I have written an emergency motion for Labour Party Conference, I have ’till noon on Thursday to get it submitted, so better get a move on, unfortunately doing this from a CLP is a bit tricky . I need to check if it’s on the Agenda but that’s a bit tricky, I am not sure they have published all the motions to hoi-polloi like me yet.
Conference notes the announcement by Liz Truss on 19th September that there will be no post Brexit trade deal with the USA, and that the Govt is once again postponing (16th Sept) the imposition of the agreed customs checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.is a bit tricky, made worse by the direction not fo
Conference further notes that the Tory ‘Hard Brexit’ has led to reduced foreign inward investment, a worsening balance of trade deficit, reduced employment, a labour shortage in many industries, most obviously in agriculture, hospitality and in the NHS, jobs are being offshored to western Europe and sterling is at its worse exchange rate ever with both the dollar and the euro. The labour shortages are compounded by the xenophobia released by the referendum and the Tory’s “hostile environment”.
Conference believes that these negative economic consequences of Tory policy are significant contributors to the cost of living crisis.
Conference believes that to start reversing the damage inflicted by the Tory ‘Hard Brexit’ Britain needs to significantly reduce the trade frictions it has imposed on its imports of goods, services and labour from its biggest trading partner, the EU.
Conference resolves that Labour will call for a closer relationship with the EU in order to alleviate the trade frictions the Tories have introduced, that we will seek to rejoin Horizon Europe and Erasmus+, and that we will repeal the cruel and intrusive hostile environment. …
Despite the picture above, this is a short piece of comparative politics, comparing the US Constitution with that of the EU, taking in some lessons from the UK. I have just watched The Original Intent of the [US] Constitution by Prof. Mark Stoler. This taught me some things and this essay reviews these points and looks at lessons for the UK, the EU and the rest of the world.
I look at the “Separation of Powers” vs “Parliamentary Sovereignty”, note that checks and balances are designed to protect the [untitled] aristocracy against the mob, that without the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution may well not have been agreed. I note the desirability of a basic law, with the ability to amend, but not as flexibly as is the case in the UK. I look at constitutional inflexibility in the residual construction of the US Senate and the EU veto. I look at the need for federal taxation powers. I have concluded that parliaments need a freedom of action, and the freedom to negotiate between party programmes. The paradox is that they need to be constrained which is why we need human rights law.
The lecture to me reinforces the need for a subsidiarity guarantee within a constitution, including taxation powers, and a human rights guarantee, remembering that human right law is designed to protect you from the Government. Vetoes are a topic for another day, although much of the failings in the US Constitution can be placed at the door of single seat constituencies, including the Presidency, elected by simple plurality, or indirectly in the case of the Presidency. I say more overleaf ….
I have been published on Brexit Spotlight. The article reviews the macro economic reporting and increasingly obvious failure of Brexit, it critiques the Labour Party leadership’s recent response reported at least by me in these two blog articles, Sensibleness Postponed, and my take on Lammy’s speech a week earlier , looks at other political forces within and outside the Labour Party. It highlights the Redfield Wilton opinion polling showing growing support for the single market and rejoining the EU and ends with a warning, that Labour “is terrified of setting out a principled case that seeks to lead, not follow, the electorate. Ironically, he i.e. Starmer risks losing Labour voters – especially young and working-age voters – with this strategy”. …
In the middle of the week, one Tory MP wrote in a House of Commons magazine. He catalogued the decline in trade, GDP and inward investment. He does not mention the traffic queues in Kent or in European airports. On exports he said,
the fishers who can no longer sell their Scottish salmon, to the farmers undercut by unchecked imports, to Cheshire cheesemakers running into £180 health certificates, even to the City which can no longer sell financial services to Europe, sector after sector is being strangled by the red tape we were supposed to escape from.
Tobias Ellwood MP, Politics Home, The House
He concludes that,
In a nutshell, all these challenges would disappear if we dare to advance our Brexit model by re-joining the EU single market (the Norway model). …
Any model will have benefits and drawbacks. The single market means the free movement of goods, services, capital and people. It would see £7bn of paperwork and checks go, and boost our economy by restoring free trade to sectors demanding change.
Tobias Ellwood MP, Politics Home, The House
What’s fascinating and brave is that this is a Tory MP!. He makes the obvious point that it’s still outside the EU and needn’t be seen as abandoning Brexit, but many in the parliamentary Tory party disagree. It has attracted the usual idiocy from Lord Frost whose response in a non-linked three tweet thread 🤦 is best seen in this article at the London Economic. It’s as light weight as everything else he does.
He’s right we should re-join the single market, and I think that support for this is growing.
I was invited to speak at the Young European Federalists rally/conference as a representative of AEIP and CTOE. I spoke about CoFoE’s proposals on Migration, and the need for a generous and inclusive citizenship definitions. My notes and lessons learnt from CoFoE and the conference are overleaf. Use the "Read More" button to accerss it ...
This needs to reported; the UK Government, is postponing the introduction on import checks on goods arriving from the EU. The announcement was made by the Minister for Brexit Opportunities Rees-Mogg. It is reported in the Guardian with the following comment,
You read that right. Jacob Rees-Mogg, arch-leaver and longtime loather of the EU, is now parroting lines from the remain campaign. He is admitting that implementing Brexit in full, honouring the 2016 promise to take back control of Britain’s borders, would be “an act of self-harm”.There’s plenty to attack here, starting with the nerve of hailing this move as “saving” Britons £1bn, when this was £1bn that Britons would never have had to spend at all if it hadn’t been for Brexit. Or you could share the outrage of British farmers, appalled that, thanks to Brexit, they have been left at a serious competitive disadvantage: they now face onerous and costly checks when they ship their goods across the Channel, while French, Italian or Spanish farmers face no such hassle moving their products in the other direction. Or you could worry along with the British Veterinary Association, which warns that not checking food imports leaves Britain exposed to “catastrophic” animal diseases such as African swine fever – a risk that was reduced when Britain was part of “the EU’s integrated and highly responsive surveillance systems”. Or you could join the lament of the UK Major Ports Group, whose members have spent hundreds of millions of pounds building checking facilities, which now stand unused as “bespoke white elephants”.
Jonathan Frredland – TheGuardian
The BBC also report with a comment from Faisal Islam, their economics editor, although they find a quote to illustrate the benefits, or at least the avoidance of further harm. This is the fourth postponement. The critical politics is that this Government, things that the customs checks are a harm.
Luke Cooper of Another Europe, in an article on Brexit Spotlight also highlights the announcement and concludes with,
This is why the Rees-Mogg announcement shows that the game is up for the British exit from the single market. … This [the asymmetric checking system] is self-evidently unsustainable. If the most nationalistic government in recent British history is not able to fully extricate the country from the European market, then it simply isn’t possible. The question now is when – not if – Britain re-joins the single market.
Luke Cooper – Another Europe
At the beginning of the year, I thought that the critical failure of exit from the single market would be in Northern Ireland but maybe not; the new lorry park in Kent is another pressure point and a number of EU exporters were just giving up on the UK as a market. …
Those of you following me, know that I have been following the EU’s Conference on the Future of Europe. I have been mainky tracking Citizen’s Panel 2 on Dempocracy and values, but also reviewed ECP 4 and their recommendations on Migration. I have had a brief look at ECP3’s Climate Change and Environment proposals; I looked at these in January and the proposals that made the final plenary will differ.
I made a word cloud of the proposals other than health. Carbon should read carbon reduction, but the generator wouldn’t work with such a long phrase. I have created summary keywords for each proposal, this would be better if I had crowd sourced this allocation stage, but I didn’t.
Word Cloud, ECP3, Climate, environment & health
The Citizen’s panels full proposals are published by the Conference. The panels work in sup groups and so can produce multiple, very similar recommendations.
My highlights are that the panel recommends, the reinforcing of the health care system and the assumption by the EU of competency for health with equal access for all. It also takes a powerful stand for a sustainable energy economy, together with transport system reform: more public transport, particularly buses and trains. …
This was published on the London 4 Europe web site, arguing that the Euro and “Banking Union” are potential political obstacles to rejoining. I just observe that the author has not caught up with the change in macro-economic management, the Stability and Growth Pact has serious credibility problems given the numerous breaches. We can hope that with a new coloured government in Germany the deficit fetishism of the EU will be weakened. Secondly, banking regulation is global and emanates from the G7 and BIS in Basel. The EU has little room for manoeuvre, although of course, should it be in a position to join BIS that would change things. This is an article designed to show how clever the author is and fails in that goal.
The ECB, Frankfurt CC DFL 2011 BY-SA
I note the article focuses on Sweden, which has agreed to adopt the Euro and not Denmark which has an opt-out. When we get to negotiating re-entry, the size of the UK economy and the sterling zone will be issues which may lead to us being given an opt-out or a Swedish deal, although I was interested to note that Nordea, Sweden’s largest bank has moved to Finland to locate in the Eurozone.
A serious analysis will come later, when both parties need an answer dealing with transaction volume, prudential regulation and fundamentally macro-economic policy. Let’s note that we had an opt-out of the compliance clauses of the SGP, we doubt we’ll be getting that back.
Macro-economics will be a problem if we have a left led Labour Govt., that wanted to pursue a policy of full employment but more importantly will be the need to meet the democracy criterion of the Copenhagen Criteria, where parliamentary sovereignty, the House of Lords and first past the post together may be seen as obstacles. Starmer’s Labour lacks the will to confront the issue of rejoining the EU but would probably welcome the shackles of today’s Stability and Growth pact. Actually, the Stability & Growth Pact is a serious barrier to rejoining for the Left; perhaps the sterling zone will save us from that too. …
Friends are considering if we/they should support Ukraine’s request for fast-track membership of the EU. I believe that Putin’s target is the EU and that its response must be robust but the criteria for membership includes a robust democracy, a market economy and an administration committed to the rule of law. Ukraine does not meet these three criteria.
From my work in CTOE on the COFOE, I have come to the conclusion that one of the weaknesses of the EU’s treaties is that while the principles of proportionality and subsidiarity are essential parts of the treaties, they only express a relationship between the EU and the member states. This needs to change such that the member states need to guarantee subsidiarity within themselves and to their citizens. The current treaties do not do this.
This is needed to ensure that the promise of subsidiarity is met, that decisions are taken as close to the citizen as possible. It annoyed me greatly, that Cameron was bleating on about subsidiarity while acting as the elected dictator of one of the most centralised states in Europe. This deficit and lack of mandate on the institutions of the EU cause problems for independence or ethnic minority movements within the member states, such as in Spain and Hungary. Ukraine also has an significant ethnic minority population and its democracy needs to offer them the same security and human rights as the majority.
Ukraine is deemed by Transparency International as the second most corrupt state in Europe, it is third worst in front of the ECtHR and is deemed to be a Hybrid State by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index. The only way in which Ukraine could join via a fast track is if the EU were to relax its standards on human rights and the rule of law. It is unlikely to do that as it is in the same argument with Poland and Hungary and is busy changing its rules to allow it to financially sanction them.
Democrats need to defend and improve the democracy of the EU, and its member states. Our solidarity with the people of the Ukraine needs to be expressed through other means.
Image Credit: CC European Parliament 2010 BY-NC-ND MEPs Voting …
This is nonsense, if we want the UK to be more than an offshore money laundering factory, then re-joining the EU is inevitable. It will only happen when membership becomes a non-partisan issue, or its partisan opponents are once again an irrelevance. The queues and delays at Dover, the developing maritime routes between Eire and continental Europe, and the declining trade balances as our export trade with the EU dies, all require remediation. To these problems we can add the labour shortage-based inflation as the plutocrats’ essential services, i.e. sandwich & fast food shops and restaurants can’t find staff and the people’s essential services are under funded and failing.
The short to medium term task for those who want to rejoin is to show & highlight Brexit’s failings, show how these failings are as a result of the Tories’ deal and that a better deal is possible. I outline my first five steps (my blog, Labour’s policy forum, medium). Other’s have points to add, but by offering a better future, we will win people to the position that we can do better than what we have. We need a better deal and we need to build a stable majority for a better relationship with the EU and see where it goes. Other’s have pointed me at this which is a better way of dealing with the policy issue.
What Starmer should have said: Boris’s Brexit deal has failed. Even the Tories can’t think of a single benefit. But we’ve left, so we need a better deal, one that frees our exporters from bureaucracy and allows our workers to travel in the EU. We will negotiate that deal.
Some argue that the EU’s own developments will strengthen opposition to the EU in this country but more importantly it’s possible that we will have problems meeting the EU’s requirement to have “stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;”; the House of Lords (and maybe Parliamentary Sovereignty & FPTP) and the “Hostile Environment” are all problems. The most rapid short-term changes in the EU today are its adoption of the Budget Conditionality Regulation, designed to sanction Hungary and Poland; this is because of their attacks on the independence of the judiciary, behaviour being repeated by our Tory government. Progressives should welcome this chance to examine and improve our democracy.
The problem with Labour under new management ‘s slogans, Fix Brexit and “Not in 50 years”, the latter a slogan used by both Starmer and Rachel Reeves is they do not allow Labour to criticise the current deal, and it looks like it’s designed not to. It also inhibits arguments for reform of the Brexit deal; this also looks to be by design. It denies Labour a role in scrutiny in Parliament or in the deal’s scrutiny structures. It’s also is trolling the membership and the majority of Labour’s voters. Their loyalty is not as strong as that of the old trade unionised workers, and New Labour lost 5m of them between 1997 and 2010. It adds to the evidence that they want to disassemble the new class coalition that voted for and is voting Labour. A quick look at politico.eu’s, poll tracker shows what happens when Labour loses the support of its remainer core vote as it did in the summer of 2019.
That Starmer’s 10 pledges have been broken is probably priced in but interestingly he was silent on the EU and Brexit, and his Labour under new management is a policy vacuum, merely following the Tories on COVID, much of its authoritarianism and now on Brexit. Someone should explain that triangulation involves minimising the differences not eliminating them because people can tell the difference between the echo and the shout, They’ll trust the Tories to do Tory things before they trust Labour. Triangulation legitimises your opponents politics and policies. It’s not a strategy for principled people.
This comes from a mindset where focus group driven triangulation remains cute, it is an electoral strategy based on letting down and ignoring those who vote for us. Last time we did that, we lost 5m votes and laid the ground for 2019 when the old steel and pit towns finally voted Tory. …
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