Home » Posts tagged 'EU'
Tag Archives: EU
The Tories have never had any ideology, so it's not surprising they've run out of steam
A lot of mileage can be made out of the ‘story’ that the Coalition has “run out of steam”, and this week two commentators, Martin Kettle and Allegra Stratton, branded the Queen’s Speech as ‘the beginning of the end’. There is a story that blank cigarette packaging and minimum alcohol pricing policies have disappeared due to corporate lobbying, and one suspects that we will never get to the truth of this. The narrative has moved onto ‘immigration’, where people are again nervous. This taps into an on-running theme of the Conservatives arguing that people are “getting something for nothing”, but the Conservatives are unable to hold a moral prerogative on this whilst multinational companies within the global race are still able to base their operations using a tax efficient (or avoiding) base. Like it or now, the Conservatives have become known for being in the pockets of the Corporates, but not in the same way that the Conservatives still argue that the Unions held ‘the country to ransom’. Except things have moved on. The modern Conservative Party is said to be more corporatilist than Margaret Thatcher had ever wanted it to be, it is alleged, and this feeds in a different problem over the State narrative. The discussion of the State is no longer about having a smaller, more cost-effective State, but a greater concern that ‘we are selling off our best China’ (as indeed the late Earl of Stockton felt about the Thatcherite policy of privatisation while that was still in its infancy). The public do not actually feel that an outsourced state is preferable to a state with shared responsibility, as the public do not feel in control of liabilities, and this is bound to have public trust in privatisation operations (for example, G4s bidding for the probation service, when operationally it underperformed during the Olympics).
It is possibly this notion of the country selling off its assets, and has been doing so under all administrations in the U.K., that is one particular chicken that is yet to come home to roost. For example, the story that the Coalition had wished to push with the pending privatisation of Royal Mail is that this industry, if loss making, would not ‘show up’ on the UK’s balance sheet. There is of course a big problem here: what if Royal Mail could actually be made to run at a profit under the right managers? Labour in its wish to become elected in 1997 lost sight of its fundamental principles. Whether it is a socialist party or not is effectively an issue which seems to be gathering no momentum, but even under the days of Nye Bevan the aspiration of Labour was to become a paper with real social democratic clout. One of the biggest successes was to engulf Britain in a sense of solidarity and shared responsibility, taking the UK away from the privatised fragmented interests of primary care prior to the introduction of the NHS. The criticism of course is that Bevan could not have predicted this ‘infinite demand’ (either in the ageing population or technological advances), but simply outsource the whole lot as has happened in the Conservative-led Health and Social Act (2012) is an expedient short-term measure which strikes at the heart of poverty of aspiration. It is a fallacy that Labour cannot be relevant to the ‘working man’ any more, as the working man now in 2013 as he did in 1946 stands to benefit from a well-run comprehensive National Health Service. Even Cameron, in introducing his great reforms of the public sector in 2010/1 argued that he thought the idea that the public sector was not ‘wealth creating’ was nonsense, which he rapidly, unfortunately forgot, in the great NHS ‘sell off’.
The Conservatives have an ideology, which is perhaps outsourcing or privatisation, but basically it comes down to making money. The fundamental error in the Conservative philosophy, if there is one, is that the sum of individual aspiration is not the same as the value of collective solidarity and sharing of resources. This strikes to the heart of having a NHS where there are winners and losers, for example where the NHS can run a £2.4 bn surplus but there are still A&E departments shutting in major cities. Or why should we tolerate a system of ‘league tables’ of schools which can all too easily become a ‘race to the bottom’? Individual freedom is as relevant to the voter of Labour as it is to the voter of the Conservative Party, but if there is one party that can uphold this it is not the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. No-one on the Left can quite ignore why Baroness Williams chose to ignore the medical Royal Colleges, the RCN, the BMA or the legal advice/38 degrees so adamantly, although it does not take Brains of Britain to work out why certain other Peers voted as they did over the section 75 regulations as amended. But the reason that Labour is unable to lead convincingly on these issues, despite rehearsing well-exhausted mantra such as ‘we are the party of the NHS’, is that the general public received a lot of the same medicine from them as they did from the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. Elements of the public feel there is not much to go further; the Labour Party will still be the party of the NHS for some (despite having implemented PFI and NHS Foundation Trusts), and the Conservatives will still be party of fiscal responsibility for some (despite having sent the economy into orbit due to incompetent measures culminating in avoidance of a triple-dip).
It doesn’t seem that Labour is particularly up for discussion about much. It gets easily rumbled on what should be straightforward arms of policy. For example, Martha Kearney should have been doing a fairly uncontroversial set-piece interview with Ed Miliband in the local elections, except Miliband came across as a startled, overcaffeinated rabbit in headlights, and refused doggedly to explain why his policy would not involve more borrowing (even when Ed Balls had said clearly it would.) Miliband is chained to his guilty pleasures of being perceived as the figurehead of a ‘tax and spend’ party, which is why you will never hear of him talking for a rise in corporation tax or taxing excessively millionaires (though he does wish to introduce the 50p rate, which Labour had not done for the majority of its actual period in government). It uses terms such as “predistribution” as a figleaf for not doing what many Labour voters would actually like him to do. Labour is going through the motions of receiving feedback on NHS policy, but the actual grassroots experience is that it is actually incredibly difficult for the Labour Party machine even to acknowledge actually well-meant contributions from specialists. The Labour Party, most worryingly, does not seem to understand its real problem for not standing up for the rights of workers. This should be at the heart of ‘collective responsibility’, and a way of making Unions relevant to both the public and private sector. Whilst it continues to ignore the rights of workers, in an employment court of law over unfair dismissal or otherwise, Labour will have no ‘unique selling proposition’ compared to any of the other parties.
Likewise, Labour, like the Liberal Democrats, seems to be utterly disingenious about what it chooses to support. While it seems to oppose Workfare, it seems perfectly happy to vote with the Government for minimal concessions. It opposes the Bedroom Tax, and says it wants to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but whether it does actually does so is far from certain; for example, Labour did not reverse marketisation in the NHS post-1997, and conversely accelerated it (admittedly not as fast as post-2012). No-one would be surprised if Ed Miliband goes into ‘copycat’ mode over immigration, and ends up supporting a referendum. This could be that Ed Miliband does not care about setting the agenda for what he wants to do, or simply has no control of it through a highly biased media against Labour.
Essentially part of the reason that the Conservatives have ‘run out of steam’ is that they’ve run out of sectors of the population to alienate (whether that includes legal aid lawyers or GPs), or run out of things to flog off to the private sector (such as Circle, Serco, or Virgin). All this puts Labour in a highly precarious position of having to decide whether it wishes to stop yet more drifting into the private sector, or having to face an unpalatable truth (perhaps) that it is financially impossible to buy back these industries into the public sector (and to make them operate at a profit). However, the status quo is a mess. The railway industry is a fragmented disaster, with inflated prices, stakeholders managing to cherrypick the products they wish to sell to maximise their profit, with no underlying national direction. That is exactly the same mess as we have for privatised electricity, or privatised telecoms. That is exactly same mess as we will have for Royal Mail and the NHS. The whole thing is a catastrophic fiasco, and no mainstream party has the bottle to say so. The Liberal Democrats were the future once, with Nick Clegg promising to undo the culture of ‘broken promises’ before he reneged on his tuition fees pledge. UKIP are the future now, as they wish to get enough votes to have a say; despite the fact they currently do not have any MPs, if they continue to get substantial airtime from all media outlets (in a way that the NHS Action Party can only dream of), the public in their wisdom might force the Conservatives or Labour to go into coalition with UKIP. There is clearly much more to politics than our membership of Europe, and, while the media fails to cover adequately the destruction of legal aid or the privatisation of the NHS, the quality of our debate about national issues will continue to be poor. Ed Miliband must now focus all of his resources into producing a sustainable plan to govern for a decade, the beginning of which will involve an element of ‘crisis management‘ for a stagnant economy at the beginning. The general public have incredibly short memories, and, although it has become very un-politically correct to say so, their short-termism and thirst for quick remedies has led to this mess. Ed Miliband seems to be capable of jumping onto bandwagons, such as over press regulation, but he needs to be cautious about the intricacies of policy, some of which does not require on a precise analysis of the nation’s finances at the time of 7th May 2015. With no end as yet in sight for Jon Cruddas’ in-depth policy review, and for nothing as yet effectively Labour to campaign on solidly, there is no danger of that.
David Cameron's red meat to the Euroskeptics
‘positive vision for the future of the EU – a future in which Britain wants, and should want, to play a committed and active part’
Currently, the EU is positive. David Cameron throwing tantrums (sic) and walking out on negotiations simply gives the perception of an arrogant Little Englander who has no sense of solidarity in the European Union. The European market is built on the social and legal basis of giving no party unfair advantage, which is why many citizens in the UK do not agree with any stance that we should opt out of discrimination legislation, or have ‘special rules’ for the City compared to the rest of the world. The rest of the world are equally successful, if not more successful. We in the UK are about to enter a triple-dip.
‘The next Conservative manifesto in 2015 will ask for a mandate from the British people for a Conservative government to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners in the next parliament.’
It is well known that the chances of a Conservative victory in June 2015 are vanishingly small. Even if you take the view they can take seats off UKIP, currently UKIP are projected to get zero seats.
‘holding an in/out referendum now would be a “false choice”
No business would willingly defer drafting up a business plan until 2017, for fear of uncertainty. This knocks dead Cameron’s “false choice”argument.
‘And when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice to stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether. It will be an in-out referendum.’
Cameron is currently set to have bargained a referendum on Scotland as well as AV. These referenda cost millions of pounds. He never offered a referendum on the privatisation of the NHS, which is currently in progress.
‘will fail and the British people will drift towards the exit’
Currently, there is more of a question of Nick Clegg drifting towards the exit, taking his Liberal Democrat party with him. His position and that of his party, having sold out on libraries, the economy, the NHS and welfare, is irrelevant.
‘Today, public disillusionment with the EU is at an all-time high’
The ‘democratic deficit’, with laws and policies being implemented which nobody voted for, such as the privatisation of the NHS and the scandal of the fiasco of disabled benefits, means that disillusionment with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats is at an all-time high.
‘People feel that the EU is heading in a direction that they never signed up to. They resent the interference in our national life by what they see as unnecessary rules and regulation. And they wonder what the point of it all is.’
People do not object to protection from racial discrimination, or being sacked without warning. The European Time Directive serves a purpose of stopping doctors making decisions which compromise patient safety, for example, and it is entirely up to our Government how it wishes to implement it in any case.
The European Union that emerges from the eurozone crisis is going to be a very different body’
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have been wishing for the European economy to implode, so that it can deflect attention from their mismanagement of the economy. The UK in May 2010 had fragile growth, totally throttled by killing off UK infrastructure investment and murdering consumer demand.
‘And when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice to stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether. It will be an in/out referendum’
It is necessary to have the precise terms of this referendum urgently, prior to any talk of the electorate deciding on the ‘yes/no’ on the basis of these terms.
‘Legislation will be drafted before the next election. And if a Conservative Government is elected we will introduce the enabling legislation immediately and pass it by the end of that year.’
As above.
‘And we will complete this negotiation and hold this referendum within the first half of the next Parliament.’
As above.
‘I believe something very deeply. That Britain’s national interest is best served in a flexible, adaptable and open European Union. And that such a European Union is best with Britain in it.’
Cameron was equally passionate about ‘no further top-down reorganisations’. It therefore does not matter at all what he believes deeply in, or not.
‘Over the coming weeks, months and years, I will not rest until this debate is won. For the future of my country. For the success of the European Union. And for the prosperity of our peoples for generations to come.’
Cameron is doing this entirely to save face in his Party. The European Union can easily continue without him, but Cameron’s political gamble will unfortunately be putting real people and their jobs at risk.