The ERG and Theresa May have played Tory MPs like a fiddle

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I am surprised at how unintelligent some of the more sensible people in the Conservative Party appear to have been over the Remain-Leave Tory amendment that was voted on last night.

Jacob Rees-Mogg and pals know full well that Brussels, Dublin and most individual EU27 leaders will reject any piecemeal legal tweak to the Irish backstop. For the European Research Group the vote yesterday evening was a gift – a chance to increase the prospect of no deal by sending May back to negotiate something she cannot win. And she knows for certain she cannot win a legal change on the backstop without reopening the whole negotiation. It is barn-door obvious that she is counting on jittery MPs voting for her idiotic version of Brexit at the very last minute to prevent no deal. For now she can continue her sneaky and dishonest claim that she is not simply running down the clock.

Meanwhile, a minority of Labour MPs who fear for their Leave-constituency-voting seats at the next election (they are so wrong in their calculations, but that is another matter) have voted with tribal Tories, the ERG posse and the DUP against the reasonable cross-party Cooper-Boles amendment which could have either allowed another referendum or a more carefully constructed Brexit. Our graspy PM could get her silly deal through in the end. In the meantime, both she and the ERG have played Tory colleagues like a fiddle, helped along by some panicky and selfish Labour MPs. Poor show.

Elved Roberts
Leicester

May has no chance

Of course, the European Commission will not negotiate – it recognises that its authority is superior to that of member states and cannot be trumped in any circumstances. It just does not give credance to mandates from the parliaments of individual nation states. As Yanis Varoufakis so vividly recalls in his negotiations on behalf of the Greek government, he might as well have sung the national anthem in Swedish for all the difference it made. You can draw your own conclusions and mull over the implications.

Lyn Atterbury
Poland

You‘ve just got to love dear old Theresa. For months she‘s been telling us that her deal is the only one available until suddenly it‘s not. All this so that she can blame the EU for any problems ahead. This is such an entrenched Tory view of the world: everyone else is to blame, but never us.

Peter Russell
Germany

The government can end homelessness – why doesn’t it?

At some point today, you may have walked past one of the estimated 5,000 people who will sleep on the street tonight. As temperatures across the UK plummet, the situation facing rough sleepers becomes even more desperate than ever. In October, Crisis found that 449 homeless people had died over the the previous year on the country’s streets. Since then, an average of three homeless people have died every week.

As Arctic winds bring snow and sub-zero temperatures to British shores, a simple community-led initiative has launched in London and it is hoped that it will spread nationwide. A rail filled with clothing provided by people living and working in the area will offer warm clothes beneath a sign which says: “If you are cold, take one. If you can help, leave one.”

While the #TakeOneLeaveOne initiative may offer some respite for rough sleepers in the coming weeks, it can will not address the root causes of homelessness. What is needed is government action. In Finland, homelessness was eliminated through its “housing first” policy, which offers people who need them permanent places to call home. It shows that ending homelessness is not a utopian dream. All that is needed the will to act.

Stefan Simanowitz
London NW3

The world’s policeman

John Bolton is only too right in saying Mr Maduro can “no longer loot the assets of the Venezuelan people”: everyone knows that’s the job of the US.

Eddie Dougall
Walsham le Willows

A socialist government released from the EU’s shackles would have real power

Paul Mason sets out an alluring picture of a radically reformed European Union committed to neo-Keynesian polices.

He correctly identifies, as marking the institutionalisation of the neoliberal order, the succession of EU treaties that negated national sovereignty over economic policy.

But if he has genuine revolutionary aspirations he fails completely to set out how his utopian vision might be brought about in an EU which entrenches the power of capital in institutions and processes far beyond the reach of popular accountability.

Mason appeals to a European centre that has consistently demonstrated its attachment to neoliberal policies. But Labour has been revived where its centrist EU sister parties have withered because Corbyn undertook to respect the result of the referendum. Labour’s manifesto gave hope to the ravaged regions where neoliberalism has destroyed a productive economy.

With more than a dozen of Labour’s key manifesto commitments impermissible in EU law, a full Brexit is the only basis on which Labour’s renewal as a party of popular sovereignty is assured.

The project to put an aroused population of working people in power, rather than the corporate class of bankers, big business and bureaucrats in whose interests the EU was established, has its only real prospects of success within the framework of the sovereign nation state.

With a democratic mandate – to challenge the power of capital that private ownership confers and radically redistribute the wealth created by labour – a socialist government unconstrained by EU treaties would have real power.

Nick Wright, Communist Party
Croydon