EU Debate: Brexit

EDITORIALLY INDEPENDENT. EST. 2010 Tuesday 21st June 2016 tw: @theheythroplion

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THE LION DEBATES: THE EU - part three With less than a week to go until Britain votes to define, or re-define, its relationship with the European Union, The Lion will be running a series of articles, written by Heythrop students, as a contribution to that great debate.

More is better: If you’re for Leave, Remain or have yet to make up your mind, we want to hear what you have to say. (And we offer a free drink to any and all contributors.) Get in touch with a member of the Lion team, or find us on Facebook, for more information.

Next, my turn. Benjamin Mercer’s case for Brexit.

DECLINE AND FALL BENJAMIN MERCER Alumn i

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forewarning: what follows is not pretty.

It contains statistics, a WTF-load of acronyms, a history both of the EU and of our place within it. I have endeavoured to keep it light, airy, breezy; but to those who bemoan an absence of fact and nuance in this debate I say this: it’s complicated. The EU is, by design, dense and opaque. But if you care – and you should - then you owe it to yourselves to put in the time and effort to understand it.

So, with that in mind...

“What has the EU ever done for us?”

It’s a great shame that this

question has been co-opted by imbeciles. Much can be said about Monty Python but slaves to orthodoxy and received opinion they certainly were not.

John Cleese himself is backing Brexit. The EU, to the extent that it resembles the Roman Empire at all, is not the great modernising, imperial force of Augustus against which the People’s Front of Judea (or was is the Judean People’s Front?) so stupidly struggled; it is the bankrupt and beggared and failing property of the megalomaniacal Commodus.

It is well along in its “descent,” as was said of Rome under that ridiculous figure, “from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.”

So let’s reclaim the question.

Let’s treat it with the seriousness this topic deserves. What has the EU ever done for us?

It’s not workers’ rights, health and safety legislation, equal pay, the minimum wage, or trade union rights. All of those were won by the people of Britain, created, debated and passed in the UK parliament long before, in most cases, the EU came into existence.

Holiday pay? 1938. The Factory Act? 1948. The Equal Pay Act? 1970. The minimum wage was introduced in 1999 not to meet EU demands but because Britain has always, even under Tory governments, far exceeded the minimum requirements of the

EU. Those who claim that Brexit will lead to an assault on workers’ rights ignore this fact; they also ignore that the real assault on workers’ rights, such as the creation of new, stricter limits on the rights of Trades Unions, is a policy of the EU. More on that later.

Alright, what about peace, security, prosperity?

To quote Ms Thatcher: “No, No, No.” Peace between the principal continental powers in Western Europe was established long before the ratification of Maastricht and the creation of the EU. It was created first by tying the economies of the major Western

European powers together in the European Coal & Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 and then, later, by formalising Franco-German political relations with the Élysée Treaty of 1963. (That agreement also enthroned the US as the arbiter of EU policy; again, more on that later.)

What has the EU given us? I’ll tell you. It’s bold, it’s controversial, it’s also easily justifiable.

The EU has given us the destruction of Ukraine, the destruction of Libya, record levels social and economic inequality, the reduction of Greece, Spain and Portugal to abject beggary, the migrant crisis, a hot war with Russia, deregulation of the banks, an assault on workers’, migrants’ and Trade Unions’ rights, perpetual recession and depression, massive debt, a privatized NHS, wage stagnation, and the systematic destruction of welfare states across the continent.

All of this for the small price of the most important power any independent nation can possess: economic sovereignty.

That’s quite a lot to address in the limited space afforded to me.

Nevertheless, I think it’s doable.

We can cover all of the above with a simple division between economic and fiscal policy (of which social policy is but a consequence) and foreign policy.

Foreign policy is relatively simple so we’ll tackle that first: The EU has a foreign policy. This, as anyone who knows anything about foreign policy knows, is absurd. On matters of immediate and pressing concern, such as genocide in former Yugoslavia, the competing interests of Europe’s principal powers prohibit quick and necessary action. It, the Bosnian genocide, required the British government to make representations to NATO to intervene because

the EU’s common defense policy was bogged down by partisan bickering. However, tellingly, once NATO – the US – had decided on a course of action, the EU became convinced, too.

It was too slow in the case of Bosnia and too quick in the case of Ukraine and Libya.

On Ukraine: it’s vitally important to remember that Ukraine is itself a modern invention. The split between the East, which is predominantly Russian in its culture and language, and the West, was not accounted for in its de facto unification in 1939 or its official independence in 1991. This explains the relative ease with which Russia was able to annex Crimea and contest Donetsk after the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime.

That coup was orchestrated by the EU and the CIA acting in tandem. They approached not the official government of Ukraine with regards to European integration (of which it was deeply sceptical) but an unofficial, fragmented opposition movement, sometimes called the Maidan movement. What followed, a consequence of EU foreign policy, was an unconstitutional coup which installed the pro-EU sweet shop magnate Petro Poroshenko, a continuation of a long policy of antagonism toward Russia which alienated the pro-Russian Ukrainians in the East. That war continues; the EU is largely responsible for it.

On Libya: the support for the US initiative to affect regime change by air power alone came, predominantly, from the EU’s European External Action Service (EEAS) fronted by Britain’s own ‘High Representative’ Cathy Ashton. This is an organisation that exposes a double flaw within EU foreign policy: first, it has been criticised for proceeding against the wishes of key members of the EU. Second, it is an

officially recognised EU agency which operated with EU approval even without the support of all member states.

Libya, of course, is now a failed state. The EU officially backs a provisional government which lacks both a support base and a physical in Libya, conducting many of its pointless meetings on NATO ships anchored offshore. Libya is now a gateway for migrants and refugees, serving as a port from which desperate people from North Africa set sail across the Mediterranean and adding a second front to the migrant crisis (which has thus far been concentrated in the Aegean). It is a point that the EEAS, and the EU’s foreign policy gurus in general, are unwilling and unable to address.

Disagree with the way EU foreign policy is conducted or directed or carried out? Want to recall Ms. Ashton? Want to elect a government that shares your values, beliefs and concerns with regards to matters of state and diplomacy? Well, tough. You can’t. As the Vice President of the European Commission, Jyrki Katainen, said in 2015: “We don’t change our policy according to elections.”

Which leads us to the most important consideration in this debate: the economy, and economic sovereignty.

Vital to this, and to the contention that the EU ensures programmes of privatisation in the NHS and other public services, is an understanding of the philosophy underlying the EU’s economic doctrine and the way in which it is enshrined by EU law, treaties, and European Court of Justice (ECJ) jurisprudence.

Bear with me; I’ll try and keep it simple.

This is the state of things as they

are: In 2010, The Fiscal Compact was signed into EU law. It outlaws Keynesian economics (the foundation of FDR’s New Deal and Britain’s post-war recovery under the Atlee government, which sees spending, not cutting, as the best way to escape recession), limiting the size of budget deficits to 0.5% and enshrining austerity in the EU constitution. This, coupled with the European Semester System which obliges each member state to have its budget approved by the European Commission before presenting it for a vote in a national parliament, and the Euro Plus Pact of 2011 which enshrines in law the requirement to reduce labour costs, makes it impossible to achieve social reform in the EU. Moreover, ECJ rulings in the cases of Viking and Laval had the effect of curbing the rights of Trade Unions, prohibiting them from taking action to stop companies moving production to countries that pay lower wages as a means of cutting costs. (Cutting costs, as I’ve explained, is a constitutional requirement.)

The ECJ’s mandate covers Europe’s economic constitution, but because the economic constitution takes precedence over social protection, EU regulations and directives are in effect predetermined by the ECJ. It’s a legislative court, entirely unelected and unaccountable.

It, and the EU superstructure more broadly, serves, as said

by Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, as an ‘antidote’ to democracy.

The Single European Act (SEA), and later Maastricht, both served as revisions to the Treaty of Rome and were intended to lead to the emergence of the single market. The philosophy of that market is one of de-regulation; its goal, which it achieved, was the removing of all barriers to the four fundamental princi-

ples of free movement: of goods, services, capital and labour.

How does all of this affect us practically? Well, the principles of free movement ensure that wealth and capital coalesce around a singularity, Germany, giving it the power to decide the future of a continent.

It deprives us, and other member states, of the ability to determine our own economic policies.

And to paraphrase Keynes: if you don’t control your economy,

you don’t control your country.

Were the Atlee government in power now, tasked with creating the welfare state, they would be prohibited from doing so by the EU’s constitutionally enshrined austerity and harmonization rules and deregulation rules and directives.

Were Jeremy Corbyn to be elected on a platform of renationalising the NHS, Royal Mail, the Railways, or indeed any other industry or service, he would be prohibited by EU law from doing

so.

What it means is that a vote to remain is a vote to continue down a path that has left Greece with 50% youth unemployment, which has stalled economic recovery across the continent, which mandates the privatisation of nationalised industries and which, by centralising control of economic policy and enshrining it in an unelected court, deprives us of the most important sovereignty we might possess: economic sovereignty.

What it means is that a vote to leave, by returning to us control over our economic model and policy, allows us to choose our own future. It allows us to escape the inevitable decline and fall of the European Union and establish ourselves as a model of sovereign, democratic, internationalist independence.

It’s been disgraced by the character of its creators, but the slogan itself is sound: Vote Leave, Take Back Control.