We do need a new vision of a post-crash, post-neoliberal, post-austerity Europe. But this will surely include getting global corporations to pay their taxes, and limiting their monopoly power – not possible for a little Brexit Britain.
Andrew Broadbent
CES Ltd Economic and Social Research
Lexit: the EU is a neoliberal project, so let's do something different when we leave it
Brexit affords the British left a historic opportunity for a decisive break with EU market liberalism.
[Labour are] exploring the freedom Brexit would provide for public ownership, lower rates of VAT to help those on the lowest incomes, state aid to support sunrise industries, and fair trade agreements with developing countries.
Remainers on the left would argue that there is no need to leave the EU for this to happen, but they are wrong about that for two reasons. The first is that a radical socialist programme that included a different approach to state aid, state ownership, public procurement and managed trade would be deemed illegal under European law. The second is that without Brexit, the impetus for change would quickly dissipate.
The Labour members who want the UK to remain in the European single market and customs union should be careful what they wish for. The only countries that can have full membership of the single market are EU member states. Others, such as Efta members, can participate in it by belonging to the European Economic Area but have to accept the EU’s four freedoms in goods, services, capital and people.
What this means in practice is that a post-Brexit British government would be obliged to tender its public services and utilities to the benefit of European multinational capital. It would be unable to prevent the further privatisation and fragmentation of the public realm and, crucially, would be powerless to stop unscrupulous employers continuing to exploit free movement of labour to undermine collective bargaining by the deployment of cheap labour from other parts of the EU, a practice that informed many trade unionists’ decision to vote for Brexit in the first place. As for the customs union, outside its own borders the EU is extremely protectionist, and its neoliberal free trade policy is not something that should be emulated.
Nevertheless, given the proximity and importance of the wider European market to the UK, it is entirely logical that agreement is reached on a mutually beneficial trading relationship. However, some of the more conservative elements in the British trade union movement also seem to think that their interests, and those of the working class, are synonymous with those of big business and are echoing the call for access to the single market and customs union on the basis of the current EU rules, thus running the risk of inheriting the worst aspects of EU trade policy without any influence to change it once Brexit becomes a reality.
Bert Schouwenburg
International officer, GMB
The politics of climate change poses a stark dilemma for anyone wanting to push back against the purveyors of post-truth. Should they bide their time and trust that the facts will win out in the end? Or do they use the evidence as weapons in the political fight, in which case they risk confirming the suspicion that they have gone beyond the facts? It is not just climate scientists who find themselves in this bind. Economists making the case against Brexit found that the more they insisted on agreement inside the profession about the dangers, the more it was viewed with suspicion from the outside by people who regarded it as a political con.
A sceptic questions the evidence for a given claim and asks whether it is believable. A cynic questions the motives of the people who deploy the evidence, regardless of whether it is believable or not.
What politicised the idea of climate change was its adoption as a cause by Democratic politicians in the 1980s, above all by Al Gore. By the start of that decade, evidence of global cooling had faded and a scientific consensus was starting to form around the idea that the climate was warming up. Gore belonged to a group known as the “Atari Democrats”, for their wonkish attachment to science and technology. These politicians saw climate as a useful issue, as well as an urgent one. It was a way of appealing to moderate Republican voters, because the concerns it raised cut across party lines. In the words of another member of the group, Chuck Schumer, then a Brooklyn congressman, now Senate minority leader: “If you’re a Democrat, especially in a middle-class district or on the west coast, [climate] is a great issue … It is an issue with no downside.”
The ecumenical quality of climate change as a political cause was emphasised when Margaret Thatcher took it up at around the same time. In her speech to the UN general assembly in 1989, she spoke of global warming as one of the most serious threats facing humanity. She was comfortable speaking the language of science, having been a scientist herself. But her motives were political: it suited her prior point of view. She drew extensively from the warnings of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, in part because she had grown to trust their advice on climactic conditions during the Falklands war. She believed in nuclear power as an emblem of free enterprise. And she had historic reasons to be suspicious of coal. For Thatcher, climate change was a convenient truth.
the so-called “climategate” scandal of 2009, when a series of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia was held up as evidence that the scientific evidence was being distorted to fit a political agenda. The emails showed no such thing. What they did reveal is that in an environment of highly politicised scepticism, climate scientists were forced to think about guarding the evidence against opponents looking for any excuse to discredit it.
If they pull back from politics, they risk letting the cynics set the agenda. If they don’t, they risk proving the cynics right.
The economics profession, like any other, is full of people who will express their doubts and uncertainties among friends. But when confronted with a hostile or bemused public, they will close ranks. Economists do not want to appear to be unsure of themselves, given how little the public understands of what they do anyway. So rather than admit that there are many different ways of thinking about, for example, free trade, they insist that all economists agree it is a good thing. As the economist Dani Rodrik puts it, when faced with hostile fire, the natural tendency is to start circling the wagons. For the many voters who do not see the benefits of free trade, this looks like a stitch-up.This tendency is exaggerated by selective treatments in the media too, of course. It took ages for any economists for Leave or socialists for Leave to appear, even as one-offs, and the mobbing and aggression directed towards them in programmes on the BBC (even C4) like the News or Newsnight was so obvious. We were being lectured at by a smug, finger-wagging clique enjoying the benefits of globalization themselves and insulating themselves from any nasty consequences while urging tolerance and austerity on the rest of us.
So --hang on, there has been an increase in EU nationals in health and social care as well? Is it that figure that has declined after Brexit was announced? Seemingly so:'The warning comes a year after the UK voted to leave the EU – and as the number of non-British EU nationals in the health and social care workforce has grown exponentially in the past eight years. In 2016, 209,000 people working in the sector in the UK were EU nationals, up from 121,000 in 2009 – a rise of 72% – according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).'
More recent ONS figures show that the number of non-British EU nationals who said they worked in the UK public sector fell by 27,000 between January and March 2017.So -- up by 88 thousand since 2009, and down 27 thousand. Still 61 thousand to go until we are at 2009 figures then (I'm not saying we SHOULD be at 2009 figures of course)
the number of EU nationals working in the UK’s social care system soared by more than 40%, in response to a parliamentary question earlier this year. [the parliamentary question caused this?] Despite this, according to the Royal College of Nurses, England alone has a shortage of 40,000 nurses and 3,500 midwives.The CEO of a group lobbying for EU citizens' rights adds another complication: 'He says that the number of junior doctors applying to come from Europe appears to be unaffected, but recruitment of EU nurses, on which the NHS relies, is “drying up”' And:
“Some of that is because employers don’t feel able to go and recruit, because they can’t answer the questions about leave to remain; some of it is that there aren’t as many people wanting to come because of Brexit [and] because of the value of sterling; and some of it is people not wanting to come because the economies in their own countries are picking up,” he says.How big are the 'somes' [sorry] I wonder. Here is a clue :
far more nurses and midwives are leaving the profession in the UK than joining, according to new figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council. The numbers of EU registrants leaving has also increased, from 1,173 in 2012/2013 to 3,081 in 2016/2017, and Brexit was one of the top three reasons this latter category cited for leaving, according to a survey by the council.
Anne-Marie Rafferty, professor of nursing policy at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, King’s College London [says]. “Markets, including Labour markets, are very sensitive to signals from government,” [she's an economist as well as a prof of nursing policy] ... “and I suspect that part of that drop [NB] is also to do with the uncertainties which surround the rights to remain – and under what conditions these rights would be granted for EU nurses.”In the background, 'The dependence on EU recruitment [arises] because of a lack of homegrown nurses [and this] could result in real difficulties [unless we increase the numbers of homegrown nurses, of course] :
data from NHS Digital, which collates data across the health service, shows that despite this massive drop in official registrations with the nursing regulator and the increase in EU nurses leaving, there are actually more EU staff working in the NHS. Nursing numbers, it says, rose from 21,030 to 22,232 between March 2016 and March 2017 – as well as midwives, from 1,331 to 1,384 over the same period. While 9,419 EU workers left the NHS since March 2016, 13,480 have joined....A record number of EU nationals are also working in hospital and community health services (61,934), up from 57,604 12 months ago, according to NHS Digital figures for March 2017.We can explain this, but only by adding yet another factor:
The apparent contradiction could be explained by the fact that while more EU nationals are leaving nursing and fewer people are registering, those who remain are increasingly switching from agency work to direct employment with NHS organisations. In other words, hospitals are employing more EU staff as they attempt to cut their agency and locum staff bill.
