I’m not going to disagree, just wanted to note that our free trade agreements here in the US did not have the mobility aspect to it, and it’s caused serious problems. I certainly don’t think that the EU structure is perfect, just that it has an aspect to it that we don’t have here. Borders - all borders - are political creations, which may or may not have historical precedents. But because they are political, they can be changed, moved, or even loosened to various degrees. I think that the free movement of capital, but the restriction of the movement of people is probably a larger problem that should be dealt with and allowed for. but yes, including infrastructure for the freer movement of people is a good idea and should be considered as part of the solution. As you note, the movement of capital alone can lead to exploitation of various kinds.
Yeah - this!
I believe in free movement of people, and the underlying principle of investing in less wealthy areas to provide them the means to grow and support communities (give a man a fish etc).
What the lack of funding / infrastructure (doctors, education, housing) did was allow indigenous tribes (heh) to become easily inflamed by non-supportive media. That was easy, and wrong.
But sigh - it sold newspapers.
Well, if large changes to the previously agreed upon form of government require a general consensus (i.e. a supermajority of voters or their representatives) then this crap is pretty rare. But that is the sort of thinking that leads to a written constitution and possibly even rights which Parliament can’t overturn on a whim. That would be un-British or something. Just because the rest of the civilized world has decided that it is a really good idea…
[quote=“clevername, post:83, topic:81177, full:true”]But that is the sort of thinking that leads to a written constitution and possibly even rights which Parliament can’t overturn on a whim. That would be un-British or something. Just because the rest of the civilized world has decided that it is a really good idea…
[/quote]
While Australia does have a written constitution, it’s pretty much entirely concerned with setting the terms of interstate trade.
And as for why not everyone is a fan of enumerated rights:
The Lisboa treaty?
You mean, the treaty that was slightly reworded and passed by parliaments despite having been soundly rejected by the two countries that were given a proper opportunity to vote on it (France and the Netherlands) when it was called the European Constitution.
Yeah, a fine example of how respectful of the democratic process is respected by those in favor of the EU (which is NOT Europe, I must say).
you’re mixing two different topics. the adoption of the treaty was embarassing and the back and forth of council and member states governments (in a Venn diagram nearly identical and back then the decisive powers) unworthy. the result is very different, the directly elected EP gained veto power for all EU decisions.
Part of the problem of the EU is that it has given mobility and social mobility largely to educated people. In an ideal world, people with the ability to acquire skills would gravitate to places where those skills can be used, and people who lack that ability would gravitate to places where the cost of living was lower, and life was perhaps less complex. The first part happens but the second part usually doesn’t. Given the UK social security budget, you can make a case, if you don’t take people’s wishes into account, for relocating people like dementia patients to countries like Romania, along with the budget. Boost to Romanian economy, and Romanians can get jobs in care without having to move to the UK, keeping their communities together. A lot of elderly patients in dementia wards and the like are rarely seen by relatives - in fact, when my mother was in a home, the mental health nurse asked us not to visit too often because she could be agitated for days afterwards. Nowadays we have video conferencing and a whole lot of tools to monitor patient treatment remotely.
The main objection to such ideas is the existence of the get rich quick businessmen who hang around government schemes looking for loopholes to exploit.
I’m guessing that Wimbledon audiences are heavily pro-Remain, and a lot of them have seen investments tank.
Regardless of how one feels about the UK government’s decision to reject the second petition, the commonplace idea, echoed again and again in this thread, that there is no left case for Leave, or that voters who did so were “stupid” or lied to, needs to be re-examined. Luckily, there are already a number of voices who have articulated the arguments in full.
But first, I just want to point out that the repulsive elitism on display in this thread, the idea that the problem with the referendum is that the voters were too stupid for democracy, suffers from the same deranged, far-right impulses as the speakers’ supposed adversaries in this debate. There is no room for this kind of nineteenth-century style sneering at the common people in a debate that takes the idea of democracy seriously.
That said, the slim referendum margin highlights the main problem with democracy, namely that it tramples all over consent, in fact does not take the concept of consent into account at all. Historically, the absence of consent has been one of anarchism’s principle critiques of democracy as such, which alone provides no protections for oppressed or out-voted minorities. As Moxie Marlinspike and Windy Hart argue,
The concept of the “majority” is particularly troubling. By always accepting the will of the majority, democracy allows for majorities to have an absolute tyranny over everyone else. This means that in the winner-take-all context of democracy, minorities have no influence over decisions that are made. This is even worse than it seems, since the “majority” in any given situation is usually not even the majority of a population, but actually just the largest group of many minorities. For a stable and consistent minority, this ever-present scenario means that democracies provide no more freedom than that of despotism or dictatorship.
Now, returning to the idea of a left case for Brexit, Paul Mason summarizes the position quite succinctly, and I believe that it suffices to simply reproduce his brief argument in full:
The leftwing case for Brexit is strategic and clear. The EU is not–and cannot become–a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites, and organised crime. It has an executive so powerful it could crush the leftwing government of Greece; a legislature so weak that it cannot effectively determine laws or control its own civil service. A judiciary that, in the Laval and Viking judgments, subordinated workers’ right to strike to an employer’s right to do business freely.
Its central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era. A Corbyn-led Labour government would have to implement its manifesto in defiance of EU law.
And the situation is getting worse. Europe’s leaders still do not know whether they will let Greece go bankrupt in June; they still have no workable plan to distribute the refugees Germany accepted last summer, and having signed a morally bankrupt deal with Turkey to return the refugees, there is now the prospect of that deal’s collapse. That means, if the reported demand by an unnamed Belgian minister to “push back or sink” migrant boats in the Aegean is activated, the hands of every citizen of the EU will be metaphorically on the tiller of the ship that does it. You may argue that Britain treats migrants just as badly. The difference is that in Britain I can replace the government, whereas in the EU, I cannot.
However–incredibly–Mason concludes that, because Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are dominating the campaign in the media for Leave, he sides with Remain, despite this ominous conclusion:
All this suggests that those of us who want Brexit in order to reimpose democracy, promote social justice and subordinate companies to the rule of law should bide our time. But here’s the price we will pay. Hungary is one electoral accident away from going fascist; the French conservative elite is one false move away from handing the presidency to the Front National; in Austria the far-right FPÖ swept the first round of the presidential polls. Geert Wilders’s virulently Islamophobic PVV is leading the Dutch opinion polls.
“As if,” responds National Chair of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) Dave Nellist, “the marginal difference between David Cameron and Boris Johnson, in the context of all Paul has identified, is in any way fundamental.” Indeed, as Nellist points out, “To Paul’s list could be added the EU drive for market liberalisation, or outright privatisation, of services such as rail, post, energy and water, as well as the threat to a publicly owned NHS that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) poses.”
Writing for the New Statesman, John King adds, “The EU has a president and a militarised police force in EUROGENDFOR, is pushing for its own army, and has helped stir up the crisis in Ukraine with its expansionism. Its single currency has caused untold misery for tens of millions of working people across Europe, yet there is no apology, just an arrogant demand for greater powers.” Indeed, as European Commission president José Manuel Barroso opined in 2007: “I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire.”
Guardian reader Malcolm Pittock writes at length about the EU’s imperial dimensions:
As a lifelong anti-capitalist and pacifist who works to promote a just and peaceful world, I can assure [Guardian writer] Owen Jones that there is a strong ethical case for leaving the EU. Whatever the benefits it showers on its members, it is clearly linked to NATO through its common defence and security policy and can be described, not unfairly, as the civilian wing of that military organisation. NATO serves the purposes of US militarism (that is why a US general is always in charge) and the EU gives diplomatic support to those aims through the imposition of sanctions. It also has a major role in the promotion of neoliberal capitalism (look at Greece and TTIP), of which the US is the main sponsor and beneficiary. The evidence of the subservience of the EU to US aims is shown by its support for the siege of Gaza.
Jones and his friends try to persuade themselves that they can turn the present EU into something different. The EU is heavily insulated against ideological change. If the EU parliament were the supreme EU authority, Jones might have a long-term case. But in reality EU policy is not decided by the votes of the citizens of the EU but by a governing oligarchy. Only outside the EU would there be any chance of a UK that tried to promote a just and peaceful world.
Still, “One of the odd things about British leftists’ support of the EU,” writes Richard Tuck with Dissent Magazine, “is that when they are invited to support a very similar institution with a different set of members, they resolutely refuse to do so. Many people on the left now oppose both the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).” Indeed, as Boing Boing itself reported in March of this year, the USA used said TPP to successfully sue India in WTO court for its Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, arguing that the project would harm suppliers in the USA.
On a fair review of the left case for Leave, it is simply preposterous to claim that the result comes from ill-informed, “idiotic” impulses. On the contrary, perhaps the liberal Remain backers must now reflect on how such vitriol in fact diagnoses their own shortcomings.
To begin with, there are a number of main topic over which the EU parliament has no say, especially since that body cannot choose whatever it is it will vote on (and let’s not delve too deeply in the way the machine gun voting sessions take place).
That being said, if you believe the way that system was put into place has no impact on how it works thereafter, I’m afraid you are being deluded.
You’ve presented some arguments in favor of leaving the EU, but no evidence that any of these arguments were the actual reason people voted to leave. I assume (or hope) that some credible people are frantically studying the vote to see why in fact people voted the way they did, but the anecdotal evidence in so far is that the votes were done by many as an emotional rail against the way the system has treated them economically, and by many others as a reaction to immigration. These are stupid reasons.
As an American (albeit one who lived for years in a part of England that voted strongly Leave) I’m not sneering at the common people. I’m sneering at the English people. If we in the US vote for Trump for president, the English will have the right to sneer right back, and I for one will not go into convoluted indignant denial over how incredibly stupid we were to vote that way.
This is a nomal modus operandi for most central banks, they are generally independent and have as policy to enable monetary stability, typically with an inflation rate target of about 2 %*. Politically dependent central banks with economic policy functions are relatively rare and imo not the best idea. Since 2008 the ECB tries to widen the envelope and fools around as political player with an economic agenda (see Greece), so far with disastrous results.
The stupid stability pact. The idiotic rule should have never be included, it was (and is, and will be) too simplistic to survive contact with the real world.
We can thank Theo “eyebrow” Waigel for this, he manhandled the clause into the treaties.
I define myself as left, see problems with the EU and still believe it’s a good idea. Now what?
This was part of the original constitution agreement, to my regret this one failed.
* not very successful since all the financial meltdowns in the last decade…
Lexit was connected to white/cisgender/heterosexual privilege.
Both sides of the argument were neo-liberal in nature. The problem with voting leave was that the two high profile campaigns appealed to fascists. I felt that the only way I could vote was remain, and seeing the post referendum increase in visible fascism I feel that was the right decision.
As I have pointed out before, I have been personally targeted by fascists in the past because of my gender identity, resulting in me being chased out of the small city I grew up in. I am now really worried that it is going to happen all over again.
As far as anarchism is concerned, being in or out of the EU is completely irrelevant. I doubt that a hypothetical post-revolution Britain would remain part of it, so why side with fascists for the Pyrrhic victory you have now?
I don’t have any illusions about the prospects of an anarchist revolution in any English-speaking country (perhaps in all of the West) within my lifetime. I included the quote from the Anarchist Library to highlight, if only in a small way, how ridiculous a 52-48% result is, and how it underscores the problems with democracy as such–without condescending to the voters themselves or painting them with a broad, straw-man brush.
That said, if a fascist supports something, that doesn’t always make it wrong. In the past, fascists opposed Stalinism, but so did left communists and anarchists, virtually everywhere these tendencies gained power. We can see similar tripartite political formations in the Syrian conflict, with Assad, regional Arab powers, Kurdish anarchists, and Islamist rebels all vying for control. Likewise, in the case of the Leave result, the people supporting it are clearly a mixed bag, not a homogeneous blob.
As several of the above quotes that I provide argue, there’s really no hope of reforming the EU in a positive, left-friendly way, so the move toward greater self-determination should be considered a positive one. I think that this statement from Sean Bell with Jacobin sums up the question of the EU as it pertains to the left quite well: “As it stands, no single nation, sovereign or otherwise, has the ability to reform the European Union into anything resembling a progressive institution, or render it irrelevant with a viable left-wing alternative.” Incidentally, his essay discusses some interesting possibilities for the post-referendum British left, albeit from a nationalist perspective that I find somewhat tiring.
Returning to the issue of fascist support for Leave, when the left has to struggle with fascists over political territory, that is a good thing. When social peace prevails, that is when the left is losing most badly (like the Spanish pacto del olvido). That said, gender violence was bad before the referendum, and I think that it would be a mistake (not to mention speculative) to argue that a Remain result would have discouraged the UK’s intensifying fascist movement. As with many other European countries, fascism is on the rise again, and falling back on traditional political institutions isn’t going to stem the tide.
Then can those people who voted leave and are anti-fascist speak out against the fascists, instead of attacking those who voted remain? I’ve been looking for them, i need them to exist (and so do many others), but they aren’t anywhere to be seen.
There’s going to be a House of Commons debate on the referendum on the 5th September at 4:30PM. I can’t see Article 50 being triggered before then.
do you have a summer break of the house(s)? the German Bundestag is AFK since last week (and they will not meet again until september. slackers.) and afaik the EP has a similar long out-of-order period.
Isn’t that just because they have to, by the rules of the petition system they set up? They’ve already said what the result of the debate will be.
Aye, they get a lovely long holiday over the summer, which at least means they can’t fuck anything up while the weather’s nice (well, ostensibly nice. We are talking the British Isles here).
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
