Saturday, March 21, 2015

Getting your money back

So a UKIP candidate has been caught trying to fiddle their expenses. Par for the course for politicians of course. But there is another aspect to this news story. The reason for the fiddle was apparently not personal gain but political principle: an attempt to "repatriate" some of the money the UK pays to the EU.
 
If you really believe that this money is not due but is a form of robbery, then this is not an unreasonable position to take. It's the same position some workers take towards shoplifting, seeing it as a "reappropriation" of a part of the wealth produced by the working class but taken from them by the capitalist class. A better way of doing this of course is collective political action to expropriate the whole capitalist class by converting the means of production from their private property into the common property of society as a whole.

It only remains to add that UKIP is wrong to think that it is "our" money that the EU is taking. What the UK government pays to the EU comes from the wealth of the British capitalist class which they took from the working class who produced it. So the dispute between the UK government and the EU is a case of thieves falling out over wealth originally taken from us.

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