q., who runs a QAnon channel on Telegram with 130,000 subscribers, is said to be among the supporters of the terrorist cell. During the Ahr Valley flood disaster, he spread the lie that the flood waters had washed up the corpses of 600 children who had been locked up and killed in order to extract a rejuvenating metabolic product from them.
One can only understand the emergence of the terrorist cell against the backdrop of years of the trivialization and promotion of far-right groups by the secret service and other state authorities.
In 2003, proceedings to ban the far-right German National Party (NPD) failed because the Supreme Court judges concluded that there were so many security agency employees in the party’s leadership that the NPD was “in substance, an operation of the state.”
When president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, advised and promoted the AfD at least two dozen state informants were part of the support network of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Union (NSU), without the state allegedly knowing of their existence. The connections between the NSU, the secret service and the murder of Kassel District President Walter Lübcke remain murky to this day.
With the return of German militarism and the Ukraine war, the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators are being systematically trivialized. The establishment parties have integrated the far-right AfD into parliamentary work and adopted its policies—letting the virus rip in the pandemic, refugee-baiting and implementing a massive military build-up.
Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), died on November 30 at the age of 96. During more than a decade in office, Jiang presided over the extension and acceleration of capitalist restoration following the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989. This had devastating consequences for the working class. Thousands of state-owned enterprises were restructured and sold off or shut down; tens of millions of jobs were destroyed; and essential social services were demolished.
Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin at closing ceremony of the 18th Communist Party Congress in Beijing, Wednesday Nov. 14, 2012. [AP Photo/Lee Jin-man]
Jiang was installed as CCP general secretary amid the political turmoil generated by mass protests that started in April and May 1989 at Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. While initiated by students who limited their demands to calls for greater education funding, a free press and the right to form independent student bodies, the protests extended to other major cities and significantly began to draw in young workers, who voiced their own class demands.
Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market agenda of “reform and opening up,” launched in 1978, had led to rising social inequality and increasing hardship for workers. Millions of former peasants were left landless and migrated to the cities in search of jobs. Price controls were lifted and inflation soared to 18.5 percent in 1988. The government reacted by cutting back credit and re-imposing import restrictions, leading to huge job losses as private enterprises tightened their belts or shut down.
While CCP leaders, most prominently the party’s general secretary Zhao Ziyang, had sought to compromise with student leaders, the grievances and demands of workers threatened the very stability of the regime. With the formation of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation and similar independent workers’ organisations in other cities, demands were raised for an investigation into the corruption and nepotism rife in the party’s upper echelons.
Matters came to a head after some two million people marched through the centre of Beijing on May 17, 1989. The majority were workers and their families under the banners of their work units or enterprises. Terrified by the mass movement of the working class, Deng sided with hardliners in the CCP leadership demanding the sacking of Zhao, the imposition of martial law and the mobilisation of the military.
On May 20, Premier Li Peng imposed martial law. Zhao was placed under house arrest and 100,000 soldiers from the Beijing Military Region were ordered into the city. On the same day, Deng turned to Shanghai party boss Jiang Zemin as the replacement for Zhao as CCP general secretary.
Just days later, on the evening of June 3–4, the regime unleashed the crackdown to clear protests out of Tiananmen Square and suppress all opposition. The deadliest clashes took place in working-class suburbs as workers sought to block troops moving toward central Beijing. An estimated 7,000 were killed and 20,000 injured. In the nationwide repression that followed, the harshest sentences, including lengthy jail terms and the death penalty, were meted out to workers’ leaders.
Who was Jiang Zemin?
The formal installation of Jiang as CCP general secretary did not take place until June 24, 1989. He was widely regarded as a compromise choice between the pro-market “reformers” around Deng and the faction led by Li Peng and Chen Yun, who blamed the pro-market policies for the political unrest and demanded a slowdown in their implementation. While Zhao was made the scapegoat, the criticisms were also implicitly directed at Deng who had been Zhao’s backer and the chief architect of “reform and opening up.”
Jiang had no substantial base of support within the party. He was the first party leader who lacked any significant connection with the CCP’s founding and early years, or with the People’s Liberation Army that seized power in the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
Jiang was born on August 17, 1926 in the city of Yangzhou, to the northwest of Shanghai. His father, an accountant/manager, gave up his 13-year-old son for adoption by the family of his brother Jiang Shangqing, a CCP activist killed in an armed clash in 1939. Jiang Zemin trained as an electrical engineer in Shanghai, joined the party in 1946 while at university, graduated in 1947 and was employed at an ice cream factory.
Jiang in 1962
After the CCP took power, Jiang worked as an engineer in state-owned enterprises, including the First Automobile Works in the north-eastern city of Changchun for six years. He went to the Soviet Union in 1955 for further training, including at the Stalin Automobile Works. On returning to Shanghai in 1962, amid the Sino-Soviet split and the withdrawal of Soviet technical specialists, Jiang was appointed deputy director of the Shanghai Electric Research Institute. In 1966, he was appointed as director and deputy party secretary of the thermal engineering research centre in Wuhan, established by the First Ministry of Machine Building.
While he lost his position amid the upheavals of the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, Jiang was not among the specialists, intellectuals and “capitalist-roaders” who were publicly vilified or dispatched to the countryside for re-education. After being sent to a cadre training school, he was appointed deputy director of the ministry’s foreign affairs bureau and in 1970 sent to Romania as head of an expert team to establish machinery manufacturing plants, returning in 1972.
In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Jiang assumed a more directly political role. As the Cultural Revolution was wound back, the so-called Gang of Four, responsible along with Mao for the huge upheaval and excesses of the Cultural Revolution, were arrested. Jiang was sent as part of a 14-person team—the “Central Committee Shanghai Work Group”—to reassert control over Shanghai which had been the Gang of Four’s stronghold. While nominally responsible for the city’s industry and transport, Jiang was clearly involved in the purge of Shanghai party ranks.
Jiang was an early supporter of Deng’s “reform and opening up” announced in 1978. In 1979, he was installed as vice-chairman of two commissions set up by China’s State Council to boost trade and investment, including through the establishment of special economic zones (SEZs). In 1980, he led a delegation that toured SEZs in 12 countries and on his return issued a report calling for tax breaks and land leases to encourage foreign investment as well as loosening restrictions on foreign joint ventures. While provoking opposition in the party leadership, his proposals were backed by Deng and approved by the National People’s Congress.
What followed was a meteoric rise into the top ranks of the party leadership. At the 12th party congress in 1982, he became a member of the CCP’s Central Committee for the first time. In 1985, he was installed as mayor of Shanghai, the country’s largest industrial centre. At the 13th party congress in 1987, he became the CCP party secretary in Shanghai and a member of the party’s powerful Politburo. Two years later in mid-1989, he was called on by Deng to become CCP general secretary.
The crisis of Stalinism
Jiang was installed as party leader amid the profound global crisis of Stalinism that led to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, beginning in late 1989, and culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the International Committee of the Fourth International alone explained, the open embrace of capitalist restoration by the Stalinist bureaucracies did not represent the failure of socialism but was the consequence of the reactionary Stalinist conception of “socialism in one country.”
Leon Trotsky had warned in the 1930s that without a political revolution to overturn the Stalinist regime and return to the strategy of world socialist revolution, the bureaucratic apparatus would inevitably resort to capitalist restoration. As the ICFI explained, the processes of globalised production in the 1980s had undermined the nationalist perspective of Stalinism and rendered obsolete all programs rooted in national economic regulation and that would produce a deepening crisis of the major imperialist powers.
The turn to capitalist restoration in China had already been underway for a decade. The 1949 Chinese Revolution was a colossal and far-reaching social upheaval, ending a century of imperialist oppression that had mired the country in backwardness and squalor. However, from the outset, despite significant social, cultural and economic advances, the pragmatic, nationalist perspective of the CCP, rooted in the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country,” led the country into a blind alley.
The nationalisation of private enterprises and banks, which was only completed in 1956, as well as centralised planning, were imposed along the bureaucratic lines of the Soviet Union, without any input from the working class. The state apparatus established by the CCP rested on the peasant-based Red Army, not democratic organs of workers and peasants. Soviet aid, advisers and technicians played a major role in establishing heavy industry, which suffered after their withdrawal during the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s.
The Sino-Soviet split not only compounded China’s isolation and economic difficulties. It also fuelled intensified infighting within the CCP leadership between Mao and his utopian schemes for peasant-based socialism, and the advocates of Soviet bureaucratic planning centred on heavy industry. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in a bid to oust his rivals, but the confused and convulsive social struggles drew in sections of the working class and rapidly threatened the existence of the regime. Mao was forced to send the army into the factories to bring the situation under control.
Neither Mao nor his rivals had any solution to the country’s mounting economic difficulties or the tensions with the Soviet Union that led to border clashes in the late 1960s. There was no way out within the framework of national economic autarky. Having long rejected the perspective of world socialist revolution, the CCP turned to US imperialism. Just 23 years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao met US President Richard Nixon in 1972 and forged a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union.
Mao Zedong with US President Richard Nixon in 1972
The Mao-Nixon meeting was the essential diplomatic and political pre-condition for foreign investment and trade with the West that began to flourish. Deng, who had been ostracised during the Cultural Revolution, was rehabilitated. Following Mao’s death in 1976, Deng emerged as the dominant leader in the Stalinist bureaucracy. His “reform and opening up” initiatives announced in 1978 resulted in the establishment of four SEZs, the dismantling of rural communes, the transformation of state-owned enterprises into profit-making corporations and the easing of restrictions on private enterprises.
A decade later, however, the broad involvement of the working class in nationwide upheavals surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests struck fear into the CCP leadership that was compounded by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. With Deng on the backfoot politically, Li Peng and Chen Yun promoted Soviet nationalised property relations and centralised planning as the example to follow, even as Mikhail Gorbachev was undermining those economic structures in the Soviet Union.
In delivering the main report to the Fifth Plenum in November 1989, Li called for the adoption of a plan drawn up by a revived State Planning Commission to enforce tight controls on credit and balance the state budget to slash economic growth and inflation. Tough new restrictions were placed on rural and provincial industries, particularly in the south of the country. GDP growth slumped to 4.2 percent in 1989 and just 3.9 percent in 1990.
Deng had sided with Li and Chen in crushing the 1989 protest movement but was intransigently opposed to the restrictions being placed on foreign investment and private enterprises. He warned that economic stagnation would undermine social stability and the CCP regime itself and insisted only by further opening up China to the capitalist market and transforming the country into a cheap labour platform for foreign capital could the necessary high levels of economic growth be achieved.
Tiananmen Square, May 17, 1989, Beijing, China. [AP Photo/Sadayuki Mikami]
The deepening crisis of the Soviet Union that led to its formal liquidation in December 1991 brought the political struggle within the CCP leadership to a head. The “Soviet” faction led by Li and Chen pushed to further reverse Deng’s pro-market policies, such as the existing SEZs. While Deng held no formal party or state position, he still wielded considerable political influence. Just 20 days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he set out on his “Southern tour” in January-February 1992, visiting the SEZs and southern cities, accompanied by top generals and the country’s state security chief.
In Shanghai, he reportedly berated Chen Yun, declaring that any leader who could not boost the economy should quit. He advocated a far greater opening up to foreign capital and embrace of the capitalist market, telling Chen: “Do not fear when others say we are practicing capitalism. Capitalism is nothing fearsome.”
Jiang Zemin’s role
Although Jiang had been installed as CCP general secretary and chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission in 1989, he was not a leading figure in the ideological infighting between Deng and his opponents. He manoeuvred between the competing factions. He later justified his manoeuvring by declaring to a biographer: “We wade across the river by feeling for stones because truth is a long road; nobody knows exactly what truth is.”
Having initially sided with the “Soviet” faction, Jiang received a thinly disguised rebuke from Deng during the “Southern tour” for failing to implement the pro-market agenda fast enough. Sensing that the political winds were shifting, Jiang fell into line. Over the next 10 years, he championed the wholesale capitalist restoration that transformed the entire country, not just a handful of SEZs, into an arena for foreign corporations to exploit Chinese labour.
Obituaries in the American and international media combine praise for Jiang’s role in opening up China to the capitalist market and foreign investors, tempered by hostility to China’s emergence as a threat to US global dominance.
The New York Times hailed “Jiang’s stewardship of the capitalist transformation that had begun under Deng Xiaoping… [as] one of his signal accomplishments” and his years in office as “the golden age of China’s embrace of globalisation.” The Guardian contrasted him favourably with current President Xi Jinping who “has isolated China with Covid regulations and an aggressive foreign policy.”
Jiang embraced Deng’s pro-market policies, declaring at the 14th CCP National Congress in 1992 that China was a “socialist market economy”—the phrase adopted by the party to disguise its headlong rush to capitalist restoration. The following year he was installed as the country’s president as well as the CCP’s general secretary.
In 1994, the CCP formally established a “labour market” by legitimising the sale and purchase of labour power. State-owned enterprises were corporatised into companies run for profit. The unprofitable ones were restructured or shut down. The better equipped, in sectors not designated as strategic, were sold off or converted into subsidiaries of foreign transnationals.
These processes were accelerated after Deng’s death in February 1997. As the Asian financial crisis began to unfold in the same year, Jiang announced to the 15thCCP Congress that the “reform” of state-owned enterprises would be stepped up. According to one estimate, from 1998 to 2002, about 34 million workers were sacked as hundreds of state-owned enterprises were sold off and thousands more shut down completely.
The heavy industries in the country’s north were particularly hard hit, leaving workers and their families devastated. The state-owned industries had been the basis for the so-called iron rice bowl, providing cradle to grave support for employees, including child care, education, health care and pensions. All that was now left to individual workers.
While formal diplomatic relations with the United States were established in 1979 under Deng, those relations were strained on multiple occasion while Jiang held power. The most serious was the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis triggered by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the US, which China denounced as a breach of the “One China policy.” In 1979, the US had ended all formal ties with Taipei and de facto recognised Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan.
As China responded by carrying out military exercises and missile launches close to Taiwan, the Clinton administration dispatched two US aircraft carriers and their naval battle groups to waters off the island—one of which was sent through the Taiwan Strait.
Tensions rose again with the 2000 election of George W. Bush as US president. Bush had branded China as a “strategic competitor” during his campaign and declared he would repudiate China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). However, in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the US, Bush sought China’s support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and his bogus “war on terrorism.” He did an abrupt about-face. China was admitted to the WTO in 2001, opening the way for a further expansion of foreign investment and trade.
Jiang with his wife and George W. Bush with his wife in Crawford, Texas, 25 October 2002
Jiang capped off his term in office by having his “theoretical” contribution, known as “Three Represents,” written into the CCP constitution at the party’s 16thcongress. The Three Represents was a logical extension of the policies of capitalist restoration, providing a crude justification for opening up the party to representatives of “advanced forces of production”—code for the millionaires and billionaires that the “socialist market economy” had enriched.
Jiang stood down as CCP general secretary in November 2002 and as Chinese president in March 2003 but held onto the powerful post of chairman of the Central Military Commission until September 2004. He continued to wield significant political authority, not least through the power base inside the CCP that he had built up in Shanghai, and was influential in the choice of his successor, Hu Jintao, as party general secretary, and a decade later, Xi Jinping.
Jiang, following Deng, laid the basis for the astonishing expansion of the Chinese economy, now the world’s second largest, but this has only compounded the contradictions confronting CCP leaders. The economic growth has rested, on the one hand, on the social and economic gains of the 1949 Chinese revolution, including a highly educated workforce and developed infrastructure and, on the other, a massive influx of foreign investment and technology.
The very development of the economy, moreover, has opened up staggering levels of social inequality that are again fueling acute social tensions amid an economic slowdown. It has also heightened geo-political tensions with US imperialism, which over the past decade has intensified its confrontation with China on all fronts, including advanced preparations for war.
Incapable of making any appeal to workers in China let alone the rest of the world, the CCP leadership has no progressive answer either to the danger of conflict or to the social time bomb on which it is sitting. That is the actual legacy not only of Jiang and Deng, but of the bankrupt perspective of Stalinism and Maoism on which they rested.
In recent months, British public opinion on the issue of Brexit has shifted. Many people in Britain are becoming more critical of Brexit. With the help of plenty of dark money, Murdoch’s press, and the gross misjudgement of a conservative prime minister, the UK held a referendum on Brexit (the British exit from the European Union) in 2016. 51.9% voted for Brexit. The policy of leaving the EU was confirmed in the UK’s 2019 election. And, on January 31, 2020, Britain officially left the EU.
With that, Britain was free from the illusionary shackles of the supposedly un-democratic EU. Self-determination and democracy were put back into the hands of the British people. Strangely, the UK’s current prime minister – Rishi Sunak – was not democratically elected by the British people, nor was his predecessor Liz Truss – both conservatives.
Well, at least Brexit stopped the migration of undocumented individuals by boat across the English Channel, right? Not quite. In fact, the opposite happened after Brexit. In 2022, up to November, more than 40,000 people had crossed the Channel in small boats. This was the highest number since these figures began to be collected in 2018. In 2021, the total was 28,526 people, while in 2020 it was 8,404.
Worse, the UK economy is going downhill. This, it seems, also fuels growing anti-Brexit attitudes. Recently, and this came for the first time, British media and even some conservative politicians began saying rather openly that Brexit might have been a mistake.
To get out of their self-engineered troubles, some British politicians are now suggesting the adoption of the so-called Swiss Model, a new paradigm on how to structure the UK’s relationship with the EU.
According to the Swiss model, the UK would have to do whatever the EU tells it to do – without any right to participate in EU decision-making governing the EU’s €15tr economy. Like Switzerland, the UK is not a member of EU. It is outside the EU’s 450 million people. This occurred because Brexit has shown that, when you put up trade barriers to your most powerful neighbour, you will get hit hard. All this came just as the nude Cambridge economist predicted in 2019. She was spot on!
Almost two years after Brexit, the economic development of the UK – in comparison with that of other G7 countries and the OECD – shows that the consequences of Brexit can no longer be ignored. The country is falling behind the EU and the OECD economically. Yet, the Britain’s conservative press has created the false idea that the Tories are good for the economy. What is worse for the conservatives is that their traditional excuses – the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine – don’t seem to wash any longer with the British public.
The silence on the B-word – Brexit – seems to have been broken. Today, the B-word can be said again. The economy in the United Kingdom is so bad that Brexit can no longer be denied as a major cause for the current misery.
A few years ago, Boris Johnson was the UK right-wing populists’ man. He was the Tory prime minister who ensured there was a hard Brexit. After rafts of scandals, he is no longer in power. His immediate successor – Liz Truss – failed bitterly. After that came the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, together with chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt. Both politicians are more pragmatic at the UK’s Brexit rudder.
Only a few weeks ago, Britain’s leading and very conservative newspaper, The Times, carried an article headlined Britain mulls Swiss-style ties with Brussels. In it, The Times writes that the British government is considering how it could bring Britain closer to the EU.
In contrast to hard-Brexit UK, Switzerland has direct access to the EU’s internal market. Unlike the UK, it also pays the EU, complies with EU regulations, and accepts the free movement of people. In a referendum in September 2020, the Swiss confirmed their model.
Today, some suggest that a frictionless trade with the EU is only considered realistic if the UK, similar to Switzerland, has access to the EU single market. However, Britain wants access without the free movement of people, despite a severe labour shortage in the UK.
Even though the EU had already rejected this in 2019, London is still hoping for an EU-UK compromise in the long term. Increasingly, the devastating impact of Brexit can no longer be hushed up by the British government.
Meanwhile, Sunak and Hunt need to get British fiscal policy and the British economy back on track. Their hard Brexit makes this very difficult, since the UK is no longer part of the EU’s single market and customs union, and exports have been declining.
Interestingly, UK government ministers now want to remove as many trade barriers with the EU as possible. The plan is to do this over the next decade. Yet, all this should – in the hallucinations of the British Tory party – be done without the UK becoming a member of the single market.
Meanwhile, Sunak has postponed the UK’s planned membership in the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Area. He did this in order not to block the UK from a closer trade relationship with the EU. In other words, the EU is already shaping British trade policy, even though the UK is no longer part of the EU. Perhaps BoJo’s grand idea of a post-Brexit Global Britain has been quietly retired, like his infamous Brexit bus.
With the dying hallucination of Global Britain, there is no longer any talk of a trade agreement with the United States, which would also complicate EU-UK relations. However, the UK’s rapprochement with the EU remains politically hyper-explosive inside Great Britain. Improved EU-UK relations are unimaginable for the Brexit hardliners – particularly after they propagated their phantasm of Brexit-wonderland for half a decade.
When it comes to the inevitable – Britain needs the EU – the Tory government immediately paddled back while sticking to its Brexit-is-great script, even though this is so clearly not the case. At a recent conference of the powerful and extremely influential Confederation of British Industry, the UK prime minister made it clear that there would be no case where the UK would comply with EU regulations. Goodbye, Swiss model.
More importantly, Sunak did not respond to the CBI’s request to follow the Swiss model. He also rejected the CBI’s idea of allowing more immigration from the EU. The CBI sought this to ensure that British companies would no longer suffer so much from their acute labour shortage. All this is bad for the UK as it will increase its economic problems.
On the other hand, some of this might well be good for Sunak and the hard-Brexiters. The PM depends on the support of Brexit hardliners inside his own party. Perhaps, this internal party support is more important to him than the campaign financing by the CBI for Sunak’s Tory party.
Meanwhile, the proponent of a hard Brexit – Tory boss Jacob Rees-Mogg – never grows tired of stressing that the public voted for Brexit and that the public wanted to end the free movement of people. There should be no more discussion, he argues.
Lord Frost – the mastermind who failed as the UK’s Brexit negotiator – said that any kind of Swiss model with EU regulations was completely unacceptable. Meanwhile, Lord Cruddas – the British billionaire and donor to Britain’s conservative party – threatened that he had enough money and influence to thwart the plan to move towards a Swiss-style relationship with the EU.
Worse was to come. Right-wing populist Nigel Farage, who was extremely instrumental in campaigning for hard Brexit, tweeted, “this level of betrayal will never be forgiven. The Tories must be crushed.”
At least partly because of Nigel Farage’s successful Brexit campaign and the UK’s successfully leaving the EU, living standards in the UK have fallen and are set to fall even more in the next two years. Out of fear of being attacked by the UK’s right-wing press, the hard-line Brexiters, and pro-Brexit Labour voters, opposition leader Keir Starmer has been reluctant to call for a Brexit model different than what Britain has today.
Meanwhile, Labour’s opposition spokeswoman for financial affairs, Rachel Reeves, admitted the obvious about the Brexit mess, “The Brexit deal the government secured has cost our economy dearly.” At the same time, Greens MP Caroline Lucas said,
The huge elephant in the room is #Brexit. Hunt didn’t once mention how it contributed to 4% productivity drop, 15% trade drop, 6% food price increase, lower wages, workforce shortages & highest inflation in G7.
Labour is proposing a trade agreement with the EU that would overturn some trade barriers. But fearing the pro-Brexiters, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer has strictly rejected a UK membership in the European single market. Meanwhile, UK prime minister Sunak and his Tory off-sider Hunt have been accused, by the pro-Brexit hard right, of having hijacked the government in the interests of the EU.
And the hard pro-Brexit right has powerful allies, such as the staunchly nationalistic and right-wing Daily Mail headlining, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt killed the dream of any Brexit dividend stone dead. The reactionary tabloid argued that Hunt and Sunak are about to destroy what Brexit should have brought in terms of benefits: a country with low taxes and high wages, where the economy and the public experience growth. This is a delusional mirage, given the current economic situation of the UK.
Facing severe economic hardship because of Brexit and rising energy costs, Sunak is forced to turn towards a kind of European-style social democracy. The recent economic development of the UK – in comparison with other G7 countries and the OECD – shows that the consequences of the Tories’ hard Brexit can no longer be ignored.
The UK is falling behind economically, and this can no longer be excused with the pandemic and the Ukraine war. According to the most recent forecast by the UK government’s very own Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the standard of living of Britons will fall by a whopping 7.1% over the next two years. The biggest fall on record, this negates the income progress of the past eight years. Brexit bites back!
Worse, data from the OBR and the European Commission show that no European country will fare as badly during next year as the UK. Its gross domestic product is set to fall by 1.4%. The UK is the only one of the G7 countries with an economy that has not yet reached pre-pandemic levels.
The latest survey by YouGov shows that 56% of respondents believe that Brexit was a mistake. Of the people who voted for Brexit in 2016, a whopping 70% still think that this was correct. Overall, one in five who voted for Brexit in 2019 now thinks it was the wrong decision. In other words, a whopping 20% of all Brexit-voters thinks what they had done was wrong.
The British economy has suffered sustained damage as a result of Brexit – something hard-line Brexiters like Sunak refuse to acknowledge, blaming instead the so-called Covid-19 legacy and the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Michael Saunders, the former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, suggests, “If we hadn’t had Brexit, we wouldn’t be talking about an emergency budget like we had this week.”
From an economic point of view, Brexit is like kicking the soccer ball into your own goal. In the wake of all this, public opinion in the UK is becoming more critical of Brexit. Lord Deben (Tory) said, “Our situation is worse in every area because we’ve left … people now know the terrible damage that leaving the EU has done.”
Perhaps many people voted for Brexit in 2016 and again in 2019 out of frustration with the general situation and for all sorts of other reasons. Many might have been misled by a well- engineered propaganda campaign by Murdoch’s powerful press, nationalistic right-wing populists like Farage, and hyper-narcissistic and power hungry politicians like Boris Johnson.
Now they are starting to realise the damage Brexit has caused to Britain. In the UK today, the B-word is being talked about again. Yet, Tory politicians that got Britain into the mess seem to know no way out. Then again, would the EU take the UK back?
On Friday, Stellantis announced that it would indefinitely lay off 1,350 workers who remain at the Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois by February 28, 2023. The attack on Stellantis autoworkers’ jobs is the latest attack against workers’ jobs as part of a global restructuring of the auto industry ahead of the 2023 contract talks with the United Auto Workers.
The company justified its attack on jobs by citing broader macroeconomic factors and the drive towards electrification by the auto companies. “Our industry has been adversely affected by a multitude of factors like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the global microchip shortage, but the most impactful challenge is the increasing cost related to the electrification of the automotive market,” Stellantis said in a statement.
Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois [Photo: WSWS]
“This difficult but necessary action will result in indefinite layoffs, which are expected to exceed six months and may constitute a job loss under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act,” the company added.
“It’s a bunch of BS,” one furious Belvidere assembly worker told the World Socialist Web Site. “They are trying to get people scared so those who are eligible to retire will go sign papers to retire. Then they can hire new-hires.”
Predictably, the the United Auto Workers (UAW) union apparatus issued the most perfunctory and hollow statements in response to the threats by the company. UAW Vice President and Director of the Stellantis Department Cindy Estrada said, “We are all deeply angered by Stellantis’ decision to idle the Belvidere Assembly plant without a plan for future product.” Estrada, who has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in income off the backs of UAW rank-and-file members, has helped push one round of concessions after another on autoworkers in the service of management.
UAW President Ray Curry added, “We believe Stellantis is grossly misguided in idling this plant which has produced profits for the company since 1965. Announcing the closure just a few weeks from the holidays is also a cruel disregard for the contributions of our members from UAW Locals 1268 and 1761. We will fight back against this announcement.”
Far from fighting back, the UAW has overseen the savage attack on the workers at Belvidere. In 2019, the 57-year-old plant employed close to 5,000 people working three shifts producing the Jeep Cherokee.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the company has laid off two shifts and destroyed jobs while the UAW has done nothing to defend workers’ jobs. The devastating impact of the job cuts has rippled through the region, including for those who work for Stellantis’ parts suppliers such as Magna, Syncreon, Android Industries and others. Laid off workers have had to uproot their lives and transfer to Stellantis plants in Michigan or take lower paying jobs in the Belvidere and Rockford metro region.
The cuts have resulted in unsafe working conditions as well. In August, autoworker Travis Baker died after suffering a severe injury at the plant. Workers at the plant reported the company shutting off lights, cutting costs and not spending any money to improve safety and working conditions.
Stellantis made close to $8 billion in profits in the first half of 2022, up 34 percent from 2021. The company has made record profits to the tune of tens of billions over the past decade. Last year, the company awarded its CEO Carlos Tavares $20.5 million in salary, more than 300 times the annual income of the average worker. The profits Stellantis made have been generated entirely off the backs of its workers.
In the wake off a $52 billion merger with the Italian-American Fiat Chrysler and the French PSA, Stellantis has pursued a brutal cost-cutting operation as it seeks to move all production towards electrification, to compete with the other global auto companies, including Ford, General Motors and Tesla.
In October, Stellantis threatened the jobs of thousands of workers at the Warren Truck Assembly Plant in Detroit. The company blamed workers for absenteeism and defects, warning that the plant, which employed over 5,230 workers, could be closed. Instead of defending the workers, UAW Local 140 President Eric Graham joined the company in scapegoating them.
Stellantis told Crains that “all options are on the table” with regards to Belvidere. Heading into 2023 contract negotiations, the auto companies are carrying out a strategy they have used in prior contract battles. They claim that jobs can be “saved” if workers accept further concessions. Corporations like Stelantis are seeking to extract even greater concessions from workers than in previous contracts as they invest billions in capital expenditure in the transition to electric vehicle production.
Moreover, the auto companies are hoping to extract billions in economic ransom in the form of tax cuts from local and state governments, with the promise of retaining jobs—promises that have been repeatedly broken. Illinois’ billionaire Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker is pushing for subsidies and tax cuts to keep auto jobs in Illinois, both at Belvidere Assembly and Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant (CAP). The business press has speculated that CAP is also threatened with closure, as Ford pursues electrification. Part of such a deal would include massive attacks on autoworkers imposed with the help of the UAW. The closure of the two assembly plants would have a devastating impact on the lives of tens of thousands of workers, affecting over 36,000 auto-related manufacturing jobs in Illinois.
Will Lehman campaigners speak with morning shift Stellantis workers at Belvidere Assembly plant on October 18, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]
“We’re being pushed into economic slavery”
“They’re going to negatively affect people’s livelihoods,” an angry Belvidere worker told the WSWS. “They’re going to decimate an entire economic area. I can’t survive off unemployment either. It’s not just us--all the suppliers, all the other vendors, all the other businesses that depend on that revenue, on the goods and services they provide.”
He added, “Corporate, big business ways are not our ways. They’re not thinking about us. They’re not worried about how they’re negatively impacting people. Now they’re going to flood the market with a whole bunch of workers that probably will have to settle for something less than what they’re used to.
“George Carlin said it best, it’s the rich against the poor, it’s an exclusive club and we’re not in it. Big corporations and politicians go hand in hand. These are the people who make the rules. Their number one rule is let’s make rules that make money. Their number two rule is don’t break rule number one.
“We’re being pushed into economic slavery. The poor are forced to serve the rich. There should be a gigantic meeting about this. There should be something done.”
He noted the imposition of a pro-management settlement on railroad workers, who were stripped of their right to strike by President Biden and Congress. “When I heard that they said Congress was going to force the rail workers to take a deal, how does that work? You’re forcing them to take a deal? How can you legitimize that?”
