The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[blandy]

1 hour ago, Enda said:

Same thing with environmental laws or the CAP. Step forward and proclaim you want the Commission more powers to punish/fine the UK if it doesn't adhere to standards

I want the standards changed. I want the policy that favours mega farms and large wealthy landowners to be replaced / altered so that it does the opposite, so that it helps the little guy, not big agriculture. That's a fundamental change to policy.

your hypothetical suggestion of possibly giving more enforcement power isn't a change in policy, it's just a change in policing an existing policy  the opposite of what you were asking for.

Im disappointed that you asked what 3 policy should be changed, and how, and I've done exactly that and you've said I'm not hearing you. I don't mind disagreement and you post really intelligent stuff, so it seems a bit out of character.

[blandy]

Just as an aside as well, the movement every month is indicative of a wider problem. While it's not the biggest deal, it is expensive, unsound ecologically, wasteful of time, it requires 2 buildings and most of all shows that the European Parliament is incapable of recognising a need to "physician heal thyself". It's a really bad symbol of inefficiency, over complex arrangements, fudges and waste.

[Enda]

34 minutes ago, blandy said:

I want the standards changed. I want the policy that favours mega farms and large wealthy landowners to be replaced / altered so that it does the opposite, so that it helps the little guy, not big agriculture. That's a fundamental change to policy.

your hypothetical suggestion of possibly giving more enforcement power isn't a change in policy, it's just a change in policing an existing policy  the opposite of what you were asking for.

Im disappointed that you asked what 3 policy should be changed, and how, and I've done exactly that and you've said I'm not hearing you. I don't mind disagreement and you post really intelligent stuff, so it seems a bit out of character.

The not hearing me comment came off as crass, sorry.

Let me use an analogy. When I think of reform, I think big picture stuff. More "Let's abolish the House of Lords" than "Let's lower taxes by 5%". So when I hear reform I think more fundamental constitutional-esque changes like voting, rather than a fairly specific policy area like CAP. When I said "you're not hearing me", I should have said something along the lines of I wasn't clear what I was looking for.

[itdoesntmatterwhatthissay]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

I think that's, how can I put this? a mistake. Obviously how you vote is entirely up to you, but to say the "view of leave" (whatever that is) wasn't listened to is, um, not really credible.

In terms of the politicians, the likes of Farage, the tory little englanders - the Rees Moggs and all them - they've been banging on about leaving for yonks, and affected Gov't policy and actions enormously over the years. The press likewise has had a huge effect. So they were listened to.

In terms of ordinary people who wanted to leave - the main reasons seemed to be "Foreigners/Immigration, "Control", Money, and Sovereignty.

It's probably true that the effect of immigration on some places was ignored for too long. Though it's also true that the UK chose not to be more stringent on immigration, rather than being somehow forced or unable to because EU. And the UK chose to spend all its money on London and the South East, rather than being more even handed across the board. And anyway, in the past 2 or 3 years, immigration has been a major issue and people have been listened to.

The other 3  - money, sovereignty and control are frankly bollex, or in truth being in the EU is advantageous with regard to these. Money - we're better off in , by a mile. Sovereignty is spurious. the world is interconnected and sovereignty is pooled to an extent in or out of the EU - whether in terms of international treaties, NATO, the UN, trading standards and all the rest. When you ask people "what law are you looking to no longer have to obey the day we've left?" no one can answer.

I'd say if anything, leavers have been listened to too much in many regards.

I'm not an enthusiast for the EU - it is bloated and wasteful and things like the TTIP (which was canned eventually) were shockingly bad, but I voted remain, in the end, because more than anything I don't and didn't trust the effwits who've been wanting to leave to have a clue about what to do or how to negotiate leaving.

I'm willing to accept their voice was heard and it was something I unsuccessfully tried to research before the election. If you (or anyone) has any pointers I'd really enjoy researching them.
I did however find many policies that people weren't willing to discuss, on both sides of the argument. 

But still, I don't feel giving the main brexit campaigners a voice is giving 'leave' a voice. I don't think anyone can say the media comprehensively explored any policy area and vocalised the solution with boring but knowledgeable people or politicians helping to further the debate.
Instead we got experts predicting doom or boom and even remainer Cameron was in on it. Worse still, there was no clamour from any political side to stimulate the debate. Even now!

On your last sentence, yup, absolutely fair point and sadly very many effwits. 

[Enda]

1 hour ago, magnkarl said:

Re asylum seekers I think it damn well is a reform that needs to happen. The people who are now within the borders of the union in Italy can't suddenly become Italy's problem when, if an Italian citizen anywhere else in the EU is the problem of whichever member state they are in. This dodgy way of avoiding the problem just shows that the EU likes to hide behind the "you want more control" excuse when it comes to garnering support for dealing with the problem of a lifetime, however when it comes to posturing about things like trying to force member states to accept the Euro and other directives goes totally the other way.

Either a) we are a union where people accept the negatives and positives and share equally in the burdens, or Sweden tells everyone to eff off and leaves the union because they are being treated extremely unfairly. If Italy and Sweden gave all the migrants EU passports and sent them to Ireland or Strasbourg you and a lot of the people on the commission would have a complete other tone towards the problem. Let's gang up on the Visegrad faction of the EU instead though, they aren't sharing our common values. Emphasis on common, as soon as the problem hits one of the smaller countries that can be bossed around said values are no longer common. Helping out asylum seekers is clearly not a common value.

There is a hell of a lot of difference in shared burden in the union considering all the talk that we are hearing of the UK "not at all getting a good deal for both sides". What would you call the deal that Sweden is currently getting in a union that preaches equality between states?

1. I'll ask it again. Do you want to grant the Commission the power to forcibly make the UK accept asylum seekers that landed in Italy? Are you really okay with that, and all that it implies?

2. "What would you call the deal that Sweden is currently getting in a union that preaches equality between states?" I'd call it a messy compromise with no obvious solution. I'd call it a real world problem with so many complexities that phrases like "the EU should reform" are about as useful as saying "We should restructure the economy to work better for people." Nobody disagrees that last statement until you actually get into the meat and bones of it. What sort of restructuring do you want? Do you mean more generous rates of UB, or do you mean fully blown state control of enterprise? They're very different things, and there's no obvious right answer when you get beyond the slogans. Same with "reform the EU" imho.

[magnkarl]

51 minutes ago, Enda said:

1. I'll ask it again. Do you want to grant the Commission the power to forcibly make the UK accept asylum seekers that landed in Italy? Are you really okay with that, and all that it implies?

2. "What would you call the deal that Sweden is currently getting in a union that preaches equality between states?" I'd call it a messy compromise with no obvious solution. I'd call it a real world problem with so many complexities that phrases like "the EU should reform" are about as useful as saying "We should restructure the economy to work better for people." Nobody disagrees that last statement until you actually get into the meat and bones of it. What sort of restructuring do you want? Do you mean more generous rates of UB, or do you mean fully blown state control of enterprise? They're very different things, and there's no obvious right answer when you get beyond the slogans. Same with "reform the EU" imho.

1) I want the whole union to carry its load based on their relative GDP and wealth. My idea of things is that the EU is on the fence about what it's doing right now. Either EU states commit to the project and work fairly with one another or countries like Denmark and Sweden will leave. Scandinavians are much more direct than Brits are and won't hesitate to leave if this continues. If you think Holland had a close shave with a populist right party then look up the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party and the Norwegian Progress Party. They are all a direct result of the poor management of the way that Europe as a whole has handled recent conflicts and asylum seekers.

2) I'd say that a lot of the problem would be solved if everyone in the EU would contribute, Ireland and UK included. When we leave the open, liberal countries of the North to take the brunt of the load like this it shows nothing else than something I haven't seen before the EU where everyone thought of themselves. Is it fair that a country like Ireland for example that has had millions of people migrating to the US and Australia shuts its doors to people fleeing the same type of problem?

A lot of the most progressive type of social democracy was born in Scandinavia, if the current problem continues without people chipping in equally all three states up there will turn into closed countries that will want to leave the union. My prediction is that Denmark will probably be the second country in Europe to leave the EU, followed closely by Sweden. This will be a direct result of people saying "it's so nice of Sweden and Denmark to take all the asylum seekers in - we don't want them though!!"

It doesn't take many whispers of the Hanseatic league to turn a lot of people in the Nordics on to more close knit trading within Scandinavia, and if anyone is going to manage on their own it's Norway, Denmark and Sweden. They've got some of the most perfect balance of oil, industry, services and tech companies concentrated within a very small area of the world.

Edited July 17, 2017 by magnkarl

[LondonLax]

12 hours ago, magnkarl said:

1) I want the whole union to carry its load based on their relative GDP and wealth. My idea of things is that the EU is on the fence about what it's doing right now. Either EU states commit to the project and work fairly with one another or countries like Denmark and Sweden will leave. Scandinavians are much more direct than Brits are and won't hesitate to leave if this continues. If you think Holland had a close shave with a populist right party then look up the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party and the Norwegian Progress Party. They are all a direct result of the poor management of the way that Europe as a whole has handled recent conflicts and asylum seekers.

2) I'd say that a lot of the problem would be solved if everyone in the EU would contribute, Ireland and UK included. When we leave the open, liberal countries of the North to take the brunt of the load like this it shows nothing else than something I haven't seen before the EU where everyone thought of themselves. Is it fair that a country like Ireland for example that has had millions of people migrating to the US and Australia shuts its doors to people fleeing the same type of problem?

A lot of the most progressive type of social democracy was born in Scandinavia, if the current problem continues without people chipping in equally all three states up there will turn into closed countries that will want to leave the union. My prediction is that Denmark will probably be the second country in Europe to leave the EU, followed closely by Sweden. This will be a direct result of people saying "it's so nice of Sweden and Denmark to take all the asylum seekers in - we don't want them though!!"

It doesn't take many whispers of the Hanseatic league to turn a lot of people in the Nordics on to more close knit trading within Scandinavia, and if anyone is going to manage on their own it's Norway, Denmark and Sweden. They've got some of the most perfect balance of oil, industry, services and tech companies concentrated within a very small area of the world.

You are wanting the EU to reform to force countries to take more migrants so Sweden doesn't need to?

Brexit would have happened years ago if that were an EU rule.

Hungary, France, The Netherlands and others would have been quickly out the door as well.

[blandy]

15 hours ago, itdoesntmatterwhatthissay said:

I'm willing to accept their voice was heard ....
I did however find many policies that people weren't willing to discuss, on both sides of the argument. 

But still, I don't feel giving the main brexit campaigners a voice is giving 'leave' a voice. I don't think anyone can say the media comprehensively explored any policy area and vocalised the solution with boring but knowledgeable people or politicians helping to further the debate.
Instead we got experts predicting doom or boom and even remainer Cameron was in on it. Worse still, there was no clamour from any political side to stimulate the debate. Even now!...

There's a few different strings in there, aren't there?

The policies thing, I agree,. The two sides tended to focus on apocalypse if we stay/go and not put much of a realistic positive argument forward. And the media, by and large was either on one side or the the other, or in the case fo the TV tended to consentrate on personalities rather than exploring the truth, as you say..

But I'd completely disagree with " giving the main brexit campaigners a voice is [not] giving 'leave' a voice". The leave campaign was not only given a voice, it was given more of a voice and went largely unchallenged when it continued to spout utter lies.

[magnkarl]

3 hours ago, LondonLax said:

You are wanting the EU to reform to force countries to take more migrants so Sweden doesn't need to?

Brexit would have happened years ago if that were an EU rule.

Hungary, France, The Netherlands and others would have been quickly out the door as well.

No, I want everyone to take their share. Right now everyone who is not accepting their part of the problem is pushing countries like Sweden and Denmark closer and closer to the exit. No one has said Sweden shouldn't take any migrants - and if you look at history Sweden is one of the countries that have always taken in asylum seekers, from Norway in WW2 to Bosnians and Croatians during the Yugoslavian Civil War. It is not honest nor morally acceptable to me that everyone else just sits back and lets Sweden, Denmark, Norway (even though they're not part of EU) and Germany bear the brunt force of issues that affects millions of migrants.

One thing I don't understand is people who voted remain but still argues against us helping our fellow EU countries with the load. In a sense they are arguing against their own values.

[bickster]

30 minutes ago, magnkarl said:

 

One thing I don't understand is people who voted remain but still argues against us helping our fellow EU countries with the load. In a sense they are arguing against their own values.

1

Sorry, must have missed it. Where did this happen?

[itdoesntmatterwhatthissay]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

There's a few different strings in there, aren't there?

The policies thing, I agree,. The two sides tended to focus on apocalypse if we stay/go and not put much of a realistic positive argument forward. And the media, by and large was either on one side or the the other, or in the case fo the TV tended to consentrate on personalities rather than exploring the truth, as you say..

But I'd completely disagree with " giving the main brexit campaigners a voice is [not] giving 'leave' a voice". The leave campaign was not only given a voice, it was given more of a voice and went largely unchallenged when it continued to spout utter lies.

Fair point. They certainly did that over and over again. They, like remain, sat behind toxic narratives, but the immoral actions of some sections of leave had the opportunity to deal some hefty blows.

You're right that it's different strings, does one hear or listen to music?  But I don't feel the remain voice was heard as well as it should have been, even if more often than not it had weightier experts delivering conclusions (not assessments). 
That's my biggest frustration of the last few years, that we weren't able/willing to tell people why the EU was great, it was assumed that everyone already knew when policy wise. we don't. have a scooby

[LondonLax]

7 hours ago, magnkarl said:

No, I want everyone to take their share. Right now everyone who is not accepting their part of the problem is pushing countries like Sweden and Denmark closer and closer to the exit. No one has said Sweden shouldn't take any migrants - and if you look at history Sweden is one of the countries that have always taken in asylum seekers, from Norway in WW2 to Bosnians and Croatians during the Yugoslavian Civil War. It is not honest nor morally acceptable to me that everyone else just sits back and lets Sweden, Denmark, Norway (even though they're not part of EU) and Germany bear the brunt force of issues that affects millions of migrants.

One thing I don't understand is people who voted remain but still argues against us helping our fellow EU countries with the load. In a sense they are arguing against their own values.

That means you want to reform the EU to give it the power to force countries to 'take their share'.

That will drive a lot of countries out of the EU in my opinion. 

[magnkarl]

7 hours ago, bickster said:

Sorry, must have missed it. Where did this happen?

A few pages back you will see for example a pretty fervent EU supporter from Ireland claiming that it's great of Sweden to do what they do but he wouldn't want to have any asylum seekers come as part of a cross union initiative. It's the sort of thing that shows that both sides of this debate are cherry picking what is good and bad about the union. Either we're in it together, or we're not really in a union at all but more of a trade agreement with loose borders where each state, Sweden and Denmark in this case, fights for themselves.

A lot of people seem to think that all the negativity about asylum seekers in Sweden and Denmark is made up, but as I've been trying to say for a long time now there's a reason why these two countries have the strongest right populist parties in Europe together with Norway. When the percentage of asylum seekers accepted per capita is up to 5 times higher than the average of their fellow union countries problems will, and have ensued.

By all means let's sit down in a meeting with Sweden/Denmark and talk about moral obligations though, I'm sure that'll satisfy them that they're not being taken advantage of in any way. They're just very attractive to go to as an asylum seeker is all mi-lord, it has nothing to do with other countries of the union being islands and building walls.

Edited July 18, 2017 by magnkarl

[LondonLax]

59 minutes ago, magnkarl said:

A few pages back you will see for example a pretty fervent EU supporter from Ireland claiming that it's great of Sweden to do what they do but he wouldn't want to have any asylum seekers come as part of a cross union initiative. It's the sort of thing that shows that both sides of this debate are cherry picking what is good and bad about the union. Either we're in it together, or we're not really in a union at all but more of a trade agreement with loose borders where each state, Sweden and Denmark in this case, fights for themselves.

A lot of people seem to think that all the negativity about asylum seekers in Sweden and Denmark is made up, but as I've been trying to say for a long time now there's a reason why these two countries have the strongest right populist parties in Europe together with Norway. When the percentage of asylum seekers accepted per capita is up to 5 times higher than the average of their fellow union countries problems will, and have ensued.

By all means let's sit down in a meeting with Sweden/Denmark and talk about moral obligations though, I'm sure that'll satisfy them that they're not being taken advantage of in any way. They're just very attractive to go to as an asylum seeker is all mi-lord, it has nothing to do with other countries of the union being islands and building walls.

If swedes don't like their immigration policies they are able and entitled to change them. 

What you are suggesting is the EU commission should have more powers to override national government immigration policy. 

[bickster]

10 hours ago, magnkarl said:

 

One thing I don't understand is people who voted remain but still argues against us helping our fellow EU countries with the load. In a sense they are arguing against their own values.

1

 

10 hours ago, bickster said:

Sorry, must have missed it. Where did this happen?

 

2 hours ago, magnkarl said:

A few pages back you will see for example a pretty fervent EU supporter from Ireland ...

 

Is there any form of consistency to your arguments?

[snowychap]

[chrisp65]

[peterms]

This is an interesting piece on the failure of many on the left to recognise the ways in which the EU constrains the very policies they would wish to develop.  (Haven't included the references, it's long enough already).

Forbidden fruit: The neglected political economy of Lexit

Quote

Abstract

The EU was an engine of neoliberalism. Our departure opens up new political-economic horizons based on precisely those policy instruments and strategies the EU disallows, with ownership and control, democracy, and participation central to post-Brexit Left economic strategies.

 

The Brexit vote to leave the European Union has many parents, but ‘Lexit’ – the argument for exiting the EU from the Left – remains an orphan. Fully a third of Labour voters backed Leave, but they did so without any significant leadership from the bulk of the organised Left, especially the Labour Party.3 Once the most Eurosceptic of the European socialist parties, Labour under Kinnock, Smith, Blair, Brown, and Miliband became so incorporated into the ideology of Europeanism – the ‘secular faith that it is an ordained agent of human progress’– as to preclude any clear-eyed critical analysis of the actually existing EU as a regulatory and trade regime pursuing deep economic integration.4 This has had profound implications for Left thinking on economic policy and strategy. The self-same political journey that carried the British Left into its technocratic embrace of the EU has also resulted in the abandonment of any form of distinctive economics separate from the orthodoxies of market liberalism.

It's been astounding to witness the extent to which many Left-wingers, in meltdown over Brexit, have resorted to parroting liberal economics. Thus we hear that factor mobility isn't about labour arbitrage, that public services aren't under pressure, that we must prioritise foreign direct investment and trade. It's little wonder the Left ended up so detached from its base. Such claims simply do not match the lived experience of ordinary people in regions of the country devastated by deindustrialisation and disinvestment. Faced with concerns about wage stagnation and bargaining power, the response cannot be to dismiss them out of hand by pointing to standard economic models. Nor should those who find themselves on the sharp end of labour markets be answered with finger-wagging accusations of racism, as if the manner in which capitalism pits workers against each other hasn't long been understood. Instead, we ought to be offering solutions – including a willingness to entertain restrictions on capital mobility and trade. But, in adopting single market ideology, the Remain Left has eschewed such forays into the political economy. Instead, we get tired neoclassical orthodoxy disguised as liberal identity politics.5

Ceding Brexit to the Right was very nearly the most serious strategic mistake by the British Left since the 1970s. That the Leave vote immediately unleashed a carnival of reaction was, at least in part, the culmination of a gigantic self-fulfilling prophecy. The field was abandoned. Jeremy Corbyn himself was howled down for expressing anything less than unconditional devotion to Brussels. The votes of left-of-centre British voters proved decisive in determining the outcome of a referendum that was otherwise framed, shaped, and presented almost exclusively by the political right on its own terms. A proper Left discussion of the issues has been, if not entirely absent, then decidedly marginal to the national debate; part of a more general malaise when it comes to developing alternatives – something that has begun to be corrected only recently, under Corbyn and John McDonnell.

Only the political savvy of the leadership has enabled Labour to recover from its disastrous positioning post-referendum, whereby British socialism had become identified by a large section of its base as defender of the same destructive neoliberalism behind the crises in their communities. Incredibly, what seemed an unbeatable electoral bloc around Theresa May has been deftly prized apart, largely through direct engagement with the underlying economic issues in the course of Labour's extraordinary general election campaign. To consolidate the political project they have initiated, Corbyn and McDonnell must now follow through on the construction of a radically different political economy. In so doing, the place to look for inspiration is precisely the range of instruments and policy options that are discouraged or outright forbidden by the EU.

THE LEFT'S FAILED GAMBLE

The fact that right-wing arguments for Leave predominated during the referendum says far more about today's British Left than it does about the European Union. There has been a great deal of myth-making concerning the latter, propagated by a ‘massive establishmentarian intellectual enterprise’ funded – directly or indirectly – by the EU itself.6 Widely credited with bringing about both peace and prosperity, the EU's record can sustain neither claim.

The origins of European integration are deeply intertwined with colonialism and the Cold War. The Treaty of Rome was partly an effort to reflate European imperium after the humiliation of Suez.7 Jean Monnet's founding vision effectively involved ‘nothing less than integrating Europe around the nucleus of what would have become a military-industrial complex’ –Euratom, the European Defence Community, and the Multilateral Force –topped off by a dangerously unaccountable executive with ill-defined powers.8 Moreover, as Susan Watkins has pointed out, the idea that European integration delivered peace might raise eyebrows among, say, Algerians or Irish republicans, given the continuing record of neo-colonial violence, while EU foreign policy and the European armaments trade have played their part in creating a ‘widening arc of devastation that now surrounds it’, from Ukraine and the Balkans to Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.9

On the economy, setting aside Europe's twenty-year postwar reconstruction boom, the record is poor. Robert Schuman's 1951 European Coal and Steel Community was already presiding over crises in both industries by the mid-1950s. Decisive pressure toward market integration ‘came from a powerful neo-liberal culture aimed at the removal of national barriers to trade’.10 Prospects for Keynesian reflationary policies, or even for pan-European economic planning – never great – soon gave way to more Hayekian conceptions. Hayek's original insight, in The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism, was that free movement of capital, goods, and labour – a ‘single market’ – among a federation of nations would severely and necessarily restrict the economic policy space, whether fiscal, monetary, or regulatory, available to individual members.11 ‘Federation’, in Wolfgang Streeck's formulation, ‘inevitably entails liberalization’.12

Britain's entry into the common market took place, as Tom Nairn noted, ‘in a period of general political reaction’, after the fires of the 1960s had burned themselves out and conservatism was reasserting its dominance everywhere. Long-running debates on the British Left over the European Economic Community (EEC) suddenly had to be resolved ‘in less than six months, between May and October 1971’.13 Radical alternatives to entry were sidelined. In the first year of EEC membership, Britain's economic problems intensified, with the opening up of a £2 billion manufacturing trade deficit, undermining the government's strategy of export-led growth.14 Despite this, Labour's 1975 referendum resulted in a decisive defeat for the anti-market Left urging withdrawal.

For pro-EEC British socialists (as opposed to social democrats and liberals), the rationale for membership rested principally on the growing transnational character of capital, and the search for ways to counter this with international solidarity, on the one hand, and the capacity for supranational regulation, on the other. This was always a highly speculative exercise. ‘We know, indeed, that the common market is intended to strengthen the sinews and the world-position of European capitalism and its various ruling classes’, Nairn wrote at the time. ‘What we do not know… is whether, or in what ways, it may also strengthen the position and enlarge the real possibilities of the European working classes’.15

We know now; hardly at all. From its inception, the EU has been a top-down project driven by political and administrative elites – ‘a political system’, in the judgment of the late Peter Mair, ‘constructed by national political leaders as a protected sphere in which policy-making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy’.16 To complain about the EU's ‘democratic deficit’ is to have fundamentally misunderstood its purpose. The main thrust of European economic policy has been to extend and deepen the market through liberalisation, privatisation, and flexiblisation, subordinating employment and social protection to goals of low inflation, debt reduction, and increased competitiveness.17 European socialists, whose aim had been to acquire new supranational options for the regulation of capital, ended up surrendering the tools they already possessed at home. The national road to socialism, or even to social democracy, was closed. ‘In the name of the international requirements of modern capitalism’, Donald Sassoon observed, governments were required to ‘accept the abandonment of internal – that is national – regulation’.18

The direction of travel has been singular and unrelenting. Virtually every political economy suffered to some degree from ‘end of history’ delusions, but only the EU constitutionalised them in its treaties. The results, across a range of socioeconomic indicators, are plain to see. Income inequality, to take one example, has increased in Britain since EEC entry in 1973 – as it has in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The same pattern holds for Austria, Spain, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Workers’ rights – a supposed EU strength – are steadily being eroded, as can be seen in landmark judgments by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the Viking and Laval cases, among others. In both instances, workers attempting to strike in protest at plans to replace workers from one EU country with lower-wage workers from another, were told their right to strike could not infringe upon the ‘four freedoms’ established by the treaties – free movement of capital, labour, goods, and services. Meanwhile, any attempt to create a different kind of economy from inside the EU has been forestalled by European law. This has happened across a range of economic areas: trade, financial regulation, state aid, government purchasing, public service delivery – many of the things the Left might conceivably wish to do would likely fall foul of competition policy or single market regulation. ‘Let us stop romanticising European economic integration, seeing it as a democratic, social project’, Martin Höpner of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne has argued. ‘It is neither democratic nor social’.19

A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY

Given that the UK will soon be escaping the constitutionalised neoliberalism of the EU, what opportunities might this afford in the future? Adam Tooze has offered the following suggestive schema of the Brexit divide, sorting the politics of the Remain and Leave camps by their attitudes (pro- or anti-) toward London-based finance capital.

Means, Standard Deviations, and Percent Changes of Loneliness for Baseline and Intervention Phases

	Pro-City	Anti-City
Remain	Official Remain	Corbyn
Leave	Disaster capitalism	‘industrial policy’1

As Tooze admits, ‘the entire mapping of the forcefield of the Brexit debate offered by Remain was designed to exclude any reasoned debate about the bottom right cell’ – in large part because the liberal Left had, ‘either through calculation or emotional or political conviction’, arrived at the position that ‘no attractive option along those lines existed outside the framework of the EU’. Having ruled Lexit impossible beforehand, Tooze argues that it is now out of bounds afterwards, too.

The problem with this question-begging exercise is that, for the Left, the bottom right quadrant is where the actual solutions lie. It is here that we find state aid, industrial strategy, targeted investment, managed trade and capital flows, procurement linkages, heterodox monetary policy, public ownership, democratic planning – the whole panoply of instruments and measures that might really deliver structural changes to our economy capable of carrying us beyond neoliberal crisis and austerity. These options are only impossible for as long as sufficient numbers of people on the Left keep dismissing or ignoring them.

Three policy directions immediately stand out as promising terrain for exploration: public ownership, industrial strategy, and procurement. In each case, EU regulation previously stood in the way of promising Left strategies. And in each case, the political and economic returns from bold departures from neoliberal orthodoxy after Brexit could be substantial indeed.

While not banned outright by European Union law, public ownership is severely discouraged and disadvantaged by it. The EEC originally tolerated plural ownership forms. However, ECJ interpretation of Article 106 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) has steadily eroded this toleration. ‘The ECJ’, Danny Nicol writes, ‘appears to have constructed a one-way street in favour of private-sector provision: nationalised services are prima facie suspect and must be analysed for their necessity. This is patently not a neutral stance but a pro-private enterprise one’.20

Sure enough, the EU has been a significant driver of both privatisation and liberalisation, and this functions as something like a ratchet. For example, it is much easier under EU law for a member state to pursue the liberalisation of economic sectors than to secure nationalisation (or renationalisation). Article 59 (TFEU) specifically allows the European Council and European Parliament to liberalise services. Since the ‘80s, there has been a concerted effort to encroach on public ownership via single market programmes in the energy, transport, postal services, telecommunications, education, and health sectors.21

Britain has long been an extreme outlier on privatisation. All told, the UK was responsible for 40 per cent of the total assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996.22 Since then, the performance record of the privatised industries has ranged from underwhelming, to calamitous, to downright larcenous. At the same time, despite carefully propagated myths to the contrary, on the basis of the evidence available, public ownership is decidedly not inherently less efficient.23 Nevertheless, new models are certainly required. Increasing inequality, poverty, environmental degradation and the threat of catastrophic climate change, together with a general sense of an impoverished public sphere and loss of local economic control, are leading to growing calls for renewed public ownership. Many activists and thinkers engaged in its recovery and rehabilitation have already decided against a simple return to the top-down centralised public corporation of the postwar period. Soon to be free of EU constraints, it's time to explore the role of an expanded and fundamentally reimagined UK public sector.24

Labour's manifesto promise to take the railways back into public hands is a great start – and would be virtually impossible were Britain to remain in the EU. The 2012 update to the First Railway Directive, one of the pretexts for the privatisation of British Rail in the first place, essentially requires that multiple operators be allowed access to the same track competitively, stating that ‘[g]reater integration of the Union transport sector is an essential element of the completion of the internal market… The efficiency of the railway system should be improved, in order to integrate it into a competitive market’.25 State reservations of exclusivity for public monopolies on public interest grounds are held to a very exacting standard indeed.

Next up, industrial strategy. Britain's industrial production has been virtually flat since the late 1990s, and has still not recovered fully from the 2008 financial crisis, causing a yawning trade deficit in industrial goods.26 Any serious industrial strategy or economic planning process to address the structural weaknesses of the UK manufacturing sector will rely on ‘state aid’ in one form or another – the nurturing of a next generation of companies through grants, interest and tax relief, guarantees, government holdings, and the provision of goods and services on a preferential basis. Such measures run right up against EU law.27 ‘Since 1957’, Nicol observes, ‘the Treaty has sought to control subsidies from member states to industry’.28

Article 107 TFEU allows for state aid only if it is compatible with the internal market and does not distort competition, laying out the specific circumstances in which it could be lawful. Whether or not state aid meets any of these criteria is at the sole discretion of the European Commission – and courts in member states are obligated to respect and enforce the Commission's decisions. To make these decisions, the Commission has adopted an approach that considers, among other things, the existence of market failure, the effectiveness of other options, and the impact on the market and competition. In effect, state aid to stricken industries is permitted only ‘in exceptional circumstances’.29

For many parts of the UK, the challenges of industrial decline remain starkly present. The grotesque power that private corporations continue to wield over workers and communities through their locational decisions was on display in recent debacles at Grangemouth in Scotland, Redcar on Teesside, and Port Talbot in Wales. Entire communities are thrown on the scrap heap, with all that implies in terms of associated capital and carbon costs and wasted lives. It is high time the Left returned to the possibilities inherent in a proactive industrial strategy, both locally and nationally.

A true community-sustaining industrial strategy would consist, in the broadest sense, of the deliberate direction of capital to sectors, localities, and regions, so as to balance out market trends and prevent communities from falling into decay, while also ensuring the investment in research and development necessary to maintain a highly productive economy. The task of industrial strategy is not to prevent market destruction and creation, but to act as a balancing agent, such that a downturn or technological upheaval in one sector or firm does not jeopardise the stability and viability of entire communities or industries. Policy, in this vision, would function to re-deploy infrastructure, production facilities, and workers Left unemployed because of a shutdown or increase in automation.

In some cases, this might mean assistance in allowing workers or localities to buy up facilities and keep them running under worker or community ownership. In other, more difficult cases it might involve re-training workers for new skills and re-fitting facilities for work in a different industry. In either case, affected localities would be able to draw on public resources whose aim is to help secure the long-term stability of the community and to sustain national production in key sectors and industries. A regional approach might help launch new enterprises that would eventually be spun off as worker or local community-owned firms, supporting the development of strong and vibrant network economies – as in Italy's prosperous Emilia Romagna region – through technical, marketing, coordination, and other assistance.30 All of this will be possible post-Brexit, under a Corbyn Labour government.

Lastly, there is procurement. The economic footprint of local government and associated spending by institutions stewarding public funds is sufficiently large that, used more intentionally, it could stabilise local economies. This in turn would reduce corporate leverage and restore the capacity for democratic control. Under European law, however, explicitly linking public procurement to specific local entities or social needs is difficult. The ECJ has ruled that, even if there is no specific EU legislation concerning procurement activity, it must ‘comply with the fundamental rules of the Treaty, in particular the principle of non-discrimination on grounds of nationality’.31 In essence, this means that all procurement contracts must be open to all bidders across the EU, and public authorities must advertise contracts widely to bidders in other EU countries. In 2004, the European Parliament and Council issued two directives establishing the criteria governing such contracts: ‘lowest price only’ and ‘most economically advantageous tender’.32 As Christopher McCrudden has written, ‘The virtual disappearance of linkage in British local authorities by the mid-1990s is one of the clearest, but by no means the only example of the negative effect of procurement reform on social linkages’.33

Unleashed from EU constraints, there are major opportunities for targeting large-scale public procurement to rebuild and transform communities, cities, and regions. The vision behind the celebrated ‘Preston Model’ of community wealth building – based on the principles and work of our own organisation, The Democracy Collaborative, in Cleveland, Ohio, and being advanced in the UK by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) – leverages public procurement and the stabilising power of place-based economic anchor institutions (governments, hospitals, universities) to support rooted, participatory, democratic local economies built around multipliers.34 In this way, public funds can be made to do ‘double duty’; anchoring jobs and building community wealth, reversing long-term economic decline. The goal is not inward investment, which implies extraction, but rather a re-circulatory model in which we ‘take in each others’ wash’.35 It suggests the viability of a very different economic approach and potential for a winning political coalition, building support for a new socialist economics from the ground up in a way that is far less scary and more comprehensible in a municipal context than it can appear at the national level.

A RADICAL BREAK

A final, dramatic post-Brexit direction for the British Left might involve taking the opportunity of the City of London's potential loss of EU ‘passporting rights’ to vastly shrink speculative trading, and rebalance the UK economy away from finance and back toward real production and social provisioning. Britain has one of the most financialised economies in the world, with rentier concerns long predominating over productive investment or social need. Critics have increasingly posited a debilitating ‘finance curse’ from this massive and over-mighty UK financial sector, akin to the famous ‘resource curse’ afflicting economies endowed with too many valuable natural resources. We ought to seize this historically unique opportunity, to essentially throw the City under the bus.

London, at present, remains the largest foreign exchange market in the world, built on dollar-euro currency transactions that now amount to around $1.2 trillion per day – nearly 200 times nominal UK GDP. There are limited benefits and many costs to the rest of the economy from this outsized role for the City. As Jan Toporowski points out, ‘it is, of course, not production within the UK that these transactions are financing, or even trade between the United States and European Union as a whole, which these transactions exceed 400 times. Rather, it is the provision of liquidity against other assets, including financial assets, and derivatives themselves’.36 The result is asset price inflation, particularly of London real estate prices, and the hollowing out of other sectors of the economy. We urgently need a new approach to finance in the UK that puts public banking, credit creation, and productive investment at the service of the real economy and public priorities.

With the prospect of a Corbyn government now tantalisingly close, it is imperative that Labour reconciles its policy objectives in the Brexit negotiations with its plans for a radical transformation of the British economy and redistribution of power and wealth. Beyond the manifesto, the scaffolding of an emerging approach can be seen, based on alternative models of ownership – the most exciting economic programme to be developed by the Labour Party in 40 years.37 Only by pursuing strategies capable of reestablishing broad control over the national economy can Labour hope to manage the coming period of economic pain and dislocation that will occur as a result of exit from the European Union, not to mention the further shocks – inevitable, and therefore to be confronted squarely – stemming from any serious attempt to unwind neoliberalism.

Based on new institutions and approaches and the centrality of ownership and control, democracy, and participation, the British Left should be busy assembling the tools and strategies that could permit a radical break with market liberalism, with all the difficulties and dislocations that implies. In this way, departure from the EU could open up new political-economic horizons and serve as a catalyst in generating the profound transformation the country so desperately wants and needs.

 

[Xann]

Quote

 

Liam Fox has downplayed talk that a future US-UK trade deal after Brexit could be threatened by disagreements over chlorinated chicken imports.

The international trade secretary said the issue of whether the current UK ban on chlorine-washed poultry would be lifted was "a detail of the very end stage of one sector" of future talks.

The EU bans imports on health grounds but free market groups want a rethink.

Downing Street said any trade deal must work for both consumers and farmers.

Mr Fox is in Washington DC for two days of talks with US officials about the existing transatlantic trade relationship and how this will change once the UK leaves the EU in March 2019.

Although the UK cannot seal a free trade deal of its own with the US until it leaves the EU, both sides have expressed a desire to make quick progress and to scope out some of the barriers to an expedited deal.

The EU currently bans imports of poultry meat which is rinsed in chlorine and it will be up to the UK to decide, after it leaves the EU, whether this ban stays in place.

Environmental campaigners have expressed concerns that the UK's desire for a quick deal could pave the way for the ban to be lifted as well as a loosening of other restrictions on imports of unlabelled genetically modified (GM) foods and beef from cattle implanted with growth hormones.

Concerns about differing EU and US standards were among issues that resulted in the two sides failing to agree a comprehensive trade and investment partnership last year.

 

BBC

[magnkarl]

With Corbyn now saying he'd go for a hard brexit too I think all hope we have of staying in the EU is either nationalists from Scotland or weird gay bashers from N. Ireland. How sad is that?

The Lib Dems need to get out on the campaign trail now to build on this. With some luck they could push well up in percentage by the next election. They're the only English party left that could say "We told you it was a bad idea..".