Maybe Obama had a deal ‘on the T-Tip of his tongue’ ..

Maybe Obama had a deal ‘on the T-Tip of his tongue’ …

There is no doubt that Barack Obama is the coolest president ever. That is why him trashing the idea of Brexit has infuriated the right-wing Leave campaign. It made Boris Johnson so angry that his buffoon mask slipped: he said that President Obama’s Kenyan heritage gave him an “ancestral loathing” of Britain. You know you’ve crossed the line when Nigel Farage thinks you’re a bit too racist.

On his official visit to Britain, Obama commented that, if it left the European Union, the UK would be at “the back of the queue” to negotiate trade deals with America. He didn’t mention any particular deal, but there is a big one being negotiated right now. Maybe its name was on the TTIP of his tongue but he just forgot.

TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is the treaty which will give corporations more rights than human beings, allowing vulture capitalists to enforce their right to exploit, pollute and extract wealth from the rest of us in special courts to which we have no access. This would include the right of American health care corporations to bid for NHS contracts – whether we like it or not.

Remain campaigners are jubilant that Obama has demolished a notion that right-wing ‘Eurosceptics’ have based their strategy on for decades – that Britain can rely on the US as an ally and economic counterweight to the EU. They might do well to consider that the US capitalists just prefer to take Europe into TTIP with one swallow.

Unlike the “official” leave campaign, socialists oppose the EU because it stands in the way of genuine international solidarity between working class people across the globe – solidarity in action against austerity and capitalism.

Dave Murray