The very tiniest consequence of Trump’s election victory is that its timing falls messily for me now that this is a fortnightly blog. This post’s main topic, which is last week’s budget, suddenly seems like old news. Equally, writing about that leaves little space to write about the US election.
But that may be no bad thing. I often think that hot takes on big events are foolish, and the scale of this event, in particular, is going to take time to process. It is going to be different, bigger, and potentially far more dangerous than what flowed from his 2016 victory. The consequences go well beyond the focus of this blog, but even within that focus they will be profound. Profound for the UK, for the EU, for the continent of Europe and therefore, inevitably, for the entire Brexit project.
A preliminary list includes issues of defence, most pressingly as regards Ukraine, but also as regards the Baltic states, Eastern Europe both inside and outside the EU, and the Balkans. It also includes economics, and the possibility of substantial tariffs on trade with the US. Both of these things will shine a fresh and very searching spotlight on the economic and geo-political incoherence – an incoherence so great that it can properly be called a stupidity – of Brexit as a national strategy. That can only add weight to calls to join (or rejoin) the EU, though it's hard to see them being heeded. It certainly ought to bring more urgency and ambition to what already seemed the feebleness of the Labour government’s ‘reset’ of UK-EU relations, and which has now been rendered utterly inadequate in both scale and pace.
Yet, at the same time, Trump’s victory will embolden and re-energise the populists and the Brexiters. Earlier this year, when a second Trump presidency was already looking likely, I wrote at length about the relationships between Brexit, Brexitism, Trump and Putin. Most of that still stands, although some of the dynamics will be inflected differently under a Labour government. Thus Nigel Farage is gloatingly cock-a-hoop, directly comparing the result to Brexit, and the crackpot idea of him being the ‘unofficial Ambassador’ to the US is doing the rounds again.
Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, the new Tory leader, is already trying to exploit the difficulties that a Trump presidency would pose for any British government, and resurrecting the Brexiters’ favourite idea that he will agree a favourable trade deal with the UK. More generally, Brexiters, who have seen their 2016 ‘triumph’ become not just unpopular but a kind of byword for failure, will see in Trump’s reincarnation the hope that their fortunes, too, can be revived.
Labour’s first budget
All of this and much more will play out in the coming years. However, that doesn’t make last week’s budget an irrelevance and it, too, will have some long-term effects. It was a notable Brexit event, albeit in a peculiarly negative way. That has two aspects, one of them fairly widely remarked upon by commentators, the other, so far as I know, not mentioned by anyone.
The widely remarked-upon aspect was trailed in my previous post, where I wrote that “at one level, [the budget] will push discussion of Brexit even further to the margins, as commentators will find many others things in it to talk about. At another level, it will make the costs of Brexit even more relevant.” And so it proved.
Rachel Reeves’ budget speech lasted well over an hour, but mentioned Brexit only once, and only in passing, when she said that the Tory “Brexit deal harmed British businesses”. The subsequent debate focussed on everything from the rise in employer National Insurance contributions to the supposed impact on family farm inheritance, but only rarely on the Brexit silence.
On the other hand, buried in the accompanying Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) documents was a reminder that, taking into account what has already happened, its forecast for the impact of Brexit on trade intensity remains the same. This presumably also means that its forecast that the long-run impact will be that GDP will be 4% lower each year than it would otherwise have been also still holds (as last formally stated in May 2024). It is also implicit in the OBR figures, and confirmed explicitly by Treasury Minister Tulip Siddiq, that 60% of this damage is yet to come.
It bears repeating that, for all the tedious misleading graphs, cherry-picked data, and attempted rebuttals that still float around Brexiter-world, and get cited as ‘gotchas’ by keyboard warriors who wouldn’t know an x-axis from the X Factor or the X Files, something like this figure is given by all the major independent estimates. There’s a good discussion of this in relation to the budget by John Wilmslow in Sussex Bylines.
The irrelevance of Brexit
All this is important, and provides a fresh example of the strange post-Brexit landscape in which the mounting economic damage is politically all but undiscussable. However, there is a sense in which the silence about Brexit in the budget was entirely justified. For the aspect which I have not seen mentioned is just how little difference Brexit has made to political debates and policy choices. Brexit was billed by its advocates as a great national liberation. This budget was a big event, setting the direction of travel for the next few years. Yet its basic parameters were indistinguishable from those of all the decades in which Britain was a member of the EU.
This is a demonstration of the fact that Brexit itself was based on an utterly false narrative of policy being substantially constrained by, or dictated by, the EU. Or, to put it another way, the false narrative that Brexit would give the UK greater ‘sovereignty’. In fact, policy remains within the familiar terrain of how much to tax, how much to borrow, and where to allocate funds.
Of course, the precise decisions made about that in this budget were distinctive, but the generic issues involved have not changed at all. It may be that in the weeds of specific measures there were some things, if so, very likely related to VAT, which would not have occurred as an EU member but, again if so, they were very marginal.
The constraints of reality
Brexiters would no doubt say this reflects the failure of the government to take advantage of ‘Brexit freedoms’ but, as the previous government found, these proved to be illusory in practice. And the reason for this is not, as Brexiters would have it, a lack of will. It is because the constraints on UK policy choices were never, in any significant sense, those arising from EU membership. In fact, as regards the budget, the principal constraints are, as was the case before Brexit and as was the case before membership of the EU, the currency and bond markets. As Labour politicians in the 1960s used to complain, it is the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’ who set the parameters of UK economic policy. That was before Britain joined the EEC, but it remained the case afterwards, as Denis Healey found in 1976.
It is still true after Brexit. That was amply demonstrated by the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget and - though to nothing like the extent that right-wing commentators claimed (£), and perhaps hoped - by Reeves’ budget. If the Reeves budget escaped the market mauling that Kwarteng’s endured it was partly because it was accepted, for example and in particular by the IMF, that the borrowing it involved provided the basis for sustainable growth and necessary public investment. It was also because Reeves explicitly eschewed the Brexitist anti-institutional frenzy which characterized the mini-budget, a frenzy which ended with the ludicrous assertions about ‘deep state’ interference and ‘socialist’ market traders.
But it’s not just fiscal policy which has shown the irrelevance of being outside the EU. The same goes for most parts of regulatory policy, something tacitly accepted by the last government, and slightly more openly accepted by the present government. The reasons, which I’ve rehearsed endlessly on this blog, boil down to the fact that, in or out of the EU, the UK largely has little choice but to accept transnational rules. Moreover, largely for reasons of geographical reality, these are very often those of the EU itself. Even immigration, the strongest candidate for the claim that Brexit has made a difference to policy choices, doesn’t bear out the Brexiters’ thesis. The detailed inner workings and mechanisms of policy have changed, but the basic parameters are framed by the same economic and political questions as they always were.
The constraints of domestic politics
This points to a related issue. It is not just that there are the same external constraints on policy as there were before Brexit. It is that there are the same, or similar, domestic constraints as before. It’s undoubtedly the case that many Brexiters on the free-market right saw leaving the EU as a way to introduce radical ‘neo-liberal’ [1] policies to become 'Singapore-on-Thames' (£), to use the common, though misleading, term. But the assumption that it was only EU membership which stood in the way was false.
The British electorate was and remains a major obstacle. If neo-liberals sought to achieve electoral consent for their vision via the backdoor of Brexit, it was because they had no confidence they could do so through the front door of a general election. That was actually underscored by the coalition of voters brought together by Vote Leave and, later, by Boris Johnson in the 2019 election. Many, if not most, of them wanted no such thing as the ‘Singapore Brexit’ agenda.
Hence, even after leaving the EU and after the pandemic, neither Johnson nor Sunak followed that agenda (£), much to the chagrin of its advocates. Liz Truss undoubtedly wanted (£) to go down something like that route but had not secured electoral support for doing so and, even if the bond markets hadn’t imploded her premiership, it’s far from clear she could have delivered on it politically even within her own party.
All this inflects another way. Just as many right-wing Brexiters saw the EU as a barrier to neo-liberalism, many on the left came to see it as a bulwark against such policies. This at least partly accounts for the shift from Labour’s 1983 ‘Brexit’ policy to its later, largely pro-EU, position. Of course this did not apply to some on the Labour left, who became what we now call Lexiters, but in the process that revealed another aspect of the incoherence of the Brexit coalition. For the Lexiters see the EU as neither a barrier to, nor a bulwark against, neo-liberalism, but as an incarnation of it.
The consequences of this are still playing out. At the time of the referendum, many left-wing remainers believed (and some still do) that because many neo-liberals supported Brexit then ‘therefore’ this was ‘the real purpose’ of Brexit. Ironically, this validates the neo-liberal Brexiters’ own complaint that what has been delivered is ‘not real Brexit’. For, manifestly, Brexit has not ushered in anything remotely like what they wanted.
The Freeports red herring
That ought to be seen as their problem, and as a demonstration that the neo-liberal Brexiters were as deluded and incompetent as every other brand of Brexiter. However, the insistence that this was what Brexit was ‘really all about’ lives on in the ridiculous claims about Freeports, which continue to do the rounds on social media, depicting these as being, or in the process of becoming, deregulated neo-liberal ‘zones of exception’ (there’s an irony in that, too, as it validates Brexiters’ own false claims about Freeports being, in their terms, a ‘Brexit benefit’).
In fact, they are no such thing, and the two pieces of ‘evidence’ cited to suggest otherwise are both flawed, as I discussed in more detail in a previous post. One is that these Freeports would violate ‘EU state aid rules’. It’s questionable whether this is true, but even if it is then it is an odd way to demonstrate their ‘neo-liberalism’. For, as the Lexiters insist, it is the EU’s state aid rules which are one of the principal reasons for regarding it as a neo-liberal institution. (Freeports aside, the Lexiter position on this is another example of the wider Brexiter falsity that it was EU rules, rather than the UK’s own political choices, which were the barrier to the use of state aid: whilst still in the EU the UK gave much less state aid in per capita terms than most other members.)
The other piece of ‘evidence’ given for deregulated Freeports is that the Retained EU Law (REUL) Act 2023 supposedly unleashed massive deregulation by scrapping 600 EU laws. But, apart from the fact that this applies across the country, not just in Freeports (so it is irrelevant to the claims about them), anyone with even a cursory understanding of this issue knows that REUL was a major disappointment to the neo-liberal Brexiters. They had wanted to scrap or automatically sunset all the estimated 4,000 EU laws by the end of 2023, and were infuriated that not only was the number scrapped so small, but that they generally related to trivialities. That decision, taken by Kemi Badenoch when she was Trade and Business Secretary, actually marked a defeat for them. That isn’t to say they may not revive in the future, and no doubt Trump’s victory will embolden their hopes of a similar resurrection, but the idea that REUL was a triumph for their version of Brexit is simply false.
The Freeports issue is an illustration of my wider point here, that the parameters of policy have not been changed by Brexit. It’s something demonstrated, if inadvertently and in a misleading way, when the Freeport alarmists talk about ‘the 86 Freeports and SEZs’ (Special Economic Zones). It’s misleading because Freeports are SEZs (so ‘Freeports and SEZs’ is a misnomer) and doing so enables them to talk of these being ‘rolled out’, when almost all of them have existed for years, and pre-date Brexit. And it’s that which illustrates the point that, both before and after Brexit, policy choices haven’t really changed. In this case, that is because SEZs were and still are predominantly areas with various business tax breaks, most if not all of which did not require Brexit. That doesn’t mean they are good, or that they are effective. It just means that they are pretty much what they have always been.
Back to the budget
This brings us back to the budget. It does so in one trivial way. Before the budget there was a report that it would announce five new Freeports. This report turned out to be mistaken, but not before much gnashing of teeth about how it ‘proved’ Labour had embraced post-Brexit neo-liberalism. Far more importantly, the budget marks a distinct break with recent economic policy, perhaps going as far back as 1979. That isn’t so much because of its taxation decisions as the role it envisages for state investment.
As such, it marks a decisive rejection of the neo-liberal ‘crowding out’ thesis – the idea that public investment crowds out private investment [2]. That was a key part of the intellectual undergirding of what became Thatcherism, and it persisted under George Osborne’s Chancellorship. Arguably, it also lay behind the Blair-Brown governments' embrace of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). This doesn’t mean that it was the ‘socialist’ budget or the “Marxist nightmare” (£) described by the ludicrous rantings of right-wing commentators. But nor does it warrant the lazy claim that there’s no difference between Labour and the Tories. It was, as Martin Kettle of the Guardian described it, “a budget in the identifiably social democratic Labour tradition”.
Whether it succeeds in delivering the economic growth it promises, and to what extent, is another question, and one made all the more difficult to answer by Trump’s election. But, along with other Labour policies, from industrial policy to workers’ rights – even if none of these go as far as some would want – it puts paid to the idea, at least for now, that Brexit was the harbinger of a new wave of neo-liberalism. In some ways, it could even be described as bringing the UK closer to a ‘European’ economic model.
The limits and consequences of choice
That might seem ironic, but to a certain sort of Brexiter, arguably the most principled sort, it would be no such thing. Such people would say that the point of Brexit was not to usher in any particular policies, but simply to ensure that the policies in place are those chosen by British voters [3]. It is the same argument they make when saying that Brexit did not mean lower immigration, just that immigration levels would be determined solely by the elected government.
It may be a fine sentiment, but it is a naïve one, ignoring the many constraints on the choices available to voters, constraints over which their elected governments have far less control than they used to over EU laws and regulations. Like it or not, voting never has been, and never could be, the sole source of policy. On the other hand, it ignores the fact that, despite those constraints, the same kind of budget as that of last week could have been delivered with or without Brexit. That doesn’t mean that Brexit has made no difference to this and other post-Brexit budgets. It has. But the only real difference it has made is that there is less money.
In a similar way, no British voter chose Trump as American President, and most of them are unhappy about his election and concerned about its implications for Britain, but they will all have to cope with the consequences of it. That would have been true with or without Brexit, but Brexit limits the choices for how to do so.
Notes
[1] I’m aware that some people find ‘neo-liberal’ an imprecise, irritating, or even meaningless term. I use it here as shorthand for the broad proposition that markets are the best way of allocating resources, that they do so best when minimally regulated, and the State should be confined to relatively limited functions.
[2] I’m thinking in particular of the influence of the ‘Bacon-Eltis’ version of the crowding out thesis. Crowding out as an idea has a longer history, but in their telling it was enrolled into the wider neo-liberal narrative of ‘private good, public bad’.
[3] This was the position of the late Tony Benn, who of course was a Lexiter avant la lettre, and, certainly in his version of it, it was not the same as either ‘nationalist’ or ‘sovereigntist’ positions.
Firstly, I've definitely missed your thoughts now that these are fortnightly. It took time to seep in, but I find myself wondering, "What would ChrisG think?". Thanks for all that you do.
ReplyDeleteLooks like I've got he first comment, a rarity. Perhaps I got to first (or at least early) comment due to complicated/technocratic/bureaucratic nature of the discussion. As you suggest it definitely wasn’t a case for more Neo-liberalism, if anything, a harbinger against it. USA-GE2024 looks to have been won in a similar vein of mistrust of institutions and perceived loss of political control. (They’re all the same as each other.)
Apologies up front, as my writing is less-good and also may be a tricky read.
Back in September, you had valid points regarding lack of strategy/movement from Labour on EU. My thoughts at the time,
1.0) Labour didn’t want to preempt a new EUCouncil mandate.(Caveat-Im a layman, and not particularly aware of all processes and political gambits)
1.1) Perhaps there is a political danger in provoking negotiations during elections / electorates. Especially in context of isolationism/nationalism.
2) A belief that negotiations should not be revealed but closed and drip-fed for leverage.
3) The rise of Sado-Populism, Authoritarianism & Klepto-Plutocracy across the West. Musk himself relates quite well to 1.1. EG Telegraph headline. I’d also point to Italy/Hungary. People forget the Conservative very close relationship to VOrban the LiSPoland, & Likud. Presumably they’re very keen on EU RW.
WRT to #2 The UK doesn’t realise its current position in terms of demands, size and parity. Labour still believe that UK can hide our options to gain leverage, ultimately if they didn’t, they would cause RW press machine to go frame it as humiliation / betrayal / un-patriotism. See #3. It also relates to #1 because if a political solution exists then it is going to have to be explained effectively and heavily campaigned for. Even at this point the UK misunderstands EU’s ability to extract more as it only takes a few disagreements from within the bloc.
USA-2024-GE is a tricky situation for reading the leaves as there are a great deal of moving things convoluted in politics / ethics / ideology / philosophy / technology / trade. Like Brexit the outcome looks to have been voted for by a very mixed bag of contradictory often individual ideologies. EG Offspring who voted Trump despite their parents being Illegal. Gaza helped suppress both Leftists and Muslims. Many of whom voted Trump as “He could surely be no worse for Gaza” - Perhaps on this they’re right. Though I will note that Jared Kushner has suggested what a wonderful investment opportunity exists in building Gaza beach properties. Blue Collar Union people turned out despite Musk relocating whole factories to stifle workers unions and strikers. Individuals are supporting food and regulation advice from someone who openly admits having had a wormlike parasite in his brain… I don’t suppose eating roadkill and washed up sea creatures had anything to do with this… Culminating in the Rights anguish over a male adult entertainer’s dead pet squirrel and Gov interference. The Republicans have all pillars of government, justice, media, enterprise and capital. With a promise to effectively end government services/regulators. (One wonders how they’re going to eject 15 million.)
1.1 and WRT to #2 are especially potent for Labour in the aftermath of their miserable experience in Scotland after the 2014 independence referendum. Nationalism heavily split their core vote, causing their near-obliteration under FPTP when the SNP brutally crushed them in the 2015 GE. Fear that the Brexit debate could be weaponized by the Tories and Reform to do the same thing in England must surely be why they are so reluctant to re-open the Brexit debate.
DeletePt2 - (will reply this comment onto my previous comment if it meets you standard to publish).
ReplyDeleteOkay, the above may read like a rant or tangent, but it’s important and necessary to begin to understand what this means as it may well be the case that the whole West is following this direction.
4) Surely the likelihood of Germany and France going AFD + NF are high and it’s very challenging to predict how developments meet reality, on current trajectory surely EU is as likely to cosy to Putin as it is to invest in defence.
Where does this leave UK people who want closer relations with EU? I used to think that there could be political gain in UK for advocating closer EU relationship and was potentially a free-hand waiting to be played. But with USA-GE-24 its not as simple, I see Trump is already in the process of dividing UK/EU. In the context of defence It’s certainly a good position for the UK, however #4 suggests this isn’t even a given. It’s going to be particularly tricky for Labour and the LibDems to hold back a pluto-klepto-RW when the rest of the world is seemingly heading on the very same pathway.
Lexiters are the most deluded form of brexiter. Although the right wing Brexiter or someone backing Brexit for what could be termed right wing reasons backed a clear dud, they at least had a policy championed by the right wing media, right wing politicians and right wing think tanks.
ReplyDeleteWhilst lexiters on the other hand back Brexit for some of the same reasons as those on the right, they find themselves having to champion a policy created by the right, of the right and for the right.
Excellent post as usual.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the focus of it (and of many other erstwhile ‘Remainers’) is on the economic consequences of Brexit and the trading/economic benefits of EU membership.
The EU project has many other features and ambitions (unfettered internal migration, currency integration, ‘ever closer’ political integration, etc) that can, and have been, used as reasons to leave/stay out.
I dare say that even some ardent remainers have reservations about these non-economic aspects of the EU but feel that being ‘in’ provides an opportunity to temper/resist these non-economic aspects while enjoying the trading/economic benefits that are so desirable.
As a large, and relatively early, member of the club, the UK could resist and choose not to participate in developments (predominantly non-economic in nature) that it was not in favour of (e.g. currency union and the social charter - at least initially) and promote those that it was in favour of (expansion of the single market).
If it were to rejoin the EU, an explicit acceptance by the UK of many of these aspects of the project would be required.
It would be great if in a future blog you could explore the non-economic aspects of EU membership and how they may be regarded by the UK electorate.
If there is ever to be an opportunity for the UK electorate to consider joining the EU again, it will be won or lost on the non-economic aspects of doing so because the economic reasons for joining are becoming more inarguable with ever passing day.
Thank you.
Didn't UK initially plan to be part of the initial adopters of the shared currency but had to drop out of the ERM because Pound Sterling turned out to be too unstable to see it through?
DeleteAgreed.
DeleteWhat could maybe have been our political future, if we had not left the EU........
..... a run at Empire II.....?
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-leader-free-world-brexit-3367633
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_euro#:~:text=The%20United%20Kingdom%20did%20not,European%20System%20of%20Central%20Banks.
DeleteThe suggestion that the UK’s potential interest in the EU is limited to the economic and trading benefits logically leads to single market membership (with or without a customs union) but there is simply no way that the UK will accept the imposition of rules and regulations by the EU with no input into, or influence over, those rules.
DeleteAnonymous 9. 11. 19:58
DeleteI am aware that the government of the time managed to sell its epic failure as a win.
Having to withdraw from the ERM when the instabilities accumulated into the break down often referred to as "Black Wednesday" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday) must have been extremely embarrassing so it is somewhat understandable that an attempt was made to hide this failure or at least play it down.
At some point this then morphed into an alternative history of not wanting to partake in the shared currency anyway.
This has now become a red herring for arguing against calls for rejoining the EU, as if a now weakened UK would miraculously be more capable of fulfilling the ERM stability criteria than the one which failed in 1992.
However, this points at a wider need for addressing the many myths about the UK's previous membership.
Which will be very difficult since governments of both major parties have either deployed this technique themselves or gone along when the other party did.
"there is simply no way that the UK will accept the imposition of rules and regulations by the EU with no input into, or influence over, those rules." Please remind me the input the UK had into the decision that plastic caps now have to be attached to plastic bottles.
DeleteKevin Krammer 10.11; 10.05
DeleteAgreed the euro is a red herring - but for different reasons.
In a global context, sterling is still a relatively stable currency, and the UK financial regulatory system quite highly regarded. And of course the UK was a highly successful founding EU member, with currency presenting no obvious problems for our key European partners. So disingenuously applying the formal criteria for typical fledgling economies and democracies is really a desperate last ditch defence for sticking with Brexit.
EU ambition is not "unfettered internal migration". EUFOM is controlled by Directive 2094/38/CE. That is, registration after 90 days which is a thorough process including proving one's income (employment/pension/savings or dependance on parents if studying), health insurance & address (checked by police visit.) Only then & in the case of dependants, only after another 6 months, will a registration ID card be given with right to reside, work, study or retire. You are not entitled to any social benefits. EUFOM comes with rights & responsibilities. I point this out because so few non EU folk understand the rules & how they work/control in practice. David Cameron was famously poorly informed when trying to negotiate EUFOM rules that his own govt had responsibility for & had chosen not to use.
DeleteOpposition to the EEC and then EU originated with the broad left, and though probably deluded, the Lexiteers are more rational than the nouveau Brexiteer right. The next time you are in the town centre, have a word with any Socialist Worker canvasser, and they will happily (or angrily) inform you that the EU is a "capitalist club" which benefits the western corporate elite and idle rich at the expense of the global working classes. But how irrational is this compared to the Conservative/Reform notion that a deeply indebted trading nation can even afford to permanently damage trade links with it's most important and reliable trading partner ?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if one can consider it as "rational" to attempt leaving the EU under the reign of an austerity loving Conservative government.
DeleteTheir Brexit was always going to be more incompatible with the Lexiters' ideas than EU membership itself.
I am a statistician by trade and I am going to to steal that wonderful line "they wouldn't know the difference between the x-axis and the X factor" to use whenever I can. But I will credit you of course. "As Chris Grey said, they..."
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome!
DeleteGreetings from Italy. Here in the EU the problem of how to handle Trump is very much felt, even more than how to handle support for Ukraine if the US blocks the shipment of weapons. The desire to waste time with a third country, the UK, which could be an ally but perhaps not, is almost non-existent.
ReplyDeleteSo I suppose that Italy has got nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers, plus existing/potential military bases in different parts of the world, but especially in the Atlantic, which it has somehow kept secret then?
DeleteWe do. And with a Trump America now unreliable, and at real risk of descending into authoritarianism, it is all hands on deck in defence and security terms. Discussions on the UK - EU Defence and Security Pact have ramped up since last Tuesday, according to Bloomberg and the Luxembourg Times.
And speaking of unreliable allies, Italy's present government has suspected links to Putin does it not....?
Yes, a our minister is great friend of Putin and he has t-shirt whit putin'face printed!
DeleteBut Salvini is not criminal and dumb enough to ask for a Italexit.
And no one here ask to left ECHR and NATO like Tory + Farage.
“…and at real risk of descending into authoritarianism”?
DeleteOver the last year, the police — who have been given billions in funding using programs which did not previously exist by Biden over the past few years — beat up students who were peacefully protesting the genocide in Gaza, which was also given billions in funding by Biden. If you somehow came through that thinking that the US was not deeply mired in authoritarianism, you might want to rethink your position. All Trump is proposing to do is to officially extend the list of victims to include groups who European-descended westerners don’t want to admit are generally harmed by western civilization, and who were generally unofficial victims anyway.
In this post and in the article by CG linked to. there's a prevailing tone that freeports are nothing to worry about and that criticism of freeports is simply alarmism. If CG wished to expand on that by saying whether or not he personally thought freeports would be beneficial or problematic for Britain - not just in an abstract sense but also from the perspective of those British people who had to work in them - I for one would read his response with interest.
ReplyDeleteThis strikes me as a disingenuous comment. I've made it clear in this post and very single thing I have ever written (in some cases, in detail) about Freeports that I do not think they are beneficial and I do think they are problematic. But some of the claims made about the nature and extent of those problems are alarmist.
Delete'every' not 'very'
DeleteChris - as ever a thought provoking blog - you know my optic - but I think the Trump presidency has the potential to really galvanise the member states to do something really big or, more ,likely flunk it with the usual syrup and treacle of compromise - this from a Brexiteer.
ReplyDeleteNow, never mind Brexit - it's done - ok, badly implemented but even informed Remainer optimists that I talk to, think it likely that it will, necessarily take a generation or say 25 years to even embark on joining ( it's definitely not re-joining) the new EU of 2050 - I digress.
I'm genuinely interested in what is happening in Germany and France at the moment - local tactical and potentially strategic issues - when you've the ex President of France ( Francois Hollande) saying in the good old Indie (today):
"And he said: “Keir Starmer needs to position himself as a European leader, while not being in the European Union. This is what he must sell to the British public..." - it's a real tacit admission of how bad things are in France - it's a puppet government currently in office because of Le Pen - what kind of power is that. Plus, in Germany there are genuine problems with their existing exiting government - this could go spectacularly worse, if the very far right wing 'thugs' of the AfD get a large part of the popular vote - all in all not good for the the EU and especially Germany.
Then we have Trump - no one really knows how he will treat the EU - but it's unlikely to be benign - MAGA and the avowed intent of EU greater strategic autonomy are almost battle cry's of strategic non-alignment. Let's at least be honest - the US and EU are competitors just like China.
Starmer/Lammy/Reeves are in an grossly invidious position - do they support their socialist /neo liberals in the EU or do they cut their 'nose off to spite their face' with the UK's largest trading partner the US?
Tough decisions ahead - I trust they make the right judgement calls for the sake of all of us.
I'm afraid that anyone who knows so little about politics as to conflate 'socialist' and 'neo-liberal' as descriptions of the EU, and who knows so little about economics as to describe the US as the UK's largest trading partner, is not a serious commentator.
DeleteChris - it's not my view its ONS/Dept Business & Trade - the top 4 export markets for UK goods and services are: US (£191Bn), Germany (£60.8bn), Ireland ( £57.4Bn) and Netherlands ( (53.6Bn) - as we all know the EU per se, not being a country, dictates trade policies. - the reality being that we trade significantly with circa 8 EU states rather than the majority of the twenty seven members were we trade relatively little - it's 'small beer'.
DeleteIn respect of socialism and neo liberalism - the majority of EU states , because of their high cost social models , tend also to be high tax, high spend and interventionist with overarching EU regulations on energy and environmental competencies.
It will be interesting to see what happens in Germany with new elections in February and in France, where pubic spending is well over 50% of national GDP - there's no hiding that Germany and France are anything like the neo liberal economies that they once were.
It's a single market and customs area. There may be purposes for which disaggregating trade with individual MSs is relevant. Decisions about trade arrangements with the US cf those with the EU are not amongst them.
DeletePs: what's the really big gig the EU could do - it could go for full on integration - no iff's or but's - the founding fathers of Monnet, Salter and Schumann always thought that 'the Project ' would be born and grow with each crisis. The crises facing the EU are now legion - not least : Weak leadership in Germany and France, Ukraine, Migration and frankly Defence and security given the yearning desire to have and cherish Macron's strategic autonomy.
ReplyDeleteMy advice would be "integrate baby integrate" as a counter to drill baby drill - will they or won't they - a fully integrated political. economic (fiscal) and monetary union will obviate the member states - no more Germany , no more France et al - there is no concept of half pregnant in a political union - can the populace in the various member states (currently) accept what this really means - maybe it's too hard a sell presently?
"The EU" can't do anything of the sort. Anything that smacks of more integration has to come from the member states. If the French and German governments are stuck, then nothing will happen.
DeleteFully integrated political union? Not going to happen absent WW3. It would involve thousands of politicians voting themselves out of a job.
You are trying to frame things in the UK's definition of union in which the constituent countries barely exist as separate entities due to the all-out centralism on the union level.
DeleteIf the EU is at some point forming a closer political union it will almost certainly follow a distributed model of governance.
It is closer to the current distributed governance and several of its members have chosen this as their own internal models.
Almost every British ex-colony, especially the anglophone ones, have chosen that model over the "parent" nation's centralism.
Going for this type of union would also allow a more step-by-step approach.
Gradually involving the union level in policy making when closer cooperation results in better yields.
At least that seems more likely to me than following the UK's path of centralising everything and later painstakingly clawing things back via "devolution".
Boris Johnson struggles to explain Brexit to French radio host.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/boris-johnson-brexit-leave-eu-france-b2649166.html
Don't we all?
"thanks to Brexit we had the chance to do the vaccinations in England much earlier."