Batting for the Bankers

So with great fanfare David Cameron claims he has stood up for Britain's national interests by opposing every single one of the other European Union member states as they attempt to claw their way out of the Euro-crisis. With everyone now acknowledging the arrival of a two-speed Europe - 26 states going at one speed and Britain at the other - the chances of a General Election in the New Year have to have increased. Hoping to ride a wave of mindless xenophobia, "Bulldog" Dave will be watching the polls closely for his hoped-for bigot-bounce over the next few months so that he can call a snap election, pose as John Bull reborn and free himself of the pro-EU Lib Dems, who face oblivion at any polls. Given the long-term economic prognosis, it could be his only-ever chance of forming a majority regime.

And yet, how tragically confused the public mood will be - because the supposed national interests he claims to have stood up for are nothing to do with the interests of ordinary people. What he has vetoed is not any of the daft (though in total relatively few) regulations that emanate from Brussels on standardised food weights or what constitutes Wensleydale cheese, or not. Nor have his efforts done anything the tackle the corruption to be found in the workings of much of the Union's institutions. He has done nothing to stop the EU's ludicrous and damaging pursuit of biofuels, nor anything to challenge the wasteful transportation of goods over huge distances of the Continent. And there is nothing to stop the  dislocation of local communities caused by the single European market (unsurprisingly, that last is the bit that the rich backers of the  Eurosceptics are very, very keen to keep as it is).

Indeed, for ordinary British people, his actions may make things much worse - as Europe faces financial disaster, any economic meltdown across the Channel will inevitably shaft Britain as much as anywhere else, creating unemployment, inflation and misery for millions. By vetoing the proposed international financial regulations, Cameron has at least delayed and probably damaged longer term the struggle to restore economic stability to our key trading partners. Why risk that?

Simple - because for Dave it is worth it.

What Cameron has done is make sure that the City of London remains free of any effective scrutiny. Yep, Bulldog Dave has been out fighting on behalf of the bankers. He has used Britain's veto on this historic occasion to strike a blow against proposed internationally binding regulation of the international finance trade that flows in and out of London banks and City brokers' accounts, fleecing hardworking people of billions in thieved commission and forcing public service cuts through their myriad means of tax avoidance and tax dodging.

He has also put paid to the so-called Robin Hood tax - a tiny levy on bankers transactions that could raise tens of billions of pounds a year to cut deficits and fund public services. Instead, Dave sees it in Britain's interests to let the leeches keep the cash. The rest of Europe may go ahead, but given the importance of the City of London in international finance - a trade with little more than peripheral, trickle-down benefits for Britain - our decision to opt-out will blunt the impact of any transactions tax. This in turn will seriously undermine wider attempts to get the international community to tackle the excesses of the banking and finance cartel that has done so much to bring our world to its knees.

And of course by isolating Britain from absolutely everyone else, he leaves a European Union which will inevitably be dominated by Germany and France - British influence will diminish rapidly in spite (and even because of) all the jingoistic flag waving.

So, I hope Dave is proud of himself. The challenge will be for progressives to expose his claims of fighting for our national interests as a lie and cover for protecting his party financiers and former school chums; yet at the same time to keep advocating for a better, social Europe. The new, more integrated arrangements that every other country seems to be signing up to may not be the right answer either, but at least at its core is an attempt to create some international public control over the currently pretty much unregulated international finance markets which play games with ordinary people's jobs, communities and life chances.

Bulldog Dave? Not likely. Just Bull**** Dave, batting for the bankers.



1946 - and the Eurosceptics mascot calls for a Union of Europe: Winston Churchill's Zurich Speech.

A Europe for People, Not Profit

On Monday, the British Parliament will debate and vote on a motion sponsored by eurosceptic Conservative MPs to hold a referendum on whether or not to leave the European Union. In the midst of the Eurozone crisis, while David Cameron has insisted on a three line whip to keep his fractious right-wingers in line and the Lib Dems will vote against, even although their leader proposed an in-or-out referendum in 2008. But with as many as 85 Conservatives predicted to be ready to break that line, the Coalition will almost certainly need - and get - Labour Party support to vote the proposal down.

And so it is very unlikely that the British people will get a referendum - even although most of them want one. So much for democracy and so much for the three parties that dominate our political world continue to disconnect further and further from the electorate they govern.

The European project was born in the aftermath of the two world wars that dominated the Continent during the first part of the 20th century. The worst conflicts in human history originated in her heartlands. From that perspective, for now at any rate, the EU has played a positive role - with the dreadful exception of the former Yugoslavia, the hot air of Presidents, Prime Ministers and bureaucrats has replaced the guns of Krupps and the Birmingham Small Arms Company.

Yet the absence of war cannot in itself justify the failures of the behemoth that the European Union has become - while its bureaucracy is not quite the bloated gravy train so beloved of the British tabloid writers, the Eurozone project has brought misery to millions of ordinary people as the European Central Bank, like banks everywhere, continues to put the interests of international finance ahead of the needs of European citizens. In other respects too, EU policy focus is very much on encouraging and protecting big business and its decision-making processes are remote and unaccountable to ordinary citizens.

Of course, listening to the Tory and UKIP eurosceptics railing about Europe taking over Britian, including  blatantly lying about straight bananas (why does no one ever wonder where these are?), their reasons for wanting a referendum soon become clear. They accept that Europe is a vital trade partner for Britain, plus perhaps they worry about having to accommodate the half a million or so angry British pensioners who would lose their right of abode in Spain, plus the 200,000 Britons in France who would be heading back to our shores.

Euromyths - according to legend, all our bananas should look like this.

So what do they want instead? A renegotiated relationship - some of them argue for a sort of club class membership, while others want to be completely outside but with special privileges of access.

What these people object to are the regulations that ensure some degree of common social protection and health and safety rules around Europe, so that one country can't undercut another by paying its workers miniscule wages and forcing them to work in dangerous conditions. The EU has for two decades been the main proponent of new safety legislation in the workplace - if it wasn't for the EU, British workers would have no entitlement to a 20 minute unpaid break after six hours of working; pregnant women would not be entitled to protective arrangements for using computer screens; and employers would not have to consult their workers before moving their jobs out of the UK. Small protections and far from ideal, but better than nothing. This is what the right-wingers in the Tories and UKIP are really fretting about - the impact on capitalists profit margins of the marginal improvements in workers conditions through European legislation.

But these motives aside, it is time to have a proper debate on the EU and vote on whether Britain remains in it. It is welcome that the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas MP, has put forward an amendment to the referendum proposal calling for a national vote on whether the EU should become more democratically accountable and economic powers be devolved back to nation states. By default, this should mean the ending of the ludicrous straight-jacket that is the Euro - if Greece still had the drachma, the current financial crisis would have far less impact.

We need multinational institutions like the EU to be able to tackle the global crisis of climate change - no one country can fight that alone. And in a globalised world where so many international corporations operate above and beyond the writ of any national governments, it is only international public and democratically accountable bodies that will ever have any hope of taming the damage they are doing. But in parallel, the Union needs to focus on the needs of its member societies rather than the desires of  international capital.

The European Economic Community emerged from the gound breaking coal and steel community forged between the former enemies France and Germany just months after Hitler's demise. If its founding purpose of ensuring that European will never again fight European is to be secured, the Union must be one for the people of our Continent and the wider world. If it is run instead for the rich, for the owners of the multinationals, then there will be no social peace and in the absence of a democratic, social Europe, as competition over increasingly scarce resources becomes ever fiercer, the gun factories may soon be taking new orders once more.

Europe past, or Europe future?

Athens and Austerity: A Hymn to the Goddess of Democracy

It must have been one of the most inspiring sights of the year. Spread across the walls of the Acropolis, high above the Athenian plain which birthed the very ideal of democracy, Hellenic Communists demonstrated against the austerity package being forced through the Greek Parliament by pseudo-socialist PASOK at the behest of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

With Greeks facing a further round of massive cuts in public spending - some €28 billions (£25 billions) in a country of just over 11,000,000 people - a general strike has begun and the streets of the capital have been filled for weeks with people from all walks of life protesting. The cuts come on top of a range of measures increasing taxes, cutting pensions and hiking the retirement age by 4 years, introduced last year in return for loans from the EU. With their nation staring bankruptcy in the face, demonstrations have turned to riots, with police deploying tear gas and a range of violent tactics to suppress the anger of the hundreds of thousands crowding in the city.

And on the Acropolis, the Communists unfurled their protest.

It was a dramatic scene, one played out with a message in English as well as Greek to speak to all the people of the European Continent as smaller states like Ireland and Portugal face the consequences of Austerity Diktats imposed by the Central Bank and the financiers. And who suffers from these measures, the consequences even now a wave rippling out of the whirlpool generated by the credit crisis and banking collapse of 2008? Not the bankers or bosses, whose wealth is now at greater than pre-crisis levels. Not at all. The hit is to be taken by the public services, the hospitals, schools, transport and social services that support the least well-off but often hardest working in society.

The Hellenic crisis is significantly enhanced by the neoliberal monetarist "shock doctrine" of orthodox economists who have run the IMF for decades and also prowl the corridors of the ECB. Their nostrums are about balancing books rather than investing in sustainable growth/equitable distribution of wealth, and consequently shrink economies further and further by sucking demand out of them. That these are also the underpinning of the single European currency, the Euro, adds substantially to the pressures on Greece. Indeed, it does not take a lot of examining to see that the real objective is far more about rescuing the Euro as a viable currency than about reforming or restoring the Greek economy.

Pallas Athena, Goddess of justice and workers

If Greece still had its own currency, we would not be here. There might still be problems with a large deficit, but these could be resolved by the Greek Government, free to take its own path and decide on, for example, expanding demand by printing money and generating wealth which in turn could increase the tax take and reduce the deficit. It could also devalue its currency in relation to other countries, improving its balance of trade and again improving Government revenues. In the Euro, with its fate tied to the desires of the Central Bank and larger economies like France and Germany, Greece has no such option.

By contrast, Iceland, which continues to enjoy financial sovereignty and control over its own currency, recently voted in a national referendum to default on billions of pounds of debts. Has it gone bust? No. Iceland remains at work, its economy readjusting itself, albeit with some short-term disruption, but still functioning and with economic growth now returned.

The same situation applies to Britain, which kept out of the Euro thanks to the punitive "five tests" created in 1997 by then-Chancellor Gordon Brown to deflect the starry-eyed desires of Premier Blair to join the super-currency. This far-sighted act has left Britain with control over its own currency and money supply. While, of course, we need to exercise prudence and cannot exist in isolation of the world economy, we retain the ability to increase the amount of money in the economy via the inelegantly named process of quantitative easing. Consequently, in spite of the hysterical nonsense prattled by the Con Dem Government, there is utterly no prospect of the UK going bust. Cameron and Clegg's often-voiced fears that the UK could end up like Greece are not merely inaccurate - they are downright lies. It is purely for reasons of ideology, not necessity, that they have worked so hard to impose the same neoliberal economic prescription of cuts and deflation on the UK economy as the IMF wants for Greece.

And so this week Britain too faces strikes, with somewhere approaching three quarters of a million public sector workers likely to strike for one day in protest at Government plans to cut their pensions. Again the Government have trotted out a load of exaggerations about the pension schemes being unviable. Rubbish has spewed from Ministers' greasy lips about "gold-plated pensions" for public employees, when the average pension is in fact no more than around £6,000 p.a. But, like PASOK in Athens, the Con Dems parrot the line of austerity and cuts for the less well-off while the super-rich continue to flourish to ever greater heights of prosperity.

The Communist demonstration on the Acropolis was not merely an imposing and inspiring sight. It was also symbolic in its location on the steps of the Parthenon temple, the House of the Hellenic Goddess Athena, deity of civilisation, workers and justice, and patron of the city where the concept of democracy was first fashioned into practice. On the same site where Socrates challenged the greed of the wealthiest and where Plato warned of eternal war between rich and poor, the battle is being fought for Europe's future - for a social Europe that values its people or for one based on the interests of secretive multinationals and a banking system that feeds on itself.

We must pray that the Goddess is listening. And then join the protests on Thursday.