Fillon, who has said he will cut public sector jobs and rein
Francois Fillon
in government spending, won 44 percent of votes in Sunday’s first-round of voting for the center-right’s nomination. He faces a second-round vote against another former prime minister, Alain Juppe, who trailed him by 15 percentage points.
Polls had him in third place. He came in first. Maybe pollsters should stop polling until they figure out how they keep getting it wrong. Customers might wish to demand refunds.
Fillon thinks Thatcher is the best thing ever and wants to cut 500,000 government jobs.
A neoliberal’s neoliberal, in other words, who is also socially conservative.
Assuming he wins the nomination, he will likely wind up head-to-head against the neo-fascist LaPen.
Here’s how that works:
If Fillon wins, his policies will hurt the French so much that LaPen will likely win the next election.
If LaPen wins, well, LaPen wins.
The left is not a factor because Hollande has betrayed everything they stand for and alienated the left-wing base completely.
Frankly, France should leave the Euro, at the very least, and quite possibly the EU. They are not winning from it any more. Because only LaPen will say that, and because the left continues to insist on irrelevance as they relate to real problems, LaPen is the future, whether Fillon wins this time or not.
This is the twilight of neoliberalism. As I have said for many years, what follows will be an age of war and revolution. This is where neoliberal policies inevitably lead, and we are now on the bleeding edge of that new era.
There will be a chance to do the correct, kind things starting in four to eight years, when the weight of demographics favors young people enough. In the meantime, the old will simply have to age out of politics.
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…The chances are we’ve gone too far,
You took my time and you took my money,
Now I fear you’ve left me standing,
In a world that’s so demanding…
— New Order, “True Faith”
In this post, I discuss the options for the UK in its relationship to the EU after the Brexit vote, particularly in light of the fact that Theresa May’s government has decided that freedom of labour movement is to be sacrificed on the altar of the hostility towards immigration–which is held to have driven much of the support for Leave. It is also increasingly clear that the EU will take a harsh view of British attempts to separate trade access to the EU from the access of EU citizens to British work opportunities. I argue that, overall, this position is justified and mostly reflects an EU leadership representing the interests of their citizens in the face of a United Kingdom that, for whatever reason, believes that it can take what it believes to be the beneficial parts of its relationship with continential Europe and leave behind what it mostly (and wrongly) considers to be the costly parts. I make this argument despite a dislike of and disagreement with some of the governing attitudes in continental Europe: The historic demands of conservative, Eurosceptic UK politicians would have exacerbated what is bad about the EU and attenuated what is good about it.
The Taxonomy of Brexits
In practice, the European Union is actually a constellation (or maybe nebula) of treaty-defined entities. An EU member is a country that participates in a certain subset of them, but not necessarily all of them (there is of course a more formal definition, but I am talking about the institutional mechanics)–the UK is one of the exemplars of this choice. Conversely, there are countries that participate in some of the EU institutions, but are not members–the best exemplar of this is Norway, which participates in the single market, the unified visa area under Schengen, in the scientific bodies, and pays a significant charge in lieu of membership dues.
We are now months after the Brexit referendum returned a clear Leave result (52-48 is not a small margin, and immediate do-overs after buyer’s remorse is a democratically terrible idea), and the United Kingdom faces a choice in how to implement the referendum. The taxonomy of choices resolves to two major taxa of future possibilities: “hard” or “soft” Brexit. Under a “hard” Brexit, the UK effectively reverts unilaterally to a mostly exterior relationship with the countries of the European Union without (much) special status or access to EU-related institutions. The UK becomes like a nearby Canada, in other words. There’s no question that the border will remain open for Brits to visit the EU, but they will likely do so under the same visa waiver terms under which Canadians and Australians live, which generally excludes labour competition with EU citizens and permanent residents, outside of designated priority professions. Goods and services will have to be negotiated by treaty separately, but they will have to be agreed-upon by the entire EU, meaning that everything, absolutely everything, would be on the table, and more favorable terms than the current access to the single market would not be on offer.
Under “soft” Brexit, the UK becomes, in practice, mostly like Norway. That is, it would retain access to the single market, have to pay dues, and remain a participant in many of the institutions–but will emerge from the direct, if often only superficial, supervision of the European Commission. Much less, in terms of the UK’s real capabilities, would change, but some aspects of internal policy and regulation become officially independent of EU authority, and much influence in EU institutions would, of course, be lost.
The division between these two types of Brexits turns out to revolve around one issue: The separability of the Four Freedoms of the European Single Market. These are: freedom of movement of (1) goods; (2) labour; (3) capital, and; (4) services. These freedoms, presently well-entrenched in the EU treaty framework, are supposed to guide convergence towards a fully-implemented, single market (meaning: It’s not fully implemented). If, as a Leave supporter, your problem with the EU lies elsewhere, for instance, in its economic regulatory framework, then you would still be willing to accept the Four Freedoms, and soft Brexit is an option that other EU partners would accept in overall good faith, especially since the departure of Britain from the rest of the EU’s convergence framework would enable other agenda items, that the UK has deliberately hindered, to go forward with minimal overall disruption.
Economic Freedom as Compromise
If, however, your problem with the EU is with the implementation of the Four Freedoms, then, Houston, you have a real problem as a Brexiteer. Because every country in the EU has some significant sectors vulnerable or sensitive to one or more of the Four Freedoms. The Four Freedoms establishes a relatively simple guiding framework for compromise among these issues. I hope that it is not too difficult to see that allowing countries to withdraw in spirit and practice from one or more of these freedoms, while retaining full privileges on the rest, is a recipe for disaster for the entire Single Market project, because some countries would become “free riders” to the detriment of the other countries, which would in turn cause the disadvantaged countries to withdraw from other freedoms, in a downward spiral that would dismantle European economic unity.
The Four Freedoms and the regulatory framework that accompanies them makes the Single Market a far superior trading arrangement to treaties like NAFTA, and, yes, TTIP. The common regulatory framework, needless to say, impedes (however, does not prevent) the degree of race-to-the-bottom behaviour that you see in NAFTA-like deals, by creating a regulatory and arbitration system that is, yes, considerably more accountable to the public than the infamous investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) that is a common practice in bilateral treaties. European, particularly British critics, decry the European Commission and its institutions as being very distant from popular sovereignty, and the criticism is true, to some extent; but that the road to accountability is long does not mean that there is no road at all, in contrast to international arbitration tribunals, which are sensitive to very little.
But more importantly, the free movement of labour is essential if you decide you want to have free trade at all. It is increasingly clear that trade deals like NAFTA, alleged to lift poor countries out of poverty by exporting low-skilled economic activity to these countries, actually have deleterious effects on developing countries. Mexico has experienced a great labour dislocation from exposure to competition from sectors that were domestically important but more productive and heavily subsidized in the US. Free movement of labour at least slightly ameliorates this by permitting workers in sectors negatively affected by this dislocation to find work in countries that directly benefited from it (overall). Because NAFTA does not lift border controls on the free movement of labour, Mexican workers who go where the work has gone (to the US) cannot send back remittances that reflect the higher US value of their labour, because they live under a wage-suppressive environment of immigration control. Needless to say, US workers do not benefit from the immigration controls as much as they are told.
What UK Eurosceptics are demanding, when they demand immigration controls for EU labour while retaining access to freedom of goods, capital, and services, is that UK business be able to profit from access to new markets in Bulgaria and Romania, countries that cannot yet compete in productivity with the UK, and yet fail to offer Bulgarian and Romanian workers the ability to improve their lot and their skills in higher-wage, higher-productivity environments with UK domestic labour protection, such as exist. It should not be hard to see why this is toxic.
European Unity and Freedom of Movement
The choice that Theresa May seems to be making is for a hard Brexit, particularly as signaled by some public pronouncements suggesting that existing EU-citizen workers in the UK would not be fully protected and grandfathered into the post-Brexit arrangement–that is, they are being designated as bargaining chips. The only condition under which it makes sense to use their status as a bargaining chip is to make an attempt for the UK to have privileged access to the EU without accepting any reciprocal obligations. (Whether it is actually possible to use them as bargaining chips this way is another matter.)
For the choice to be something in the middle between a hard and a soft Brexit, the EU would have to allow cherry-picking among the four freedoms, and therefore its own demise as a political project. I have described some of the reasons for this above. The EU is not going to passively accept its own demise at the hands of right-wing British Eurosceptics, some of whom have made no secret of their desire not only for Britain to leave the EU, but for the EU project itself to fail.
The mistake of British Eurosceptics, at least those who care about maintaining a privileged economic relationship with the European Union, is to fail to understand many continental politicians and bureaucrats, and significant portions of the continental public really “mean it” when it comes to European convergence. While the spectre of WW2 hangs in the air, somewhat faded due to the inevitable passing of those who survived it, continental Europe has still had regular reminders that it, the originator of colonialism, is in the modern world now itself susceptible to divide-and-conquer politics steered by greater, exterior powers. Critics of the EU say that the democratic legitimacy of its institutions is undermined by the non-existence of a European “demos,” but policy-makers are well aware of that. That is the whole point of the convergence process. The EU, in fact, has programmes to encourage social relationships between citizens of member states, precisely out of a desire to ensure that a European demos emerges in a future generation, and, yes, the United States of Europe can thereby be finally constructed.
Freedom of labour movement is a element of the unification of peoples explicitly envisaged by the construction of the European Union. In addition to its role in helping the Single Market to be mutually beneficial, the workplace is a key element of social integration and the building of trust between peoples at an individual level. Among younger British people, the policy has already shown signs of working–one of the complaints of younger Brits about Brexit is precisely that they were the generation that had both the most developed European identity and the highest intention of taking advantage of freedom of labour movement, of educational movement, and other related European freedoms.
National and Personal Factors
I would be remiss if I stayed only at the “high” institutional levels when discussing the dilemma into which the EU must now force the UK. There is certainly a personal dimension that cannot be ignored. British Eurosceptic politicians and media, both UKIP and Tory, have attacked what most continental Europhiles, both official and otherwise, see as the emotional core of the EU project, and did so consistently and constantly, so much so that EU immigration is seen as a prime driver of the Leave vote. Indeed, so much so that Theresa May feels compelled to choose it over Single Market access. Anyone who believes that such a consistent attack on a core belief and life work of many European politicians and bureaucrats would have no effect on how the negotiation proceeds is fooling themselves. Greece’s and Syriza’s offense during the 2015 negotiations was to attempt to step off script and make it politically impossible for German politicians to sell the band-aid to their own public; this is nowhere near as offensive as a direct political attack on free labour movement. If the UK gets off this with less visible damage than Greece, it is only because the UK is, for various reasons, economically much stronger than Greece–and not a member of the Eurozone.
Furthermore, it evidently became a bad habit in UK politics to blame domestic policy failures on the EU. The UK was never a member of the Eurozone, and there is nothing about the EU that prevents the UK from running a more social-democratic economy than it has. It was always within the power of the UK to handle its own housing crisis, its economic inequality issues, its infrastructure issues, and so on. What flaws the EU has (and it definitely has flaws!) cannot be blamed for very many of the problems now viewed as causing the political alienation that has led to the Brexit vote. Now, yes, it is a common sport across the EU for national politicians to blame Brussels officials for preventing them from doing things, and this is often true: The Commission has known democratic legitimacy issues, even if it is better legitimized than ISDS arbitration tribunals. Eurocrats are used to serving as the “distant scapegoat” function. The problem is that UK politicians did not, apparently, know when to pull back, or they knew it and chose to go over the cliff anyway, because an internal Tory party battle was more important than keeping the European project together. EU negotiators are human; they are not going to simply accept that they were the cruel masters from whom the British people needed freeing.
Therein lies a major, unavoidable issue. There are parties, particularly in countries like France and the Netherlands, that would likewise wish to scapegoat Brussels for whatever goes wrong and sell an EU breakup as a panacea. Former (?) colonialist countries like France have populations that share the imperial nostalgia issues that right-wing British Eurosceptics do. It would be actually irresponsible if EU negotiators simply attempted to go for the narrow-sense, economically most mutually beneficial deal with the UK possible. It must be seen that the EU was not the author of British woes, but at worst neutral. This is quite a different situation from Greece and the Eurozone, where, in material terms, the structure of the Eurozone acted as a real straitjacket on Greek well-being and Greek fiscal democracy.
Brexit, Boiled Hard
If there’s anything underhanded about the EU position on these matters, the blame goes principally to the people who set up the EU treaties well before this point. The article 50 exit procedure is deliberately designed to disadvantage the exiter by turning the tables: Exit is turned into exclusion, and exclusion happens automatically after the (too-short) deadline. No negotiation is possible until the country in question puts on the article 50 dunce cap and sits in the corner of shame. The architects of European convergence have always been especially careful to ensure that convergence is a one-way procedure wherein departure is so costly as to be better to be avoided at all. This was done, to put it in Ianwelshian terms, because they thought it was the right thing. Otherwise, European convergence would not be externally credible, and its lack of external credibility would be a further invitation for foreign powers to play wedge games.
One may argue that a hard Brexit also damages Europe as it disrupts the flows that currently exist, and this is always costly. European leaders have made it crystal clear that the project is more important to them than the short-term cash flows. Just as the British say that they can find substitute buyers and sellers, so can the rest-of-EU–with, in some ways, greater efficiency, because manufacturing still significantly exists on the continent. And everyone, even German industry, knows that the destabilization caused by separation of the four freedoms of the Single Market would, in the medium term, be more costly than putting up tariffs against the UK, to be negotiated down in a later and less UK-favorable process than full UK membership.
In this instance, I do explicitly take a strongly EU-sympathetic position on this. The aftermath of the Leave campaign has shown that anti-immigrant hysteria, nationalist nativism, and colonial/imperial nostalgia had a major impact on the shape of this, not a major desire for either libertarian economics or left-wing fiscal expansion. These are real dangers and ought not to be rewarded by political victories. Even under a hard Brexit, it still remains fully within the power of UK politicians to ensure that ordinary people are at least exposed to only minimal immediate suffering, and if they are not willing to use their means to protect their people, we know, once-and-for-all, that the woes and alienation of the people of the UK were never because of Europe.
I assume that Cameron is done and there will be a new Conservative leader. (Update: And he’s gone. This is just a thing, not a good thing or bad thing, until we know who replaces him.)
There may be a general election. I hope so.
This is going to be really bad for ordinary Brits IF the Conservatives remain in power because there are a lot of worker and environment protections and so on that the Conservatives want to scrap.
I expect the EU to try to be very vindictive. Bear in mind, however, that Britain buys more EU goods than the other way around. Still, Brussels can’t let this pass without punishing Britain severely, lest other nations get the same idea.
A lot of other nations will be in a better position if they leave: Greece, Italy, Spain, and Finland top the list, but even, say, France, might be better off. So, yes, this is an existential threat to Brussels.
Brussels should take this is as a rebuke of its anti-democratic ways and of its austerity policies, BUT current politicians won’t be able to. If they are replaced, however, there is some hope for serious democratic fixes to the EU. Hope is not the same thing as “I expect.”
Because the EU is a neoliberal organization, this could be to Britain’s benefit IF Corbyn winds up in charge. The best case scenario right now is if Cameron steps down, a new Conservative leader is elected, there is an election, and Labour wins.
But the same newspapers and media outlets who were pro-Remain will still be against Corbyn, because they actually like the idea of losing labor, environmental protections, and so on.
The leave campaign was run on a pretty racist and anti-immigrant basis. That creates a rather ugly mandate. It will be up to Labour and Corbyn to turn this into something hopeful and good, rather than something stupid and nasty.
I’ll be curious to see if attempts are made to keep Britain in the EU regardless, also.
Still, this is a big deal, and historic. It will be VERY interesting to see how it plays out.
Update: This graphic is interesting but completely unsurprising.
Basically, people who are doing well voted for the status quo, those who aren’t voted against. Scotland doesn’t trust London to run Scotland (which should be no surprise) and wants Brussels as a counter-weight. (Scotland should have left Britain and stayed in the EU, I’d judge).
So be it. If you don’t make your country work for at least the majority, I will hear no complaints when the majority pulls the rug out.
And now the Article 50 Process will be invoked. Here’s the text in full:
Article 50
1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.
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.
4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.
A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.
The kicker is in numbers 2 and 4: It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.
and
A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
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Some polls are now showing majorities for Britain exiting the EU.
That this is surprising to many is surprising to me. The status quo has been failing the majority of British for going on 40 years now.
The EU is part of the status quo. A lot of people will vote against it.
The jobs have rushed in London and London is unaffordable, because the government refuses to create and enforce laws against absentee owners who neither live in nor rent their property. The financial collapse saw the banks made whole and the people slaughtered. Good jobs have been gushing out of England for two generations now.
Once more: Repeated failure causes people to despise whoever they consider to have been in charge during the repeated failures. Britain has been part of the EU for a long time.
This same dynamic is working for Trump and it worked for Sanders. It is why Corbyn is now Labour leader and not some Blairite, “New Labour” sort.
These are the early spasms. If things keep getting worse (and they will), there will be spasms of real violence.
I have no sympathy left for all this. Too many people on all sides failed and failed and failed. Too many people wanted to believe in absolute bullshit: “We can all pay less taxes and be greedy bastards and get rid of regulation and send our industry overseas and it will all work out wonderfully because the market fairy will always ensure we live in the best of all worlds.”
You have exactly what you or someone else fought for you to have. Nothing more. Your lords and masters cut deals with proles only when they have no choice. Cameron and Blairite Labour types want you to live a life of complete misery, because they believe you are useless wastes of space who are lazy and are the reason why Britain is in decline.
It’s all on the proles; it certainly isn’t on the people who have led Britain for the past 40 years, because they know they are the bestest, and brightest, and the hardest working, so it sure as hell couldn’t be them.
You are walking meat-sacks with no intrinsic worth to your masters. They will give you as little as they can get away with, and your suffering, or your death, means nothing to them. To look at how pathetic and worthless you are simply reinforces their knowledge of how wonderful they are.
These people regard you as their meat, if they think of you at all. You should think of them in the same way. Any MP or CEO or executive who has repeatedly worked against you is your enemy. And that is almost all of them.
Most politicians aren’t your friends. Their job is to fleece you for corporate masters. There are rare exceptions, like Corbyn, but they are exceptions and you can tell them in part by the relentless hatred the rest of the master class has for them. Men like Corbyn (and FDR in the day) are traitors to their own people, and they are treated like traitors.
So Brits may well leave the EU. Doubtless they will be punished, because leaving neo-liberal organizations must be met with pain, or other people might do the same. International organizations like the EU, IMF, and WTO are how the elites make sure that neo-liberalism continues, because their rules make it impossible to run non-neo-liberal economies.
A lot of this is ugly, of course. Because the left won’t lead, the front men are right-wing nativists and racists, who at least have the guts to fight.
In a sense, this is hopeful. Almost the entire establishment is for staying in the EU and a lot of British have just tuned them out. Not listening to the master-class’s lies is the fist step in being free.
So, I am not running around scared of Brexit. I don’t much care whether Britain stays or leaves. That puts me on the outside of the cultural left’s consensus, but so be it. Leaving the EU will make things worse for Britain, but it will also free Corbyn to do what is necessary if he wins. We will see how it plays out.
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The EU is a trash fire. To see what the EU is about, you have only to see what they did to Greece, and what they are doing to the rest of the south.
Insane austerity policies have wrecked economies for no good reason other than a failed ideology and a deep-seated desire to give more money to the already-rich.
The EU may have been created to prevent a future European war, but the austerity policies it is pushing are fueling the rise of Catalonian independence, and of both the far left and the far (a.k.a. fascist) right. Now, I’m ok with the far left, in the European context, because so far all it has meant is Corbyn: A 1960s-style liberal, updated with social concerns.
The rise of the far right is rather more worrisome, however, since these lads tend to be nativists–not more than one step from neo-fascists and often less than that.
Austerity creates economic despair, and economic despair creates the breeding grounds for movements like fascism.
When I was about ten or so, I said to my father, who had grown up in the Great Depression, that I saw very little racism in Vancouver.
“Just wait till times are bad, “he said,” you’ll see plenty of racism then.”
Again, the EU is a trash fire. It started off liberal, in the best sense, and there is still plenty of good it does, but it is currently creating the conditions for a great deal of political violence and even war.
So, does that mean that Brits should vote leave?
Not necessarily. Depends on your pain tolerance.
While the EU is a trash fire, Britain isn’t in the Euro, which is the worst part about the EU. If Corbyn was Prime Minister, I’d say leave. Leave now!
But he isn’t. What the Conservatives will do under Cameron or Boris Johnson (or whomever, there are no “good” options for the next leader if Cameron steps down), is truly horrible. Even worse than what they are already doing.
As for the doomsayers: No, the world will not end if Britain leaves the EU. The fact that economists and pundits are screaming in unison that it will means nothing. Economists are trained seals who say what they are supposed to say. Most of them have been wrong about everything of significance related to the economy for their entire professional lives; why should we believe them now?
It’s all a trash fire. Of course, the people who benefit from the status quo want the status quo to continue and continue to trend the way it has been (which hasn’t been good for most ordinary Britons).
That doesn’t mean you should vote to leave. It doesn’t mean you should vote stay. It means they aren’t credible. What they say should not be listened to as anything but people squealing for the world to stay favorable to them.
If you leave the EU now, things will be worse than staying, not because of economic apocalypse but because the EU does have a fair number of good regulations and laws by which Conservatives will no longer be bound.
If you stay, and someone like Corbyn gets into power, he will be handicapped by the EU in the opposite direction.
International institutions in the age of neoliberalism exist mainly to further neo-liberal policies. This is true of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and yes, it is true of the EU.
It’s all a trash fire, because, post-Bretton Woods, it was all changed or designed to be a trash fire (this is especially true of the Euro, which at least Britain dodged). Its purpose is to impoverish developed world workers and transfer money to the rich. I judge its purpose based on its results.
Vote as you will, but understand what is actually at stake.
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The majority of French citizens are opposed to the relaxation of labour standards that Hollande wants to push through, and there have been massive demonstrations against it. So what does Hollande’s government do?
France’s government announced Tuesday that it would empower Prime Minister Manuel Valls to bypass parliament and push through controversial labour reforms by decree despite widespread public demonstrations against the bill.
And the French people had a party at the Bastille when Hollande won! Hollande is a far more loathsome individual than, say, British PM David Cameron. Cameron ran as a right-wing pig-fucker who intended to destroy the social state.
There are other options than neoliberalism, but people like Hollande are too intellectually cramped and too much products of “there is no alternative” to even know what they are, let alone consider them.
The people who run France are a small and inbred group. They make Britain’s elites look inclusive. In 80s, the foreign aid community’s joke about the French system was that it produced the best second-raters in the world.
Hollande doesn’t even rate as a “second-rater.” He’s incompetent as a neoliberal technocrat, unable to game the system.
I am tired of very intelligent, highly-educated morons running the world.
I suggest the French go riot at the Elysee palace, and by riot, I don’t mean demonstrate outside.
Demonstrate inside. Perhaps explain, personally, to Hollande, a soft-handed courtesan born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who has never soiled his hands with hard labor, why his ideas are bad ideas.
This sort of bullshit will continue until it is stopped by ordinary people making a ruckus in the halls of power.
And they aren’t going to be allowed in because they ask nicely.
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Yet Europeans in the 70s did not get rid of their civil liberties in the way that France, for example, has. They also did not react with the frankly embarrassing pant-wetting fear we have seen. Maybe that’s because, in the 70s, there were still plenty of people around who remembered World War II.
Terrorism is a serious threat to developed nations only because of the way we react to it. We, or our leaders, or both, seem determined to give up liberties and freedom over a danger far less likely to kill any of us than walking across the street.
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If Britain had adopted the Euro and the referendum was about leaving that, I’d be for it.
As it stands, I’m still for leaving, but only slightly.
The EU is brakes. It has significantly slowed down and limited the abominable policies of the Conservative party. As such, it has been good for the British.
But it is also brakes on a lot of what a real left-winger would want to do–especially in the arenas of trade, state ownership, and so on.
Corbyn wants to stay and argue for a more socially progressive Europe. But if he actually becomes Prime Minister, he will find Europe will act as a shackle on any power he has to implement his plans.
I’m generally in favor of sovereignty for nations under the current world regime.
However, and in short, the EU makes Conservatives better than they would be otherwise, and will make a real left-wing government worse than it would be otherwise.
Of course, what Corbyn or any other real left-winger will be really crippled by are all the so-called trade deals.
In general, institutions which were created or have evolved to serve neo-liberalism, even neo-liberalism with a social democratic face, like the EU, are not suited to actual left-wingism, even of the updated 60s variety favored by Corbyn.
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