Five days ahead of the Commons' vote on May's divorce deal, Westminster is like a hornets’ nest. More and more rival factions and contenders for May’s mantle are appearing by the day.
The latest game in town is "defeating" May in the Commons. Never mind that these “defeats" have no consequences in the real world and that none of them can, will - nor is even designed to - stop the Brexit chaos!
We are told that MPs have obliged May to publish her Attorney-General's legal advice on Brexit. But so what? Weeks of wrangles just to get the government to reveal its hand, when it is already supposed to be answerable to MPs?
As to the "great victory" that some MPs boast of having "won", because they will now be able to lodge amendments to the government's future Brexit plans - what difference will this make, since these amendments won't even be binding on May?
So much for parliamentary "sovereignty" - the same sovereignty that parliament was supposed to regain, thanks to Brexit, according to the Leave camp. It’s all just a farce, in which the working class has no stake whatsoever!
The bosses' chess game with jobs
Meanwhile, having applauded May's divorce deal as a "lesser evil", the bosses are increasingly throwing their weight into the Westminster fray.
Toyota was the latest company in a long series, last week, when it stated that rejecting May's deal would cost the company £10m/day - implying that a proportionate number of jobs would be at risk.
This came after Vauxhall's new owner, PSA, announced another 241 job cuts at Ellesmere Port (on top of 650 others, earlier this year). Others in the car component industries have already announced plant closures: like Michelin, in Dundee, and Schaeffler, in Llanelli and Plymouth.
At the same time, almost all car manufacturers - from BMW and Ford to Honda and Jaguar Land Rover - have plans for extended shutdowns, layoffs or short-time working over the coming months. Jaguar Land Rover has just said that 500 workers will be laid off at its Solihull plant, while its Castle-Bromwich facility is working 3 days a week.
Are all these attacks due to Brexit? Probably not. Bosses are gearing up to protect their profits by cutting costs in anticipation of an exacerbation of the world crisis. They are also responding to slumping car sales - due to the fall in living standards which cuts purchasing power and the phasing out of diesel engines. But this doesn't stop them from using Brexit as a cover to cut workers' conditions.
The fact is that the bosses increasingly expect to get away with murder when it comes to cutting jobs and conditions. This was how zero-hours contracts spread to the whole economy, including big production factories, through the use of agencies and on-site contractors. And now they are trying to push their parasitism even further, by using the pretext of Brexit.
They need to be stopped!
But it's not too late to stop the bosses from playing havoc with our jobs. Nor is it too late to stop their trustees in government and Parliament from playing politics with Brexit. And it’s not too late, either, to stop our living standards from going down the drain and vital public services from collapsing.
Everything in this capitalist jungle is a matter of balance of forces. But the capitalist class is just a mouse that roars. It's tiny, it produces nothing, it's parasitical and it’s weighed down by wealth. Just because it legally owns the economy, because it made the law for its own benefit, it thinks it can intimidate workers into subservience - despite the fact that we produce all the wealth in this society!
Well, there's no reason for us to allow them to get away with this. The bosses shed tears over their "losses" (real or imaginary)? Fine, but why should workers pay, when we've never gained anything out of the "fat" years? Let companies and their shareholders empty out their bulging wallets first: and let all available work be shared among all available hands, without loss of pay!
And talking about wages, enough of the past decade of wage freezes and enough of today's price inflation! We need a big wage increase and, what is more, we need wages to be automatically increased as prices go up. If this can be done with train fares, it can be done with wages too!
As to the catastrophic collapse of the NHS, social care and social housing, they have a common solution. Instead of singling out foreign workers, EU and non-EU, as a potential burden on society, the vital role they've always played in building homes, manning hospital wards and caring for the aged, should be recognised once and for all - we need them to work and live in Britain, alongside us, as part of our class.
What we, the working class, need to create, is a "hostile environment" against the capitalists and their profiteering. Until we feel strong enough to get rid of them altogether!