Brexit process

[UndercoverElephant]

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ ... w-13294005

A Downing Street spokesman said: "It is categorically untrue that No 10 is planning a snap election."

Uh-huh...

[vtsnowedin]

This post tells us that migrant workers are better for the economy because we don't have to pay for their education and they usually leave before they come up for retirement pay. That's not the case for the Windrush generation nor for many others I suspect. Many will stay on intol pension age and some will then take their pensions abroad.

Neither does it seen to take into account the money which these migrants remit abroad to take care of families, either close or extended, who they still take care of.

To study that question the families of the migrant workers must be taken into account. The worker may come and go while leaving behind a newly divorced wife (or simply abandoned) with a house full of dependent children born at post WW2 baby boom rates. These children may well grow up to be fully productive citizens but our cost to raise them as western children are today is high and the government wont break even on their income taxes until they approach middle age.

[fuzzy]

Actually in the UK it's far worse than that. If you come to the UK from the EU and get a national insurance number [for work+tax+welfare], then you can claim various benefits [the gov keeps saying they will delay some for immigrants, but I don't believe this]. One is child benefit, which you can get even if your kids are elsewhere in the EU [EU mandatory]. If you then leave a day later, you still get the child benefit from the UK when you have moved to another EU country or home. This is the EU law and has been tested in UK courts by the welfare agency.

[kenneal - lagger]

And people wonder why most of us want to get out. We are a cash cow for the rest of the EU.

[Automaton]

And people wonder why most of us want to get out.

Isn't it great the way the word 'most' sounds like 'almost all', rather than 'just over half', which is what it really means here?

Brexit: let's leave the EU because half of the population are unhappy, and let the other half be unhappy instead. Ok, maybe people didn't have any idea what they were really voting for, because they were manipulated and lied to in a variety of ways, but hey, what's new about that? Of course even more people might be unhapppy afterwards, especially as prices rise for unimportant things like food; (the UK imports more than 50% of its food, most (as in 'almost all') of it from the EU. More admin and import taxes = higher food prices. Maybe we can change that one day, become more self-sufficient, though more likely we'll start buying from the US instead. But hey, it's just poor people that'll suffer for that, so who cares? Any business that sells to or buys from the EU will have (at the very least) higher running costs, resulting in more expensive products, and potentially face bankruptcy; but let's not worry about little things like that, or even give them any time to prepare. And yes, it'll cost us lots of money to leave the EU (is anyone counting how much its cost already.... good thing there's nothing else we could be spending the money on, right?), but it'll make (some of us) feel better about ourselves, so let's just do it, and pretend 'most' people wanted it.

We are a cash cow for the rest of the EU.

I'm going to assume you were just joking what you said this bit. But maybe not; maybe you could share your calculations.

[/scarasm]... 'most' of you are probably thinking 'bloody liberal remainer talking bollocks'. But you're wrong. I don't know whether we'd be better staying in or leaving... but I believe I (and everyone else) damn well should know before I get to vote in something as important as a referendum. I've touched on a couple of ways in which the UK will suffer post-Brexit, but there will be many more; and I'm not seeing many positives to balance it out. Yes, we might be better off eventually, but there is no way that anyone can know that to be the case; it's just a guess, just a hope, maybe just an illusion. We're being fed the illusion that we' had a say', that this is 'what the people wanted', but the statistics are ridiculous. Hell, there was even cheating in the leave campaign, yet we just give them a little fine and continue anyway, despite the very small majority that 'won' the vote. We still have the same emotive bollocks from people with a strong opinion, yet we really don't know what Brexit is going to mean for the UK, even now. Someone (very reasonably) asked earlier in this thread "who gains from Brexit?" (or words to that effect). It seems to me that the only sure answer is that it'll be the ones who always win; the rich. Brexit isn't about what's good for the UK, it's about what's good for the rich and powerful, and they will have engineered Brexit for their gain. If we buy into the propoganda instead of viewing it critically, we miss that.

[fuzzy]

Automaton, get a grip. Of course we would be better off if we knew the exact outcomes of our actions. Have you noticed that North Korea is the way it is because no one will change the problem? You are soaking up the constant manipulation of terror, on the brexit broadcasting service and the rest of the media - driven by the city of london corporation. Why harp on about a small majority vote? It was an astounding wake-up call that enough people chose to vote for their own lives, with our own gov telling employers to tell their employees how to vote and delivering one sided leaflets to every house, while the media, city and EU distorts reality.
Let me give you some true facts. The service and hospitality industry, outside of the labour shortage south east etc, has actually started to re-employ 40+ yr old UK men. This astounding turnaround is precisely due to a decrease in the endless supply of estonian ballerinas with PhDs to work reception, poles, spanish etc, and the retiring peak of older workers. There is an uncounted millions in the UK of men who are very underemployed, while their wives/girlfriends will always get work [there is almost no 'male' job that is not better suited to a bright obedient young adult - that's the real facts]. Many of these will receive little or no welfare because they are in a 'working' household, have small or no mortgages etc. These people are treading water and are 'invisible'. They are not brainwashed by the 'hard work' media bullshit. Many are not desperate to get ahead in life as they have already achieved some of life's goals, but part-time or flexible jobs are only in certain sectors due to gov [city] neurosis about empowering the working class. Meanwhile, every UK employer still gets regular spam email from job agencies trying to find placements for eu workers...

[kenneal - lagger]

Wot Fuzzy said!! And we don't query the legitimacy of a government when it only gets a 1 or 2% majority so why this vote?

[Automaton]

Fuzzy you've mixed up lots of things here, so it's difficult to know what to say. Every single sentence you've written misses what I'm saying, or is just plain wrong. If you believe that Brexit will solve the issues that you seem to be concerned about, then I can only say 'good luck with that', because it's not based on facts.

But we'll see, won't we?

[emordnilap]

And we don't query the legitimacy of a government when it only gets a 1 or 2% majority

Maybe that's what's wrong.

[Automaton]

Wot Fuzzy said!! And we don't query the legitimacy of a government when it only gets a 1 or 2% majority so why this vote?

Maybe we should query that too Ken. Every election leads to a minority government, i.e. whoever wins, most of the population didn't vote for them. How idiotic is that? But that's a discussion for a different thread.

And Brexit is rather more important than some short-term government, don't you think?

[kenneal - lagger]

Yes, Brexit is more important than other votes because it gives us the chance to right all the lies that we were told when we voted to join the EEC all those years ago. We're only in the EU now because we were told we were joining a Trade Association and specifically not a political union. If we had been told that not many people would have voted to join. And you worry about the petty lies that BOTH sides trotted out in the last referendum!

[emordnilap]

Wot Fuzzy said!! And we don't query the legitimacy of a government when it only gets a 1 or 2% majority so why this vote?

Maybe we should query that too Ken. Every election leads to a minority government, i.e. whoever wins, most of the population didn't vote for them. How idiotic is that?

I like sortition.

We used it in Ireland for the citizens' assembly. The government chooses its own ideology over that of the assembly, because over-riding the wishes of the citizens is what government do.

But that's a discussion for a different thread

Agreed! Back the the topic.

[Little John]

You picked the wrong side Automaton.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... g_share_fb

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

The great European mystery is why the political Left so reflexively supports the EU, the euro, and the ‘neo-liberal’ erosion of worker interests by the Brussels project.

One can see why the corporatist Right might find this regime congenial. It is marvelous for the owners of capital. It allows companies to hold down wages through cross-border labour arbitrage. It has led to a systemic rise in the profit share of GDP.

Old Labour used to call the EU a “bankers ramp� and that is exactly what it has become. It upholds the interest of creditors and multinationals, leaving governments unable to pursue socialist policies beyond superficial tinkering.

This would remain that case after Brexit for any British government if the UK is still caught in the EU’s regulatory and legal orbit.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell know this. Parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party - the globalist graduate wing - no doubt wishes to bind their hands with EU rope precisely in order to head off any radical demarche.
What is puzzling is that Momentum activists are so easily beguiled by the EU’s moral claims. They fought George Osborne’s austerity cuts vehemently, yet they forgive the deeper reactionary cuts imposed on half of Europe by ‘ordoliberals’ in the German finance ministry.

This EMU austerity went beyond any defensible therapeutic dose. It was procyclical, and pushed southern Europe into an economic depression worse in aggregate than the span from 1929 to 1935.

The historic socialist parties of Europe immolated themselves enforcing economic policies that led to levels of youth unemployment - Greece (60pc), Spain (56pc), Italy (43pc) - that would have been unthinkable for a post-war social democratic government with its own sovereign instruments.

This contractionary bias is now embedded in the Fiscal Compact, which legally requires eurozone states under to cut their public debt ratio each year for two decades, by as much as 3.5pc of GDP annually in the case of Italy, or 2pc for France. It is a deflationary straightjacket. It outlaws Keynesian economics. It makes Left-wing governments impossible in Europe. Does Momentum understand this?

Costas Lapavitsas, an economics professor at London University (SOAS), is bravely trying to educate the British Left. His book - The Left Case Against The EU - argues that the Social Chapter of the Delors era has long since given way to “institutionalised austerity�, with a Europe divided between a rich core and a pauperised South, and under the thumb of “German industrial export capitalists�.

Costas Lapavitsas speaking as a Syriza MP in the Greek Parliament. He watched the Greek Spring being snuffed out by the EU gendarmes. Credit: Tagespiegel

Monetary union in particular is the coercive whip of the ascendant ideology. “The euro has been an outstanding instrument for imposing discipline on workers,� he writes.

Prof Lapavitsas was briefly a Syriza MP and witness to the failed Greek Spring. He argues that politics as we normally know it is impossible in the EU. The Left is wasting its time thinking it can change anything by democratic activism. “It is a transnational juggernaut. Neoliberalism has become EU the credo. Capital wins at every major turn,� he said.

His warning to Jeremy Corbyn is that EU rules on state aid, public procurement, and nationalisation would make it impossible to carry out his industrial policies. “These are not minor issues. They lie at the heart of any attempt to transform Britain’s economy in a socialist direction,� he said.
"These are not minor issues. They lie at the heart of any attempt to transform Britain’s economy in a socialist direction"Prof Lapavitsas

The only way he could pursue transformative policies and build the Corbynist ‘new economy’ is under the much wider latitude of WTO rules.

Eurosceptics and ‘Lexit’ advocates are a small band, with a home at the website Jacobin. One of their leading voices is Wolfgang Streeck from Germany’s Max Planck Institute, who deems the euro to be the instrument of a hegemonic “German Empire� disguised in the cloak of supranationalism.

Prof Lapavitsas makes a critical point rarely understood in this country. Germany has not been an economic success under the euro. It has lagged by global standards. Investment has stagnated. Productivity growth has been worse than in Greece.

What Germany did through the Hartz IV labour reforms was to deliver a “sudden shock� to the old tripartite system of collegiate bargaining by employers’ groups, trade unions, and the state, replacing it with a Hobbesian labour market of mini-jobs and precarious part-time work.

It became easier to hire and fire, and therefore to play off German workers against cheaper salaries in Eastern Europe. VW threatened to relocate Wolfsburg production to Poland unless workers accepted de facto pay cuts.They capitulated.

“The gains of productivity, such as they were, accrued to capital. United Germany became a harshly unequal society. The income share of labour collapsed,� he said.

This shift in Germany’s internal balance of political power enabled export industry to hold down wages from late 1990s onwards, gaining intra-EMU competitiveness in a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy. “The German real exchange declined systematically. This is the true source of German hegemony in the EU,� he said.

“The creation of EMU allowed Germany to implement a neo-mercantilist policy of keeping domestic demand weak by suppressing wages, while seeking growth through external surpluses. This has placed France and Italy in an impossible predicament,� he said.

German and north European surpluses had to be recycled (and still have to be). This took the form of capital flooding into the Club Med bloc - unstoppable under EU single market law - which destabilized their economies. This was a banking and design debacle. Yet when the storm hit, the EU blamed only the borrowers.

Brussels became the debt-collector for private banks, forcing taxpayers in the peripheral crisis states to take on Troika loans to repay creditors at full value. All that mattered was to save monetary union and the European banking system. As the IMF admits in its mea culpa, Greece was sacrificed for the euro.

The British Left know this sorry tale. They deplored by the harsh treatment of these countries at the time. Yet they cling to the fond hope that the EU can be reformed and that electoral victories by socialists will break the grip of the Brussels machine and the single market gendarmes.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. There is a reason why the 187,000-page corpus of EU law is called the Acquis. Trying to reverse any of it is like pulling teeth.

In the hands of the European Court, the Acquis is a “veritable machine for the relentless application of neoliberal ideology across Europe.� Social policies lose when they clash with the legal imperative of market efficiency.

Prof Lapavitsas argues that what occurred during the EMU crisis was not the result of policy mistakes but the mechanical outcome of the EU structure that had evolved under German ordoliberal and mercantilist control.

This structure has not changed, and is not about to change. Berlin’s policy elites think they got the crisis right. The situation is now even worse. A panoply of powerful bodies have taken flight, whether the bail-out fund (ESM), the Eurogroup, or the Eurogroup, or the shadowy Eurogroup Working Group, all beyond direct democratic control.

The ‘Six Pack’, ‘Two Pack’, and other disciplinary tools have been created to bring aberrant states to heel. “The fiscal regime underpinning EMU has become considerably harsher,� he said. The euro is more dysfunctional than ever.

“The point of departure for a Left strategy in Europe ought to be that the EU is neither a purveyor of ‘soft power’ nor a benevolent and humanitarian force. If the Left intends to implement radical anti-capitalist policies, it must be prepared for a rupture,� he writes.

The great Left-wing parties of Europe have not been listening. One by one they have collapsed, compromised as enforcers of ordoliberal austerity or as apologists for the cultural nihilism of borderless ideology. The French Socialist Party is a ruin, while Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement snatches the working class base, defending the French welfare model in what amounts to national socialism.

The historic Dutch Labour Party has sunk to fifth place. Sweden’s Social Democrats have just suffered the worst defeat in a century. Beppe Grillo’s neo-anarchist Five Star rebellion has swept aside the Italian Democrats.

Germany’s Social Democrats are in agony, tied neck-and-neck with the hard-Right Alternative fur Deutschland, and that is the warning that Britain’s Left should heed. The political centre of gravity in Europe is not moving Leftwards. There is no conceivable alliance of EU governments pushing for Labour values.

The choice is between the capitalist technocrat Right and the cultural nationalist hard-Right, and these two may be merging judging by the conservative candidacy of Manfred Weber for the next Commission president on a “Christian identity� ticket. That is the reality of Europe.

So my question for friends on the Left - living in what is perhaps the most tolerant of the EU’s big states, and the only one with a vibrant Left-wing movement - is why are you dying in a ditch to defend a system that is reactionary, deflationary, hostile to everything you stand for, and certain to block your policies however large your electoral victory?

Objectively - as a Marxist might say - Brexit is your friend.

[Little John]

At heart, the Brexit vote is about the supremacy of Parliament. All else is noise

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... g-els/amp/

[adam2]

Actually in the UK it's far worse than that. If you come to the UK from the EU and get a national insurance number [for work+tax+welfare], then you can claim various benefits [the gov keeps saying they will delay some for immigrants, but I don't believe this]. One is child benefit, which you can get even if your kids are elsewhere in the EU [EU mandatory]. If you then leave a day later, you still get the child benefit from the UK when you have moved to another EU country or home. This is the EU law and has been tested in UK courts by the welfare agency.

And presumably the human rights lobby, and the EU will demand that these payments must continue after Brexit.
It was a desire to end this sort of nonsense that lead to people voting to leave.