Future of the European Union

[Montmorency]

How about; we don't assent to common governance. Stop.

I'm still not sure why the clear alternative to "common governance" isn't intensifying deterritorialization of governance.

Or is it another layer of my misunderstanding of your position and

What EU will we get?
My thoughts from a few years back - not significantly changed with the arrival of brexit/macron/etc.

Does Brexit maximise regional harmony (read: the EU)?

[...]

What EU do I want?
I want an EU that does not force the little nations to knuckle under the 'consensus' thrashed out by the bigger boys.
Britain was big enough and ugly enough to carve out the opt-outs it needed, but that is not true of many of the smaller nations.
For this reason i would have been very happy with a remain vote if Belgium had not demanded that exemption to ever closer union must apply only to britain. A more callous and selfish act I have rarely seen!
Since this was the result, i'd be more than happy if we ended up back in EFTA, with the intention of creating a power block to push back against ever closer union.
To be clear, my aim is not to obstruct European nations from going where they want to go, but to prevent the EU from steamrolling nations that don't wish to go with them.

is actually a dialectical argument that considers instigating a crisis in the system as part of the path to a resolution (like Slavoj Zizek on global capitalism and the Trump election)?


Social engineering is always a gamble.

[Furunculus]

I'm still not sure why the clear alternative to "common governance" isn't intensifying deterritorialization of governance.

It isn't a clear alternative to anything, as international treaty law with its spongy interpretability and poor understood mandate is an exceedingly poor way to govern social interaction.
Further, we all clearly submit to common governance (with the possible exception of somalia), but there is no moral reasoning that would necessitate a nation of people assenting to a governance by a different polity if that was not their express wish.

Or is it another layer of my misunderstanding of your position and is actually a dialectical argument that considers instigating a crisis in the system as part of the path to a resolution (like Slavoj Zizek on global capitalism and the Trump election)?

Closer, but dialectical in what sense? I tend to talk about it in fairly dry terms, but the subject discussed is politics and political identity, and ultimately that is a matter of personal sentiment and emotional attachment.
I do think the Zizek argument has some application here, as I believe the EU to be a dysfunctional form of government in being unable to usefully represent the desires of its various people[s] it has a tendency to stasis. Which makes it an inflexible construct that has low adaptability to accommodate shifting circumstances.

Social engineering is always a gamble.

Agreed. A charge I would lay at the feet of the pro-eu elites in two separate parts; 1. with the likes of new labour treating mass immigration as a tool for social transformation. 2. on the part of eu policy makers that seek to enhance and promote regional identity within the EU such that national identity loses tractability and visibility. Was the context in which you raised the point?

[Montmorency]

It isn't a clear alternative to anything, as international treaty law with its spongy interpretability and poor understood mandate is an exceedingly poor way to govern social interaction.
Further, we all clearly submit to common governance (with the possible exception of somalia), but there is no moral reasoning that would necessitate a nation of people assenting to a governance by a different polity if that was not their express wish.

Deterritorialization.

Your preference/expectation for a successful Brexit is a Singapore model, a market economy of services. A globally-embedded market economy necessarily removes local control in favor of the interests of influential horizontally-mobile market actors, and a service economy in this context is heavily fluctuating and precarious as the small fry contract on an irregular basis and desperately compete to maintain value against one another. In other words, intensifying the economic trends of the past two generations.

I guess, as with Singapore, wealthy technocrats heavily repress personal rights and social group interests to maintain conditions for market churn? Why not a Lichtenstein model, a minimally-populated tax haven free market utopia that is HOLY CRAP A LITERAL MONARCHY.

Socialists like Corbyn of course have a different take on the opportunities of Brexit. I'll present their view later on. A little bit like your A2 "UKIP[???]-driven scenario"; I can't help but feel they're too optimistic about their case, since your scenario is the default trend for the world at-large regardless of Brexit.

Agreed. A charge I would lay at the feet of the pro-eu elites in two separate parts; 1. with the likes of new labour treating mass immigration as a tool for social transformation. 2. on the part of eu policy makers that seek to enhance and promote regional identity within the EU such that national identity loses tractability and visibility. Was the context in which you raised the point?

Hasn't the fatal flaw with the European Union been that the leadership wanted it both ways, broad new institutions and agendas without taking the effort or commitment to reshaping the popular consciousness?

You seemed to advance that a non-failed Brexit is the best case for pushing the EU into the form you would like to see it take, something that itself depends on dramatic future shifts in the consciousness and attitudes of various national populations (facilitated by political and economic shocks of Brexit).

So, social engineering at a certain remove.

[Furunculus]

Deterritorialization.

Having read The Rule of Law in Crisis and Conflict Grey Zones, Regulating the Use of Force in a Global Information Environment, I chose to read the word above as the use of international normative law. An emerging doctrine that essentially gives life to the concept, but since it is not accepted and universal fact the enormous majority of de-territorial law is in fact international treaty. Which would fail for the reasons specified, and there is nothing to indicate that normative law does not suffer the same problems. Do you have a different interpretation?

Your preference/expectation for a successful Brexit is a Singapore model, a market economy of services. A globally-embedded market economy necessarily removes local control in favor of the interests of influential horizontally-mobile market actors, and a service economy in this context is heavily fluctuating and precarious as the small fry contract on an irregular basis and desperately compete to maintain value against one another. In other words, intensifying the economic trends of the past two generations.

Everything is relative. A Singapore in europe doesn't have to be anything more than a nation that keeps public spending at 5% of GDP lower than the median for the EU, with regulation at a similar level of unobtrusiveness. Let's say 37.5% (versus 42.5%), and our existing penchant for non-socialised regulation of finance, energy, gm, etc.

I guess, as with Singapore, wealthy technocrats heavily repress personal rights and social group interests to maintain conditions for market churn? Why not a Lichtenstein model, a minimally-populated tax haven free market utopia that is HOLY CRAP A LITERAL MONARCHY.

So I don't really think this scenario applies. Afterall, it isn't like the rest of the anglosphere doesn't operate on exactly the same basis already.

Socialists like Corbyn of course have a different take on the opportunities of Brexit. I'll present their view later on. A little bit like your A2 "UKIP[???]-driven scenario"; I can't help but feel they're too optimistic about their case, since your scenario is the default trend for the world at-large regardless of Brexit.

I would be keen to hear some try and put a structure on how the corbynite left hopes to succeed as a left-wing country outside the protectionist bloc that enables such structure...

Hasn't the fatal flaw with the European Union been that the leadership wanted it both ways, broad new institutions and agendas without taking the effort or commitment to reshaping the popular consciousness?

Yes. But that doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day it is just politics (and it is just that), and i'm not obliged to assent to it.

You seemed to advance that a non-failed Brexit is the best case for pushing the EU into the form you would like to see it take, something that itself depends on dramatic future shifts in the consciousness and attitudes of various national populations (facilitated by political and economic shocks of Brexit).
So, social engineering at a certain remove.

Not social engineering, political engineering. A process that happens all the time everywhere, as governence must perforce respond to changing circumstances.
To be specific: do you think my scenarios of the EU evolution are realistic? And what might you suggest in their stead?

[Fragony]

You are lucky, Germany and France might fuck but they do not make love, in the end France is a whore who wants money and Germany gladly gives it if nonody tells his wife. Basic EU-politics explained.

[Husar]

No it is a parasitical overhead that gets into your pants

I've got to be numb there because I never noticed.
The only thing I did notice was that I could call my dad in your country without having to worry about roaming fees.

You are lucky, Germany and France might fuck but they do not make love, in the end France is a whore who wants money and Germany gladly gives it if nonody tells his wife. Basic EU-politics explained.

I notice a trend here...
What happened to Squirrels and Ferrets? Are you switching over to dark fantasy or argument noir?

[Fragony]

If they can why can't I, oh right, fake news, I forgot that everytihing anti-EU is fake-news

[Montmorency]

Having read The Rule of Law in Crisis and Conflict Grey Zones, Regulating the Use of Force in a Global Information Environment, I chose to read the word above as the use of international normative law. An emerging doctrine that essentially gives life to the concept, but since it is not accepted and universal fact the enormous majority of de-territorial law is in fact international treaty. Which would fail for the reasons specified, and there is nothing to indicate that normative law does not suffer the same problems. Do you have a different interpretation?

Well off the mark. I meant it as derived from the Deleuzian/accelerationist sense, but we don't care about those labels so in the concrete sense of political controls being diffused into the hands of trans-national elites, for instance by virtue of their market clout and the overriding imperatives of their economic framework. C.f. what googling the term gets:

the severance of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations.

This is exactly what I've been trying to refer to you over time, that leaving the EU ub favor of liberalization to all comers clearly - or if you don't agree with "clearly", then suggestively enough that you can't ignore the possibility - eliminates more popular control, or at least popularly-responsive control, than EU membership ever could in the medium-term.

As I said, Corbyn appears to believe otherwise, that Brexit is an opportunity to show that the capitalist system can be defied. Summary in a followup post. Pre-emptively I'll state that I think the UK is too small and weak to accomplish this, that the concert of explicit and implicit controls of the world economy, institutions, and state actors results in the rapid and premature electoral expulsion of a radical Labour government. Alternatively, Labour would have to install a socialist-in-name dictatorship and emulate the quasi-self sufficiency of Cuba, an outcome that can hardly be called inspiring (inspiration matters in setting an example to other countries' socialist movements) and one that cannot shield the UK in the long-term context of persistent international capitalism (every factor in the world, from political to technological to ecological, inciting the implosion of the country).

In a world of islands the UK would not be allowed to pretend to be an island, in other words. Maybe EU membership overall provides some sort of buffer, when you need every edge you can get.

Everything is relative. A Singapore in europe doesn't have to be anything more than a nation that keeps public spending at 5% of GDP lower than the median for the EU, with regulation at a similar level of unobtrusiveness. Let's say 37.5% (versus 42.5%), and our existing penchant for non-socialised regulation of finance, energy, gm, etc.

What makes a Singapore from the spending-GDP ratio? It sounds like you're saying not a particular policy, but simply keeping overall spending below 40% of GDP will automatically reproduce some aspect of the Singapore model.

So I don't really think this scenario applies. Afterall, it isn't like the rest of the anglosphere doesn't operate on exactly the same basis already.

What are you referring to?

Anyway, what exact features you envision for a Singapore model, whether these are desirable for most people, and if they are compatible with other narrow aspects of your preferred state (e.g. military interventionism) are a separate topic and beside the point. I'm more interested in why you assent to one kind of politics and not another, and what contradictions are present.

Not social engineering, political engineering. A process that happens all the time everywhere, as governance must perforce respond to changing circumstances.

It strikes me as a kind of misuse of the term to, as I suppose you are doing, limit it to the continuous efforts of a central government. Why should private groups and discrete political events be excluded if they arrive at the same type of result? Which is not to say that there is a linear correlation between the aims of the engineers and the actual product, just the opposite. There are always unforeseen consequences. That's why I called it a gamble.

To be specific: do you think my scenarios of the EU evolution are realistic? And what might you suggest in their stead?

I said I believe something like your Singapore - more broadly speaking, liberalized dissolution - is the default scenario for the UK, applicable in or out of the EU but with more rapid development outside. Some would call that "pessimism".

[Furunculus]

Well off the mark. I meant it as derived from the Deleuzian/accelerationist sense, but we don't care about those labels so in the concrete sense of political controls being diffused into the hands of trans-national elites, for instance by virtue of their market clout and the overriding imperatives of their economic framework. C.f. what googling the term gets: "the severance of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations."

Ah, I understand what you are talking about now. Thank you. No, I certainly wouldn't aim for that as an explicit goal in public policy making. But I also don't see that it entirely avoidable in a society that embraces globalisation as an opportunity. Nor too I recognise that it will by default be worse under one situation or another: in or out of the EU. The EU is an explicitly political project, and you could make a perfectly good argument that in being sucked into a world where:
1. Politics system is arranged on a more consensual basis
2. Public policy making is framed by a greater respect for the precautionary principle
3. Law-making reflects less a common law growth, preferring instead statute
4. Constitutional arrangements are framed more cautiously with safeguards and limits on parliamentary sovereignty
5. Social policy is assumed to be more collective, with a privelege of equality over liberty
6. Foriegn policy that sees its role only in the softer side of dispute resolution
That we have been deterritorialising the governance of britain from its roots for the last forty years, anyway.

This is exactly what I've been trying to refer to you over time, that leaving the EU ub favor of liberalization to all comers clearly - or if you don't agree with "clearly", then suggestively enough that you can't ignore the possibility - eliminates more popular control, or at least popularly-responsive control, than EU membership ever could in the medium-term.

I accept the possibility, as stated above. I do not consider it to be likely, or inevitable.

As I said, Corbyn appears to believe otherwise, that Brexit is an opportunity to show that the capitalist system can be defied. Summary in a followup post. Pre-emptively I'll state that I think the UK is too small and weak to accomplish this, that the concert of explicit and implicit controls of the world economy, institutions, and state actors results in the rapid and premature electoral expulsion of a radical Labour government. Alternatively, Labour would have to install a socialist-in-name dictatorship and emulate the quasi-self sufficiency of Cuba, an outcome that can hardly be called inspiring (inspiration matters in setting an example to other countries' socialist movements) and one that cannot shield the UK in the long-term context of persistent international capitalism (every factor in the world, from political to technological to ecological, inciting the implosion of the country).

In a world of islands the UK would not be allowed to pretend to be an island, in other words. Maybe EU membership overall provides some sort of buffer, when you need every edge you can get.

I read you post with interest, and I broadly agree with you reading. It is not something I would support - or consider desirable - but it seems a reasonable view of what 'they' might want.

What makes a Singapore from the spending-GDP ratio? It sounds like you're saying not a particular policy, but simply keeping overall spending below 40% of GDP will automatically reproduce some aspect of the Singapore model.
What are you referring to?

Yes, but not just spending ratios. I'd add regulatory 'ratio's if that were a thing. And when I refer to regulation I do not necessarily mean less, rather I mean regulation with less socialised aims. I use the examples of popular public distrust and regulatory banishment of GMO and fracking on the continent, and assume this derives from the more collective social culture which is happy to adopt a precautionary principle in public policy making 'for the public good'.

Anyway, what exact features you envision for a Singapore model, whether these are desirable for most people, and if they are compatible with other narrow aspects of your preferred state (e.g. military interventionism) are a separate topic and beside the point. I'm more interested in why you assent to one kind of politics and not another, and what contradictions are present.

We all assent to one kind of politics or not. We have preferences. We vote the way we vote for inumerable different motivations. I do not talk about the mechanisms of gov't, i.e. how the executive or the civil service should function, but raw politics itself. And the EU is an explicitly political beast itself, and has moved far beyond being merely the implementing arm of the will of the council. And on those terms I am able to reject it on exactly the same terms that I would choose to reject a green/labour/tory manifesto in a general election.

It strikes me as a kind of misuse of the term to, as I suppose you are doing, limit it to the continuous efforts of a central government. Why should private groups and discrete political events be excluded if they arrive at the same type of result? Which is not to say that there is a linear correlation between the aims of the engineers and the actual product, just the opposite. There are always unforeseen consequences. That's why I called it a gamble.

I think your objecting to what I expanded upon in my paragraph above, but I'm not totally sure of that. If so, please say so, and on that assumption; yes, it is a gamble. But I am very happy to have a political system that gives people the tools they need to succeed wildly or fail disasterously. I don't seek artifical restraint on the limits of power through fear. I am a negative liberty kinda individual (a classical liberal), not a positve liberty communitarian (social democrat).

I said I believe something like your Singapore - more broadly speaking, liberalized dissolution - is the default scenario for the UK, applicable in or out of the EU but with more rapid development outside. Some would call that "pessimism".

I agree, but I would call it optimism, because I hold the six points above to be undesirable.

[Furunculus]

Socialists like Corbyn of course have a different take on the opportunities of Brexit. I'll present their view later on. A little bit like your A2 "UKIP[???]-driven scenario"; I can't help but feel they're too optimistic about their case, since your scenario is the default trend for the world at-large regardless of Brexit.

Paul Mason has beaten you to it:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politic...ssels-sabotage

For the left, however, the social market economy is the specific European form of neoliberalism: it prefers private over public, vaunts market mechanism over state direction or subsidy, relies on effective competition to make capitalism fairer, rather than strong regulation. The Bad Godesberg principle adopted by the German social democrats in 1959 – market where possible, state where necessary – was never accepted by British social democracy at the time, and has come to embody the neoliberal reflexes through which Germany runs, dominates and exploits the Eurozone.

A third problem is the domestic political reality Labour expects to face as it enacts the most radical left programme any major country has ever undertaken. The “very British coup” scenario is a non-starter. But mild civil service obstruction, combined with destabilisation by private security and intelligence firms, combined with the nabobs of Brussels issuing arbitrary and vindictive rulings, combined with 30-odd Blairite Labour rebels … that’s what Corbyn needs to guard against.

[Montmorency]

Paul Mason has beaten you to it:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politic...ssels-sabotage

In that case, I'll just compare two angles. [My summaries are respectively ~500 and ~1500 words, read them]

Mason's article:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The EU is a German neoliberal vehicle that seeks to constrain social democracy in the UK to promote its business interests, so a kind of neo-mercantilism. Countries bound in the EU have to operate within certain parameters of state action to keep a "level playing field".

[Modifying Lisbon treaty and capturing European parliament] have to be part of a self-preservation strategy.

Customs union or single market membership is OK as long as there are exemptions from EEA rules. Author prefers a Norway-plus model, but if it and its attendant regulatory autonomies are not possible, then customs-union-only has to be accepted [sounds a lot like Furunc].

However, the real threat is active ideological containment measures on the part of the EU ruling class, such as were undertaken in Greece in 2015. A binding agreement is necessary over potential future Labour government initiatives [isn't that putting cart before horse, does Labour have power in the first place to ensure such a thing?]. Also, civil service and private obstructionists against a Corbyn/radical Labour government would find it harder to justify themselves without appealing to EU intransigence or disapproval.

Pro-EU British liberals think of the EU as more social-democratic than neoliberal, but the Left should disagree (see Furunc's quote). EU promotes "privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation", which can go against national interests. Also, like individual nations, the EU is vulnerable to being captured by the far-right currents du jour, and the unelected Commission even more so.

So Labour needs to do what European social democracy should have done years ago: go to war on the Lisbon Treaty inside the EU, co-ordinating with any social democratic, green and left party in Europe prepared to join in.

[...]

The immediate aims a new EU left alliance should not be a detailed programme or a new party. It should be a declaration in principle against three things: austerity, xenophobia and the erosion of democracy.

European Left alliance forms faction in European parliament and tries to capture Commission presidency.

If the combined forces of progressive Europe could muster enough votes to win the spitzenkandidat election, the appointed boss of the Commission could then appoint a left-led commission. At this point we would find out exactly how much left politics the EU structures can bear.

[Those last are the most interesting bits in the article.]


************


Why the Left Should Embrace Brexit

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

othing better reflects the muddled thinking of the mainstream European left than its stance on Brexit. Each week seems to produce a new chapter for the Brexit scare story: withdrawing from the EU will be an economic disaster for the UK; tens of thousands of jobs will be lost; human rights will be eviscerated; the principles of fair trials, free speech, and decent labor standards will all be compromised. In short, Brexit will transform Britain into a dystopia, a failed state — or worse, an international pariah — cut off from the civilized world. Against this backdrop it’s easy to see why Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is often criticized for his unwillingness to adopt a pro-Remain agenda.

The Left’s anti-Brexit hysteria, however, is based on a mixture of bad economics, flawed understanding of the European Union, and lack of political imagination. Not only is there no reason to believe that Brexit would be an economic apocalypse; more importantly, abandoning the EU provides the British left — and the European left more generally — with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show that a radical break with neoliberalism, and with the institutions that support it, is possible.

Predictions and models of British economic malaise post-Brexit (specifically, post-Brexit vote) have all been wrong. The British economy is actually doing decently on common indicators, well above the negative scenarios. This serves both to demonstrate that Brexit per se won't be a disaster, and that the economists making these predictions have a fundamentally wrong set of premises, which produce fatally flawed models inconsistent with empirical data.

As Larry Elliott, Guardian economics editor, wrote: “Brexit Armageddon was a terrifying vision — but it simply hasn’t happened.”

The neoliberal biases built into these models include the assertion that markets are self-regulating and capable of delivering optimal outcomes so long as they are unhindered by government intervention; that “free trade” is unambiguously positive; that governments are financially constrained; that supply-side factors are much more important than demand-side ones; and that individuals base their decision on “rational expectations” about economic variables, among others. Many of the key assumptions used to construct these exercises bear no relation to reality.

Even British manufacturing is doing well, due to "benefits of the lower pound and improved world trade conditions."

EU membership has had fewer economic benefits than purported. With EEC and EU accession, the growth in GDP per capita fell below the 2.75%/year trend of the 50s and 60s. EU membership did not improve EU-15 measures of GDP-per-labour-hour or per-capita income relative to the United States. The single market and the common currency did not increase the proportion intra-EU or intra-Eurozone exports (it decreased intra-Eurozone). UK exports to EU and Eurozone as share of total UK exports have been falling since the recession.

The much-vaunted establishment of the Single Market in 1992 didn’t change things — neither for the UK nor for the EU as a whole. Even when we limit ourselves to evaluating the success of the Single Market on the basis of mainstream economic parameters — productivity and GDP per capita — there is very little to suggest that it has lived up to its proponents’ promises or to official forecasts.

[Of course, this napkin-back analysis does nothing to indicate that EU/EEC membership was worse than the alternative of non-membership... The point about trade doesn't even address the context of changing trade patterns outside Europe, as though the only way the EU could be successful is if members did all their trade between each other. Maybe EU membership enables diversification of exports outside Europe. And this author doesn't explore the possibility that international trade is not the only measure of human success. Anyway...]

As the Cambridge researchers note, this suggests “a negligible advantage to the UK of being a member of the EU.” Moreover, it shows that Britain has been diversifying its exports for quite some time and is much less reliant on the EU today than it was twenty or thirty years ago. A further observation drawn from the IMF Directions of Trade database is that while global exports have grown fivefold since 1991 and advanced economies exports have grown by 3.91 times, EU and EMU exports have only grown by 3.7 and 3.4 times respectively.

These results are consistent with other studies that show that tariff liberalization in itself does not promote growth or even trade. In fact, the opposite is often true: as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has shown, all of today’s rich countries developed their economies through protectionist measures. This casts serious doubts over the widespread claim that leaving the Single Market would necessarily mean “lower productivity and lower living standards.” It also exposes as utterly “implausible,” in the words of the Cambridge researchers, the Treasury’s claim that Britain has experienced a 76 percent increase in trade due to EU membership, which could be reversed upon leaving the EU. The Cambridge economists conclude that average tariffs are already so low for non-EU nations seeking to trade within the EU that even in the case of a “hard Brexit” trade losses are likely to be limited and temporary.

[The supersized text is kind of true. Alexander Hamilton is probably one of the top-five most influential economists in history.]

Furthermore, it is often forgotten in the debate over Brexit that the Single Market is about much more than just trade liberalization. A crucial tenet of the Single Market was the deregulation of financial markets and the abolition of capital controls, not only among EU members but also between EU members and other countries. As we argue in our recent book, Reclaiming the State, this reflected the new consensus that set in, even among the Left, throughout the 1970s and 1980. This consensus held that economic and financial internationalization — what today we call “globalization” — had rendered the state increasingly powerless vis-à-vis “the forces of the market.” In this reading, countries therefore had little choice but to abandon national economic strategies and all the traditional instruments of intervention in the economy, and hope, at best, for transnational or supranational forms of economic governance.

This resulted in a gradual depoliticization of economic policy, which has been an essential element of the neoliberal project, aimed at insulating macroeconomic policies from popular contestation and removing any obstacles put in the way of capital flows.

The EU-as-neoliberal-institution.

In this sense, it is impossible to separate the Single Market from all the other negative aspects of the European Union. The EU is structurally neoliberal, undemocratic, and neocolonial in nature. It is politically dominated by its largest member and the policies it has driven have had disastrous social and economic effects.

The Left has a hard time abandoning its affection for the EU because it has internalized wrong ideas about trade and prosperity, the importance of public deficits and debts, the possibility of reform, @Husar and that countries can't survive with pooling their sovereignty in supranational institutions.

Even a hard Brexit is likely to have minimal effects on British economy, and most of Britain's worsening problems are related not to Brexit but

to the extent that the UK continues to face serious economic problems — suppressed domestic demand, ballooning private debt, decaying infrastructure, and deindustrialization — these have nothing to do with Brexit, but are instead the result of the neoliberal economic policies pursued by successive British governments in recent decades, including the current Conservative government.

The UK needs more democracy.

While it may be true that in some areas previous right-wing British governments have been positively constrained by the EU in their push for all-out deregulation and marketization, the notion that the British people are incapable of defending their rights in the absence of some form of “external constraint” is patronizing and reactionary.

[...]

As John Weeks, professor emeritus at the University of London, writes: “The painful truth is that the vast majority of British households will be better off out of the European Union with a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn than in the European Union under the yoke of a Conservative government led by anyone.”

The author writes concordantly with the Mason article's argument:

This leads to an obvious conclusion: that for a Corbyn-led Labour government, not being a member of the European Union “solves more problems than it creates,” as Weeks notes. He is referring to the fact that many aspects of Corbyn’s manifesto — such as the renationalization of mail, rail, and energy firms and developmental support to specific companies — or other policies that a future Labour government may decide to implement, such as the adoption of capital controls, would be hard to implement under EU law and would almost certainly be challenged by the European Commission and European Court of Justice. After all, the EU was created with the precise intention of permanently outlawing such “radical” policies.

That is why Corbyn must resist the pressure from all quarters — first and foremost within his own party — to back a “soft Brexit.” He must instead find a way of weaving a radically progressive and emancipatory Brexit narrative. A once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity has opened for the British left — and the European left more in general — to show that a radical break with neoliberalism, and with the institutions that support it, is possible. But it won’t stay open forever.

************


At this time there is no more use in trying to litigate these perspectives from the position of staying in the EU - Brexit is a fact of life - so I guess the more interesting tack is to figure out what exactly it means for the Labour party and its strategy going forward.

I see the Corbynite strand is to assert that the neoliberal order is not indispensable even in the short-term, rewriting the multilateral rules is necessary so that it doesn't become entirely a tool of Russia/China on one hand or big business on the other, the UK has the power and wherewithal to embark on an intense round of state capitalism paving the way for socialist transformation, and that proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Bold.

@Pannonian

You've consistently been resentful of the current Labour party's risk-taking wrt government and Brexit; perhaps there is no better option left? He who dares, wins?

Hey, maybe my belief that only America can model socialism to the world is jingoist fantasy, and any reasonably-big country can do it.

[Montmorency]

Well, I'm skeptical about a lot of the economic points on the usefulness of the EU - how bad is the EU in the context of late-20th c. neoliberal trends compared to a scenario without the EU, each country racing to its bottom? - and the immediate costs of taking on the world order (some foolish people, like Goebbels-puke Julian Assange literally believe that you have to bring the US down and let Russia and China do whatever they want with the pieces in order to have room to maneuver)...

But I think that MIGHT makes 'the ability to do right', so even our current market system would be forced to respond to a state producing results with socialist policies.

Everything would ride on a Corbyn experiment not crashing and burning, when many would be working at its neutralization.

[Pannonian]

@Pannonian

You've consistently been resentful of the current Labour party's risk-taking wrt government and Brexit; perhaps there is no better option left? He who dares, wins?

The Loyal Opposition is supposed to challenge the government on their promises to the electorate. The Labour party has done nothing of the sort. The Loyal Opposition is allowing the government to do whatever it likes and present it as the will of the people. What's the point of an Opposition, including a leader who draws an additional salary to the comfortable figure he already commands as an MP, if they do not oppose? The Lords has been more of a Loyal Opposition than the Labour party.

[Montmorency]

The Loyal Opposition is supposed to challenge the government on their promises to the electorate. The Labour party has done nothing of the sort. The Loyal Opposition is allowing the government to do whatever it likes and present it as the will of the people. What's the point of an Opposition, including a leader who draws an additional salary to the comfortable figure he already commands as an MP, if they do not oppose? The Lords has been more of a Loyal Opposition than the Labour party.

If that's the case, what next besides fretting about it? What is the Labour Party doing elsewhere in government (vis-a-vis Conservative policy)? What would you want them to do in the near-future that they aren't?

And to the extent that a Party offers its own coherent set of promises, would that count towards challenging the government/opposition's conduct?