Where now for the UK?

‘On the other hand, May’s record at the Home Office is one of some who thinks that “citizenship is a privilege and not a right”’

Can you see the difference between securing the rights of a million people, and granting citizenship to a million people?

I think what gripes me the most is that it is clear that there are no consequences in British politics for Tories any more.

Liam Fox is back, without even a fig-leaf of repentance.

Years of austerity junked because Brexit matters, no call that schools and hospitals and infrastructure maybe should have mattered too.

Boris “paid the price” of his nonsense by becoming Foreign Secretary.

Ze K 07.15.16 at 9:10 am
… Lying is, of course, what politicians do; every politician. …

No; not every politician.

I think it’s much too early to say where the government stands on economic matters relative to the old one. Osborne’s policy was focused squarely on the deserving poor – increasing the tax free allowance, making the Living Wage compulsory, etc – while hammering those on benefits, both cutting amounts and reducing eligibility. And it was explicitly pitched as a matter, not just of prudence, but of social justice.

I suspect that is exactly what May means to do. George Osborne has many times given a version of Theresa May’s victory speech. In fact, the central message was taken, almost word-for-word, from Osborne’s most famous speech. The person they both see as their prime target is a working, but struggling, homeowner.

I suspect we will see more of the same, but with less fiscal discipline and more tax cuts.

She has already abolished the department of climate change and appointed a global warming denier to the ministry of the environment . Cameron also talked a good game on inequality back in 2009 but he was a liar then and she’s a liar now. Brexit Britain is going to be a return to the worst kind of bigoted, small-minded little England Toryism.

What perplexes me the most about Brexit is this:

The UK is a big net importer, and this can be a drag on jobs. From this point of view, a brexit might make sense if it is a step toward more protectionism (I’m a lifelong euroenthusiast, so I would still dislike brexit, but it would at least make sense to me).

However:
1) The same effect could be obtained by devaluing the Pound, since the UK was not in the eurozone. The fall of the Pound after brexit is often seen as a problem, so the UK apparently does not “want” to devalue the Pound.

2) Various brexiters say that they would like to stay in the EU free trade zone or, if this is impossible, to have other free trade deals with other partners. So no protectionism either.

So what the hell did the Britons brexit for??

My opinion from the outside is this:

If UK politics is similar to politics in Italy (where I live) the EU has been used by local politicians as a scapegoat for policies that they already wanted to do, but that they tought were umpopular.
These policies generally are austerity for workers (because, we have to tighten the belt together) and tax cuts for the rich (because, keynesianism), and have the final purpose of reducing the share of GDP that goes to workers (something that would actually make the UK more competitive, but at the expense of the workers).
The brexit referendum was mostly internal political theatrics, but as the brexiters won, they now have to find a way to sell the same policies without the scapegoat.

IMHO these policies will go on or will be strenghtened because of the negative economic effect of brexit (as the EU will try to take home the financial activity that currently passes through London), and the pro-worker rethoric will be used to pass rather anti-worker laws, possibly still blaming the EU (this time as an “enemy” that mistreats the poor UK during the negotiations).
For example the government could enact policies that devalue the Pound, while doing “austerity” so as to prevent nominal wages to rise as a consequence of the devaluation.

I hope I’ll be proved wrong but I think this is the most likely scenario.

So what the hell did the Britons brexit for??

EU money laundering regulations.

Johnson really does seem an impossible choice, but then again I’m old enough to remember George Brown

The link above courtesy of: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-brexit-the-myth-of-post-truth-politics/18554#.V4jPJY7LA4D

Very amusing and full of eye-popping stats attesting to the normality, good sense, and general fairness of the British populace.

@ 20 I’m not offering any comments on the poll. I take your point, but fairly clearly your views didn’t carry much weight with the electorate. My position is that the smugness and insults leveled at Leave supporters didn’t particularly help set the stage for constructive dialogue.

And there’s little sign those hurling the charges of racism have learned much from their defeat. The Spike article is good fun!

I’d be curious to know if there is anyone or anything Ze K does consider to be racist.

It’s perfectly true, and not racist, to mention that Barack Obama’s father is Kenyan.

It’s rather more dubious to claim he has an “ancestral dislike” of the UK. That’s probably racist.

But interestingly, Johnson didn’t make that claim himself. Instead, he said “Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire…” So who are these some? Interestingly, it’s the Guardian. So I expect you all to accept that Boris Johnson isn’t racist, and turn your ire on the Guardian.

Right?

I’d be curious to know if there is anyone or anything Ze K does consider to be racist.

Anti-racists, obviously, since they cause racism. And Mohammed Ali, if I recall correctly.

What now for the UK is less consequential than the what now for the EU. The EU will continue to fight any other attempts at a democratic vote on its legitimacy among the remaining members. The will continue to cling to an economic model that will neither solve the Mediterranean debt crisis nor support more coordinated fiscal policy across the Euro zone. May be they can keep together a little longer, but things that can’t go on forever, won’t.

Why does the EU continue to muddle forward, with Germany pushing its foot on the brake, while disfunctional economic policies are maintained elsewhere. I, for one, think the UK is just ahead of the curve and Brussels inability to respond to legitimate critiques of its policies with anything but “racist, racist” means they deserve to fail and the experiment should end up in the dustbin of European history…

@ 27 Ok. Have it your way: “the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”.

The quote is actually from the Spike article. I thought of modifying it, but left it in to see who’d bite.

If the ‘ancestral dislike’ comment was the only racist thing Johnson had ever said this burgeoning threadjack might be more understandable, albeit still depressing and exasperating. It isn’t. Google is your friend people.

@ 34 I know part of me lives in your head. Who’d have imagined that?

“the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”

Thanks for making my point!

map maker: “I, for one, think the UK is just ahead of the curve and Brussels inability to respond to legitimate critiques of its policies with anything but “racist, racist” means they deserve to fail and the experiment should end up in the dustbin of European history…”

Perhaps; but I imagine the common currency and sovereign debt denomination problem will make Grexit, Spexit, Itexit, Frexit, etc vastly more difficult than Brexit; and Brexit seems already insurmountably hard.

@ 39 “And, to the extent that a large plurality did so, they did so because they fell for a lie, that voting ‘leave’ would have the result that ‘decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.’ ”

Proof? Evidence? Belly-button lint?

@map maker 31
“The EU will continue to fight any other attempts at a democratic vote on its legitimacy among the remaining members.”

How does exactly the EU fight referendums on partecipation in the EU? When did this happen?
Actually, it is quite easy to legally exit the EU, as the whole “article 50” story shows.

I agree on the economic model though.

From Chris Bertram’s OP : “One that is markedly to the left of the Cameron-Osborne version on matters of economic policy and markedly to the right on individual rights and citizenship.”

From what I have read May also seems progressive on gender issues. She developed policy against the violence and abuse of women and girls, and she also was in charge of policy against modern slavery which predominantly affects immigrant women in the UK I think, from what I heard at a talk I saw a few months ago. So even if she is not to the left on immigration matters generally, the modern slavery legislation was a really important law reform that helps immigrants.

Salem: “It’s not racist to mention other people’s beliefs.”

Right. So when I say “some might say you’re an apologist for racism”, I’m engaging in just that same trick, the trick you’re using with Johnson, where I’m promoting the idea that you’re an apologist for racism, while taking cover in the fact that I haven’t actually said you are at all, I’ve just noted that other people might say that; and of course, other people might say anything at all, so I’m right, aren’t I?

Johnson, in your view, gets a pass on promoting a racist notion about Obama, because he’s clever enough to just repeat it as someone else’s view. That’s a license for spouting racist views with impunity.

MisterMr produced a comment with some very good analysis of the referendum, and you get the same dynamic, of politicians claiming that some other part of the government is forcing them to do something that is unpopular but which they want to do anyway, in the United States with its own system of federalism and separation of powers.

As a result, you increasingly get policy decided in behind the scenes deals, and since you can’t rely on politicians’ speeches, you have to employ the techniques of Cold War era Kreminology to decipher why supposedly democratic governments have taken certain actions. For example, though I’ve been trying hard over the last few weeks, I can’t figure out what Cameron or May really think of the EU. Actually the same can be said of both Johnson and Corbyn. Its hard to forecast the direction of policy because its hard to determine what the key actors really want. Do the continental European governments really want the UK out so they can finally move towards a federal union? Are American policy makers happy to weaken a potential challenger (a federal Europe) to US hegemony, or did they want the UK inside the EU so they could weaken it? I’ve seen arguments for both positions.

kidneystones @ 42

Think, man!

If the article tries to debunk the notion that Brexit voters fell for a pack of lies by noting that they voted for decisions about the UK to be taken in the UK;

and if MisterMr @ 20 points out that the notion that Brexit results in decisions about the UK being taken in the UK is a false notion;

and if you agree (@21) with MisterMr that it’s a false notion;

then you actually agree the article fails of its purpose.

@ 52 Thanks for this! It all makes sense.

No facts, no evidence, no proof – just CT comments.

All you need!

Time for my nap.

“Lying is, of course, what politicians do; every politician”

Not to hijack the thread but this belief, which I admit is so widespread as to be almost universal, really makes it tough on honest office-seekers. There are a few now and then. But almost no one believes them.

Also “human trafficking” is generally shorthand for “globalize prostitution rings”, which while bad are not quite an exclusively progressive issue, or one that’s really as broad as it might sound. It doesn’t tend to extend to bringing workers abroad and mistreating them and housing and paying them poorly while taking away their passports, as far as I know.

After following May’s time as HS I am a bit surprised by her economic stance. Her rhetoric on the economy is to the left of Cameron/Osborne’s. Their rhetoric was around equality of opportunity, working people, fairness (which I always read as is it fair that the taxes which I pay go to help people that don’t even work), and they were clear on cuts to public services to bring down the deficit. May’s view seems to be a big departure from that, although I will reserve judgement until Hammond’s first budget. It does look like whoever wins the Labour leadership contest will have to be anti-austerity to position the party to the left of the Tories on the economy, I don’t think austerity lite will cut it now.

I like the navigation analogy, it makes me think of unchartered waters either being marked with monsters (the remainers’ view) or having tales of lands of gold (the leavers’ view). While I think it is more likely that we will find monsters we’ll not have a clearer picture until the government says where we want to get to from Brexit and then when we actually try and get there.

I think they should just go ahead and make kidneystones a front-page poster, since every thread is now about his opinions.

bianca steele,

@61 Women and girls make up the majority of victims of human trafficking, but victims are not exclusively female. Also I don’t think many cultures these days would really be pro-slavery. About half the world’s estimated modern day slaves are in the Asia Pacific region, but I am not sure that there are many countries where slavery is actually legal.

@62 The Act has wider application than only pertaining to victims of human trafficking who are forced into prostitution.

It requires companies with an annual turnover of £36 million to state on their websites whether they have made efforts to eliminate slave labour in their supply chains. If they haven’t made efforts they need to state that on their websites.
http://shiftproject.org/sites/default/files/Shift_Mapping%20Modern%20Slavery%20Act%20Against%20UNGPs%20Note_July2015.pdf

The UK now has an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner.

The UK now has specialist legal advocates for trafficked children.

“The issue of protection for overseas domestic workers was a frustrating one. The draft Bill was silent on the plight of hundreds of workers enslaved in households in the UK. But, following sustained pressure and hands-on advocacy in which Anti-Slavery supported Kalayaan and others, a historic vote was taken in the House of Lords which brought back domestic workers’ right to leave an abusive employer. Unfortunately, the government remained deaf to our arguments and passed its own amendment requiring domestic workers to receive a positive decision from the National Referral Mechanism confirming they have been trafficked before allowing them to change employers. It is a bad decision that will deter domestic workers who face abuse and exploitation from coming forward to the authorities. On the other hand, it is a major achievement in itself that the Act now contains a specific provision on overseas domestic workers which is a gateway to getting better protection for this vulnerable group of workers in future. The fight on that issue continues.”
http://www.antislavery.org/english/press_and_news/news_and_press_releases_2009/analysis_of_modern_slavery_act.aspx

ZM,

Thanks for the details (are you saying that May supports these measures in their broader aspects). It does seem that what we are referring to as “slavery”, though, refers to more modern relationships, where employers might claim them to be contracts freely entered into, and the state (or activists) maintain that the actual circumstance can’t constitute a free choice or involve coercion and preventing employees from exercising their rights. In the case of sexual trafficking, which seem more likely in the case of children, there is almost always fraud at the point of emigration (the job was represented to be a different one), or outright kidnapping, at least in the many cases that involve immigration from developed countries.

Ze K @70
Advocacy is not the same as lying.

Theresa May is the Minister who was responsible for putting the draft Modern Slavery Bill to the Parliament I think. I’m not quite sure what you mean about the definition of modern slavery?

“Tackling modern slavery in Britain is a “personal priority”, the home secretary has said following the discovery of three women allegedly held as slaves for at least 30 years.

ZM, I was replying to your @69! Have you already forgotten what you wrote? Time for more coffee maybe!

The racist part of the Kenyan thing is not Kenya, but the “ancestral.”

Let’s try this: “President Obama is a smart man, and he knows history. He has an understandable loathing for the British Empire, because he knows what it did in Kenya, his father’s native country, during his lifetime.” Which behavior, let’s remind ourselves, was frankly and openly racist.

I’m Irish by heritage, and I’ve been reading Edmund Spenser lately. I hate the British Empire with considerable passion, but it ain’t “ancestral.”

I don’t think most modern slaves are women or sex workers. My vague memory of May’s modern slavery bill is that it was first used to protect men held prisoner in a labour camp of some kind. I’m hoping she won’t mess up her modern slavery stuff by reneging on the sex work legalization recommendations currently coming out of parliament. I think May has serious views on border control, terror and slavery that aren’t all just anodyne right wing nastiness, but I fear on the environment and right to assemble she’s going to be far worse than e.g. Johnson would have been. I hope she moves away from Cameron and Osborne’s war on the working poor (someone above suggested that “austerity” was targeted at the undeserving poor but this is bullshit, almost all the major cuts hit the working poor first).

I think she has put Johnson in foreign affairs in order to make him fail, so he is thoroughly discredited and has no path to the leadership. Johnson accidentally shafted Cameron and May by accidentally winning the referendum even though he hoped to lose, and they have thoroughly out-played him in the aftermath. People thought Johnson was hiding cunning beneath the bozo exterior but it turns out – shock! – he is just a bozo. And so the Bullingdon club go down in history as the pack of stupid fucks who wrecked the British economy, dragged them out of Europe and failed to negotiate an alternative. Let’s never let an Eton boy near anything more powerful than his own shriveled little willy ever again.

Oh and speaking of shriveled little willies, please don’t respond to kidneystones. If we all talk to each other like adults and ignore him, he’ll run away to behave like the sad little wannabe fascist that he is – somewhere else.

Philip @ 65: It does look like whoever wins the Labour leadership contest will have to be anti-austerity to position the party to the left of the Tories on the economy, I don’t think austerity lite will cut it now.

Still Tory-lite but imitating a different flavor of Tory. That’s the ticket!

@83

Seems like the English could use some real US-style libertarians to take over the defense of exploitative, coercive “contracts” and the coercion of female runaways, take some of the burden off the left. Of course, you might eventually end up with the equivalent of Trump if you go that way.

@54: The Kennedy family have, or had, a strong Anglophile streak dating back to Joseph Kennedy’s ambassadorship. John F. Kennedy and his sister Kathleen were big social successes in London. Kathleen married into the Cavendish family and nearly became Duchess of Devonshire, later making her home permanently in England. Her brother Jack always maintained close ties to his British friends and never showed any special feeling for Irish nationalism (although he was very conscious of being Irish and an outsider).

Younger members of the family like Edward and Jean did take a real and active interest in Irish affairs. And a daughter of Robert Kennedy married one of the Guildford Four. But there was no “ancestral” dislike of Britain in the family at all, if anything the opposite.

It’s even more off topic, but I agree about Obama and his father. I have always suspected that the more crucial parental relation was/is with his late mother.

“But this is the same old conflict where the intersection of women’s issues with multiculturalism ends up with feminism on the rightwing half of the divide, whether that is helpful or not (since the right’s opposition to “slavery” tends to end somewhere short of “equality,” and the left seems to take the presence of conservatives and rightwingers on the other side as an excuse to punt and ignore the issue while claiming true leftism will magically solve all).”

Bianca you are right on about this, and further the exact same dynamic is playing out in the labor unions/immigrants situation where the cosmopolitan left takes the presence of rightwingers on the other side as an excuse to punt and ignore the issue.

“So what sort of government do we have? One that is markedly to the left of the Cameron-Osborne version on matters of economic policy and markedly to the right on individual rights and citizenship. ”

I think economically liberal, socially conservative is part of an overall political realignment that is happening. Trump is essentially doing the same thing.

The decision of Democrats & Labour to ally so strongly with neoliberal forces means that they no longer have the strength or credibility to resist losing the economically liberal space. Liberal voters that care about economic issues more than social issues are now vulnerable to capture.(and I’d hazard that there are quite a few)

It didn’t happen with same sex marriage, though. Maybe Andrew Sullivan made the difference? I’m happy to do my bit and send him back (this is not a call for him to be deported).

> Google is your friend people.

Specifically, ‘Boris picaninny watermelon low IQ Uganda colony’.

Real google experts could try to find a racially offensive term he hasn’t used…

The deepest problem with Boris’ Obama/Kenya jibe isn’t anything about his specific choice of words, even the insinuation that Obama’s hypothetical resentment of the British empire is innate and “ancestral” rather than conscious and intellectual; the problem is that he explicitly frames resentment of the British empire as a criticism at all. Whether he’s sincere about it or not, he’s implying in so many words that he would personally wave the Union Jack over a pile of Kenyan corpses where a polite establishment politician like Cameron would hesitate. This may be a somewhat thin line that exists more in rhetoric than in actual policy, but it’s still a major line of separation between liberal capitalism and fascism, and Boris clearly intends to signal that he’d cross it the instant the poll numbers added up right.

Suzanne @88
Obama’s second term is ending and I still haven’t read Dreams from My Father (or Kloppenberg’s book Reading Obama).

Yes, OT. Now back to racism, trafficking, slavery, etc.

@96

I agree with this, “The deepest problem with Boris’ Obama/Kenya jibe isn’t anything about his specific choice of words, even the insinuation that Obama’s hypothetical resentment of the British empire is innate and “ancestral” rather than conscious and intellectual; the problem is that he explicitly frames resentment of the British empire as a criticism at all,” and should have said it.

But I think that the “ancestral” is a serious problem as well, as it suggests that, unlike Anglo-Saxons, people from other ethnicities are blinded by their ancestry to the glories of the empire.

To which the proper response is, “Bullshit.”

And, by the way, Harry Frankfurt’s notion of “bullshit,” helps with the whole discussion of lies. Many things get said in political campaigns. Some are lies. Most are things like “Black Lives Matter advocated for a moment of silence for the shooter in Dallas,” which is said for signaling purposes, rather than for its truth value, which is nil.

Not all politicians lie. But they almost all bullshit. But then, so do almost all of us, unless when we’re being vigilant about what we say.

Boris’s great-grandfather Ali Kemal shortly after the first world war set up an organisation Ä°ngiliz Muhipler Cemiyeti (“The Anglophile Society”), which advocated British protectorate status for Turkey. So he is hardly the first member of his family to see British rule as advantageous.

(Wow. An awful lot of sound and fury on this this thread.)
But I did find this polling tidbit interesting:

More than three quarters (77%) of those who voted to remain thought “the decision we make in the referendum could have disastrous consequences for us as a country if we get it wrong”. More than two thirds (69%) of leavers, by contrast, thought the decision “might make us a bit better or worse off as a country, but there probably isn’t much in it either way”.

This seems a much bigger divide than anything else I’ve heard floated, so may provide a better handle on voter motivations than whichever spin is put forward by your favorite talking head (smug or otherwise).

As if Remain and Leave weren’t operating in the same perceptual universe… But if you believe this vote actually did matter, the Leavers don’t come across as particularly sensible or well-informed, no.

@ 102: She apologized for that and promptly. It does seem to me that grasping around for something nice to say about a recently departed woman who had the same “job” you did, grasping the wrong thing, and then apologizing, is not comparable to Johnson’s, uh, approach. There was certainly no antigay implication.

I’m not arguing the egregiousness, or hideousness, of the error, mind. As you know, it wasn’t just that the Reagans weren’t leading the charge against AIDS or “starting a conversation.” As far as they were concerned, it didn’t even exist.

109: If you believe, as pretty much all of the modern right wing movement does, that objective reality doesn’t matter (if it exists at all), only one’s subjective beliefs are relevant, then everybody in the “reality-based community” must in fact come off as hysterical.

Btw, which “apocalyptic predictions” didn’t pan out?

Best response to BoJo’s appointment came from Ofwono Opondo , a governments spokesman in Uganda:

Boris Johnson’s opinion that countries like Uganda would be better off as colonies in inconsequential. We would be more concerned if the US or Russia appointed someone like Boris. But Britain no longer wields much power globally, that’s why they have run away from the EU

“it looks as though he may get a pass for his offensive comments about the Turkish President.”

THERE IS A COUP IN TURKEY! QUICK, BORIS JOHNSON, MAKE A RAPE JOKE!

FFS he was a Spectator Editor who’s said lots of racist stuff. That’s it.

If Thersea May thinks he can do this job, she can’t do hers.

@ 56 Hi Sam, Thanks for this. We may well differ on that point, but perhaps not. I stand by my original claim, however.

Smearing Leave supporters as ‘racists and xenophobes’ for years virtually ensured an end to all dialogue with Leave supporters primarily interested in returning the decision making processes to the UK. As the poll cited above confirms, the single largest group of Leave voters voted for Leave primarily to have this decision making process return to the UK.

Which makes the Leave outcome very much the consequence of Remain hostility. That’s where we differ, perhaps.

The single largest group of Leave supporters have been and continue to be described as racist by people here to no evident objection from you. That doesn’t make you a ‘bad person.’ But it does make us different. It’s frankly wrong on the most fundamental level to knowingly and wrongly accuse people of racism. It’s also very bad politics, as we’ve seen. And like Hitler/Holocaust comparisons, these cynical manipulations degrade all those suffering from the ongoing impact of racism in its myriad manifestations.

Britain is nowhere near as racist as it once was. And that’s a good thing.

Salem 07.15.16 at 10:37 pm
…
I voted for Boris, twice, not out of any great enthusiasm for him, but his opponent was Ken Livingstone, so like most Londoners I found it an easy choice. …

Where ‘most’ means (a) something between 50% and 55% of those who voted and (b) a smaller percentage than the percentage of voters who found they could vote for Ken Livingstone in the first two London mayoral elections.

I predict Boris will be a hugely popular Foreign Secretary, …

That strikes me as an odd description for anybody. When has being Foreign Secretary ever made anybody hugely popular?

Considering the entire opposition spoke out against the coup, Erdogan might not be considerd quite as evil at home as in some caricatures here )-:.

@Ze K
I see the Donald picked a neocon for veep.

Pence is not a neocon. He is a social conservative a la Cruz and comes out of that part of the Repub party afaik.

Not everyone who supported the Iraq ’03 invasion qualifies as a neocon. ‘Neocon’ has a determinate if in some cases contestable meaning (i.e., there are ‘borderline’ cases). ‘Neocon’ refers to (a) those who made the transition from left-of-center (or in some cases earlier radicalism) to conservatism in the ’60s, most of whom were converts to a particularly aggressive and ideological foreign-policy approach (cf. [the late] Jeane Kirkpatrick); and (b) the various descendants of this group, either biological (as in the case of Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz) or simply political, as in those grouped around the Project for a New American Century and similar outfits.

Pence is not a neocon. Nor is he a Buchanan-like paleocon. He is a Midwestern conservative with strong links to the social-conservative, evangelical part of the Repub base.

Well, the coup appears to be collapsing, so, yay for democracy and the rule of law, I guess.

@hix: so, that the Erdogan regime is corrupt and repressive is a “caricature”, then? That’s what I like about CT: there is always something new to learn.

Since this thread appears to be caroming in various directions, will take the opportunity to mention, à propos of racism, that browsing randomly for a few minutes in a library the other day I ran across a thick 2-volume paperback reprint of an English translation of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (w intro. by George Mosse). Spent maybe 5 mins. w/ it. I doubt it gets checked out much. I certainly didn’t check it out.

Were talking about Turkey here, including the Kemalist opposition. All convinced democrats that never ever relied on more or less overt military support to stay in power in the past )-:.

novakant,

“ZM, I’m not familiar with the UK anti-slavery legislation, but it seems Theresa May’s compassion for vulnerable women is rather limited:”

Re: Yarl’s Wood, yes that sounds very bad.

We have a similar situation here in Australia with rape and sexual assaults occurring in detention centres, as well as deaths in some cases. The government has not dealt with the issue here well enough either.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott responded to the Moss review “into allegations of sexual assault in offshore immigration detention centres by saying that “occasionally … things happen”…. The Australian prime minister argued that most asylum seekers transferred to the Nauru and Manus Island processing centres were treated well most of the time. “Occasionally, I daresay, things happen, because in any institution you get things that occasionally aren’t perfect,” Abbott told 2GB on Friday. “But, look, the most compassionate thing we can do is stop the boats. That’s what we’ve done and those centres on Nauru and Manus are an important part of that.””
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/20/things-happen-tony-abbott-on-sexual-assault-allegations-in-offshore-detention

There seems to be a different standard of care for people in immigration detention which is unfair and it becomes really terrible when offences that happen in detention are not dealt with properly by the authorities.

Ze K, that was the impression he wanted to create to become Mayor and while he was Mayor. It seemed to be the case that the buffoonery was an act and he was a decent enough Mayor. I don’t live in London so don’t really know how much he was just a figurehead and how much policy was his own and believe he his office had to keep a close eye on him to prevent him making gaffes. The problem is if the buffoonery is an act and the more outrageous statements are to be ignored then what are his actual aims and views? After the Brexit vote he needed to articulate his view of what should be achieved and he failed to do that. So even if he doesn’t mean the racist statements he made he was still prepared to make them and I don’t see anything that he stands for except his own ambition.

A Bigot at the Top: Boris Johnson Is No Joke; He Is Racist

Another: “So what the hell did the Britons brexit for??”

Collin Street: “EU money laundering regulations.”

Note that Brexit could really boost the power of the right in the UK. They’d be out from the bothersome ‘human rights’ requirements of the EU, and they’d be more able to make England the money laundering capital of the world. IIRC, Murdoch stated that he supported Brexit because Number 10 (Downing Strett) listened to him more than Brussels.

Patrick: “On the flip side, if you believed the vote wouldn’t change much, the Remainers came off as hysterical chicken littles. Especially, in retrospect, after most of the apocalyptic predictions didn’t pan out.”

I wonder if you grasp that they haven’t left yet? That those now charged with leaving are apparently reluctant to do it, and are in no hurry to proceed, because they, too, believe the apocalyptic predictions?

If he was decent mayor of London, that counts.

He wasn’t

What he thinks about the politics of Uganda is irrelevant to him being Foreign Secretary?

However, on the other hand you will get protectionism

Enh. Protectionism… shutting the door is only a good idea if the enemy on the outside is worse than the enemy within, and this is basically only going to be true if your juristiction’s prospective government is going to be better than the international average… or in other words if your national authorities are leftist or maybe centre-right.

If your domestic government is a noxious concoction of second-hand and rather thick arse, locking yourself in with them probably isn’t the best idea. We’ve all seen that horror film.

correction:
As this is

“Uganda doesn’t matter much…”

I’m sure they feel the same way about you.

@140,141
They didnt say “when Brexit started”, they said immediately, perhaps taking some version of the EMH to heart and believing that market would price in the news as soon as they got it. And of course, as members of the government cameron and osborne should have been aware that they werent going to trigger article 50 right away. They just sounded really uncredible, compared to the calm voices among the leavers that were dominating the media before the vote like Jacob Rees-Mogg: “Yes, a vote to leave means some economic disruption, No it doesn’t mean we need to leave instantly or stupidly.”

Patrick: ‘They didnt say “when Brexit started”, they said immediately…’

I’ll bite. Let’s see them saying ‘immediately’.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0Z2188

“Osborne said he would aim to introduce the emergency measures within two months of a Leave vote.”

I’d say yes. A lot of economic claims get exaggerated in politics and the EU has a tendency to ignore/undermine referenda that they disagree with.

@ Patrick, I don’t think this makes your point. You seem to be arguing that the dire predictions were said to be tied to the vote but not to the actual exit. But no one explicitly said that; it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that the dire predictions were offered as a consequence of exit.

Ask yourself why no one will commit to any date on which to invoke article 50. To me, it’s perfectly bloody obvious – article 50 is a fused time bomb, an act which transfers all leverage to the EU to the detriment of the U.K. The best possible outcome of article 50 negotiations is that the UK gets a trade deal which looks in every respect like their status quo as an EU member, while surrendering any ability to influence EU rules, etc. This would be a good outcome economically but would like enrage Leavers because it does not end free movement or exempt the UK from EU regulations; and this means those in power will get the axe. The much more likely outcome is that the UK gets fuck all, no free trade deal of any kind with the EU, because the rules limit negotiations to 2 years, give every single away member country a veto on any deal, and the EU has no incentive to give countries an easy out. The only reason that isn’t baked into the market is that the market does not (yet) believe anyone will actually light the fuse.

Patrick: “I posted a source which ties the emergency budget to the vote and not the exit. Exact quote.”

Actually, your source does not seem to quote Osborne tying the budget to the vote and not the exit. If you think it does, point to Osborne’s words quoted by your source. I can’t find them.

Regardless, I think you’re being silly. If I said “if the US votes for war, people will die”, I think you would agree that I’m attributing the deaths to the actual war, not just the vote. Is that not fair?

Cameron stated he would trigger article 50 immediately, but he chose not to after the vote in order to shaft Johnson. Osborne and Cameron are no longer in their positions. So how does osborne’s stated intention to do anything have any relevance to predictions about what will happen if Britain votes leave?

I don’t think you can credibly say Osborne didn’t make this threat Bruce – it was all over the media at the time, and a google search even now reveals lots of news reports about it and lots of news reports about how it isn’t going to happen. My point is that this budget not happening is not a sign that the remain camp lied, since Osborne and Cameron are gone, so whatever they said they would do as a result of a leave vote is irrelevant to whether they lied.

I would prefer to see the people claiming this was a lie instead attack the IFS study on which Osborne’s emergency budget pretended to be based.

(Separately – how pathetic is Osborne that every problem has the same solution, austerity? I also note that before the election he said that a leave vote would mean that the UK had no economic plan; but then after the election he claimed it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to prepare a contingency plan for a leave vote. Has there ever been anyone as small-minded and reckless as Osborne in charge of the Exchequer?)

@ novakant

Yes, and he’s supposedly the one that is keen on civil liberties! God help us with the rest of them….

Patrick 07.15.16 at 9:16 pm
“On the flip side, if you believed the vote wouldn’t change much, the Remainers came off as hysterical chicken littles. Especially, in retrospect, after most of the apocalyptic predictions didn’t pan out.”

Meanwhile, on the Brexit side, we saw a wave of resignations and statements becoming no longer operative.

Layman 07.17.16 at 11:31 am
“Indeed – the contention that dire predictions about Brexit were predictions about consequences of the voting, rather than consequences of Brexit, is monumentally silly.”

I notice that the Brexiters seem to be in an aaaaawwwwwwfffffffffuuuuuuullllllll ‘non-hurry’ to invoke Article 50 – that is, to actually Brexit.

That some of the dire predictions about Brexit were idiotic pronouncements by well-practiced fools is simply a fact at this point. It is hard to imagine anything taking place in the context of British politics that didn’t feature fools saying idiotic things on all sides of every issue. That’s just part of British political culture and an artifact of politics being a branch of show business.

The political problem with Brexit was always going to be the difficulty of negotiating an adjusted relationship with Europe, a problem that arises from the political rigidity built into the EU’s core commitments to the “four freedoms” — idealizations that sound good in the abstract, but also disable government for good and ill, handicapping the political ability to collectively adapt and respond to changing circumstances. The core institutions of the EU are designed to resist negotiation, to resist in essence the emergence of responsible and responsive politics enveloping those issues.

From the viewpoint of a Brexiteer, I would imagine that the political rigidity that makes Brexit difficult and hazardous — the problem that the EU may not have the ability to negotiate a new relationship within the allotted time period or any time period really — is itself a reason to Brexit. That is, the Brexiteer instinctively seeks to escape the grip of that political rigidity.

I don’t personally have an opinion one way or another on Brexit per se, though I think a peacefully organized Europe is a big gain for world civilization that should not be lightly discarded. It is, for me, a distant and fascinating spectacle, and I would be cheering a united Europe, except for my hostility to neoliberalism.

That Osbourne was spouting his usual nonsense — or the fine particulars of what he said — is not as interesting to me as was his ability to rope Alistair Darling into supporting him in it. That part of the immediate fallout of the Brexit vote was a desperate struggle to oust Corbyn is fascinating.

My hope for Britain and Europe would be that somehow in the chaos of politics the vote for Brexit becomes an opening to breaking the deathgrip of neoliberalism.

Well, if May is sincere that Article 50 won’t be triggered until in effect Scotland agrees (“she would not trigger article 50 until “a UK-wide approach” had been agreed for negotiations to leave the EU”, as per the Guardian) Brexit is seeming a little dead in the water, no?

bruce wilder@180: “It is hard to imagine anything taking place in the context of British politics that didn’t feature fools saying idiotic things on all sides of every issue”.

You think that only applies to British politics?

B. Wilder
the problem that the EU may not have the ability to negotiate a new relationship within the allotted time period or any time period really

No doubt the EU has some built-in rigidities (hard to imagine a 27-country org that wouldn’t, though the EU’s may well be excessive). But as for negotiating a new relationship, my sense is that the EU, at least the Fr and Ger officials, would be happy at this pt to say “the UK’s new relationship w us is now basically the same as any other non-EU country’s. Signed on the dotted line pls.” There are things that have to be unraveled, including perhaps the status of EU nationals now working in the UK, but the basic framework seems something that from the EU’s standpoint is fairly clear. It’s the UK that needs the time, presumably, to work out a transition that doesn’t rile up its business sectors etc too much. That’s just the sense I get from casually following.

LFC 07.17.16 at 9:45 pm
B. Wilder
the problem that the EU may not have the ability to negotiate a new relationship within the allotted time period or any time period really

No doubt the EU has some built-in rigidities (hard to imagine a 27-country org that wouldn’t, though the EU’s may well be excessive). But as for negotiating a new relationship, my sense is that the EU, at least the Fr and Ger officials, would be happy at this pt to say “the UK’s new relationship w us is now basically the same as any other non-EU country’s. Signed on the dotted line pls.” There are things that have to be unraveled, including perhaps the status of EU nationals now working in the UK, but the basic framework seems something that from the EU’s standpoint is fairly clear. It’s the UK that needs the time, presumably, to work out a transition that doesn’t rile up its business sectors etc too much. That’s just the sense I get from casually following.

So, here’s part of the famous (notorious?) Article 50:

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

There’s a two-year grace period to negotiate more specific arrangements, but what happens at the end of those two years if agreement hasn’t been reached? Answer: the withdrawing member becomes a non-member, exactly like any other non-member. If agreement isn’t reached in two years, it just isn’t, that’s all; the withdrawal is still effective, with no special modifications, qualifications, or conditions.

So, Scotland doesn’t agree, no article 50, no Brexit? Then, in addition to having the EU to blame for the country’s ills, they’ll have Scotland to blame now too. Brilliant.

Just hope the agreement will be one that lowers “financial service” exports a lot.

@181

“I think somewhere along the line there are going to be problems for the UK political establishment, as many of the people who voted to leave realise that little is changing and that many of that section of the elite that supported the Leave campaign were doing so for their personal or sectional political interests. Given the sheer level of inertia and the lack of ideas since the referendum, I think it is highly likely that a deal will end up being cobbled together that keeps the legal fact of UK ‘independence’ intact while accepting virtually all the conditions of EU membership.”

yep – at the moment we just hear about “sulky Remainers”, but soon that will be swamped out by the wave of “We Feel Cheated” Leave voters, from Jan 2nd 2017 at the latest, when they notice immigration hasn’t ended but they’re worse off anyway.

Gove et al are already getting their “Blame Remain” line ready to explain away the fact that the end result wasn’t the wonderland they promised.

“Project Fear” is simply the formula for every Conservative election/referendum campaign since 1979: if you don’t vote for our policies, the country will be destroyed.

The novelty this time round is that it was turned on a cause that the Tory Right themselves support, and they didn’t like it.

TM @ 192: My impression is that you mix up the UK with Greece.

Probably, I mix up the EU with the EU. I do that sometimes.

Britain really does live in a different EU from the one most other European countries get. Because Britain demands and gets a lot of big exceptions to the “four freedoms” scheme. Britain opted out of the Euro, out of Schengen and they kick about a lot else. And all that exceptionalism irritates the powers that be in the EU, as other commenters have noted.

I suppose it is easy enough in Britain’s EU, where a Tory government is resisting directives on labor standards like overtime, to overlook the neoliberal turn the EU took around 1992 and its consequences. This is not your grandfather’s social democratic EU.

There’s more than a little irony in having bloody-minded Tories provide the electoral muscle for this rebellion. Greece would like to rebel, but . . . they aren’t allowed. Different EUs and Greece chose the wrong one, I guess.

So you noticed that the EU has taken a “neoliberal turn”? How perceptive. I’ve got news for you: the whole world has taken a “neoliberal turn”, Britain right in the vanguard. So what is the argument?

TM: what is the argument?

“My hope for Britain and Europe would be that somehow in the chaos of politics the vote for Brexit becomes an opening to breaking the deathgrip of neoliberalism.”

[by the way, if you think my comment @ 180 was a rant, you really do have low standards for the art]

Not just a rant, but also “cynical grandstanding”. So few people here even know how to interpret what other people write. That makes them pretty much the worst possible interlocutors: politeness and reasonability are worth nothing if you reliably can’t even understand what you’re responding to.

It seems to be sinking in for some people that, as should have been obvious from the start, a non-binding resolution won by a 52% vote does not equate to leaving the EU. This period is only a continuation of EU/UK politics, not an end to it. All sorts of results are possible. Perhaps if people really strongly feel that the vote came to the wrong result they should be organizing or protesting or something.

Chris—sorry—I tried to get into that account to pick up your email but I don’t seem to be able to (I hadn’t checked it for years). I’ll set up a new one before I comment again but if it’s urgent let me know and I’ll email you. Fwiw I haven’t been sock-puppeting.

Only concerned about sovereignty, my arse:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36803544

Ze K 07.18.16 at 1:03 pm
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/brexit-a-blow-to-the-ruling-class

In the case of the victory of Britain’s majority vote to leave the European Union, workers simply no longer believed the official blarney that the single market will provide them with the bright, shiny future they had endlessly been promised.

Instead, they fell like an egg from a tall chicken for the blarney about a bright, shiny future to be provided by Brexit.

Layman was interpellated

My standard-issue, if a bit old, desk dictionary has
interpellate: to question (a person) formally: a form of political challenge to members of the administration in legislative bodies of certain countries [from the Latin interpellatus, past participle of interpellare, to interrupt in speaking]

Perhaps an unabridged dictionary would be more helpful (could go to OED, I suppose), but from this definition, at least, I don’t really see the application…

@LFC, the only thing that makes sense to me is that he misspelled ‘interpolated’.

mcmanus @214
this cd well have been what R. Puchalsky was alluding to, I suppose. Though I can’t deal w Althusser right now. Sorry, also for the (unproductive) derailing.

Yes, I meant the Althusserian meaning. I wrote about people not bothering to figure out what someone wrote: Layman turned around.

I’m not talking about the existence of a past golden age, nor am I offering a judgement about whether today’s cultural tics are better or worse off overall than some previous age’s. But today’s cultural tic or whatever you want to call it is a sequence that goes: a) someone is angry about something, b) they decide that they would most like to be angry about X, c) whoever they are talking to is X. That’s how BW above becomes a cynical grandstanding ranter, which whether you agree with BW or not or whether you think that his comment was worthwhile or not just has no reality value as a description of what his comment actually was. Note the relationship to postmodernism: if everything is interpretation and the authorial reading doesn’t exist, no comment actually has any content and it can be whatever you want it to be.

” Note the relationship to postmodernism: if everything is interpretation and the authorial reading doesn’t exist, no comment actually has any content and it can be whatever you want it to be.”

Though just not a good account of “post-modernism” whatever that vague appellation might mean.

@220: Whether new or not, the lack of dialog in comments like these is extremely depressing. No effort is expended in trying to understand why people might disagree with the writer – instead, it’s whether someone is a racist, or a neoliberal, etc., and thus not worthy of engagement (but definitely worthy of having their words twisted for the sake of righteous mockery).

Nice try, Rich, but sometimes people are just wrong on the substance. Bruce is wrong here. The fact remains that there is a good EU and a bad EU, and Britain is quitting the good one. Bruce acknowledges this, and then pretends that it doesn’t matter. Brexit is a right-wing project, driven by a dislike of immigrants and regulation.

The EU behaved badly in Greece, and we would all like to see somebody punished for this. But destroying the post-war internationalist order is not the answer. The only winners will be right-wing nationalists.

Ze K 07.19.16 at 7:22 am
“Take back control” is not misleading. The main advantage of the Leave is exactly the fact that its statement is perfectly clear and meaningful. What’s the statement of the Remain; is it “better in”, or something?

We’ve had a previous exchange about ‘take back control’ and at this time I have nothing to add to my previous remarks on that subject, although I’m happy to restate them if they’ve slipped your memory.

‘Better in’ is an expression that some people may have found conveniently encapsulated their views, but only people who already agreed with the sentiment; accurate or not, it can have played no part in deceiving anybody into changing positions.

@230

Half of the UK population – including large majorities in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London – have just been completely disenfranchised, while the other half is presented with a PM that hasn’t been elected by anyone but will stay in power until 2020 as they are slowly finding out that next nothing they voted for will actually be put into practice because they were systematically lied to by the right-wing establishment.

Yeah, power to the people!

When has being Foreign Secretary ever made anybody hugely popular?

The elder Pitt? (Technically Secretary of State for the Southern Dept., but the same thing.)

> “Take back control” is not misleading.

See, there’s an assymetry here. “I experienced it as misleading” demonstrates the potential for something to be misleading — obviously — but “I did not experience it as misleading” does not demonstrate the lack-of-potential for something to be misleading.

So a person’s experience is dispositive to demonstrate existence but not to demonstrate non-existence. A person says it was misleading or confusing, it was misleading or confusing to that person and thus someone unless you’re calling the person a liar.

As an aside, any existing country/nation state is to some extent a product of war and conquest. If people acknowledge the legitimacy of their political institutions, it’s because at some point violence was used. The EU is maybe the first experiment at forming a political entity by consensus and negotiation. Design by committee is awful, everybody knows that. The old-fashioned way with guns and tanks is certainly more effective. I’d like to give that experiment with all its warts and flaws a little bit of credit for trying.

Marc, saying an argument is racist doesn’t mean you think the person using it isn’t worth engaging with. It just means you are going to engage with it on that basis. I have said repeatedly here that you can’t argue with leavers if you interpret their “concerns” independent of the racist framework they give them in. If you ever doubt that, try talking to a Middle English leaver about “illegal asylum seekers ” or Irish travelers. When they say “take back control” and you ask of what, it is borders, not fishing law. When you ask the, about democracy, they ignore the uk’s ridiculous electoral problems (as we have seen here) and focus on an eu process they don’t understand. If you don’t consider the racism you won’t be able to counteract the slogans.

Some people commenting here seriously see, to think that racist discourse has not changed from 50 years ago, and that of someone is t using racist epithets they aren’t racist (except people like Salem, who don’t seem to understand that “picaninny” is a bad word). If you don’t understand what is racist and what isn’t, you can’t deal with racist claims.

Ze K,

I think the EU represents peace and cooperation after 2 world wars. I guess Russia was involved in the world wars but as far as I know the USSR wasn’t really conceptualised as a way of bringing peace and cooperation to all the Soviet countries. Has Russia tried to join the EU after the disbanding of the USSR?

To be honest I have very little idea about the process of federation the USSR went through, but USSR was a *lot* more centralised than the EU in its governance structures as far as I know.

Do you think that the USSR was really very similar to the EU, or has the Soviet and post-Soviet experience just generally put you off the idea of large federations of countries?

I think there probably has to be a balance between the regional or national cultures, and the federated or international law making and policy.

But I don’t think I would want silos of national jurisdictions with their own laws and policies, there are some important benefits to larger federated sort of governance structures, and to international governance structures or communities. I saw something that said at the World Economic Forum China proposed to build a global energy grid by 2050. This would really help countries where the renewable energy potential is not that high, or where renewable energy potential fluctuates seasonally. Although I think it would probably be good if this was done via the UN or something, rather than leaving it to one country.

Time for a public service announcement: Please kindly do not feed the troll.

The democratic deficit with regard to the EU, at least in terms of what Mair’s book talks about, is exacerbated by the way in which European politicians play the two political levels against each other. Anything that can really only be done at EU scale they encourage votes on nationally, knowing that the EU has no process by which these can be turned into EU decisions: anything that really has to be done at the national level they say can’t be done due to EU restrictions.

But that’s just a subsymptom of a larger diagnosis which has to do with the formation of a “homogenous professional class” that presents national voters with no alternatives. The point of democracy isn’t really to make good decisions. The point is to make responsive decisions. If old, poor, and uneducated people are unhappy enough and xenophobes are offering them the only alternative, they are going to take that alternative. That isn’t a judgement in favor of xenophobia, it’s a description of reality.

If the EU can’t make democratic decisions — if it’s too large, and maybe there’s an “optimum democracy area” like there is supposed to be an optimum currency area — then it absolutely should not exist. That’s something that can be said independent of whether people are xenophobes or of whether Murdoch wants something. It’s not insane: defending the EU as having nothing wrong with it other than economically seems a lot more insane to me if you really believe that it’s too large for democracy.

As for whether the UK should stay together — that’s up to the people in the UK. Have their leaders been giving them any reasons to stay together?

did abb1 escape from Putin’s troll factory?

WT, you haven’t read carefully (re “insane”).

Greece: I realize that those using “democracy” as the big stick to shake against the EU don’t really care about institutional questions but I’ll pretend they do. When you criticize the EU on the basis of “democracy deficit” or lack of institutional legitimacy, that is different from just saying their policies towards Greece were terrible. We can easily agree on that, but that’s not an institutional critique. I’m sure you are following me here. Democracy doesn’t preclude terrible policy. So the question I am raising is, on what basis can one argue that these policies were not just bad but lack institutional legitimacy, were undemocratic? So far, nobody has addressed that and I would be curious to hear your response.

Because on understanding of democracy as majority rule, there was nothing undemocratic in the fact that small Greece was overruled by the EU majority. EU critics can’t have it both way. The EU response to Greece’s debt crisis affected not just Greece itself but the rest of the EU as well. You cannot argue in the name of democracy that Greece alone should get to decide – just as the British can’t argue that their democratic Brexit decision now obliges the rest of the EU to make concessions. Britain has the right to leave, but the EU also has the right to retract all privileges of membership (or to negotiate a different arrangement, as they see fit). Likewise, Greece had the right to reject the bailout conditions but then the rest of the EU had the right to refuse the money. It is unpleasant to point this out since policy wise, the conditions were terrible, we all agree on that. But the pfui Schäuble how undemocratic argument is confused and misguided. Like it or not, Schäuble did represent a democratic majority.

hix @ 251

You make a good point about the political ambiguities inherent in federalism, and we in the U.S., God knows, have had our noses rubbed in them often enough. The infamous misuse of states’ rights as a defense of slavery led us to a very nasty civil war, and the nastiness has lingered long after Appomattox was supposed to have settled the issue. To pick a more mundane example, the expanding interpretations of the commerce clause offered as an antidote to intractable legislative blockades, however necessary they might have seemed at the time, have certainly not been what one would normally think of as resounding democratic successes.

Whichever side you pick in the ongoing struggle between Brussels and the increasingly pinched national governments of the EU, (Germany excepted, perhaps), the fact remains that the decisions taken at the top of the EU food chain are taken by a relatively small number of people who are accountable to no one, not, anyway, in the sense one would expect if one believed in the invulnerability of representative democracy to capture by a class in business largely for itself. How does one resolve the deadlocked forces that have brought the EU to a state of schizophrenic paralysis? Joschka Fischer thinks there should be a United States of Europe. As a U.S. citizen, I’d respond that he should be careful what he wishes for.

Ze K,

“The essence of the EU is the “single market”. That’s also the essence of neoliberalism: the domination of ‘market’ over national governments. To reform this thing, you’d need to destroy it first, and then create something else, a union of nations, where the ‘market’ has its place, but not of the dictator, not the ruler. Of a servant, rather…”

I suppose I would want a balance between nations sharing a single market and some nations or people or groups of people in nations not being exploited. It is impossible to argue that there is not exploitation in the global economy at the moment. But I don’t think I would want to go back to Australia having protectionist economic policies.

I don’t think you have to destroy everything to fix things though. That would cause a lot of problems.

There are a lot of problems with the global economy at the moment, inequality and environmental problems, but I don’t know whether I would say these problems are the result of the structures of national, transnational, and global governance rather than being the result of legislation and policy (and the civil sphere too in many cases).

The 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals are meant to help achieve a more fair global economy in many ways as well as transitioning to an environmentally sustainable global economy. I don’t think it is that likely that national and global governance structures are going to change so much as you are suggesting in the time that we have to deal with current environmental problems and inequality issues, so I would hope the current governance structures could cope with them.

Do you really think there is that much need for a complete destruction and rebuilding of governance structures, rather than centring the need for change in the realm of legislation and policy (and maybe *some* structural change)?

From the linked article “Our analysis details the sharp increase in the proportion of households in income groups that are simply not advancing—a phenomenon affecting people across the income distribution. And the hardest hit are young, less-educated workers, raising the spectre of a generation growing up poorer than their parents.
…
The economic and social impact is potentially corrosive. A survey we conducted as part of our research found that a significant number of those whose incomes have not been advancing are losing faith in aspects of the global economic system. Nearly one-third of those who are not advancing said they think their children will also advance more slowly in the future, and they expressed negative opinions about free trade and immigration.”

I don’t think policies for more economic growth in advanced economies if that means increasing consumption are the right approach though, because of the effect on environmental problems and inequality with other countries.

I guess it depends why people are concerned about incomes being flat or falling, and if there is a way to address the concern with policy, without making environmental and inequality problems worse.

I am not going to go into a general theory of how big a country can be and still be a functioning democracy. Given that I’m an anarchist and that I’m not really in favor of democracy at any scale, my opinion is pretty much irrelevant to the thread.

What is relevant is that if you really do believe that “An entity like the EU cannot work on the principle of simple majority rule. It has to protect minorities and seek consensus, which lo and behold is what the EU has been doing all along”, then you’re not arguing for democracy, which is pretty much majority rule. As such, why it should be surprising that some people disagree? Not necessarily because they are super-advocates for democracy, but because seeking consensus in a situation in which there clearly can not be consensus is a formula for unresponsiveness, and if you let problems go on long enough without any response you get populism, nativism, and then even more troubling isms. Worse, you get the entire system predictably gamed for no response to popular concerns but for responsiveness to elite concerns when the elite share a common interest, because there can be an elite consensus that can be implemented for the elite when they are the only ones who control the levers of the system.

So if you actually figured out what BW was writing you’d have to actually figure out what you are writing. Is democracy a nice idea but impractical, and sadly we need some large-scale decisions to be made by technocrats? If so then don’t be surprised when people argue against that and are especially find it kind of laughable when you say they’re insane. Are you defending limited democracy as the best of a bad set of options? Well that package includes xenophobic outbursts like Brexit as part of the package. Or is it “Remain and Reform”? Remain and Reform is at least consistent with the left’s general values, but no one has been able to say how it actually could be done.

ZM @ 259: There are a lot of problems with the global economy at the moment, inequality and environmental problems, but I don’t know whether I would say these problems are the result of the structures of national, transnational, and global governance rather than being the result of legislation and policy (and the civil sphere too in many cases).

I would say, reality bites back. If we are tracing our problems back thru structures of governance and the details of policy, we might have to be prepared to confront physical circumstances, consequences and blowback that do not much care about our slogans and storytelling and good (and bad) intentions.

Certainly, that’s the case with climate change, global warming and ecological collapse: the developed world is playing Oedipus Rex, wilfully and arrogantly self-satisfied on our throne as much because of as despite our murderous debauchery and stubbornly ignoring the prophecy from the gods that says we are responsible for our own undoing, an undoing locked into the history of our own ungoverned actions.

Once of the core problems of governance is the problem of feedback for control, which is a problem of learning from error. The rudder is at the back of the boat and we are facing the rear. You only get to “decide” after you’ve made a mistake and realized the consequences. You cannot just will the good with pure intentions and good taste. You have to learn from cleaning up your own shit. And, there will always be shit to clean up.

Humans are intelligent creatures, allegedly, and we have the option of improving control and reducing error and its wastes by improving our understanding of what’s happening to us. We can develop theories and models that help us connect what we wilfully do to what happens to us and use rules to regularize our behavior. (Note to Oedipus: Avoid road rage. Also, choose someone your own age.) We can understand our own collective role in destabilizing the earth’s climate and overwhelming the assimilative capacity of the earth’s natural environment and, perhaps, constrain ourselves. Or, alternatively, we can pluck out our eyes, and bray to the unforgiving gods in the last act.

I think sometimes we underestimate the perennial political appeal of the plucking out of eyes.

Historically from 800 or 900 years ago, government in Europe was the hereditary privilege of a smallish class descended from brigands. Stuff happened to get us to now. Now, politics is a multifarious negotiation employing the terms and frameworks of ideology masquerading as social science theory and coordinating a vast and complex system of distributed decision-making and cultural production on a scale of population and human activity wholly unprecedented.

The most basic reactionary conservative impulse is to deny human responsibility: honor the gods. Sometimes, in our era, it is expressed in the doctrine of the self-regulating market. Disable government and let the Market be our god. (Which, of course, is not incidentally a recipe for handing all political power to the very wealthy and large business corporations.)

I am being a bit cynical about the Market God, but not inaccurate, just selective. It can be couched in quite idealistic terms. Freedom of movement! And, that’s not wrong; our political evolution has been in the direction of distributing power in a vast, loosely coordinated system of markets and hierarchies.

Coming back to the problem of sorting out structure and policy, in a system of distributed decision-making, (dis)enabling and (dis)empowering “peripheral” units is necessarily going to be a critical issue that combines structure and policy. The structure is the policy.

In relation to the Euro, disabling Greece’s ability to manage its economy, requiring a punishing and self-defeating austerity in the name of technocracy, while supervising a looting operation by global capital, looks like Polanyi 3.1 to me.

In relation to global climate change, resource exhaustion and ecology collapse, it seems to me that some kind of global constraint that turns away from “growth” is necessary. “Growth” became the political mantra during the last 250 years of political evolution because it was a way of breaking political stalemates over zero-sum conflicts of interest: everyone could share in incremental progress if they would be cooperative and go along.

“Economic growth” is no longer a sensible shibboleth. That’s something we need to rethink. We need a model that better fits the impending calamity that follows from the growth we’ve already indulged in, if we are to control our destiny.

TM @239 makes a lot of sense. If this weren’t a CT comment thread, I might have said more about it (largely in support).

Ask yourself who decided Greece’s fate. It wasn’t nameless, faceless bureaucrats. It was the democratically elected governments of several European countries.

People can play the “my definition is different” game all they want. There is never going to be a single, simple definition of democracy any more than there will be of any other political word. I was trying to get past that with democracy = majority rule, but that evidently isn’t going to work.

So instead, use whatever definition of democracy you like, and ask “is that kind of democracy really working for the EU?” If democracy is supposed to be about protecting minorities and operating by consensus, what happened to Greece? Don’t tell me that was an economic decision and not a political one. But OK, let’s try to get past the next good EU vs bad EU thing and say that that was the bad EU. What kind of democratic decisions of *any* kind are really being made? Does your definition of democracy have anything in it that usefully distinguishes it from wholly technocratic and non-democratic rule? Or is that just what democracy means these days?

“If democracy is supposed to be about protecting minorities and operating by consensus, what happened to Greece.”

Whoever said democracy always produces the best result?

Layman @ 375

Quoting that bit of journalism is like snapping a photo of a moving car. Even if you can see who is driving or who is riding, you don’t know where they have been or where they are going, let alone whose interest is served or what power has set the trip in motion. It does not mean anything.

RP: I’m surprised by your insistence that strict majority rule is the only valid form of political organization. I thought your sympathies were anarchist. Whatever. You haven’t given any account of your understanding of democracy, other than to agree that it is majority rule (but no answer to 259 – majority of what entity should decide?). Your comment at 266 seems to suggest that democracy excludes protection of minorities. I disagree. And of course the fact that people disagree about these questions is not surprising. What I have insisted however is that those who claim that the EU is undemocratic give an account of what they mean by democracy, and how a “more democratic” EU would look like. Then we can at least understand what we disagree on, and perhaps learn a bit from the discussion (yes that could be possible BW). I have given some suggestions: do they want EU wide referenda (most countries, including the US and most EU member states don’t have national referenda, so are they undemocratic?)? A president elected by popular vote (again most EU member states don’t elect their government in that way, are they all undemocratic)? Or what is it that EU democracy would entail?

Nobody has responded to that and we can all guess why.

About the book, ok sorry I haven’t read it. Thanks for the reference but I can’t judge it’s content. I’m not dismissing the book at all, just responding to your comments.

So, I, for one, am a EU citizien and a lifelong euroenthusiast.

I’m also very much for a “United States of Europe” thing, so I present my plan for this:

1) We start with a parlamentarian (not presidential) model of democracy, because of language barriers (that make electing a specific candidate a problem):
1.1 people vote for parties in the european parliament;
1.2 The EU parliament then elects a president of Europe, who chooses his own ministeries;
1.3 The parliament is sovereign as it represents the will of the people, and can remove the president with a simple no confidence vote (the italian parliament works more or less this way, and this causes the very short lifespan of italian governments);
1.4 Since small nations would never agree to this (see point 2 later) the parliament will actually have 2 chambers, one elected through strict proportionality across the whole USE, the other elected by the various national governments, so that small nations get a bit more power than big nations (I don’t really like this because it is undemocratic, but I think small nations would never agree without this clause. The reason the commission has more power than the EU parliament to this day is exactly that small nations don’t want to cede power).
1.5 The second chamber has a veto power VS the first chamber, but doesn’t get to write the laws (to speed up the process, and also because I don’t like the second chamber).

2) All sovereignity from nation states is ceded to the USE, because the USE parliament is supposed to be sovereign. National governments will still exist but their powers will be limited to local laws, as regional “governments” are in present day nation states. They also get to send representatives to the second chamber (see 1.4). Furthermore:
2.1 all citiziens are considered citiziens of the USE, and this supercedes citizienship in the various nations (today citiziens of, e.g., Italy, are supposed to be both citiziens of Italy and of the EU);
2.2 since you can’t have a USE where une nation state is in on monday, out on tuesday, and in again on wednsday, nation states can exit the USE only with some sort of supermayority in a referendum for current the residents of this or that nation (like 2/3 of the people with the right to vote voting out).

3) as the government of the USE takes over most of the responsibilities that now are of the national governments, also fiscally most of the taxing-and-spending is switched from the national governments to the government of the USE, that then can redirect the tax money to the various “national” governments equally. The government of the USE still has to offer the same services to all USE citiziens, so will take charge of the NHS in every nation state, of unemployment benefits in all nation states, of publicly founded schools in all nation states etc. (equally everywhere in the sense that, e.g., unemplyment benefits are the same in Germany and in Greece). This automatically causes a redistribution of tax income from richer to poorer nation states, wich together with the fiscal union solves the “optimal currency area” thing (and anyway I suspect that this optimal currency area thing is mostly bogus and the problem is just that the EU turned towards austerity).

So, using my “plan” as a basis for comparison, I’ll explain why I think that people who say that Brexit is good for democracy (or against neoliberalism) are wrong.

1) In order to have a democratic EU (or a democratic USE), the parliament and the government of it has to hold most power. This means that national governments have to cede sovereignity. Brexit obviously goes on the opposite direction, and thus makes a more democratic EU less likely.

2) A basic concept of (modern) democracy is that all citiziens are equal, hence the idea of “citiziens of Europe”. Brexit not only goes against it, but apparently was based exactly on the opposite principle of not treating people from other parts of the EU as equals. For example, people from Italy that go to work in England are described as “migrants”. Are people from Wales or Scotland who go to work in England also described as “migrants”? Even if this difference is not caused by racism it is still very bad.

3) Redistribution: I’m a leftist and generally I’m favourable to redistribution from rich to poor. A USE would be very redistributive (as for my point 3 above), but Brexiters campaigned specifically agaist the (really small) net contribution the UK had to give to the EU. The UK had to give a net contribution because UK incomes are on average higher than incomes in the resto of the EU, so the whole point is “yeah we have more money but we don’t want to share” dressed up as democracy and self determination (this by the way is very similar to the italian Northern League party and likely to various other “separatist” parties in Europe, so people from the USA who like this kind of parties, be careful of what you’re cheering for). In fact the idea was that “immigrant” crowded the UK’s NHS, so it was literally against the use of public services by “others”. But the whole purpose of public services is redistributive.

4) with regard to “neoliberalism”, the whole point of it is that the sorta “social democratic” governments of the postwar period retreated to a much less social democratic stance. But a brexit makes a social democratic EU impossible, because it goes against my point 2, that is a prerequisite to point 3. People who are pro Brexit perhaps think that each nation state, outside the EU framework, could act more “social democratically”, but IMHO this is impossible, because european countries are too small and trade too much one with the other (because they are small), so that an high tax, high redistribution country would be too much at a disadvantage VS other trading partners (we obviously have high taxes in EU countries but said taxes are much less progressive than in the USA, because of a very high VAT. The VAT is high because it is a way to tax stuff produced in other countries, taxing only profits would be more redistributive but would cause capital flights).

bruce wilder,

As well as the environmental issues, the advanced economies need to envision their economies in a more equitable relation to other countries’ economies as well.

I managed to attend the first part of a symposium on China in the late afternoon today, and one of the speakers, Christine Wong, mentioned two “Centenary Goals” that China has at the moment; the first Centenary Goal is that by 2021 China reaches a “comfortable” living standard, and the second is that by 2049 China reaches the rank of being among the world’s “advanced economies.”

The advanced economies are going to have to make room for other countries and what being an advanced economy is probably will have to change by 2049.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. The Australian economist Ross Garnaut, another one of the speakers, said that Chinese export centred growth has caused a “viscerally protectionist” reaction around the world, and China now has a new model of growth policy which is intended to shift the emphasis from economic growth based on exports to economic growth based on internal demand, but this shift is progressing somewhat slowly.

@ bruce wilder

In other words, you’re just playing a game. You know already that the Greek bailout terms and conditions were largely determined by the democratically elected leaders of EU countries, but you just want to pretend for the purposes of the discussion that they weren’t.

@Novakant: Well there’s all those Nazis the EU seems to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/06/croatias-far-right-weaponizes-the-past-ustase-hasanbegovic/

RP: Suppose the policies of the UK central government have bad results for certain economically weak regions or communities. Would that best be analyzed as a failure or deficit or dysfunction of democracy? Perhaps. Or maybe the government was pursuing bad policy, or they were deliberately sacrificing the interests of a minority group in order to win favor with other more powerful groups (which could be consistent with majority rule). Even in the best of times, democracy is flawed (in the sense of Churchill’s dictum). The romantic idea that democratic politics is to “let the people decide” assumes a homogeneous “people”. When there are massive conflicts of interest, massive distributional fights within a polity, whatever method is used for resolving those conflicts will produce discontent. The most successful polities are those where most people still accept political decisions as legitimate even if they disagree with them. Increasingly, even old, reputably stable democracies like the US and yes, the UK show signs of that legitimacy eroding. Ultimately these conflicts could result in major political upheavals not just in the EU. My concern is that there is little reason to expect the changes to be for the better. BW has above (203) proposed creative destruction as political theory. I’m not willing to give up on our flawed liberal democracy on the desperate bet that this time, what emerges from the chaos of Weimar will not be fascism.

Peter T @287

That was the report Ze K linked to @263 that I replied to @264 — the article made for interesting reading. It is going to be interesting seeing the policy responses develop. I don’t think countries can really go back to protectionism, but bringing people along with any substantial economic changes will need a lot of political leadership and consultation.

Rich P: ‘“democracy is whatever people call democracy, and the whole bit about democracy is a distraction” (paraphrased)’

Translation: I can’t resist the temptation to miscast what my interlocutors say.

” At this point, what earthly reason do the Greeks, or for the matter, the Irish, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians, or even the French have for respecting the legitimacy of the European Commission”

The fact that the European Commission is made of one Greek, one Irish, One Spanish, one Portuguese, even one French (plus others)?

As I pointed out above, the reason the European Commission is given more power than the european parliament is that the commission overrrepresents small countries, and small countries wouldn’t want all the power to the parliament where in pratice they are represented in proportion to their population.

WT 295: It’s an observation, not an explanation. And obviously not a “natural” process.

The question regarding the legitimacy of the European Commission of course is not frivolous. However, I think many Greeks quite understand that the legitimacy of their own establishment is at least as much in question. And I wonder what you think why the Greeks still want to stay in the EU?

RP 293: “The usual, historical solution has been to break up the polity”
I think that’s debatable (there are both tendencies in history, the breaking up and the fusion/expansion). Anyway your solution could really apply to any polity, the UK no less than the EU. Whether it’s really a solution again is very debatable. 282 makes a strong argument to the contrary.

Anyway, at least the breaking up peacefully is provided for in the EU framework, thank heaven I say.

TM @ 298

Yes, on this we probably agree. The Greeks wanted to stay in the EU and in the eurozone, I suspect, for some of the same reasons that a liberal (or black) Alabaman would look to the U.S. Federal Government — as an antidote to the cruelties of the government closer to home. Varoufakis is very eloquent on this subject: something along the lines of we expected the European powers-that-be to help us overcome the corruption of our own establishment, regain control of our tax base, adopt a sustainable and honorable relationship with our European creditors, etc., etc., and instead, the EU served us up to them yet again.

My sense of this — from a very great distance, and in perhaps equally great ignorance — is that Syriza and Varoufakis wanted reform, while ordinary Greeks would have been content just to escape. In either case, they were disappointed — perhaps betrayed is not to0 strong a description — by the very EU they appealed to for succor. For this sad state of affairs not to have had echoes throughout Europe in general, not to mention the UK in particular, would have been something of a miracle, and we don’t get miracles much these days, do we? (I mean, try reciting Salve, Regina, before you look at the morning news, and up pops either Angela Merkel’s rhombus, or Hillary Clinton’s scowl. Misericordia, indeed.)

@Ze K 299

they are chosen by the “Council of the European Union”, that is made by the various countries’ governments, so I’d say they represent their own country, even though they swear that they will act in the interest of the whole EU (the two things are not the same, I can represent A and act in the interest of B on behalf of A).

Anyone can pretend to not understand, refuse to understand, or in rare cases be unable to understand. I’m 99.9% sure that in this case it’s one of the first two, so why should I continue? There doesn’t seem to be any reason to continue for me since having to explain this to you isn’t teaching me anything.

@Ze K

I certainly hope I’m a good guy!

The problem is not what the EU represents, it is an institution, not a symbol.
The problem is, what is the other choice? For example in the EU I vote a government, which then sends a representative to negotiate in a smoke filled room with representatives of other governments, with small democratic controls.
Without the EU I vote a government, which then sends the same representative to negotiate with the same representatives of the same other governments, in another smoke filled room, with absolutely no democratic check whatsoever.

But then many people think that breaking up the EU is a great idea, in the name of democracy, because they apparently think that there is some weird entity called EU that is distinct from the EU countries, and that this entity is specifically neoliberal.

I think that you all are victim of a case of reification.

“If you are in Greece, in the EU, your government can do nothing, so a lot of good voting does you.”

This is simply not true. The Greek governments have repeatedly chosen what they saw as the lesser of two evils. They could long ago have chosen the other, and the EU would have no power over them any more. And, when put to a vote, it has to be said that the Greek people have signaled approval of the ‘remain in pain’ approach.

For all the talk of the democracy deficit in the EU, does anyone think there would have been a different outcome for Greece had the voters of the EU been polled on the subject, rather than being represented by their various elected national governments?

One of the major problems with this thread is the talk about ‘the Greeks’, ‘the British’, ‘the Germans’, ‘the Italians’, etc.

Mister Mr @ 308 lays the whole problem out in its essentials. If the EU disappeared tomorrow we would still be confronted with a string of national political elites and international economic elites that would be more nationalist but no more democratic or socially-orientated than the EU. That is the point. Without a programme directed against the UK political establishment voting to leave the EU effectively just creates delusions. In time people might come to their senses and realise that they have been manipulated. This could lead to an extreme right-wing reaction, or if the left is active and persuasive enough it could act against the UK elite. In this scenario, however, unless you believe that some kind of North Korean-style oligarchy is the way forward, we are still going to need some form of alliance and sympathy from the peoples of other countries. If the ordinary people of Greece had had this reaction then maybe the whole situation would have been different. In short, socialism in one country can only go a small part of the way.

So if the US government handles a crisis badly your solution would be to disband the US?

The unusual high level of prejeduce in Britain againt Germany is indeed likely to have influenced the brexit decission :-). Also the unusual high regard for the own political system up to the point of calling others non democratic :-).

Its rather likely the EU will always be more “German” than “British” in term of institutional structure and even culture, since both are routed in a past that much closer resembles the European polity than the British one ever did.

Layman @ 322

Oh, my gosh, people disagree! I had no idea.

@ b9n10nt

“Why do you imply that people don’t want delusions, don’t want to be manipulated?”

I suppose for the same reason that people don’t indulge in sado-masochism? It doesn’t turn them on and they want to keep some dignity. Plus, if it was the case it would make political analysis a bit pointless and give carte blanche to dictatorships and elites. They seemed to dislike perceived manipulation from the EU anyway.

Basically I think that Germany imports too few, not that it export too much, and that this depends on a wage share to total income that is kept too low.

BW 312: “Even the most anodyne EU regulations must annoy the British, as they displace the Common Law.”

Gosh, BW continues to bewilder. Now the UK government opted out of the 48 hour work week because of … Common Law. They (together with the UK National Farmers’ Union) helped sink the European Soil Framework Directive (*) because of … Common Law. It’s just a matter of cultural incompatibility, see.

“The spirit of the EU rests in part on admiration for the German way of doing things and clashes with Britain arise from the British saving that admiration for themselves”

Maybe in the age of Trump it’s fashionable to explain politics by vanity but I still suspect that EU (and UK and US) politics is driven by power struggles just like politics always was. I have had quite enough of half-informed cultural anthropology served up as political science, thank you very much.

(*) Another one of those “rules imposed from the outside” by faceless Brussels bureaucrats. Here’s the indispensable George Monbiot:

“The draft directive asked the member states to take precautions to minimise soil erosion and compaction, to maintain the organic matter soil contains, to prevent landslides and to prevent soil from being contaminated with toxic substances. Terrified yet?

At the end of last month, unreported by any British newspaper or broadcaster, something unprecedented happened: a European legislative proposal was withdrawn. The Soil Framework Directive has been scrapped. The National Farmers’ Union took credit for the decision. … For eight years the NFU and its counterparts in other European nations lobbied against the directive. They were supported by a small number of member states, led by the United Kingdom. Both the Labour and Coalition governments collaborated with the union on this project. Under these administrations, Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has been captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate, until it now stands for Doing Everything Farmers’ Representatives Ask.”

An EU Directive, btw, needs approval both by the EU Parliament (democratically elected) and the Council (representing the member states’ governments). One can surely say that it’s undemocratic that a minority of national governments have the power to sabotage the process (just as it is undemocratic that US Senators representing a minority of the US population have de facto veto power). But then one can’t also complain about rules being imposed from outside against the UK’s will. Yet self-styled EU critics want to have it both ways. Notice that in more than 300 comments on this plus many more on other threads, despite repeated requests (e. g. 239), not a single valid example of something being forced on the UK by the EU has been offered. But it’s terribly mean of me to suggest (256) that certain commenters here don’t really care about the institutional structure of the EU.

Ze K,

“Just hypothetically and simplistically (of course I realize that it’s more complicated): suppose Italy leaves the EU tomorrow, introduces 50% tax on all car imports. I postulate that the day after tomorrow Fiat hires 100K workers, wages go up, the budget situation improves, economy improves, people live better. Is there something fundamentally wrong with my logic here?”

Yes, you forget the ripple effect. Italy might add 50% tax on car imports, then Germany adds 50% tax on clothes and tomato imports, etc etc leading to a trade war

I think that the difference between “pro EU” and “anti EU” sides in this argument lies in this:

– Both agree that we are in a “neoliberal” economic system, and this is bad;

– The anti EU side thinks that this is caused by institutions (lile the EU), that cause the economic situation. Hence less EU -> less neoliberalism;

– The pro EU side thinks that the “neoliberal” system is a natural development, and that the institutions should put a limit on this, but they are too weak. Hence less EU -> more neoliberalism. This at least is my opinion, I’d appreciate feedback from other pro EU commenters.

@Ze K 331

Italy is a net exporter overall, and I think has a net trade surplus VS Germany, so I don’t think it would work.
My opinion is this:
The whole problem is caused by a low wage share everywhere. As the wage share is low, governments are forced to take up debt to boost consumption (fundamentally they recycle capitalist’s savings into consumption) to stave off recessions (lowering the interest rate stimulates private debt creation and serves the same purpose). But in case of net exporters, the savings of German capitalists are recycled by the Greek government, and show up as Greek government debt. Since debtors are punished, everyone tries to be a net exporter by becoming more “competitive”, but “competitive” means slashing the wage share even more, so at the end of the day we get “secular stagnation” everywhere. To put this in other words (but this is the same) every country is trying to be more competitive by constraining imports (because there is no way to directly boost exports) and this causes either underconsumption or a run up of debt and finance; increasing tariffs would be another step in the same direction IMHO.

Italy does indeed run a substantial export surplus (overall, not with Germany though) – I wasn’t aware of that. The biggest export deficit among EU member countries? UK, distantly followed by France and Spain.

So maybe Brexiteers want protective tariffs to become less import dependent? Would make sense but that is precisely what to my knowledge nobody has advocated – Brexiteers are adamant that that they want to stay in the common market. Freedom of movement for goods and capital yes, just not for people.

336: The evolution (?) of these intricate and partly arbitrary global supply chains is one of the more interesting and important aspects of neoliberalism and globalization, and does create a material reality, not a mere affective acquiescence, of “there is no alternative” and gets workers in Bavaria invested in conservatism and political stability in Britain and Tunisia, including perhaps low wages and social benefits that make the necessary parts cheap enough from the overseas suppliers that their own wages can be kept a little higher. The neoclassical story that only Tunisia could be competitive in making a particular widget is obviously ridiculous, but I don’t believe it was any conspiracy either. Or maybe it is a conspiracy, worked out in trade deals and financing.

Brexit minister David Davis sees the advantage of Brexit in – wait for it – the possibility to quicker and easier negotiating free trade deals. he wants to “maximise returns from free trade” and “knock down trade barriers” between the UK and US, China and India.

“We can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU. Trade deals with the US and China alone will give us a trade area almost twice the size of the EU, and of course we will also be seeking deals with Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, the UAE, Indonesia – and many others.

How will this help our economy? For a start, it will obviously provide massive markets for our exports, but it will also helps to cut the costs for our manufacturing industries.”

The UK’s already huge trade deficit doesn’t seem to bother him. Ze K, your turn to explain how Brexit is a repudiation of Free Trade neoliberalism.

http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/07/david-davis-trade-deals-tax-cuts-and-taking-time-before-triggering-article-50-a-brexit-economic-strategy-for-britain.html

Meanwhile, Italians have no appetite for Italexit: two thirds would vote Leave in a referendum, and even the main eurosceptic party is opposed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/no-eu-exit-for-us-say-italys-on-the-rise-eurosceptics

Oops… ” two thirds of Italians would vote to remain in the event of a referendum.”

Novakant: “And if you want to know why ‘the people’ voted Leave check out Panorama on iplayer – if that’s your idea of democracy then we shouldn’t really bother.”

I’m not going to check out Panorama on iplayer. But unless the people depicted were actually beating people up, then I’m guessing that that is democracy. In general I don’t know what your politics is, but a whole lot of it does seem to be this kind of sneering at democracy, and I don’t get it. I rejected democracy because I rejected the entire state. But unless you’re an anarchist, what is democracy supposed to mean to you anyways? The people get to vote, and the results are only valid if your side wins? The people have to be guided by well-meaning and intelligent overlords because they’re racists? If we allow people to control their political arrangements we’ll end up with something horrible so we’d better not?

Re. that Atrios quote: I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest some of that overt contempt is coming from members (not identified as such) of the right-leaning major party in the US. We know the media is “liberal,” so anything that sounds “liberal” in the press can be attributed to the “liberal media,” and then it is evidence the media is “liberal.”

novakant, clearly I have policy and moral preferences — I don’t want racial discrimination or the death penalty to occur. And when I was a liberal, I also supported agreed-on limits to democracy: the idea that people can’t vote to do certain things because they’ve made a more important, more long-term agreement that they can’t do those things. Usually you’d need a supermajority or something like that to change those, depending on what country you’re in. I’m unaware that Brexit contravenes some more long-term or more basic agreement like that, but maybe you think that it does.

But if the procedure has been followed, then yes, that’s democracy. If a majority of people don’t like existing arrangements — or a supermajority doesn’t like the more long-term, basic arrangements, then you’re out of luck. It’s generally considered at that point to be better to let people get what they want peacefully than to say that they can’t and wait for whatever happens after that. That’s just basic liberal political theory.

And as written above, I’m fine with people who say that they aren’t going to commit themselves to thinking that some kind of stupid decision is valid just because a majority voted on it. But what are they then? Anarchists? Vanguardists? They aren’t liberals of any description as far as I can tell.

I can only say again that Ze K is making more sense than other people, which worries me. Yes, when people vote on a referendum that has a yes or no result, and that referendum although non-binding is commonly perceived to have important political implications, that is democracy. You don’t need a general theory of what democracy is to say that this is an example of it.

Ze K, we are still waiting for you to explain how David Davis’ vision of a ” free trade area massively larger than the EU” is a repudiation of globalization.

Literally everyone has contempt for the voters. And why wouldn’t they? Everyone thinks their own policy preferences are just common sense, so when the majority disagree clearly it’s because they are morons.

What I meant is only that it’s up to each state how they decide whether or not to leave the EU. Of course it’s true that “the consequences” of such a step also depend on the response of other countries.