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Is it time for more left Euro-scepticism?

Jun 13

Posted by James in Europe | 6 Comments

I’m radically pro-European. You should like your neighbours, ideally, and I do. Consider every country in Europe in turn and you should be able to access a wide range of positives, politically and culturally, about each. Sure, some may be stereotypes, but this is an extraordinary and diverse continent to be part of. I also feel more European than British, frankly: happier spending time in Greece or Holland or Croatia than in much of England.

But does being pro-European in that sense mean you necessarily have to support EU membership no matter what? The crisis over the single currency is part of a broader crisis around the structures of the EU, including the regularly-described “democratic deficit”. The expansion of the directly democratic element of EU politics has come in baby steps, with the European Parliament’s greater but still inadequate powers being handed over begrudgingly by the Commission and by member state Ministers on the Council.

The weak argument is also still made that those Ministers represent a democratic element, despite a complete absence of public accountability for their decisions as Europe’s second chamber. In this country, at least, the European Parliament’s day-to-day decisions are almost always ignored by the media and the public, partly because no serious effort is made to explain them or even produce a clear website. The best-known MEPs are typically those from parties not at Westminster: Nigel Farage and Caroline Lucas (prior to her 2010 win in Brighton Pavilion).

Overall, it’s hard to avoid the idea that the European Union is a quintessentially elite project, at best a vehicle made by those elites as a representation of profoundly pro-European but relatively vague attitudes that have been a majority across much of the continent since the Second World War. There have been no protests against the nation-state as previously constituted, though, no substantial ginger groups distributing petitions for more integration – “what do we want? a reduction in qualified majority voting! when do we want it? before the Lisbon Treaty comes into force!”

Despite that, there is much the European Union has been responsible for that I admire, typically exactly the sort of thing that makes Farage go red in the face. Environmental regulations, the “social chapter” and limits on the working week (which the UK should have signed up to), free movement of citizens and their right to work across the Union, consumer protection legislation, all that good stuff. If it weren’t for the very obvious price to pay, it’d be great not to have to change money while travelling across the continent.

The flip side is substantial, though. What if we wanted to renationalise the railways? EU rules require at least an accounting separation of rail infrastructure and train services, a substantial part of the problem, and this is enforced by an aggressively pro-competition Commission. Same with postal services – it’s possible that it would prove hard even for an independent Scotland to undo the three-party consensus Royal Mail privatisation within the EU.

In fact, if you could sum up the politics of the pre-crisis European establishment in one word, it would be “competition”: it’s perhaps more central to the Union’s operation than it was to Thatcherism itself. There is no ill the Commission doesn’t think can be fixed by more market liberalisation, and no institution too important to jeopardise with this ideological drive.

But all of that is being eclipsed by the single currency debacle. The mainstream left, right and centre all backed this project (less of the right, admittedly), but not the Scottish Greens – although I have to admit my concern about stability was based on the effect of a single interest rate on divergent economies, not about the combination of deregulated banking sectors combined with divergent fiscal policies and bond rates.

And the fact remains that the EU establishment’s response to the Eurozone crisis has been threefold: dither, slosh public money into banks rather than bailing out innocent depositors (where the right’s concerns about moral hazard are also valid), and impose massively regressive anti-cyclical cuts on the public sector. We also have to watch the unpleasant spectacle of Germany in particular benefitting from the Euro’s low value (as far as German exporters are concerned), at the direct expense of the poorer nations for whom the single currency remains an over-valued albatross.

The solutions being touted to this failure to integrate is, as always, further integration. The much-written about Eurobonds would mean the richer nations, not just Germany, would cover the loans to the broken banks while also effectively setting fiscal policy throughout the EU. There would be virtually no point Syriza winning the Greek elections on Sunday: much of their agenda to protect workers’ rights would be subject to an Angela Merkel veto.

Just last night it transpired that Commission President Barroso is proposing a union of banks to go with the bankers’ union we already see in effect: a more efficient way to fleece the public on behalf of the markets than European Union policy has perhaps never been devised. Like many of the Eurozone sticking-plasters, this will have a substantial impact on the non-Eurozone members of the EU too.

And can this deeper and closer political union, a union with internal financial transfers and two speeds in the same direction, even be delivered before the Euro collapses under the weight of its own inherent contradictions? Will public opinion across the EU permit it?

For now, most of the organised party-political scepticism about the project is on the right: not just the Blimpish UKIP but also harder right elements in European politics like Wilders’s PVV. The reasons for centre-left support for the project vary from member state to member state, but are often rooted in a laudable desire for international solidarity.

For the Labour party, specifically, and the parts of the UK-wide left which still believed in Labour during the 1980s, there’s also an emotional link: Jacques Delors was an effective opposition to the Thatcher administration in just the way Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot weren’t. But that’s no basis to determine our position in international structures, especially given the market fundamentalism set out above. EU membership does come with a limit to how right-wing your government can be, but it’s pretty slack: neither savage austerity nor such abominations as the recent Hungarian media legislation seem to be offside.

The point is that membership also limits how left you can be, especially economically. It’s explicitly a market project, not a popular project, and where I’d expect to agree with the smarter part of the Tory right (Douglas Carswell, Dan Hannan etc) is that it should be up to the voting public to determine where national policy lies on that spectrum. The alternative is to accept a distant backstop in the direction you don’t want to see the country go, the price being a limit to the ambition with which you can head in the other direction.

Greens in this country have spent long enough saying “yes, but reform” to the EU. Is it time to take that to “no, unless”, at the very least? Should we really abandon healthy scepticism about this floundering project to the right? It may well be time to look at the alternatives, and to start setting out how more independent nation-states might cooperate on labour and environmental standards, as well as working together in other ways that could preserve the EU’s wins for the people but stop putting the thumb on the scale for deregulated speculative capitalism.

Yes to Independence, Yes to Growth, “Yes” to Anything

Jun 13

Posted by Jeff in Governance | 29 Comments

“Yes”

The word will quickly be, if it isn’t already, synonymous with the SNP and winning independence. It is important therefore that the Scottish Government has clear lines of demarcation between what is official devolved Government business and what is part of the referendum campaign.

The above may look like a page from the SNP’s prospectus on independence but it’s actually taken from the Scottish Enterprise website.

I missed this when Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale first blogged on it but I’m surprised the media hasn’t picked up on it yet as I rather suspect that this is the first of many instances where the SNP will be criticised for blurring its responsibilities as a Government of a devolved Parliament and its burning ambitions as a political party.

For me, it’s over the line, quite a way over the line, as it is quite blatantly an attempt to aid the independence campaign by associating it with government bodies. ‘You want growth, you say Yes to Growth, well vote Yes in 2014’ is the quite clear overture here.

It’s not all going to be one way of course. Indeed, the SNP has already fired a very meek shot across the unionist bows for using “Better Together” when (prepare to be outraged), NHS Scotland are already using that phrase. Personally, I think the unionists are jumping on the Better Nation bandwagon here and since we thought of that phrase ourselves we… (what’s that? Alasdair Gray? Dennis Lee?). Ok, never mind…

Taking every fair advantage to get one over on the opposition is reasonable, undermining fairness (and the potential inappropriate use of public funds) is really not. A heavy price would and should be paid by anyone who falls into the latter camp and so parties should tread with caution here. It’s easier to lose a reputation than it is to build one.

The SNP needs to hit everything with a straight bat for the next two years if it’s to have any chance of winning the referendum. This “Yes” linkage with Scottish Enterprise? Well, it’s just not cricket.

From Walthamstow to Westminster: why I want to lead the Green Party of England and Wales

Jun 12

Posted by Guest Blog in Parties, Westminster | 9 Comments

An exclusive guest post today from Natalie Bennett. Natalie has announced she is standing to be leader of the Green Party following Caroline Lucas’s decision not to restand in September. Her website is here: http://www.natalie4leader.org/

In the 2001 general election, having just moved to Walthamstow, east London, I went to the polling station to vote Green. I was surprised, and disappointed, to find that there wasn’t a Green Party candidate. The moment came back to me five years later, when I decided it was past time to make doing something about the state of the world a personal priority.

Joining the Green Party of England and Wales – helping it stand in places like Walthamstow – seemed the natural step, but if you’d told me then that six and a half years later I would be standing for the leadership of the party south of the border, I would certainly have thought you’d been looking at the carbon emissions graphs for too long.

Yet in a way the path from Walthamstow to here is clear enough when I look back.

I’ve been through some great highs with the Green Party, and some pretty tough lows – a high in 2006 in the central London borough of Camden when we won our first two councillors, and a low in 2010 when we lost two of by then three councillors to the general election Labour swing.

I’ve learnt a lot about the party, and politics, since 2006. As an activist, candidate, and now chair, of Camden Green Party, and as founding chair of Green Party Women, I’ve seen how much there is to do, and how difficult it can be to shape lots of enthusiastic volunteers and minimal financial and physical resources into a high-functioning whole.

I’ve become utterly convinced that a Green political approach is the only appropriate response to the current economic and ecological crisis. It’s so screamingly obvious that we can’t continue to treat the world as a combined mine/rubbish tip, and can’t keep discarding to a life of poverty and fear millions of people, whether they are trapped in low-wage jobs or on inadequate benefit payments.

Yet it’s also clear that the Green Party itself is at a critical point. We’ve made the huge leap to our first MP. We’re now identifiably the third party in London following the mayoral/Assembly elections.

But still, for many people up and down the country who might like to vote Green – and we know that when presented with our policies, unbranded, they’re the most popular with voters — there’s no sunflower logo on their ballot paper. And for many others, the Greens have yet to establish themselves sufficiently locally to look like a viable choice.

This needs to change. Fast.

We need to work to ensure that by the end of the decade everyone has at least one Green rep, an MEP. We can certainly treble our number of MEPS in 2014 as a starting point, covering six regions.

Over the next decade we can put at least one local councillor in every major town and city around the country and have a spread of serious Westminster target seats around the country.

To do that, we have to transform how our party works. The Green Party believes in localism; we have local parties, not branches, who decide their own activities and direction. Lots of good in that – just look at the dreadful results of centralised diktats from other parties, from Tony Blair’s pager MPs downwards.

But we’ve also in general interpreted that as leaving local parties to their own devices, to sink or swim. Some have powered on confidently – Brighton, Norwich, Lancaster, more recently Solihull – but many, without targeted, organised support, have not. Under a first-past-the-post electoral system, it is hard to get a real foothold.

Local parties need to work together as teams. Regions need to act as a coordinated unit. The national party needs to bring it all together into a supportive, coherent whole.

And we need to stand up proudly with the courage of our convictions. We have a model for an entirely different kind of economy and society that the public is crying out for, yet we haven’t done enough to develop it and to put it into ordinary language, in mass circulation news outlets.

On many policies – drugs, nuclear weapons and prostitution to name just three — we have what the Daily Mail would call shocking ideas. Yet these are ideas that the majority of the public actually back – and sometimes we’re not brave enough in proclaiming them.

Neither of those points is a criticism of Greens working hard up and down the country. We don’t need them to work even harder – that would hardly be possible. But we do need to work smarter, and in a more coordinated way. And we need to make sure we’re telling the public about what we’re doing, convincing them to vote for us, to support us, to join us.

Then we can ensure that everyone not only has the chance to vote Green, but the opportunity to contact an elected Green rep with their concerns, at every level of government. And we can move confidently on to be the third party in the country, then beyond. And in doing that we’ll not only elect more Greens, but start to pull the centre of political gravity in Britain back from the hyper-capitalist neoliberalism that’s nearly shredded our economy and society.

Salmond should resist eating ‘his’ Greens

Jun 10

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood | 73 Comments

My first reaction to The Herald’s exclusive that the Greens have “walked out on the Yes campaign” was exactly the same as Labour MSP Patricia Ferguson’s soundbite – it’s either Salmond’s way or the high way.

It would take the most blinkered Cybernat to dress this up as media bias or an exaggeration of a minor split. Patrick Harvie sat cheek by jowl with Alex Salmond in the Cineworld cinema two weeks ago as part of the ‘broad church’ Yes Scotland campaign kick-off. Now Patrick can’t confirm that the Scottish Greens will even be participating. We will have to wait until the SGP conference in October to learn if that’ll happen.

This isn’t the first time that the Greens are concerned they are being taken from granted by the SNP. Who can be forget the pulsating drama as the Greens voted against Swinney’s budget in 2009 over an insulation plan that did not go far enough? And on her blog, Joan McAlpine has regularly mildly scolded the Greens for not pushing independence harder:

“As a party, they claim to support Scottish independence, but I see little evidence of this in their campaigning.”

Two parties wanting the same thing but undermining each other by not overcoming their relatively minor differences makes me think of the squabbling Socialists and their unfortunate lack of representation at Holyrood. The second parliamentary term contained six Socialist MSPs, so the appetite for their policies is out there, but political infighting is the easiest way to scare away voters and that’s what could happen with Yes Scotland here if this disagreement isn’t fixed.

Why would floating voters vote Yes to independence if even the proponents of a separate Scotland can’t get on? Indeed, why would would-be-Yes-voters vote Yes?

The silver lining is that we are still well over two years away from the independence referendum and a more consensual approach from the SNP coupled with a notably hungrier attitude to winning a Yes result from the Greens is a compromise well within reach.

Those in the SNP may reasonably point out that the SNP have all the campaign money and its election machine won a parliamentary majority at the 2011 election while the Greens didn’t improve upon their lowly two representatives, so who is best placed to lead, perhaps even dominate, the Yes Scotland campaign? That may be so, but it would be arrogant to assume that any party would want to sit under the SNP only to lend their arguments a greener hue and more weight. As James has said before, the Scottish Green Party is not the environmentalist wing of nationalism. It certainly shouldn’t be treated as such.

So what happens from here? Well, it may sound dry and boring, but hopefully an organisational design can be drawn up that satisfies all relevant Yes Scotland stakeholders and decision makers, and then the coalition can get on with doing what really matters – taking their arguments to the nation and convincing the voters.

Alex Salmond doesn’t suffer fools gladly but if he continues to see Patrick Harvie (and Colin Fox) as passengers and not partners, and by extension ‘fools’, then he’s going to win a very small battle but lose a very big war.

There needs to be a third way over and above Salmond’s way and the high way for something as important as this.

Loadsa money

Jun 9

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 2 Comments

Spain seems to have agreed to accept €100bn of bailout for its banks. The only meaningful difference between why this happened and why Ireland had to be bailed it is because Ireland nationalised its banks and their losses, something Spain thankfully seems to be reluctant to do.

At least, that’s what’s being briefed. Given they’re still denying even asking for this, the details seem likely to change before the markets open on Monday, but the narrative so far requires this to be a done deal by then or everything’s going to go on fire. Which is good for Spain, and probably why they’re not being forced to impose even greater austerity than they were signed up.

What’s potentially more problematic is that Spain isn’t following the Icelandic route and hanging their arguably endemically corrupt banking institutions out to dry. In attempting to keep them going, and there are good arguments as to why that’s necessary (the Caja system is largely funded from small depositors, despite a surge in regional government bond holdings recently), the Spanish system is becoming increasingly reliant on the relatively powerless central government to manage the economy.

As it does so it inevitably becomes increasingly dysfunctional: the asymmetric federalism of the Spanish system has been unable to either reduce their deficit, because the regions refused, or coordinate an effective fiscal stimulus to keep things going.

One of the bellweathers of the global economy is the Baltic Dry Index, which represents the cost of moving raw materials by sea. This is important because it’s an efficient indicator of expectations about the future that isn’t open to revision or speculation. It’s fallen a quarter in the last month, and a half since January 6 months.

I don’t have a good solution to propose. Eurobonds are politically problematic for the countries that would underwrite them, even though they benefited from the artificially low exchange rates during the boom. Equally, mutually agreed splits into a “hard” and “soft” Euro would cripple the hard-zone exports and the soft-zone debts and domestic demand. Even an orderly exit by Greece would be catastrophic and wouldn’t solve the problem.

To be honest, the closest analogy I can think of is the credit crunch of 2007, right before Northern Rock went under. It seemed bad at the time without anybody really realising the next few years of economic Armageddon that would follow, and that was with a globally coordinated policy response.

That’s not where we are now. The risks are greater: we’re talking about large nations becoming insolvent, not just large banks and small nations. The relative size of possible response are smaller: a countries GDP is, almost by definition, larger than it’s banking sector.

Most worryingly, there’s an absolute vacuum of leadership. Few of the current set of world leaders really understand what’s going on, fewer still have the domestic political capital to use and none of them have the international standing required. Obama is hobbled by a frankly insane legislature, Cameron is set on playing the ingenue, Merkel is constrained internationally if not domestically and Hollande hasn’t either the strength of personality, intellect or international credibility required.

ETA: To sum up, this classic movie clip