The Case Against the EU

The response of the European Union to the 2007-9 global crisis lacked democratic solidarity, protection of individual rights and social renewal, exposing starkly the lack of proper democracy in the EU. Its forms of democracy were generally observed but not the content of them, and even the forms were sidelined by emergency measures.

National electorates had a free choice of whom they wanted in their parliaments but the parties thus elected had no freedom to choose their economic or social policies in response. Big business and big banks used an army of lobbyists to set the political agenda in Brussels and thus the equivalent policies by national governments. The electorate, especially the working class and those deprived of work, as well as small business owners, found themselves deprived of any voice in how they were governed—how they wanted to respond to the crisis.

Liberal democracy everywhere seemed blind to its own erosion, but the working class directly experienced the hardships of neoliberal EU policies which they had no means of influencing. The proletariat experience was that of a growing awareness of their loss of sovereignty, the issue that had motivated British trade unions, many in the Labour Party, and bold spokespeople like Tony Benn, to oppose the referendum of 1975 to Remain in the EEC—as the EU was then—after Heath had taken us in with no reference to the people's wishes.

Popular sovereignty is the working people and small business owners that rely on them having some influence on their living and working conditions. In ensuring the real participation of the lower class, liberal democracy has always been deficient and social democrats also failed to notice it. It has led to a growing sense of despair and powerlessness among poor workers who had seen their jobs and communities disappear. This was the cause of the mass protest visible in the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. To ignore that protest will only exaggerate their despair, and lead to the response often seen in the last century, and increasingly today in the European Union—fascism.

The decline of democracy and loss of sovereignty indicate the shift the EU was intended to generate in favour of capital and against labour, leading to a escalating insecurity of employment, income, health care, social provision,pensions, etc. Meanwhile capitalists rapaciously appropriated national wealth, thereby vastly increasing inequality. These trends were happening throughout the capitalist world ever since Thatcher and Reagan had made greed and therefore neoliberalism respectable, but the EU with its "Social Chapter" conjured by Jacques Delors to persuade workers and particularly trade unions to get onside—and succeeding—rather than trying to counter inequality failed adequately to confront its own crises—like that of the Eurozone—continued to favour capital and worsened labour conditions, wages and social action needed to mitigate the problems.

On top of these systemic failures of the EU caused by its self inflicted legal obligations to favour competition, the migrant crisis—exacerbated by the US and Nato's military bullying of nations in the Middle East and North Africa—gave right wing, fascist and cryptofascist forces a perfect excuse to spread fear of a threat of alien hordes taking over white peoples' countries in Europe. Islam was again posited as the historic enemy of Christian Europe. It was an ideal excuse for the right to claim to be the guardians of national sovereignty as guardians of Christian Europe and claim popular leadership on all matter political.

Yet in the UK, for long a multicultural country with a national fondness for foreign food—Indian, Chinese, Italian—the fear was not of the Asian or African refugees so much as the impoverished workers from Eastern Europe entering because it was one of the EU's Four Freedoms, that of free movement, whereby these poor people were willing to undercut the wages and conditions of those working people here who were already suffering poverty and deprivation themselves. The aim of the free movement clauses of the four freedoms set in the concrete of EU law is precisely to boost capital at the expense of labour by the legal enforcement of the right of poor Poles, Rumanians and others to move to wealthier countries in Europe to undercut local wages and conditions, thereby cutting capital costs and maximising profits.

Those of us on the Left advocating leaving the EU do so because it cannot be a liberal--meaning free and fair—democracy when it is conditioned by immovable pro-capital, pro-competition laws built into the roots of its legal structures. It is "neoliberal", a modern economic ideology hearking back to Adam Smith's description of early capitalism in "The Wealth of Nations", but devoid of Smith's precautions. Smith considered Liberal to refer to the freedom of the bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—to do as it liked economically. Neoliberalism differs from it in that the precautions that Smith foresaw as needed in liberal capitalism—because it could be foolishly rapacious and potentially unstable, needing those limits to be placed upon it by the otherwise liberal state—could be bypassed and just applied in exceptional circumstances. Marx went much further in the next century, explaining that the intrinsic instability of capitalism meant that it could not be permanently managed. It was a sort of house of cards that could be built with care, and repaired to a degree, but ultimately would collapse. The periodic crises we find in capitalism are the equivalent of a few cards falling out of place and needing attention, but eventually there will be a terminal crisis leading to social revolution and socialism, often preceded by imperialist wars to grab the resources of other people like a burglar robbing a house when needing fresh funds.

These crises keep happening but so far the capitalist class, with the aid of its lackeys in government, have been able to avoid the collapse except in certain circumstances where the might of world capitalism us subsequently exerted by sanctions or military intervention to overthrow the revolution. So neoliberalism ultimately is a synonym for blatant capitalism and has little or nothing to do with what most people would understand as "liberal". Of course, the Liberal Party is capitalist as was New Labour, the remnants of which are still in the Parliamentary Labour Party and doing their utmost to stop us from leaving the EU.

Germany is the ascendant member of the EU, initially making use of its industrial leadership and favourable trade balance to become the EU's creditor nation, enabling it to force EU debtor countries to accept internally oppressive policies like market liberalism and austerity as conditions of its financial bail-outs—Greece being the archetypal example. Such adverse practices causing income maldistribution and weak demand, impacting on our high streets, is a consequence of the devotion of the EU to its capitalist and neoliberal bases in the treaties. Governments have to try to solve the crises in the interests of capital and competition at the expense of labour and the social policies that could mitigate the effects. Of course, the proper answer is to reject neoliberalism all together, as the Corbyn led Labour Party proposed to do, but for which an exit from the neoliberal restraints of the EU is essential. The social democratic attitude within the EU is precisely what is not needed—and the reason for its rapid decline—as exemplified by Martin Schulz, leader of the German Social Democratic Party in 2017 who argued that austerity could be stopped and national investment promoted by aiming to have a fully federal United States of Europe by 2025 (achieving what Hitler in Germany and his henchman Moseley in Britain wanted before the last war). As if to emphasise the EU attitude to democracy, he wanted to expel member states who opposed his plan. The UK could still be the first if leavers refuse to accept the establishment bullying and propagandising that has saturated the country in the three years since the decision was taken.

The social democratic left in the UK seem to hold similar views to Schulz, defending the EU in the name of socialist internationalism. They imagine the EU offers simply a neutral structure of union government and administration able to adopt and apply any policies based on their merits. The EU is, to repeat it yet again, structured in law to favour capital and obstruct labour. Inasmuch as this means industrial capital, it is the German industrial capitalists who benefit. The EU is beyond left wing reform. The notion that some campaign to co-ordinate left wing governments in enough countries simultaneously so that they can enforce a programme of anti-neoliberalism is utter fantasy, for even if it happened, restructuring the Eu would still be an almost insuperable problem. It is not in the least likely because the "democracy" of the EU is designed to make it essentially impossible. What is possible is to leave!

The democratic deficit of the EU is the reason for the popularity of the right wing authoritarian parties across Europe. The paradox is that the EU's own authoritarianism would suit them, if they were able to control the EU bureaucracy. To counter this menace the policies hitherto proposed by the Corbyn government need to be followed, and real socialist internationalism would be to use them to influence the left across Europe, whose own leaders have sold out to neoliberalism. These are policies to favour labour, strengthen democracy, regain sovereignty, and offer socialist rather than purely capitalist recipes for change could be spread from a successful implementation here.

In short the left must reject capitalist conformity and recapture its traditional radicalism. Not to do so leaves that field open to the bogus offerings of the ultra right and cryptofascists to gain even more strength from popular support, only to turn to their real masters, the capitalists and their militarists, once they believe the left has been out maneouvred and the working class have been conned.

The meaning of Brexit

Brexit does not mean Brexit unless the UK is a sovereign state after leaving the EU. That cannot be the case if the UK government has been required to accept "full alignment" with the rules of the internal market and the customs union because of the Irish border. PM May claims that "full alignment" does not mean we have to accept EU rules and regulations but that we use our own ways of achieving alignment!

Mutually agreed standards obviously helps trade between nations, and those states which choose to trade harmoniously with each other will agree whatever standards assist the process providing that they do not make difficulties elsewhere. The EU already has trade agreements with other countries without making acceptance of EU rules a condition.

And free trade does not necessitate regulating trade union activities, worsening conditions and pay, pensions or redundancy provisions, nor obliging industries that are not involved in exporting to implement the same standards necessary for exporting to any particular country, including the EU. It is for our own government to set the standards that we want for our own people to be able to provide for their own dependents, without being beholden to foreign corporations or, indeed, our own!

It means the UK must not be regulated as a member of the single market, or as if it were such a member. It must be free to set its own policies for its own people and subject only to those people--the electorate. If we were to accept the so-called soft-Brexit of leaving the EU but remaining in the single market, our governments, of whatever hue, would be a hostage to decisions in Brussels by the EU bureaucrats and their corporate puppet masters.

EU harmonisation of labour, bankruptcy, taxation, and corporations is a delight to big business for whom the system is designed. The so-called Social Chapter, much vaunted by left Remainers, has repeatedly been proven to be bogus, even by the ECJ on the occasions when it has been appealed to, and in practice in all those particularly southern European countries that are suffering at the hands of the EU.

Moreover, although the emphasis os constantly on external trade and therefore all those businesses involved in it, it is the vastly larger number of small local businesses that will benefit most from not having to regulate their products to no purpose for them. They will, of course, be subject to whatever regulations an independent UK government imposes on businesses as a whole, but, free of the EU bureaucracy, the UK government could make appropriate provision for small non-exporting businesses should it wish to.

Blair promised us we should not be subject to the idiocies of the CAP during the New Labour period, yielding up some of the rebate on the £350m a week membership bill for it, and got absolutely nothing for it from the EU! Out of the EU we would be liberated from it, and could distinguish properly between needy smallholders and wealthy lowland multi-acre ranches.

As for foreign trade, given that we remained subject to EU control, what would be the incentive for external countries to trade with us when our regulatory framework was the same as that of the EU. They will think they might as well trade directly with the EU and so we might as well have remained a full member anyway.

A soft Brexit might as well be a no Brexit if it means remaining a member of the single market and subject to its decisions and not our own. A hard Brexit has always simply meant Brexit, plain and simple, then the agreement between free civilised countries over how relations between them including trade will be managed. That the EU trades with lots of the world's countries without the need for common regulations about almost everything proves that the obstruction of these negotiations by the EU is their usual tactic of trying to force a referendum reversal, as it did in other cases like Ireland and Denmark. No one on the left should be fooled.

Why Socialism is Effectively Impossible in the EU

It is because the EU Treaties not only contain procedural protections for capitalism, they also entrench substantive policies which correspond to the basic tenets of neoliberalism. 

The EU is based on two core functional treaties, the Treaty on European Union (TEU, originally signed in Maastricht in 1992) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, originally signed in Rome in 1958 as the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community). These lay out how the EU operates, and there are a number of satellite treaties which are interconnected with them. Mostly they have been repeatedly amended by other treaties over the years since they were first signed, so a consolidated version of the two core treaties is regularly published by the European Commission. The EU can only act within the competences granted to it through these treaties and amendment to the treaties requires the agreement and ratification (according to their national procedures) of every single signatory.

Reforming the EU to make Socialism Possible

The methods of Treaty amendment are laid down in Article 48 TEU. Under the ordinary revision procedure, Member States must agree by common accord the amendments to be made to the Treaties. Under simplified revision procedures (used to revise Union policies), the European Council also must act unanimously. In each case, changes must be confirmed by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. Crucially, irrespective of which procedure is used, only one national government can veto treaty change. All 28 governments would have to want to give up capitalism simultaneously to change the Treaties such that socialism is possible. In other words, the treaties are designed to make socialist change impossible

Privatising Public Utilities

The socialist position would be that Member States should determine how big their own public sectors are. But EU liberalisation legislation consolidates privatisation. Nationalising sectors such as gas, electricity, telecommunications and postal services is prevented by giving corporations the right of accessing any market. The sort of extension of public ownership brought in by the 1945 Labour government could therefore be prohibited because the new public enterprises would have to compete with private firms in a capitalist market, and that is not socialism! It is the “competitive public ownership” sought by Labour right winger, Anthony Crosland, trying to undermine the efforts of the Attlee government and the welfare state it introduced after 1945. The EU makes publicly owned companies act like private companies--eg run for profit not for public benefit like the NHS--particular when the Treaty provisions on state aids are taken into account. Similar legislation on railways is presently going through the EU institutions.

All legislation in the EU has to come from the EU Commission and be submitted to  the Council and Parliament. Supposing that a socialistic national government sought to introduce EU legislation to allow all Member States a free choice over the public or private ownership of their energy, postal, telecommunications and rail sectors, it has to rely on the Commission to make and submit the proposal. Under Article 352 TFEU the Council must act unanimously, so a single national government can instruct its minister in the Council to veto the proposal, and ALL 28 must therefore agree from the outset their support. Once again it is impossible.

TTIP

Assuming TTIP is agreed before the next UK general election, the prospects of the EU discarding it are even less likely. Assuming withdrawal is permissible, the TEU and TFEU do not make provision for how the EU actually does it. On the face of it, Article 352 TFEU with its unanimity requirement would have to be used, again allowing a single government to stop withdrawal from the TTIP. Again it is easier to do for a single independent state.

Facing up to the Constitutional Obstacles to Socialist Advance

Campaigners claiming it is possible to make the EU more left-wing, have the duty to explain it can be done in the face of EU treaty requirements of unanimity and common accord. At present, these requirements make socialism within the EU nigh on impossible. Those pretending there is a way forwards within the EU like Yanis Varoufakis, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 2025), and “Another Europe is Possible”--have to show what the practical means are they propose to use to make progress against the EU constitution without tearing up the treaties which amounts to all 28 Member States rejecting the EU as it is.

Let us leave now, while we have a reasonable chance.

D. Nicol, ‘Is Another Europe Possible?’ U.K. Const. L. Blog (29th Feb 2016) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/

The meaning of TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade and investment treaty being negotiated in secret between the European Union and the USA. TTIP negotiations were first announced by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address of February 2013, and negotiations between European Commission and US officials began that July. The talks are to be rushed through swiftly with no details entering the public domain, so they can be concluded before the peoples of Europe and the USA find out the scale of the TTIP threat.

Officials accept TTIP is not really to stimulate trade by removing tariffs between the EU and USA, as they are already minimal. Its aim, they admit, is to remove regulatory “barriers” which restrict the profits possible by both US and EU based transnational corporations, “barriers” that are actually standards and regulations important to us, such as labour rights, restrictions on GMOs and food safety rules, limits on the use of toxic chemicals, fracking, digital privacy laws, and financial and banking safeguards meant to prevent another bank-led financial crisis. TTIP also seeks to open public services and government procurement contracts to transnational corporations, threatening a wave of privatizations in sectors like health and education. These costs to us could not be higher.

Worst of all, TTIP gives investors a right to sue sovereign states, in customized private tribunals, for loss of profits from any of their governments' decisions that reduce corporate profits. This ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) puts transnational capital on the level of national states, thereby challenging or destroying popular democracy in both the EU and USA, and instituting a corporatocracy as the NWO!

So TTIP is not a negotiation between trading partners, but an attempt by transnational corporations to deregulate markets on either side of the Atlantic. EU and US citizens are equally concerned at the threats posed by TTIP, and civil society groups, trade unions, academics, parliamentarians, and others are uniting to prevent pro-capitalist bureaucrats from signing away valuable social and environmental standards. Join this resistance in an existing union or local campaign, or by starting one.

Free trade is an ideology of the powerful and can be a very effective means of engaging in lobbying. Critics are right to seek to prevent TTIP. For the real danger of TTIP is beyond well-known headings such as chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated meat and GM food—the attempt of commercial lobbyists to establish undemocratic procedures which would give corporations substantial influence, on two continents and thus worldwide.

www.rosalux-europa.info

A Warning From Canada

The free trade agreement with Canada has been under negotiation since 2009 and has now been largely completed—but not published. The EU Commission probably fears that the text of the agreement will be met with so much public outrage that TTIP negotiations would fail immediately and permanently.

The EU Commission has already experienced twice how dangerous public outrage can be—the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was blocked in 2012, as was the international investment agreement MAI in 1996. Thus, the EU Commission is silent on what it has negotiated with Canada. Until now, all we have are rough summaries and some excerpts that have been leaked. But even this meagre amount of information is sufficient to alert experts.

A principal witness is the Canadian lawyer Howard Mann, who has been dealing with investor protection agreements for more than 15 years and has co-operated with more than 75 governments on issues of investment clauses. In December 2013, Mann was commissioned by the Canadian parliament to assess the free trade agreement with Europe. His assessment was devastating—This agreement was the most “investor-friendly” contract the Canadian government had ever negotiated.

It can thus only be concluded that we cannot trust the EU Commission’s assurances that it wants to restrict investor protection. Instead, it is presumably going to enter into agreements which go far beyond prior agreements.

The agreement with Canada is, however, not merely a blueprint of what could be expected from TTIP. It is worse. The German Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) warned that TTIP would not even be necessary, should the agreement with Canada be ratified. For the US and Canada are both members of the NAFTA free trade zone. Put simply, a branch in Canada will be sufficient to rely on the investor protection clauses.

Nothing speaks in favour of free trade agreements, (http://www.rosalux-europa.info/userfiles/file/FreeTrade_UHerrmann.pdf) be it with Canada or the US. The risks are enormous, and the benefits minimal.

Talking Back against European Union Naivety

The Germans are wonderful people in my limited experience of them, and so are most other Europeans, and their parties are doubtless heavenly compared with the Tories, but it is all quite irrelevant to our being all members of the same EU international bund.

The EU was set up as the Common Market to be run by bureaucrats with a mockery of a parliament, and it still is 40 years later. Knowing that, and the rest that we now know, would any of us want to vote “yes” in a referendum today? We are told the EU is not imposed on us externally. We have freely joined it. Then why cannot we decide to exit it? Because it suits our ruling class, which, some say are worse than the ruling classes of our fellow Europeans, but our rulers are not so stupid they do not realize they are stronger while they have these virtually unbreakable ties with almost every other country in Europe, not to mention the threat of NATO looming in the background should anyone show dissent. It is harder to blow a hole in a big wall than it is in a small one, it is harder to untangle a large skein of legal threads than a small one. The longer we stay in it the harder it will be to get out.

And it seems we shall soon have another layer of courts to deal with, besides the ECJ, as a condition of the TTIP. If EU membership offers us any crumbs of benefits, the shackles and conditions imposed for them render them worthless.

In discussing our predicament in the EU, some light-hearted contributers, think it is fun to propose various hypothetical stances, but we actually are in a real situation, right now! It has never been the game some depict it as. While we remain in the EU, all thoughts of socialism are wishful thinking—the very rules of the neoliberal club exclude it. And for those who are loath to lose their European identity, we were Europeans before we joined the EU. If we leave it, we shall still be European, besides being British. That we would be rejecting the people of Europe by leaving the EU has always been one of the main false lines of the pro-European media. Lastly for those of a Marxist inclination…

The US–EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

The US–EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was agreed on at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June. It would be the world’s largest trade agreement, and Obama has declared it a priority for his administration, intended to be signed by the end of 2013. Over 98 percent of EU tariffs would be eliminated. The first round of the trade negotiations has now happened, and a further round will yet take place, but the earlier rounds were delayed by the US shutdown and the NSA spy scandal revealed by Edward Snowden.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information showing the extent of US espionage on allies abroad. EU diplomats weren’t satisfied with the answers they received in Washington regarding the spying on EU leaders by the US. France and other EU members said there could be no trade negotiation unless the US guaranteed it would halt spying operations on EU allies. Germany threatened to be particularly tough after the revelations of US NSA special surveillance on 80 European leaders and embassies as well as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, and implied it would want data protection guarantees as a condition for signing the treaty. US Secretary of State John Kerry amazingly said he thought the trade partnership is “separate from any other issues”. Germany with Brazil submitted a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly calling for an end to excessive electronic surveillance, and data collection methods. But the US has given no guarantees it will curb spying on its allies.

Non-tariff barriers such as different standards and definitions increase the cost of business, and, as NASA’s mix up of metric and imperial showed, can be dangerous. A car, crash-tested in the USA, need not be tested again in Europe. But limiting health, safety and environmental regulations to boost trade will leave the ordinary citizens worse off in these respects. Glyn Moody, journalist and author, says the US and EU are “putting the corporation above the nation”. Giant corporations like Monsanto would use the new trade agreement to sue the EU for billions of dollars if they refuse to import their products like GMO.

The agreement is being sold as a huge boost to trade with the potential to boost economic growth by $100 billion per year in reduced tariffs, lifting employment on both sides of the Atlantic, and disposable income. The extended bilateral trade ties (the Pacific one as well) will cover about 50 percent of global economic output, 30 percent of global trade and 20 percent of global foreign investment. UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said at the G8 summit the TTIP could add US$157 billion to the EU economy, over $125 billion to the US economy, and $133 billion to the rest of the world. The EU says (“Reducing Transatlantic Barriers to Trade and Investment”, March 2013) it means an extra $730 (€545) in disposable income for a family of four in Europe and an extra $875 (€655) per family in the US.

These figures however are largely conjectural. Moody rightly commented that people may not want to have their food less safe or environment polluted for the sake of more money. All that is certain is that transnational corporations will gain immensely in profits and in power to stop governments from regulating against them. Their profits are at the expense of ordinary workers, who will suffer a loss of quality as a result, and the supposed household gains, if they ever emerge, will soon disappear as the huge additional corporate power is used to squeeze wages as well as standards, leaving any gains to be accrued by the rich. Socialist legislation would be impossible, change would require revolution, and the country that took it on would then be treated as a pariah state like Syria is now, and will be forced into conformity. Menacingly, President Obama has called it the “economic NATO”.

In summary, Glyn Moody said that there would be fewer constraints and companies will benefit, but:

The public will pay in terms of regulation reduced protection and that is never calculated in these trade agreements. It’s always about the bottom lines of the big companies.