Michael Meacher MP

The economic skies have rarely looked darker.   The determination of the coalition government to press ahead with major spending cuts this year (assuming that the appointment of the inexperienced Danny Alexander as Chief Secretary doesn’t change the direction of policy) looks more dangerous by the day, given how the international economic environment is steadily worsening.

The growing contagion in the Eurozone directly threatens the UK recovery even though (thankfully) we are not members of it.   Some 60% of UK exports go to the EU, including 50% to the Eurozone.   If the Eurozone breaks up – an increasing likelihood – the Tory Little Englanders won’t get the economic common market of their dreams, but a collapsing system of debt default, competitive devaluations, and widespread stagnation.   A significant loss of UK export markets would undermine bond-holders’ confidence that the UK, locked in recession, could soon escape the vicious spiral when caught between rising debt charges and deepening recession. (more…)

Who would have thought that the stresses and tensions between the Cons and the Libs would have been exposed so mercilessly so quickly?   Angela Merkel, having to expend on behalf of Germany 20% (Euro 150bn) of the colossal Euro 750bn ($1 trillion) Greek bail-out, understandably is now demanding that there should be quite fundamental changes in the Lisbon Treaty to ensure that fiscal irresponsibility by one State cannot in future drag down the whole of the Eurozone.

Germany has already tabled a 9-point plan rewriting the Euro regime so as to embed legally sanctioned budget deficit ceilings in all the 16 member Eurozone States.   At the heart of this is a new enforceable Stability and Growth Pact which is designed to achieve budgetary rigour to prevent any State exceeding certain deficit ceilings.   This has of course been tried before  to ensure that the more easy-going budgetary practices of the South of Europe were kept more in line with the stricter rules of the North – only to fall apart when both Germany and France exceeded the limits, but then because of their political muscle went unpunished.   It’s a fair question whether this newer version will fare any better.   But there’s a sting in the tail. (more…)

After Clegg’s absurd hyperbolic puff about his (welcome) civil liberties reforms being the most radical programme since the Great Reform Act of 1832, the Cons-LibDems are now facing reality on several fronts – three in particular.

First, the Eurozone nightmare is ominously beginning to lap round the shores of the UK.   Having defenestrated Greece, the bond markets are now prowling round their next potential victims – Spain, Portugal, Ireland, UK.   Within a year or two the UK could well have the largest public deficit as a proportion of GDP in the EU.   The bond markets are assessing, not the rhetoric of ‘savage cuts’, but what the coalition actually delivers – where exactly they draw the line between cutting the short-term cost of debt to restore market confidence whilst not putting economic recovery at risk.   They will be looking at UK growth prospects where Government forecasts of 3.5% are widely seen as uproariously optimistic.   They will be judging whether the Eurozone can survive without either greater fiscal harmonisation or much closer moves to political union to safeguard the currency, and how an alternative new Stability and Growth Pact might impact on UK economic prospects. (more…)

While the British election meanders along its somewhat flat and lacklustre course, disconnected from the real fundamentals, an ominous cloud is gathering elsewhere in Euroland.   The Greek Government’s decision to initiate help from the IMF and ECB, because it cannot finance the market’s bond yields while still hoping to cut its budget deficit, could on the worst scenario trigger a domino effect across the EU.   The obvious next candidates for vigilante financial attack are Portugal and Spain, with the UK on the outer margins. (more…)

The fault-line in the euro-zone has taken a long time to appear, but the  Greek dilemma has now made it unavoidable.   While the country remains locked into euro-land, there only only two ways out, since devaluation is ruled out by the single currency.   One is deflation, the other is default.   The former is being made a lot harder, if not politically impossible, by intense trade union and citizen resistance to mega cuts.   The latter would be pressing the nuclear button since it would likely trigger the unravelling of the euro, with Spain, Portugal and Ireland in the offing.   That’s why at the last minute Germany is now signalling its belated acceptance of loans and loan guarantees to the Greeks. (more…)

Like a searchlight on a night landscape, the appointment of the obscure couple, the Belgian PM Herman Van Rompuy and the British peer Cathy Ashton, casts a revealing insight into the current state of the EU. Despite the Lisbon Treaty paving the way for a powerful new European voice in world affairs, the opportunity has been passed up in the interests of preserving the dominance of the main few key nation States. Despite the pressure to balance the widening of the EU with a deepening of accountability to its citizens, the democratic deficit has been intensified. Despite the need to create a fairer balance of power between the big States and the medium/smaller States, the horse-trading has been confined to the traditional carve-up within the handful of the biggest States. Despite the desirability of transparency to usher in a new era of glasnost, the decision has been taken with the usual secrecy behind close doors as though only half a dozen persons mattered and the other half million were irrelevant. Welcome to the new, or rather very old, Europe.

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The charade of horrified defiance of the EU which the Tories displayed this week takes some beating. Under the pretence of demanding that the EU super-state already has too much power and must be drastically cut back, George Osborne calmly welcomed without demur a few days earlier the biggest intrusion into the British economy at the hands of the EU that we have seen for decades, namely a massive carving-up of two of the biggest UK banks as the price for the second round of gigantic bail-outs. Not a peep came from the Tory front bench. Hannam, the Tory Eurosceptic MEP who resigned from their front bench rather than accept Cameron’s lame figleafs for dropping his ‘cast-iron’ guarantee of a referendum and who then announced a crusade to restore self-government for Britain, didn’t even mention it. What did however stick in the Tory craw was the charter of fundamental rights (which the other 26 EU States, most of them with right-wing governments, have taken on board without complaint) and the social and employment legislation enshrined in the EU Social Chapter. That says it all.

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People seem to have two rather different ideas about a Blair Presidency of Europe. Either (like David Miliband) that we should have him because on landing in Washington, Beijing or Moscow he could stop the traffic, or (like George Monbiot) we should have him because he’s bound in the course of his duties to have to go to countries where he could be arrested and put on trial for war crimes over Iraq. And then again, there are some – probably a majority in the EU – who don’t want him at any price. But in all the backstairs lobbying and grubby deal-making now going on across the diplomatic capitals of Europe, there is another issue that sticks out: why can’t the people of Europe choose their own president by a vote?

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A bizarre episode occurred in the House of Commons yesterday. We were debating the impact of the EU Lisbon Treaty on human rights. The Government line was, yes, we accepted that the Charter of Fundamental Rights was legally binding, but don’t worry, we then negotiated a protocol to make sure it won’t apply in the UK. The Tory line was that there was still no guarantee that bits of the Charter wouldn’t leak from this prohibitionist protocol because of judicial creep when cases came before the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
What a stitch-up! In my speech I made the obvious point crying out when all the other 26 EU Member States have accepted it without demur? Is it because the Charter would ban excessive working hours when British workers already work more hours a week than anyone else in Europe and the CBI would like to keep it that way? Is it because it would also permit secondary action in industrial disputes when at present British workers cannot take such action though employers can, and no doubt the CBI would like to keep it that way on that matter too? Yet the right to take secondary action has never been an issue in any other country in Europe, and it’s hardly the job of a Labour Government to maintain in the UK what Tony Blair once boasted to a business conference was “the most restrictive trade union legislation in the Western world”.
It really is ludicrous that the Government continues to resist what ever other country in the EU, without exception, has taken in its stride as the foundation of a civilised society. It’s not even as though the Government can succeed. The Swedish Prime Minister said in the Swedish Parliament on 26 June last year: “It should be stressed that the UK was given a clarification, not an opt-out”.
Even more significantly, when Blair was presenting the protocol to the UK Parliament the day before, he misread the text (well, I assume he misread it). He said: “Nothing in the Charter creates justiciable rights applicable to the UK”, whereas the text of the protocol actually says: “Nothing in Title IV of the Charter creates justiciable rights applicable to the UK”. The clear implication is that, although one section of the Charter cannot be used to create new rights, other sections almost certainly will be.
But even in respect of Title IV on social rights, the text of the protocol states explicitly that the Charter does not create justiciable rights applicable to the UK “except in so far as the UK has provided for such rights in its national law”. Presumably then it will be left for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to decide for itself whether the UK has attempted to provide for such rights in its national law and to decide whether the attempt to provide such rights is adequate in the light of the Charter.
Indeed it’s very difficult to see how this supposedly unique carve-out for the UK can actually work. Firms operating in more than one Member State will clearly be affected. Migrants coming from another Member State to the UK would presumably be covered. Anyone who travelled to another Member State from this country, for example for health services, would presumably be able to use the Charter. Moreover, there are 30 years of EU jurisprudence to say that there can be no two-tier system of European rights.
So this claimed uniqueness for the UK will almost certainly steadily unravel. It will be eroded by proactive ECJ judgements and also by the interactive knock-on effects between Title IV and other parts of the protocol. It surely is farcical that the Government are investing such enormous legal and logistical resources into resisting something which they are all too likely to lose in the end and which every other country in Europe has decided is practicable and desirable. We really need a Government in Britain which stands up for the British people and does not bow down to the CBI and the Eurosceptic press.

The current debate about whether there should be a referendum on the proposed EU Reform Treaty isn’t really about the precise arguments for or against it at all. Rather it’s about people’s different conceptions of what the EU is about or what it’s for.
If you’re a Eurosceptic who thinks the EU should be a loose trading relationship with little or no political super-structure, you’ll support a referendum in the expectation that it will be lost, which might then open the way to leaving the EU and achieving the neo-conservative goal of closer alignment with the US.
However, the arguments actually used are that having an elected EU President for a 30-month term, creating an EU Foreign Minister in all but in name, making the EU a legal entity in certain contexts, and sacrificing the veto by the switch to QMV in 60 (mostly minor) policy areas constitutes a shift of power to Brussels – which it is – though whether it’s a significant shift is a fine judgement. It’s also argued too that Blair promised a referendum on the EU Constitution before the 2005 election (to keep the Murdoch press sweet) and that this Reform Treaty is almost the same– which it is – though it involves nothing like the leap in integration agreed in the Single European Act in 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 when there were no referendums. And anyway Blair changed his position on having a referendum 6 times in his last 5 years as PM, so there’s plenty of evidence to quote for his supporting either side of the argument.
What drives the pro-referendum lobby therefore is not their ostensible claims, which are anyway not as strong as they pretend, but rather their underlying view of Europe and their hostility to any move towards even the slightest pooling of sovereignty, whatever the corresponding gains might be.
If you’re a Europhile, the argument will be that there’s no loss of power since Member States will still have to reach unanimous agreement over common policy objectives and a declaration confirms that foreign policy will remain under the control of Member States – though the declaration is not legally binding. It will also be argued that Britain retains an opt-in if it wishes to co-operate with other States in tackling such issues as terrorism and crime – though if Britain did opt-in to an agreement and then found that the final draft was unacceptable, it might not be able to opt out again.
Again therefore the anti-referendum lobby is equally motivated less by force of argument over the minutiae of the Treaty than by their underlying concept of Europe and their sense of Britain’s purpose within it. The key issue here then is how precisely that purpose is delineated.

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