Europe Archives - Page 2 of 4

Posted in:

‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’

by Anthony Coughlan 30 March, 2018 1 Comment

‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’ is the title of what will surely come to be seen as one of the more important social science works of our time (Pluto Press, 2017, €23). In it Australian economics professor William Mitchell and Italian political theorist Thomas Fazi reconceptualise the Nation State as a vehicle for progressive change. They issue a highly topical challenge to progressives, leftwingers and genuine liberals to come to the defence of national sovereignty and not cede that issue to the populist right. For the thirty years from the end of World War 2 to the 1970s a left-oriented Keynesian consensus held sway in the developed world. Then, for reasons this book describes, the mainstream Left as represented by the mass Labour and Social Democrat parties in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere, and by the Democrats in the USA, ideologically disarmed themselves before rampant neoliberalism. Key neoliberal propositions were that national sovereignty had become irrelevant in today’s increasingly complex and interdependent international economy. Globalisation had made individual States increasingly powerless in face of market forces. The growth of multinational companies and the internationalisation of finance had eroded the ability of national States to pursue progressive social and economic policies and deliver prosperity for their peoples. Consequently the only hope of meaningful change was to “pool” State sovereignty and transfer it to supranational institutions such as the European Union, thereby regaining at supranational level the sovereignty that has been lost at the national level. Many who regarded themselves as progressive and on the Left came to share these views, stressing how neoliberalism has involved a retreat or a hollowing-out of the State, which found itself increasingly powerless in face of market forces. To cover their abandonment of criticism of capitalism as a social system, progressives and Left parties generally focused instead on issues such as racism, gender, homophobia, multiculturalism and environmentalism – social marginality being no longer described and opposed in terms of class but rather in terms of identity. This book analyses the political timidity, ideological opportunism and intellectual fallacies involved in this surrender. For example the decades of neoliberalism have seen little or no decline in State spending as a percentage of GDP – a key measure of the strength of the State in society. Even supposedly neoliberal governments such as Reagan’s or Thatcher’s did not reduce overall public spending, although they altered its composition, for example spending more on weaponry and less on welfare. As the authors point out, “even though neoliberalism as an ideology springs from a desire to curtail the State’s role, neoliberalism as political-economic practice has produced increasingly powerful interventionist regimes.” Neoliberalism has entailed extensive and permanent intervention by States and their Governments: for example the liberalization of goods and capital markets, the privatization of resources and public services, deregulation of finance, the reduction of workers’ rights in collective bargaining, cuts to social programmes and the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital at the expense of the middle and working classes. The authors show how neoliberal ideology, in its official anti-State guise, has been little more than a convenient alibi for what has been an essentially political and State-driven project aimed at placing the commanding heights of economic policy in the hands of capital and especially Finance Capital. Far from neoliberal globalisation making the Nation State out of date, all its key elements were the result of choices deliberately and consciously made by national governments as their ruling elites set out to limit State sovereign rights. The authors call this a process of “depoliticisation” of policy. Its principal elements were: the reduction of the power of parliaments via-a-vis the executive; making central banks formally independent of government; adopting constitutional limits on debt-to-GDP ratios and public spending, as with the 2012 Stability treaty, thereby limiting what politicians can do at the behest of their voters; enforcing free movement of goods and capital, and, above, all shifting government powers from the national level to the supranational. Why did national politicians choose to ‘tie their hands’ in this way ? As the EU case epitomises, the creation of these self-imposed ‘external constraints’ allowed national politicians to reduce the political costs to themselves of neoliberal policies that were generally unpopular. It enabled them to ‘scapegoat’ these externally imposed rules and supranational and ‘independent’ institutions. These could be publicly presented as an inevitable outcome of the new harsh realities of globalisation, about which supposedly little or nothing could be done at national level. In this way national government choices and State macroeconomic policies were insulated from popular criticism and protest. Mitchell and Fazi contend that the war on sovereignty has been in essence a war on democracy. This process was brought to its most extreme in Europe where the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that created the euro-currency embedded neoliberalism into the EU’s very fabric, effectively outlawing in supranational EU law the Keynesian policies that had been commonplace in the previous decades. Given neoliberalism’s war against State sovereignty it is only natural that the revolt against neoliberalism should first and foremost take the form of demands for a ‘repoliticisation’ of national decision-making processes – that is, for more democratic control over politics and particularly over the destructive effects of the free movement of capital, goods and labour unleashed by neoliberalism. This necessarily can only be done at the national level by means of the national State in the absence of effective supranational mechanisms of representation. The latter are impossible to bring into being as long as people’s primary political identification is with their own nationality and State. Supranational structures will always lack democratic legitimacy because people do not identify with them as their own. The case of Iceland shows what even a tiny country can do when it used its State sovereignty, an independent currency, capital controls and sequestration of its banks to overcome an extreme economic crisis. The authors argue that progressives and the political Left should not regard Brexit –

Posted in:

Dumb greens and unions

by Michael Smith 27 March, 2018 0 Comments

One of the things historians may dwell on is how the key December 2017 and February 2018 eu drafts of the Brexit agreement came to take the forms they did. It is all the more important since the inept UK Government of Theresa May failed to produce its own draft, though it might have been expected to do just that. Of course that suggests a lack of seriousness on the UK’s part about the agreement and perhaps that the EU Drafts may not go as far as we, and the EU, think, but that is a separate matter. In particular it is interesting that the drafts – the first a draft political agreement, the second a draft legal agreement with the same substance enshrine the EU’s rules for the customs union and single market but not its rules for multifarious other spheres of eu activity that bind the UK while it remains a member of the EU: most notably on the environment, labour and consumer affairs. The body politic and commentators have missed the following: the UK could become the trading neighbour from hell by ignoring EU environmental, health, labour etc standards – exploiting the competitive advantage over the eu you’d expect from a country saving money by keeping these standards low. It is interesting is that so many dogs have failed to bark. One might have expected the British trade unions to be shocked at the potential dangers to workers’ rights if EU standards are abolished and they become subject to the whims of a hawkish Tory party. But they didn’t because, like the British Labour party of course, they can only think of the superior standards Jeremy Corbyn will bring to the sphere. This is self- absorbedly naïve. Corbyn will not be in power for ever and the Tories won’t be going anywhere. When they return they will not have to observe the comfort blanket that EU standards provide. We know well the frustrations of the Tory party over the years with what used to be known as the EU’s ‘Social Chapter’. Nothing is as certain as that they will not observe its prescripts on issues like maternity and overtime if they return to power in some post-Brexit outturn. There are occasional insights into this thinking but mostly the protagonists remain mute. Surprising too that the Irish unions have made so little noise about it but then the Irish Congress of Trades Unions and SIPTU are both challenged by having members and remits both North and South of the border. You’d think they’d be on the warpath. Environmentalists and Green parties have said little perhaps because typically they languish far from the vehicles of power and tend not to be as forensic or aggressive as the circumstances here demand. Village tried to provoke the establishment media, most of RTÉ’s and the Irish Times’ Europe, Northern Ireland and Environment correspondents etc (by twitter) into recognising their failure to cover this issue but – to a man – they’re too complacent, and probably too immersed in politics and economics, to think about social and environmental rights and rules. The issue is clouded as terms like “a common regulatory area on the island of Ireland” and “a single regulatory space on the island of Ireland…” in themselves don’t do justice to the fact that there are important areas that will no longer be regulated by the EU. It’s also a bit difficult for many people to get their heads around as “regulatory alignment” of Northern Ireland with the EU is only envisaged as a ‘backstop’ if the UK can’t strike a more wide- ranging deal with Ireland and if a technological border solution proves impossible. Of course with only a year left to Brexit it’s looking increasingly like neither of the two contingencies will come to pass. The easiest way to avoid the backstop is for the UK as a whole to remain in the customs union and the single market. But the UK government insists this will not happen. Because the contingencies are uncertain they were left out of the draft Withdrawal Agreement which is a strictly legalistic document, thought they had appeared in the December political draft – and they remain politically possible. It’s complicating too that the Tories and Brexiteers so vociferously think the common regulatory area described in the EU draft goes too far rather than not far enough – though of course they are referring essentially to economic matters, not to environmental and social matters about which they may care little. It is clouded because it may well be that no deal is possible. It is important to note that, despite occasional diplomatic pleasantries, there has been little progress on the central conundrum of the negotiations: if the UK leaves the EU trading bloc, then a customs border is needed either on the island of Ireland or in the Irish Sea. One is ruled out by the EU drafts, the other by the UK. Theresa May asked Brussels if Britain could stay in the bits of the single market that she likes and exit the bits that she does not. The EU doesn’t have to, and won’t, run with that – no matter how self-righteous Brexiteers fume. On this basis it is very possible the EU’s draft terms form no element of the (WTO) arrangement that the UK falls back on. And it is clouded because confusingly the Draft Withdrawal Agreement refers, in its Article 12, to the Environment. Most people (not you dear reader) glaze over a little when contemplating the diktats of a customs union and single market. The customs union is an agreement among members to charge the same import duties as each other and usually to allow free trade between themselves. The single market guarantees the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour – the “four freedoms” – within the European Union. You couldn’t for example have goods which comprise some material, imported into Britain on the basis of a tariff-free agreement between Britain

Posted in:

IR FU(EU)

by Robert Neville 1 February, 2018 0 Comments

The nineteenth Six Nations tournament begins on February 3 but one man who won’t feature is Simon Zebo. It was announced in October that Zebo will be leaving Munster at the end of this season and moving to Paris to play for Racing 92 in the French Top 14 league. The announcement of his planned move abroad resulted in Zebo being excluded from the November Tests series, and now his exclusion from the Six Nations Squad. Joe Schmidt claimed at the official launch of this year’s championship that Zebo has been left out of the squad due to his form rather than the fact that he is about to leave the country, with prodigious Leinster young gun Jordan Larmour his preferred option as reserve. Larmour could well be a fullback great, but Zebo still has plenty to offer his national team as he is only 27 years old and in his prime. The IRFU has a policy, which the current Irish management helped to devise, of only selecting home-based players. This is in part to safeguard provincial rugby and as a way of preventing the top players accepting lucrative contracts with foreign teams. This policy has only come into play in recent years, in part due to the struggles Ireland had with Johnny Sexton during the 2014 and 2015 Six Nations Campaigns when he played for Racing 92 – Zebo’s home from June 2018. Sexton missed vital training sessions as he had to report back to Paris for the two rest-week periods during the Six Nations and to play club games in France: not ideal preparation despite the fact that Ireland was victorious in both of these campaigns. It is something Schmidt is wary of ever repeating. Zebo is Munster’s all-time leading try-scorer, and has become an established member of the Irish squad in recent years, scoring 9 tries in his 35 caps for Ireland. He played all but 5 minutes of the 2017 Six Nations Championship. There has been a clamour for Zebo to be brought back into the squad for the Six Nations but Joe Schmidt and the IRFU have stuck firm. There are a number of other players who ply their trade abroad who could easily be picked for the squad if the policy were to be scrapped, such as Donnacha Ryan at Racing 92, Tadhg Beirne at the Scarlets, Ian Madigan at Bristol and Marty Moore at Wasps. The policy appears to breach the legal requirement of Freedom of Movement and Residence for persons in the EU or, at the very least, its spirit. Freedom of movement and residence for persons in the EU is the cornerstone of the internal market and indeed of European Union citizenship, which originated in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. Today, the provisions governing the free movement of persons are laid down in Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of EU citizens and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States. Restrictions are only permitted if they are a proportionate response to an inherent need in a sport. One need only look to how ludicrous it would be to impose the same restriction on soccer players to detect a lack of proportion. Zebo, and all the other players who could theoretically be picked by Ireland if the IRFU’s policy were to be changed, are being blocked from significant earning potential. While many people might not have too much sympathy for the players considering they are highly paid and get to enjoy sport for a living, it is worth noting that the Irish players will not receive match or training fees from the IRFU, but a Grand Slam win would see each of them receive a bonus of over €70,000. By excluding Zebo from the team due to his move to France, the IRFU are directly affecting his earning potential from winning, and also from additional sponsorship opportunities that come with being included in the national team. Remarkably, English players get a much better deal: they will earn £22,000 per game from match fees, training fees and image rights. This means that for any team member who appears in all five games will be guaranteed to be paid £110,000 each. The result is that Zebo has been ruled out of international consideration and has now sacrificed any dreams he may have had to represent Ireland in the 2019 World Cup in Japan. Ireland kick off this campaign against the French in Paris – a fixture we have only won three times in 46 years. A player of Zebo’s quality and skills could have been the key to unlocking the French defence. In fact we can expect a fourth win to be added come 3 February – due to the current state of the French team. In the long run the IRFU policy seems to serve Irish rugby well, irrespective of the EU Spirit. The top players are incentivised to stay in Ireland, their game time gets managed punctiliously and they are always made available by their clubs for training camps, no matter what time of year. Another benefit for Irish rugby is the Prodigal Son pardon that is bestowed upon anyone who returns to an Irish provincial team – they can be immediately included for the national side. This can act as a major incentive as there are examples where individuals came back to Irish teams much improved from the time spent away from home in a different environment learning from new coaches and strategies. Tommy Bowe developed immensely from his time in Wales, and look out for Tadhg Beirne once he leaves Scarlets for Munster next season. He appears to have slipped through the cracks for Leinster, he has been nominated for European Player of the Year and has dramatically enhanced his performance level due to the freedom he is allowed in the Scarlets team. Ireland look set to be the best placed team to push favourites England all the way in this year’s

Posted in:

Nati(on) off

by Desmond Fennell 29 October, 2017 0 Comments

In 1985, the Irish-Australian writer Vincent Buckley, after spending some time in Ireland, wrote in his book ‘Memory Ireland: “Ireland has been asked to lose its national memory by a kind of policy, in which politicians of almost all parties, ecclesiastics of all religions, media operators, and revisionist historians co-operate to create (and let us hope they do not need to enforce, for if they need to, they will) a new sense of corporate identity. This sense contradicts the immediately preceding one (the one based on the rising of easter 1916 and its aftermath), which proved first so exhilarating and then so wearying to its generations, some of whom had fought to realise it. Ireland is not a nation, once again or ever, so the new story runs, but two nations; maybe several; it does not have its characteristic religion—or if it does, it ought not; it does not have its characteristic language, as anyone can see or hear; it has no particular race or ethnic integrity. Ireland is nothing – a nothing – an interesting nothing, to be sure, composed of colourful parts, a nothing mosaic. It is advertising prose and Muzak”. Buckley was saying in effect that Ireland had lost its national identity: the fact of being a nation distinguished from other nations by a combination of language, history, culture and values, and the knowledge of being that. Since 1985, the collective condition that Buckley depicted – that of being together nothing in particular – has intensified. At the centre of Ireland’s capital city a tall monument, designed in London, has been erected which honours and signifies literally nothing. (A joke says ‘The Spire’ was meant to be delivered to the other Blackpool – Duibhlinn means “black pool” – the seaside resort across the Irish Sea.) Ireland’s distinctive religious culture – women blessing themselves as they pass a church; traffic jams at city churches on Sunday mornings; fasting during Lent; May and Corpus Christi processsions; the family rosary; the TV newsreader finishing the evening news with “God bless you” – has withered almost to vanishing point; and with it a set of moral values, forceful because they pointed towards a happy eternal life and gave security against punishment there. With the study of Irish history made unnecessary for the Leaving Cert, and all forms of mass media blind to that history beyond the Famine, knowledge of Irish history by most Irish university graduates reaches no further back, with the post-revolutionary missionary movement into Africa, Asia and South America bringing Christianity, hospitals, schools and anti-imperialist sentiment omitted as a ‘merely religious matter’; not to mention, earlier, the repeated resistance to conquest or those dark times before Europe began when Irish monks and monasteries brought Christianity, literacy, art and learning to Britain and the Continent as far as Germany, Austria and Italy. Meanwhile, with the nation speaking the same language as the much larger nation beside it, its journalists, instead of writing or saying ‘in Ireland’ or ‘in the Republic’ commonly make do with ‘here’ or ‘in this state’. Irishmen use the word ‘Irishness’ derisively; politicians avoid uttering ‘Ireland’ or ‘the Irish’ with pride or in exhortation; the media treat English football and politics including ‘the Royal Family’ as part of the Irish scene. The only still habitual demonstrations of Irish nationhood, far from being everyday are occasional: everyone cheering for Ireland when an Irish football team is playing a foreign team, or people drinking together on St Patrick’s Day. In short, with regard to distinctive identity, Ireland, as an offsore island of Britain, is close to becoming a larger version of the Isle of Wight. A nation can lack a national identity for either of two reasons. It can, like Ireland, have lost the national identity which it previously had. (Ireland had a well-known, distinct identity from the sixth century to the eighteenth when it began to fade to the shadow of itself it still was in 1916.) Or it can, like say Zambia, never have had one. Formerly Northern Rhodesia and named after the river Zambezi, it was created in 1964. With English as the official language, Zambians belong to about 70 ethnic groups, speak a similar number of languages, and adhere to many religions. It is widely believed that a national identity is an important thing for a nation to have – that it favours national wellbeing; creates, when needed, a national collective effort; generally urges the nation towards success and buttresses it in bad times. If one googles “national identity” one finds at least 25 pages – I gave up counting – filled with items dealing with it. (Denmark, a small country like Ireland, seems to be particularly interested in the matter.) It is, of course, entirely possible to get along without a national identity, as Ireland and Zambia have been doing; living from day to day. Even with the consequent absence of collective zest, it is not catastrophic. But when after the Breivik massacres in Norway a few years ago, the Norwegian Prime Minister told his people: “This must strengthen our resolve to make our Norwegian values prevail”, some old-fashioned Irishman might have felt a pang of regret that no Irish Taoiseach could speak of “our Irish values”, because no such things exist. national values indicate that at least Something is there rather than nothing. They suggest that in that nation aspiring minds are at work. The present cultural condition of Ireland is the result of successful cultural colonisation by two forces: first, by the Protestant british from the sixteenth century onwards, second from the 1960s onwards by American neoliberalism working through its Irish converts. The process by which cultural colonisation works was well illustrated by an incident in which the present writer participated in the 1970s. A Dubliner, I was living for some years in a still Irish-speaking part of South Connemara. Talking one day in Irish to a local 16-year-old boy who was telling me about a Frenchman he had met on a

Posted in:

If not zeal then logic

by Niall Crowley 8 January, 2017 0 Comments

It could not be clearer. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014 says that public bodies must, when they are preparing strategic plans, assess and identify the human rights and equality issues that are relevant to their functions as policy maker, employer and service provider. Public bodies must also identify the policies and practices that they have in place or that they plan to put in place to address these issues. We can only assume they meant it when they enacted the legislation, two years ago now. The excitement could, therefore, hardly be contained as the Department of Education and skills was first out of the traps with its new statement of strategy. All other Government Departments are still in the process of finalising their own new statements of strategies. They lag behind education, hot off the press with its ‘Action Plan for Education 2016-2019’. The statement of strategy opens with a picture of a smiling minister Richard Bruton and his commitment that “we can work together with all the people who work in and depend on the education and training service to, collectively, make it into the best in Europe”. This ‘best in world’ stuff is cringe-inducing but, whatever, how did it manage the new public sector duty? It is worth setting it out in full. It comes under the less than promising subheading “ensuring equity”. Equity, it must be remembered, is about fairness, not the more particular, more ambitious equality, not even human rights. It goes like this… “As part of their public sector duty, public bodies are required to consider human rights and equality issues relevant to them. In preparing this document, such issues were considered and individual actions address matters specific to the education and training sector. Ensuring access to an equitable system is a driving force throughout the Department’s work”. That’s it. It feels like a crude two fingers to the legislation, to the Oireachtas that enacted it, and to anybody who had naively entertained expectations deriving from the legislation. Human Rights don’t even get another mention in the 64- page document. Equality gets a mention as it is part of the name of the Deis (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) initiative and, under Goal 2, where the statement of strategy complacently recites that “we have made considerable progress in advancing equity and equality of opportunity”, but does deign to acknowledge that “significant challenges remain if we are to ensure that children and young people from different backgrounds are adequately supported so that they can experience success in the education system”. Anything vaguely equality-related is squashed into Goal 2 of the strategy statement which is to improve the progress of learners at risk of educational disadvantage or learners with special education needs. Goal 2 has 18 actions. This compares with 35 actions under Goal 1 to improve the learning experience and success of learners, 29 actions under Goal 3 to help those delivering educational services to continuously improve, 37 actions under Goal 4 to build stronger bridges between education and the wider community, and 20 actions under Goal 5 to improve national planning and support services. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has produced limited but clear guidance on implementing this public-sector duty. The steps required include: Undertake an assessment of human rights and equality issues that are relevant to its functions, to the services it provides and to its employees. The Department of Education and Skills Statement of Strategy demonstrates no evidence of such an analysis. Consult broadly with employees, managers, trade unions, individuals and communities accessing and using the services, and other key stakeholders, which may be affected by inequalities and human rights issues. The Department of Education and Skills received submissions from 600 individuals and groups but there is no evidence that any of these related to equality and human rights or the public-sector duty. Screen and analyse policies and programmes from a human rights and equality perspective, identifying which existing policies and programmes are particularly relevant. The Department of Education and Skills Statement of Strategy demonstrates no evidence of such screening or analysis. Develop action plans on human rights and equality with defined actions and responsibilities. The Department of Education and Skills Statement of Strategy demonstrates no evidence of such an action plan. So, what next? The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, in its guidance, states that where it “considers there are failures to fulfil the Public Sector Duty, it can invite a public body to carry out an equality and human rights review of the work of the organisation and prepare and implement an action plan”. Logically then, the only outstanding matter now is when will the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission act? Niall Crowley

Posted in:

How maths will destroy capitalism

by Jaime Dixon 7 January, 2017 0 Comments

The consumerism-generating-capitalism- it usefully loyal, generating-consumerism cycle that characterises the developed or ‘Northern’ world depends on inequality, even as it purveys certain equalities, and is the main obstacle to tackling climate change, the most serious long-term problem facing humanity. Capitalism is struggling to maintain itself. In one formal sense this is good for equality. A crucial weakness of capitalism (not sufficiently noted by the Left) is that by relentlessly pushing its ‘free’ market into every corner of life to seek profit, it puts a cash-price on everything,and it thereby becomes a great social leveller: status, is replaced by capital or money as the measure of societal eminence. As a result, other than the great inequalities of money, we now live in communities with a level of personal and legal equality that was totally unimaginable throughout human history or even 40 years ago – for gender, sexual orientation, race, ‘legitimacy’, nationality, and religion, for example. Capitalism eschews the personal inequalities which torpid caste-based civilisations emphasised. Only money matters now. But the crucial point is that the promotion of personal equality by capitalism also causes constantly growing agitation by workers for a just share of their social production as they now see themselves as equal to their bosses. In response to this growing agitation for equality, the capital-owning class must react, like any ruling-class or mafia, in two ways: one section of the exploited must violently be repressed, the other will be bribed to keep inside. England, as one of the biggest imperialist powers has done this regularly and systematically. It did it in the 1819 Peterloo massacre of demonstrating workers. It did it in the 1840s when famine starved a million people in ireland while massive amounts of food were being exported under British army guard to Liverpool. Towards 1850 when Chartist agitation for equality again became strong in england, instead of violence the Corn Laws were dropped to allow imports of cheap food as the ‘bribe’ to quieten agitation. Colonies were brutally plundered by England’s imperialism to deliver bribes to English workers. Friedrich Engels noted this in a letter from 1882 to Kautsky: “English workers gaily share the feast of England’s colonies”. Ireland at this time was used as one source of those bribes as part of the effort to maintain the English working-class comfortable enough to forgo dangerous agitation, even to join the imperial army. But the equality drive continued, Ireland demanded and won independence, and after two diverting world wars and the likes of the Jarrow march in the 1930s, in the 1970s and 1980s there again arose agitation among the English working-class against capitalism’s economic inequality – most noticeably the 1974 and 1985 miners’ strike and opposition to the poll tax from 1990, in spite of the material benefits to the working classes third world imports of cheap food and raw materials. There was also strong, often violent agitation by the colonies, following Ireland and Viet Nam‘s example, for national liberation, for the equality of races and nations. This new agitation was a dangerous crisis for capitalism, and as there were no further colonies to plunder, a new source of wealth, beyond cheap food and raw materials, had to be found. Thatcher’s capitalism achieved this: up to the 1970s colonies were generally not allowed to manufacture, this was reserved for the North so that for example India was forced to send its raw cotton to England and to buy back spun and woven goods. The new policy was that the ex-colonies and third world in general needed to get the national liberation they were increasingly demanding and could then develop manufacturing on their low wages to export the new agitation-quitening bribe of cheap manufactured goods back to England. Reagan and the North in general did the same. Ireland had become part of this group, exploiting not exploited. This new system worked well and subsists: a surfeit of cheap manufactures from the southern nations, often produced by children working in horrible conditions, as the North’s diminishing manufacturing drifts toward a financial economy where billionaires speculate to produce damaging bubbles and get bailed-out when a bubble bursts, as Thomas Piketty notes in ‘Capital in the 21st Century’. The class-struggle, previously within nations, has become global, between nations. The ‘bribes’ mentioned are not just cash incentives, there is an intrinsic turbocharge for the enthusiastic wealthy consumer. Consumerism thrives when a worker in the US or Ireland receives the equivalent of $15/hr while the worker in, for example, China producing equally-sophisticated manufactured goods is only paid $2/hour. Capitalists gloat at the classic opportunities to trade the spoils, the only issue is the ‘terms’ of trade. A worker in the US or Ireland can trade one hour’s labour, in a shopping mall, for several hours of equal-quality Chinese labour. This looks like a winning gambler cashing in the chips. The more you shop for consumer goods the more your profit grows as you indirectly exploit foreign workers. This is the economic basis of that particular ‘buzz’ element of our Consumerist consciousness. The incentive is inbuilt, the process stacked to the advantage of consumers in the North. It is the instinctive grasp of this situation by a worker who is comfortable with capitalism that matters. a worker might exchange 30 minutes labour at a routine retail job for the price of a pair of imported jeans. the cotton must be: planted-grown-harvested-spunwoven-dyed-cut-sewn,then zips-pockets-hems-buttons- belt-loops-rivets-labels applied, and the lot transported. The same is true, though it is less obvious, if both workers are on car-assembly lines in their own countries. The consumerist ‘buzz’ arises from an unequal worker-to-worker relationship, not worker-to-capitalist. In striking contrast shopping for manufactured goods before 1980 felt like the much cruder experience of being mugged by capitalists as the wages earned exchanged for a less than equal amount of labour because when a worker shopped, those workers who produced the manufactured goods were in the same economic area and so were paid the same wage rate (the missing labour-value of course expropriated as profit by capitalists). This is why shopping for the working

Posted in:

When shall we three meet again?

by Peter Emerson 6 October, 2016 0 Comments

This is a saga of sadness, a tragic tale of three ‘whiches’, a fairy ‘which’, a whichsoever ‘which’ and a wicked ‘which’. In initiating each of three referendums, David Cameron said, “You have a choice, ‘this’ or ‘that’, which do you want?”. So all three ballots were binary, and while the first two delivered what he wanted, the last one was, in effect, political suicide. All three outcomes were inaccurate reflections of ‘the will of the people’. Let’s have a look, and then let’s consider a better methodology. 2011 Referendum on the Electoral System After the 2010 general election, the UK had a coalition government: Cameron’s Conservative Party (Tories) and the Liberal-Democrats. And he probably thought to himself, “How can I rid myself of the Lib-Dems’ persistent pursuit of proportional representation, PR?” Hence the first ‘which’, so to silence any further debate on electoral reform. Some people liked single-seat constituencies, either the UK’s first-past-the-post, FPTP, a plurality vote; or France’s two-round system, trs, a plurality vote followed by a majority vote; both are single preference systems; or again, there is the Australian alternative vote, av, a preference vote which is like a knock-out competition – in a series of plurality votes, the least popular is eliminated after each round and his/her votes are transferred to the voters’ second or subsequent preference… until a candidate gets 50%. Meanwhile, many wanted PR in multi-member constituencies. There is the German half FPTP and half PR-list system called multi-member proportional, mmp. There is PR-list – in Israel, you vote for a party; in the Netherlands, for a candidate of one party; in Belgium, for one or more candidates of one party; and in Switzerland, for those of more than one party. Or there’s the Irish PR-single transferable vote, PR-STV, where voters can vote cross-party in order of preference; STV is like AV except that success depends on (not a majority but) just a quota of votes. Overall, then, the choice was huge. But Cameron’s 1st preference was FPTP and his 2nd av. So that was the 2011 referendum, the first ‘which’: “FPTP or AV, which do you want?” For countless (and uncounted) supporters of pr, this was like asking vegetarians, ‘Beef or lamb?’. Now maybe FPTP was the most popular but, based on data from just a two-option poll, impossible to say. For Cameron, however, it was a dream: he chose the question, and the question determined the answer, just as any fairy godmother would have wished: a massive 67.9 to 32.1%. Magic. Furthermore, the Electoral Commission said the question was fair. Amazing. The Ombudsman agreed. Incredible. And many thought this was all democratic. So that was the end of that argument. So why not a second fantasia, another referendum? Scotland 2014 “Double, double, toil and trouble”, said the witches in Macbeth. The Scottish Nationalist Party, (SNP), always on about independence. How can I rid myself of these skittish Scots? This was Cameron’s second problem, and so, as if on a broomstick from the darkest recesses of Westminster, the second ‘which’ enters the political stage. There were three options: (a) the status quo, (b) maximum devolution or ‘devo-max’ as it was called, and (c) independence. Thinking that (a) would easily beat (c) in a two-option contest, just as FPTP had wiped out av, Cameron waved his wizard’s wand and demanded a binary ballot. So the second ‘which’ was again dichotomous: “(a) or (c), which do you want?” In the campaign itself, however, the gremlins were grumbling, option (c) was gaining ground. Cameron twitched; no – panicked: and so, as if at the witches’ coven, a vow was made – zap! – and option (a) morphed into option (b). On the ballot paper, however, there was no switch, the ‘which’ was still “(a) or (c)?” So the result was a stich-up: 55.3% and 44.7% respectively were highly in ated levels of support for (a) and/or (c). Furthermore, the winner was (b)… but no-one had voted for it! For Cameron, though the potion was fading, the plebiscite was still successful, and that was the (very temporary) end of that argument too. We return to the diviners’ den. The EU Referendum Believing as it does in majority voting, the Tory Party (and many another) is a beast of two wings and no body. Little wonder that this weird creature is often in a ap, especially over Europe. “Those cursed Europhobes”, he might have muttered. And then, stage extreme right, another scary monster, the UK Independence Party, Ukip. “Oh how can I rid myself of these damned devils?” Ah-ha, the third… but this was the wicked ‘which’. The wrong side won. The Electoral Commission’s semantic change from ‘yes-or-no?’ or ‘in-or-out?’ to ‘remain-or-leave?’ did not change the poisonous potent of the poll, its binary bind, its divisive ‘positive-or-negative’ nature. The question – “Which do you want?” – was again adversarial. The campaign was horrible. And the result? 48.1% chose ‘remain’ to 51.9% ‘leave’. But nobody knows what the latter actually want! To suggest, then, that this outcome is ‘the will of the people’ is, again, bunkum. Meanwhile, politically, Cameron is dead, impaled on his own petard; in a word, ‘bewhiched’. Democratic Theory and Practice So what should have happened? Well, consider first a hypothetical example. The average age of the electorate cannot be identified by a majority vote. If such a piece of research were to be attempted, the question would probably be, “Are you young or old?” In which case, no matter what the answer and by what percentage, it would be wrong! If, however, the question were multi-optional, ‘Are you in your twenties, thirties, forties, etc.?’ the answer could be pretty accurate. With average age or collective opinion, as in a German constructive vote of con dence, voters should be positive. No-one should vote ‘no’ or ‘out’ or ‘leave’; instead, everyone should be in favour of something: for the UK to be in the EU, or like Norway in the EEA, or like Switzerland in a looser

Posted in:

Irexit

by Anthony Coughlan 6 October, 2016 0 Comments

Since the Brexit referendum in June I have been rapporteur of a Private Study Group of Irish economists and constitutional lawyers who have been examining what we should do when and if the UK leaves the EU. In August their report was sent to the Taoiseach, his Ministers and the Secretary-Generals of all Government Departments. It has been sent also to the EU embassies in Dublin, to UK Prime Minister Theresa May, her key Ministers and senior civil servants concerned with Brexit, and to a wide range of British Brexiteers whom my colleagues and I have got to know over the years. The report’s basic conclusion is that it is in the interest of the Irish people that Brexit should be accompanied by “Irexit” – Ireland exit. We applied to join the then EEC in 1961 because Britain and Northern Ireland did so. We joined simultaneously with the UK and Denmark in January 1973. Now that Britain and the North are leaving, we should do the same, for three principal reasons. The first is that Ireland is nowadays a loser, not a gainer, from EU membership. In 2014 we became a net contributor to the EU Budget for the first time, paying in €1.69bn and receiving €1.52bn. This means that in future any EU moneys that come to the Republic under the CAP, EU cohesion funds, research grants, support for community groups and the like, will be Irish taxpayers’ money coming back, employing some Brussels bureaucrats on the way. Henceforth the EU will no longer be the ‘cash cow’ most Irish people have regarded it as for decades, and which is the basis of much of our official and unofficial europhilia. A bonus would be that outside the EU Ireland can take back control of its sea-fishing waters. Eurostat’s estimates of the value of fish catches by non-Irish boats in Irish waters since 1973 are a many-times multiple of the EU cash we got over that time. The second reason why Irexit should go along with Brexit is that that is the only way of preventing the North-South border within Ireland becoming an EU external frontier, with new dimensions added to Partition, affecting trade, travel and different EU laws and legal standards as between Dublin and Belfast. For example without the UK as an EU Member alongside it, the Republic would be in a much weaker position to withstand pressure to adopt continental norms in EU crime and justice policy, which differ signi cantly from Anglo-Saxon ones in such areas as trial by jury, the presumption of innocence and habeas corpus. Such divergence would adversely affect good relations within Ireland as a whole and while it would not undermine the Peace Process, it would not help it either. If we stay in the EU while the UK leaves it would mean that for Irish reunification to come about at some future date the people of the North would have to rejoin an EU that Britain had long left, adopt the euro-currency, take on board a share of the €64bn of private bank debt which the ECB insisted that Irish taxpayers nance during the 2008-2010 currency crisis, and implement the further integration measures that are likely to be needed over the coming years if the Eurozone is to be held together. It would give 26 EU Governments in addition to the UK and the Republic a veto on eventual Irish reunification. Such a development should be unacceptable to all Irish nationalists. Another consideration is that if the South remains in the EU while the North leaves along with Britain, future Irish reunification would make the whole of Ireland part of an EU military bloc that is likely to come under greater Franco- German hegemony following Brexit. That potentially could be a security threat to Britain. This will surely change significantly the calculus of British State interest and give Britain a strategic reason for keeping the North inside the UK, an interest it has not got today. The third reason why most Irish people should now reassess their attitude to the EU is that the business case for Ireland remaining an EU member diminishes significantly if the UK leaves. Most foreign investment that comes here is geared to exporting to English-speaking markets, primarily the UK and USA, rather than to continental EU ones. Once the UK leaves the EU two-thirds of Irish exports will be going to countries that are outside it, as they are going today to countries outside the Eurozone, and three-quarters of our imports will be coming from outside. Outside also, Ireland’s 12.5% corporation tax rate would no longer be under EU threat. Of course our relations with the UK and the EU in the Brexit context are complicated by our membership of the Eurozone. Irish policy-makers abolished the national currency and joined the Eurozone in 1999 on the assumption that the UK would do so also and that by going first they would show how communautaire they were. It was an utterly irresponsible action in view of the fact that the Republic does most of its trade with countries that do not use the euro. With the pound sterling falling against the euro as the UK disengages from the EU, Ireland desperately needs an Irish pound that can fall with it, so maintaining its competitiveness in its principal export markets – the UK and America. That is why the Irish State urgently needs to get its own currency back. Economist Chris Johns noted in the Irish Times on 20 August that if the Irish pound existed today it would be worth some 10 percent more than the pound sterling. This was the level it reached in January 1994, when Irish industry was in crisis because of its overvalued exchange rate – explicitly then, implicitly today. That in turn precipitated the major devaluation which inaugurated our ‘Celtic Tiger’ years. Ireland needs to regain the freedom of being able to determine its own exchange rate. There is no legal way to

Posted in:

Oxford, Britain

by Frank Armstrong 6 October, 2016 0 Comments

North Oxford is a heartland of academia where leafy halls of residence mingle with stately homes and rarefied hostelries. Situated in almost the very centre of Britain a windless calm favours scholarly reflection removed from modernity’s fugue. Even the traffic is orderly with bicycles sensibly preferred. It is one of the most attractive places in the world. Spend an afternoon on the lawns at Christchurch if you doubt it. Oxford is world-class in so many ways: the city and the university. PWC and Demos rated it the best place to live in Britain, in 2012, across a wide range of criteria. Shanghai ratings names Oxford University the seventh best in the world. South Oxfordshire was recently named Britain’s best rural place to live. It is transcendent England. What has this to say about Brexit, the political issue of this generation? The City of Oxford is located on the confluence of the Isis (the idiosyncratic name for the Thames here) and Cherwell rivers. Broadly, it may be divided into three zones with a clear north-south divide: that affluent and mature north Oxford of Jericho and Wolvercote; predominantly twentieth-century suburbs including Cowley to the south; and the historical and commercial centre linked to Botley and Osney Island, built around an Anglo-Saxon settlement of which little remains. This contains renowned colleges such as Christchurch, Balliol and Magdalen. The first sign of incongruity is how close it nestles to the ‘any-town-UK’ commercial centre and its array of gaudy chains. Moving south, there is yet another Oxford as housing gets cheaper and industry is evident. The first industrial revolution passed Oxford by as colleges objected to the contagion of commerce. Only after World War II did significant manufacturing arrive as the city attracted a car industry. By the early 1970s, 20,000 people were employed in the sector and the original Mini Minor was developed here in 1959. Unfortunately, as in much of the country, a significant proportion of heavy industrial jobs have departed. The working class areas now face social problems familiar in many English cities. Living as a jobbing tutor and supply teacher in Oxford for two years I encountered classroom behaviour that made experiences in schools in socially-deprived areas of Dublin seem almost meditative. Oxford is a place of profound educational inequality. Oxford accomodates a great literary tradition: JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Graham and Irish Murdoch wrote from Oxford. The number of Prime Ministers that have passed through Oxford University is startling. 28 overall. Only Jim Callaghan and John Major, who revelled in his immersion in the university of life, among English Prime Ministers since Winston Churchill (who finally left office in 1955) did not pass along its quads. Alumna Theresa May (St Hugh’s, 1974) joins a list that includes Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair (St John’s, 1974), Harold Wilson (Jesus College, 1937) and Clement Atlee (University College, 1904) as well as Tories Anthony Eden (Christchurch College, 1922), Harold MacMillan (Balliol College, 1914) Edward Heath (Balliol College, 1939), Margaret Thatcher (Somerville College, 1947), and David Cameron (Brasenose College, 1988). Oxford indubitably has seeded the post-War UK political establishment. Moreover, numerous Tory politicians maintain an association with the wider shire. Churchill himself was born in the nearby ancestral estate of Blenheim Palace (though he passed some of his early childhood in Dublin’s Phoenix Park). David Cameron, MP for Witney, Oxfordshire, lives in Chipping Norton close to Rebekah Brooks, Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the well-placed Chippy set. Michael Heseltine (Pembroke College, 1954) dwells in style nearby though one imagines he looks slightly askance at the gobby neighbours. Theresa May grew up in the village of Wheatley a few miles east of Oxford where her father served as vicar. Further east towards London, Boris Johnson (Balliol College, 1987), the new foreign secretary, lives in Henley-on-Thames. Jeremy Paxman, Richard Branson, Kate Moss, Kate Winslet, Rowan Atkinson, Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley: celebrities, high-and-low-brow, live in Oxfordshire. Perhaps the county has a quality – an England of the imagination – that grandees of all sorts gravitate towards. It could be the low rural population density, a legacy of the Enclosure Acts (1760-1830) that placed formerly common land in the hands of expanding gentlemen farmers. Today, though located only an hour from some of the most in ated land prices in the world in London, it is possible to drive for long stretches without seeing a single dwelling. The hoi polloi were kept at bay, in Oxford and swathes of its hinterland. As an Irish person living in the city of Oxford I never had a sense that I was unwelcome, or at least any alienation was no different to that felt by the bulk of the population before a converging aristocratic and mercantile elite: unlike the ancient regime in France since the Tudor era, nobility has been open to the highest bidder and an Oxford education provides the polish. One must however acclimatise to the southern English reserve and a sardonic sense of humour. The historian Tony Judt (St Anne’s College 1980- 87), who concededly knew little of Ireland, wrote that the English are perhaps “the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes”. Succumbing to generalisation I regard English friendships as firmer than Irish for all the latter’s sociability. But these societies of companions generate mosaic communities often hostile to one another. Better the devil you know and bugger the rest. In the era of the Internet there is a growing suspicion of the ruling class of politicians. Many do feel “shat on by Tories, shovelled up by Labour” in the words of Uncle Monty in ‘Withnail and I’. They are often seen as a separate cast reflecting the cultural dominance of Oxford and Cambridge Universities (‘Oxbridge’) which extends to the media and business. This trend perhaps explains why maverick and grumpy (though otherwise profoundly different) outsiders such as Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage (and Boris Johnson who went rogue over Brexit) are appealing to a jaded electorate; a state of