I’d say comparing Brexit to the Miners’ Strike is bonkers.
If you read carefully what Alex Gordon writes, his point actually seems to be that the Brexit referendum was more revolutionary an act than the Miners’ Strike, as the miners were defeated while the Brexit referendum delivered a “catastrophic defeat” for the ruling class:
“The miners, and indeed the entire working-class movement, were defeated by the state onslaught planned and executed by the Thatcher government. The EU referendum on June 23 2016 was a catastrophic defeat for the principal strategy of British state monopoly capitalism, from which a decade later it has not recovered and shows little sign of being able to do so.”
The Miners’ Strike was a sustained collective action on the part of a significant section of the working class for its class interests, fought under a class leadership (one which had shortcomings, but nevertheless was a class leadership). It did have revolutionary implications, though in the end it was defeated.
The Brexit referendum divided the working class. It was led, on both sides, by bourgeois, capitalist elements; and stirred up reactionary ideas on both sides.
The referendum result was certainly a defeat for the main wing of the ruling class, but it does matter at whose hands they were defeated. They were not defeated by a movement of the working class putting forward its own interests, but by an unnatural coalition led by bourgeois elements, uniting behind it some sections of the working class; petty-bourgeois, reactionary racists; etc.
Alex Gordon makes some interesting points about the breakdown of the agreement between Anglo-US capital and Franco-German capital, but then ends by saying:
“The question is whether the working class and those who are crushed by the interests of the financial oligarchs of the City of London will choose to live in a new way.”
The democratic vote to leave the EU in 2016 disoriented Britain’s ruling class who can no longer rule in the old way. The question is whether the working class and those crushed by financial oligarchs of the City of London will choose to live in a new way.https://t.co/z0Aj8ECQGQ
— Alex Gordon #JoinAUnion (@alexgordon4me) June 23, 2026
This sentence should be read together with the reference at the beginning to “British state monopoly capitalism”.
Anyone who knows anything about Britain’s Road to Socialism (BRS) – the Stalinist programme that expounds the two-stage position of the CPB – will realise that he is in fact advocating an alliance between the working class and the mythical ‘national bourgeoisie’, meaning those sections of the ruling class who are “crushed by the financial oligarchy”…
You don’t believe me? Read the BRS in its latest edition:
“Other people too, including those in the non-monopoly section of the capitalist class, can become aware of the destructive and divisive character of monopoly capitalism, coming to see it either as the cause of problems in society or as the system which obstructs their solution.”
And further down it advocates “an anti-monopoly alliance, in favour of redeveloping Britain’s productive economy and combating the anti-democratic use of state power against the interests of the great majority of people.”
To be noted: in this article, a feature in the Morning Star by the CPB general secretary, a main political statement therefore, the word “socialism” is not even mentioned.
