Last week's EU summit in Brussels was yet another exercise in deciding nothing. It exposed, again, the paralysis of governments in front of the crisis of their own system.
Reasserting their "duty" to stick to the "budget discipline" which had already been enshrined 19 years ago, in the Maastricht treaty, is hardly a credible way of resolving the present economic havoc! Especially as this "discipline" has never been respected by any of the participants, nor enforced by the EU. In fact, the only thing these governments have in common is the same determination to make the working population pay for the capitalist crisis. They are all enforcing similar austerity measures for just this purpose.
As to Cameron's so-called "veto" - or "victory", depending on which paper you read - it was nothing but farcical grandstanding, since there was nothing on the table to "veto" in the first place!
Cameron was merely posturing in order to stress, yet again, that his government would do everything in its power to defend the interests of its banking masters in the City - which everyone knew anyway - while playing up to the little-Englander prejudices of his Tory backbenchers.
Back to the real world
This show business and politicking would be laughable, if it was not for what is happening in the real world.
While the heads of states were bickering between themselves at great cost to the taxpayer, it was business as usual for the capitalist class. The financial market, which was meant to be appeased by the EU summit, went up for a short while, before being caught again in the same frantic havoc as before. The bankers and big shareholders who preside over its destiny do not believe for one second in the governments' ability to control the crisis. Nor do they see any point in refraining from their speculative behaviour in order to restore some sort of order to the economy - profits always come first.
While politicians are trading hot air in summits such as last week's in Brussels, the crisis carries on taking its toll at the expense of the jobs and the standard of living of the working populations of the entire planet.
As to the so-called "national interest" that Cameron claims to be defending, what can this possibly mean at a time when the economy is collapsing on a world scale, due to the greed of the capitalist class?
Today's City speculators can, with a click of a computer mouse, place bets worth hundreds of millions of pounds affecting any region of the planet they like, regardless of the consequences to the populations. So, what does Cameron's protection of the "national interest" really amount to except allowing these speculators to carry on doing whatever they please, creating even more chaos for the sake of boosting their profits?
Our interests and those of society
Of course, Cameron's playing on "national interest" does have another purpose. It is a version of the worn out "we're all in it together" lie, that Labour, Lib-Dems and Tories have all used to justify their austerity policies.
But the working class of this country has no interest in common with its exploiters, be they City bankers, private bosses or big shareholders.
In the so-called "affluent" years which preceded the crisis, how many times did we hear the bosses claiming (regrettably, often with the backing of union leaders) that we had an interest in helping them to boost their profits? How many times were companies "restructured" in those days - meaning cutting jobs and increasing the workload for remaining workers - in the name of improving the bosses' balance sheets? And what did we ever gain out of this? While a tiny layer of very wealthy capitalists piled up mountains of profits, we got rising unemployment and casualisation, together with a deterioration in our working conditions!
No, the working class shares no common interest with the capitalists parasites. Nor can the working class afford to fall for the "national interest" line that politicians peddle, as a cover for their attempts to defend the profits of British capital, necessarily at the expense of the working class.
If the present crisis has shown anything, it is that this crisis-ridden capitalist system is incapable of catering for the needs of society - whether here, in Britain, or on an international scale. The interest of the working class, indeed, the interest of the population as a whole, is the same in every country - it is to get rid of such a system, before it can cause further damage.