Solidarity to Counter Corporate Exploitation

As though in response to my previous post (!) Chris Bryant will today make a speech addressing the political economy of immigration. According to extracts published in yesterday's Telegraph, he will accuse Tesco and Next of deliberately hiring workers from other EU countries because they are prepared to put up with working conditions and terms of employment that unions outlawed for British workers several decades ago. This, at last, is Labour fighting back on behalf of labour but it comes nearly a decade too late.

Most of the public prognostications about immigration are performance rather than policy, because since the major Enlargement of the European Union in 2004, right in the middle of the last Labour government, there has been a labour-market of 500 million people but without legislation to protect working conditions. What the EU proudly calls the 'largest enlargement so far' took place in 2004 and saw ten new countries join the EU including the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Solvenia, Hungary and the Baltic States. This creation of a huge pool of surplus and low-paid Labour was inevitably going to create downward pressure on wages and cause migration from lower- to higher-paid economies across Europe.

I opposed the Enlargement because I saw that it would increase the size of the low-skilled labour-market and therefore as part of a corporate agenda to undermine the power of working people. I lived in Wales at the time and it was obvious from that vantage-point that the life-chances of those who relied on employment in the factories of multinational companies would suffer seriously if workers earning far less were to become available within the same single market. I assume that Chris Bryant, MP for the Rhondda, has a similar vantage-point but his protestations come to late and with no concrete policies attached. If trade unions, and the Labour parties that were supposed to represent labour and were in power in many of the EU countries at the time, had insisted on equal terms and conditions and a single European minimum wage then the Enlargement could indeed have spread poverty eastwards, but without this agreement it actually brought poverty and employment insecurity westwards.

The conditions of employment, democratic rights and legal protections we enjoy in the UK--the very reason that living and working here is so attractive to those overseas--were won as a consequence of long and bitter struggles. Globalisation, through the expansion of out-sourcing and off-shoring as well as the freer movement of labour, has weakened these rights. This is an issue that stems from the relative power of capital and labour rather than an argument about who us, or is not, a racist. The whole immigration debate is a classic example of divide-and-rule, distracting from the obvious truth that all workers need to be protected with basic employment rights and minimum wage rates.

In the 19th-century the attempt by those who control capital to exploit workers by moving them beyond their sphere of natural rights was recognised and the proposal was one if international solidarity: that workers of the world should unite. If Chris Bryant is to move beyond rhetoric, and to convince working people that there is some purpose in voting Labour, then he needs to get his union friends across Europe to organise that solidarity and call for uniform working conditions and a Europe-wide minimum wage.
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Land for People and for Food

Biofuels are back in the news: today MPs will decide on whether to continue to offer subsidies to crops that can be burned in power stations to create electricity. This problem began with what seemed like a simple and natural solution to our energy problems: plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow which is balanced by its release when burned to create power. This simplistic idea was grasped by an industry that rapidly developed and sadly persuaded the EU to offer subsidies. The later research demonstrated that many of the biofuels crops actually produce more CO2 than they save.

The other side of the biofuels debate is the land grabbing that is gathering pace in countries that have less power in the global trade system and whose politicians are prepared to see their land be used to feed the lust for energy of those in richer and more powerful societies. Campaign group Grain have accounted for 17 million hectares of land that has been grabbed by global agribusiness to produce fuel crops between 2002 and 2012. Much of this land is in some of the poorest countries in the world; it has been diverted from producing subsistence for local people into growing crops to produce energy for the fuel-hungry West.

Grain, the NGO that supports small farmers across the world, identifies the EU subsidy regime as the source of the problem. The latest proposal sets a target of an energy equivalent of 40 Mtonnes of oil to be provided by biofuels as part of the 20% renewables target to be reached by 2020. While the Green Party welcomes the emphasis on renewables it is keen to ensure that this is not achieved at the cost of the destruction of habitats and livelihoods.  Oxfam also express deep concern about this policy, arguing that it will increase global hunger directly, through removing peasants from their land, and indirectly, by increasing the price of staple foods on the global market.

As with so many of the examples of tension between the economy and the environment the problem arises from the scale of operations and the failure of accountability this causes. This is where the proposal for a bioregional economy is so powerful. If regions were aiming to become self-reliant in energy and food production within their boundary, and introduce tariffs for the import of these products, then they could make decisions about balancing the protection of their local environment with their need for energy generation. It is the creation of a global trade in fuel crops and the exploitation of the environments of those for whom we cannot have accountability that is the source of the devastation caused by biofuels.
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The Art of the Hypothetical

The news, to my rather simplistic way of thinking, is about stuff wot happened. Today's headlines make clear just how wrong I am about this. Today's news is dominated not by events but by a speech that didn't happen twice. First David Cameron moved his speech to avoid the tactlessness of metaphorically bombing the EU on the day of the Franco-German love-in; then he postponed it because there was disastrous news from Algeria. Today what has been billed as a 'long awaited speech', although other than journalists it is hard to find anybody waiting with much excitement, will finally be given. It was so unwelcome in Europe that Cameron ended up delivering it in the last place he wanted: London.

I fear that the outcome of the speech will be to show the Conservatives' approach to Europe as weak and misguided. For some of their less informed supporters, the ones who are considering voting for UKIP, it might seem appropriate to adopt a position of superiority, lecturing the 26 other countries of the EU about what is best for them. This is a posture learned on the playing-fields of Eton where the empire is a fond memory for which such schools and their games masters continue to take credit. In the world where the rest of us  live, Europe is a social club where we feel rather comfortable and where most members operate social, cultural and infrastructural systems we find generally superior to our own.

In such a club you cannot make the rules on your own: you make them by agreement or you are forced to leave. This seems genuinely incomprehensible to the Tories who think we can operate our selfish individualist model of neoliberal capitalism, dump on all the systems our 'European partners' have put in place to protect their peoples and our planet, and still be invited to the party. The Tories' attitude to Europe is the ultimate example of the free-riding of the rational economic man.

The question of a referendum that is at the heart of today's speech is an entirely hypothetical one. What will we be voting to leave or stay in? The crisis in the Eurozone and the fiscal pact that the majority of EU members are now signed up to is in itself not in fînalalised. Cameron vetoed our membership but that leaves open so many questions that a wholesale renegotiation is inevitable. The smart move would be to get ahead in those negotiations, which the better players of the EU game are no doubt doing right now, while Cameron is losing friends in Europe in a desperate attempt to keep friends in his own party.

The very sad thing is that the Euro-sceptics inside the Conservative party have totally outflanked the Cameroons. They know that his strategy of hypothesis-testing is bound to fail. They know that they have already succeeded in making a decision to leave Europe a possible outcome for the first time in three decades. Their understanding of Europe is better, and so it their understanding of politics.
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Potholes in the Amazon Business Plan

It may be a sign that being a district councillor is getting to me, but I have begun to take an unreasonable amount of interest in potholes. Or perhaps it is because I have now been living without a car for three months, and from the saddle of a bike one's intimacy with the road surface increases considerably. There were two things that really set me to thinking about this most mundane of issues. The first was when I hit a large and definitely new pothole close to my house, in the dark, and was nearly thrown into the path of traffic. The second was a conversation I had with a road-mender, who told me he paid his taxes to have the roads fixed and yet they were becoming worse by the year.

In a way typical of the present approach to public concerns, the government has established a 'report a pothole' website. This is reminiscent of the 'cones hotline' fiasco, and about as likely to result in any action. The 'politics of austerity' means that we must put up with roads full of holes along with a postal service that is no longer reliable and rapidly rising waiting-lists for operations.

So what is the economics of potholes? As usual we need to dig a little bit deeper than questioning who pays and who benefits. The fundamental question is who causes damages to the roads, and do they take responsibility for that damage? Many years ago I stood as a general election candidate in Preseli Pembrokeshire. One of the hot local debates was about the trans-European highway that would traverse the constituency on its way from Latvia to Dublin. This, it was argued, would bring jobs and growth. That was a lie of course. The jobless Welsh citizens watched huge lorries pass through their villages taking products made by low-paid Latvian workers to consumers in Ireland whose purchases were funded by a Celtic boom that has now busted.

The purposes of the guff about trans-European highways was to persuade politicians to spend money upgrading the roads. In contrast to my last post, here we see the European Union most under corporate pressure, with its Council Directive 96/53/EC of 25 July 1996 obliging us to upgrade our roads to permit 40-tonne axle lorries by January 1999. As ever larger lorries have pounded our carriageways costs have risen and the quality of the road surface has declined. This is the reality of the single market: the exploitation of vulnerable workers and the expansion of pointless road freight.

And here is where the pothole whinge meets the other first-world problem of the Christmas period: items bought online that did not arrive in time for Christmas. Because many of the trucks that were hammering the highways during the last month have been delivering items bought from Amazon. The same Amazon that does not pay any tax. So to answer the road-mender's question, if the companies who use the roads for free as part of the slimline business model avoid paying their share of the cost of maintaining them, your taxes can never be stretched far enough to ensure that you will have a comfortable ride.
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TINA Makes an Unwelcome Return

The voice of authority telling you that you cannot possibly think a certain way or that their view of the world is simple common sense is hard to resist, especially when it is intoned with the upper-class accent that we have learned to defer to. So it is that Cameron and Osborne tell us that we are a trading nation and that the Europe we want is the Europe of markets and competition. So it was when they told us that there was no alternative to the politics of austerity and the destruction of our welfare state. They are deeply wrong on both counts.

Such powerful manipulation of our thinking must be challenged. We must actively resist the 'England Good; Europe Bad' mantras that are issuing forth from both the Tories and UKIP and being fanned into a bushfire of anti-European sentiment by an irresponsible and ill-informed media. So let's start now by recalling some of the policies from Europe that have made our lives better in this country than they would have been had the free market of Beecroft and Paterson.

Let's start with the End-of-Life Vehicle Directive. This is a practical policy devised by European Greens to challenge the throwaway culture of contemporary capitalism. The Directive passes responsibility for the disposal of cars back to the manufacturer, thus putting a cost incentive behind attempts to improve recyclability of components and reuse of materials used in the manufacture of cars. The WEEE Directive achieves similar objectives in the case of electronic equipment.

The REACH regulation is a system for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances. It is an attempt to acknowledge that fact that new chemicals are proliferating in our environment. It is clear that the interests of corporate industry have had too much influence over this regulation, as a critical account by Anne Chapman describes, but it is at least an attempt to gain social and political control over this potentially most destructive of industries. Where would we be without the EU regulating the chemical industry?

The European regulation that is a key target of the marketeers and that working people would miss most is the Working Time Directive. This has been subject to vilification akin to the fictional attempts to straighten out bananas, but in reality it is a system of reasonable boundaries to protect workers against exploitation. Who except the likes of Beecroft could object to requirements such as 'a minimum daily rest period, of 11 consecutive hours in every 24' or 'paid annual leave of at least four weeks per year'?

The very aspects of the European project that the Tories and their business friends would seek to support are the same ones that I deplore: the pro-corporate market that is not obliged to consider the needs of people or the environment. It is only our 'European partners', and amongst them the powerful Green Group in the European parliament, who are protecting us from such a fate, as the three parties who dominate Westminster politics and the strange purple party that dominates the debate on Europe sacrifice everything of true value for the sake of economic growth.
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Dispatch from Austerlitz

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union is a timely reminder of the central role that this much-maligned organisation has played in all our lives. If we have spent our lives in comfort, alienating decadence even, and without having to fight for our birth-right, then much of the credit for that must go to the founding fathers who found a way to ensure that we had more to gain from standing together than by falling apart.

But the economic crisis that was caused by finance and has shown the current generation up for the political pygmies they are has frightening echoes of the crisis of the 1930s that led us into the last great European, and then global, war. During the 1930s, as brilliantly described by Karl Polanyi, the gold standard was the strait-jacket that strangled domestic economies while allowing the financiers to grow rich. This time around that role is being taken by the Euro and the Eurocrisis is allowing them to grow rich while the people of Europe are impoverished.

The Czech economy is doing pretty well by the standards of some of those with whom it joined the EU. The Czechs had the good sense to hold onto control of their currency the Koruna. It trades at around 35 to the pound and this allows the Czechs to maintain a fairly significant manufacturing sector. This small Central European country has more reason than most to fear the spectre of European war. In the Jakubske church in Brno, the city I visit most regularly, there is a series of dates painted onto the ceiling to commemorate dates when the people of the city needed to seek refuge. My Czech friends laugh when I say that my country has not be invaded since 1066; they can recall 60 invasions the last of which was the cost of 'peace in our time' for Chamberlain.

A few miles away is the battlefield of Austerlitz, site of Napoleon's most famous victory. My visit to the battle site was appropriately undertaken under thick fog, similar no doubt to the fog that enabled Napoleon to disguise his attack on the Pratzen heights and overwhelm a superior force. The greatest danger I faced was from a rally race that was most inappropriately staged by the battle memorial. The battle lies at the heart of Tolstoy's War and Peace, where it is a staging-post to the glorious victory of the Russians in 1812. The following century it was the Somme, which reminds us again of the exceptionality of what really has been peace in our time for the past 70 years.

If you travel to the south of France by train you will leave Paris from the station named for this battle; it matches our own Waterloo station, named to commemorate the place in Belgium where the English army halted Napoleon's continental rampage. These stations remind us of the century or so of conflict that ended in 1945. Between the cultural exchanges, the creations of pan-European institutions, and the mutual guarantee of economic security, the EU can and should be rewarded for underpinning peace in most of Europe for most of the past century.

This is why the Peace Prize comes at a timely moment. Because the current European obsession with the single market is putting the unity of nations in jeopardy. When David Cameron calls for a negotiation so that we can improve our relative situation he ignores the fact that our gain will be another's loss. His question 'What does Britain get back from Europe?' Is the wrong one. The project of peace in Europe is one we all gain from jointly, that cannot be counted in terms of a million here or there on farm subsidies. I have two sons and a daughter of fighting age and what I most want from Europe is to be assured that they will not be called to fight on her soil.
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Financial Ignorance a Sinn

The next step on the rocky road of the Eurozone crisis is the financial union, proposed by Barroso last weekend. The proposal for a banking union is suggested as a way of saving the euro and the European financial system. If we will not take this step then the finance houses will not trust us and will destroy us. But just a minute. If the financiers are so all powerful how come they needed us to bail them out? This is one basic logical flaw. Another is why a system that failed because it was too consolidated and too centralised is to be saved by becoming entirely centralised, with just one regulator overseeing all of Europe's 6000 banks.

The answer is that German money is needed to make the banking union work, and the German monetary authorities will not agree to this unless they have control of what those banks are able to do. A proposal so draconian and disempowering will never be acceptable to banks in the countries of the European periphery that still have the economic strength to resist, which will make withdrawal from the EU much more likely, and especially in the UK. The proposal is the opposite of a real solution to the crisis, which would rely on more diversity, the breaking up of the larger banks into smaller banks more responsive to their local communities, and the creation of many currencies rather than the monopoly of the Euro.

The public debate about the Eurozone crisis has been lamentably shallow. A recent exception was an interview with Hans-Werner Sinn on Hardtalk. He was responding to George Soros's recent call that Germany should either 'lead or leave' the euro, which Sinn portrayed as a veiled demand for Germany to pay more. As a financier it is unsurprising that Soros should call for the German government to create more money that, as previously identified on a guest post on this blog, will mostly end up in the hands of financiers.

The most interesting parts of the interview have been cut from this video, although Sinn does identify how the 'policy of making private debt contracts public debt contracts is dangerous to Europe'. By increasing tensions between national governments, as the northern countries become the creditors of the southern European countries. This will raise tensions between the nations of Europe, the very tensions that the EU was set up to diminish. The whole interview, available as a podcast, is well worth listening to, as a heterodox view of the Eurozone crisis that also exposes the ignorance and lack of understanding of BBC staff.
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How Green is My Parliament?

As Greens we generally have a fairly warm and fuzzy feeling towards Europe. After all, the European parliament has a large group of Green MPs and when it comes to European elections people actually vote for us in large numbers. The extraordinary experience of receiving 2 million votes inevitably leaves a pleasant memory with those of us who were part of that campaign back in 1989.

And the EU does have some notable environmental achievements, especially in terms of its adoption of targets and commitments, such as to reverse the decline in biodiversity by 2020 and to pour significant amounts of money into preserving habitats. While the LIFE programme represents less than 1% of the EU budget, it has protected some of Europe's more endangered species and it works better than comparable projects in other jurisdictions.

However, at a recent conference in London, Ariel Brunner from Birdlife International made a strong case that many of the EU policies actually operate as perverse incentives and can even have harmful impacts on the environment. The most destructive policies have been those associated with agriculture and fisheries. Pillar 1 of the CAP is the most destructive: clearly the result of political pressure by large-scale farming interests, it tends to send money towards the most destructive farms without any positive environmental or wider social results. Fisheries policy also has perverse targets, with 26% of the cash going towards fleet modernisation and exacerbating the problem of over-capacity, while 40% goes towards expanding ports, again supporting the large-scale industrial fishing which is destroying fish stocks.

One of the best things about Ariel's presentation was a clear account of the EU budget, to the extent that a clear picture is possible for a budget whose auditors have for years refused to sign it off. The graphic shows the heavy emphasis on the CAP within the overall budget, and the slightly larger budget that is the 'cohesion fund' to redistribute money from poorer to richer countries across the EU.

The emphasis of European policy making is 'green growth' and 'green jobs'. While readers of this blog would probably join me in suggesting that 'green growth' is a contradiction in terms, encouraging the transitional investment necessary to create green jobs might be worth the political effort. A recent report showed that, during the next EU budget period 2014-2020, a €1 billion investment in conservation-related employment can create 29,000 jobs where the same investment in CAP will only create 6,200 jobs. If we are all in this economic crisis together, isn't it time that we stopped subsidising large landowners and spent that money to improve our shared environment instead?

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