Ideas on Europe Blog

Somewhere in Whitehall, there’s a small office. In it, a bright young thing is working hard on Brexit. As the afternoon sun bounces down to the tiny window that provides the only fresh air, a spark flares up in the bright young thing’s mind. They dash down the corridor to their line manager, bursting through the door to breathlessly stutter: “I… I think I’ve solved how to do it.”

This, to a not inconsiderable extent, presents how many in government would have liked things to go over the past two years: a model to solve all the problems and leave everyone stunned by its beauty and creativity: Britain is GREAT at cunning plans, indeed.

Sadly, things haven’t quite worked out like this.

The breadth and depth of the issues involved, plus the rather arbitrary red lines that May set out upon her entry into Number 10, have made both simple and cunning solutions impossible. The best our imagined bright young thing might come up with is that something’s got to give.

In fairness to the government, this last point has been evident for quite some time: the difficulty has been in deciding what should give and how that’s going to be broken to all involved.

Neither of these are easy, even before we add in the obvious political and reputational costs that would be incurred. In the very worst case, the government might make a concession that leads to its demise as a viable political unit: leadership contests, party splits, general elections, ‘out of power for a generation’, etc., etc.

But at the same time there is also the ever-stronger conviction that to leave the EU without a deal would be an unnecessary and deeply counter-productive move: the ‘freedom’ it might generate would be lost in the miasma of uncertainty and damage to the UK’s standing in the international community. As the on-going discussion about an FTA with the US underlines, the UK is very much a demandeur: its need to show it can still get deals means everyone else can set a high price. Domestically, there’s also plenty to worry about as it is, even if things do run smoothly.

So let’s play the game for a bit: what does the UK have to give way on?

The big one is the balance between alignment, territorial integrity and the Irish border. If the ability to diverge matters more, then the backstop looks the least painful way to do that. The DUP won’t be happy, but if Labour get on board with the package, then it doesn’t matter (in Commons arithmetic terms, at least). If diverging isn’t so important – and remember there’s a difference between diverging and having the potential to diverge – then full UK alignment on backstop terms might work, And if neither of those work, then the UK government needs to get ready for a no deal outcome.

The smaller issue is the role of the Court: it matters, but less so, not least because technical work-arounds look more viable (mainly because they’ve already been tired out elsewhere). But essentially it requires the UK to give way on its very literal interpretation of this red line, which was never realistic in any case (as government lawyers doubtless pointed out at the time).

The cover for all this is some kind of ‘temporary‘ arrangement: witness the by-the-by noting that given the current inability to go either the customs partnership or maximum facilitation, we might just have to live with a decade or so of full alignment: lift your eyes from the mud to look at our bright, bold future.

At some level this makes sense: if people are willing to accept that this is a complex change and takes time to do properly, then the deferral might be worth it. However, if they consider it to be another step down the road of endless delay, then it’s not going to work.

Of course, much hangs on which ‘people’ we’re talking about.

In essence it’s the Tory backbench that matters here. Cabinet has its splits, but the agency of any faction to impress its preferences depends on the 1922 Committee and the ERG. Likewise, a determined backbench can stymie any attempt to reach across the aisle by prompting leadership challenges.

As I’ve noted before, the backbench isn’t minded to crash the Brexit bus, but that doesn’t mean it won’t exert a good deal of pressure on May and the Cabinet’s work over the coming months. Any putative challenger needs the cover of a conclusion of a deal before moving in, so might feel that concessions are acceptable, especially if it allows them to strengthen their case that they would have done a better job, if only they’d been in charge at the time.

However, as so often in this process, nothing is really certain. Individuals might prove inflexible, by design or by accident. Events might conspire to deny enough room for manoeuvre. The EU might succumb to hubris and overplay its hand.

Pretty much the only thing that’s clear is that the rest of 2018 are not going to be easy going for anyone involved in this. A bright young thing might decide to just keep their head down, rather than get stuck in: that might make sense for them, but not for the process as a whole.

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EHEA Ministerial conference in Yerevan in 2015. Photo credits: Fernando Miguel Galan Palomares

Martina Vukasovic

 

Embodying multi-level and multi-actor characteristics of governance

That governance of higher education and research takes place across several governance levels – institutional, national, European – is, arguably, common knowledge. The beginning of the Bologna Process and the launching of the Lisbon Strategy almost 20 years ago greatly intensified European integration and Europeanization in these two domains, as evident in European funded cooperation programmes, national reforms and institutional adaptations. While these developments are marked with various tensions between governance levels, as well as different policy domains, they are also characterized by strong involvement of stakeholder organizations, adding the ‘multi-actor’ aspect to the ‘multi-level’ description of governance arrangements.

 

What is interesting is that many of these ‘new’ actors are multi-level organizations themselves. For example, the European University Association (EUA), a consultative member of the Bologna Follow Up Group and contributor to public consultations organized by the European Commission, has national rectors’ conferences and individual universities as members, both of which are active in policy development in their own domestic policy arenas. The same goes for other university associations and alliances (e.g. EURASHE, LERU), European Students Union (ESU), professional and disciplinary organizations. Moreover, institutions, decision-making and advisory structures at the European level – such as the European Research Council or the Advisory Group on the European Qualifications Frameworks – are connected to national or institutional policy-making through their individual members and their own connections that span governance levels.

 

It is such collective non-state actors that operate across governance levels – i.e. transnational actors – that are the focus of the recently published special issue of the European Educational Research Journal, co-edited by Tatiana Fumasoli (Institute of Education, University College London), Bjørn Stensaker (Department of Education, University of Oslo) and Martina Vukasovic (Centre for Higher Education Governance, Ghent University).

 

Transnational actors as expert platforms, (latent) interest groups, meta-organizations, and linkages between governance levels

In the introduction to the special issue, the co-editors present various theoretical perspectives that have been employed thus far in analysis of transnational actors, including European integration, multi-level governance, comparative politics, policy analysis, organizational sociology and higher education research. These perspectives highlight different attributes of these transnational actors, e.g. their role in interest intermediation is particularly interesting for comparative politics, while the fact that many of them are meta-organizations – organizations of other organizations – is specifically visible through the lens of organizational sociology. The five contributions to the special issue each employ one or more of these perspectives, focusing on the shifting relationship between governance and knowledge, and on how new actors influence the processes and outcomes of decision-making within the field of higher education.

 

The European Qualifications Framework Advisory Group (EQFAG) is analysed by Mari Elken, who sheds light on the conditions conducive to organizational stability and legitimacy of a key organization in European knowledge governance. Elken’s study of how EQFAG was institutionalized shows that, while the EU constructs policy arenas to be filled up, actors profit from room to manoeuver and flexibility with regards to their new roles, suggesting that European level policy arenas can (also) act as opportunity structures for policy entrepreneurs.

 

Martina Vukasovic and Bjørn Stensaker compare two university alliances – EUA and LERU – focusing on how diverse membership bases (i.e. comprehensive vs selective) and diverse resources lead to somewhat differentiated roles and representation of interests in European policy-making. While both alliances have rather easy access to EU decision-makers, the bases for their legitimacy are different, affecting their positioning as well as the breadth and ambiguity of interests they advocate for.

 

Looking at three European student organizations (ESU, ESN, and AEGEE) Manja Klemenčič and Fernando Miguel Galan Palomares investigate the conditions determining insiders and outsiders in European knowledge policy processes. Their article shows how legitimacy plays a major role in accessing EU institutions and policy processes, even when organizational structures and resources are similar.

 

Tatiana Fumasoli and Marco Seeber provide a mapping of European academic associations, focusing on their missions, structures, and positioning. Their findings articulate a nuanced landscape where traditional scholarly associations coexist with socially orientated academic associations. Equally, their article offers an insight into the different patterns of centre–periphery structures from a geographical, political, and resource perspective and highlights the coexistence of traditional and innovative academic organizations with varied levels of access to European institutions.

 

Finally, Bo Persson investigates the role played by key Swedish science policy actors in the process of building the European Research Council (ERC) in the 2000s. The article shows how national policy actors have leveraged on their organizational capacity and legitimacy to contribute to European agenda-setting and policy formation. Importantly, the article shows how national policy actors are able to do this partly through bypassing their own state authorities, thus becoming embedded in the European policy arena.

 

Key ingredients for understanding governance of the Europe of knowledge

The in-depth analyses provided in this special issue show how European transnational actors can be conceptualized and compared according to their mandates and missions, organizational structures and decision-making processes, through their linkages to the EU institutions, the levels and types of influence in policy-making, and their position in the broader arena of European knowledge policies. These characteristics can be seen as the outcome of policy design, and of strategic intent, but also as the result of incremental and organic changes. Overall, while expertise and legitimacy could be considered requirements to access and influence policy processes, we suggest that organizational structures, resources, identities, and decision-making processes of these transnational actors need to be scrutinized further. The latter point implies that insights from comparative politics and organizational studies might be combined into a valuable framework for studying European governance in general, and that we need more studies in this area if we are to understand the governance of the Europe of Knowledge.

 

Martina Vukasovic is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG) at Ghent University. In her research she combines insights from comparative politics, policy analysis and organizational sociology in order to analyse multi-level multi-actor governance in knowledge intensive policy domains (e.g. higher education, research). More specifically, she focuses on the role of stakeholder organizations in policy processes, the interaction between European, national and organizational level changes, and the relationship between policy coordination and policy convergence. She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo and a joint MPhil (Erasmus Mundus) degree by the universities of Oslo, Tampere and Aveiro.

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Mike Ungersma argues the West may have made  

fundamental mistakes in confronting Putin’s Russia

“Russia is unlucky with timing. Everything that happened 150, 200 years ago in other countries is happening here as we speak.  You guys had your civil wars in long-ago centuries. The last murder of your king was in 1649.  We killed out Nicholas II 100 years ago.”

Russian industrialist Vladimir Potanin, Lunch with the FT

Imagine a country where your grandparents could speak of their land invaded twice in their lifetimes, two wars that saw tens of thousands of their homes destroyed, their factories looted, their cites wasted, and above all, millions of their young men killed in the worst combat in modern times. It is almost impossible, to think of any nation that has suffered more in terms of loss than Russia. But that was long ago, and while Russia has mostly recovered from the disaster, it did so along a different path than its European neighbours.

Sold on a perverted form of Maxism, led by a series of dictators starting with Stalin, the country’s post-war development stalled, stuttered from one achievement to another – all of them modest and comparatively insignificant – while the remainder of Europe moved forward, first haltingly and then spectacularly with its modified and tempered form of capitalism.  But in the East, dramatically and without warning, the “Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics” staggered and collapsed leaving behind a colossal and confused muddle of states.

The events that followed are sadly familiar.  Russia moved from a centrally planned economy to rampant oligarchy and the single-handed rule of Vladimir Putin.  By international standards the performance of its economy is mediocre at best, and almost totally reliant on the fluctuating demand for its gas and oil exports. And even they, especially oil, face an uncertain future as the world seeks more environmentally friendly alternatives.  As President Obama remarked in his last press conference, Russia “does not produce anything anybody wants to buy.”

The question that arises is why?  Why did this vast nation end up as it is today?  Given the same chances the nations of the rest of Europe had, what prompted Russians to choose the road toward continued tyranny – however disguised?  And importantly, what could the West have done to encourage Russians to steer a different course?

“The problem with the Soviet people is our country was like a cell.” It is the comment of one of those oligarchs – Vladimir Potanin, in his luncheon meeting with the Financial Times’ Henry Foy in Potanin’s private country club he built for himself and his friends an hour’s drive from Moscow.  “We were cut off,” Potanin tells Foy.  “And then we became suddenly open…those who had appetite for risks and understanding and skills of course had an advantage.”

What the “system” produced  – if corrupt and colluding government and private interests can be called a system – was a Russia where all of the state’s important assets were sold off in the infamous ‘loans for shares’ scheme.  The government callously used the country’s most valuable resources as security for loans that according to Foy, both bankers and politicians knew would never be repaid.  It resulted in a handful of oligarchs controlling 50 per cent of the entire Russian economy.

If individual nations have a certain dominant psychological characteristic, then Putin’s response to all of this was highly predictable.  Russia was like the person who fails in achieving anything important and then lashes out at others, seeking to draw attention away from his failures.  Putin flexes Russia’s military muscles to demonstrate that the country remains a powerful player on the world stage. Moreover he uses the internet’s social media to sabotage everything from Western elections to objective journalism because it is the only instrument short of open aggression available to him.  He struts and boasts, and like Donald Trump, tells the his countrymen he is determined to “make Russia great again.”

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of ordinary Russians, who for centuries have shown no real interest or understanding of representative government.  Russia, under czars or commissars, has produced no great political thinkers or philosophers – they are very thin on the ground.  Because they are not ‘citizens’ in any Western sense, Russians seem bored with the very idea of democracy with its tedious insistence on wide-spread public discussion and consultation, and its elaborate and complex electoral systems intended to insure the majority rules but only without trampling on the rights and wishes of those who disagree.  It’s easier to let Putin decide.

Could it all of this have been prevented?  Could Russia at a crucial turning point in its history – the fall of the Berlin Wall – have been steered and nudged toward democracy?  Does the West share any culpability for the present situation, what some are describing as a new “Cold War”?  The answer must almost certainly be – Yes.

Mikhail Gobachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika were bold moves that ultimately won him a Nobel prize in 1990, but they were met with indifference in the West – NATO continued to regard the now-prostrate Soviet Union as a threatening enemy.   His successor, Boris Yeltsin, continued with significant reforms.  They failed to work.  Confronted with sagging oil prices, corruption and the rise of the oligarchs, Russia’s economy not only stagnated but fell into deep recession.

In her book, The Russian Kleptocracy and the Rise of Organised Crime, Johanna Granville writes: “Yeltsin’s policies led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market”.  Wall Street was busy, seeing a chance to profit from the decaying corpse.

Not only was the West indifferent to the democratizing opportunities that events in Russia threw up, in many ways it sought to exploit Russia’s weaknesses as its economy collapsed.  It is what historian Niall Ferguson has called “Western overreach.”  One by one, former Warsaw Pact allies of the Soviet Union were invited to join NATO.  Writing in the journal Foreign Policy earlier this year, Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, said

Days after the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in March 1999, the alliance began a three-month bombing campaign against Serbia — which, like Russia, is a Slavic Orthodox state. These attacks on a brother country appalled ordinary Russians, especially since they were not carried out in defence of a NATO member, but to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo, then a Serbian province.

And the view from the Kremlin?  Steil writes: “Moscow knew that its former vassals, by joining the alliance, had now bound themselves to support Western policies that challenged Russian interests. The farther east NATO expanded, the more threatening it would become.”

And where NATO led, the European Union was not far behind.  By 2004, no less than eight former Warsaw Pact nations were offered accession to the organisation, the largest single enlargement in the Union’s history.  And in 2007, they were joined by two more former Communist countries, Romania and Bulgaria.  Russia’s historic buffer against another German invasion had disappeared.

In this context, Putin’s reaction – seen by Professor Ferguson as a “striking impersonation of Michael Corleone in The Godfather – the embodiment of implicit menace” – is hardly surprising.

Now, the West, faced with an increasingly hostile Russia, with its newly re-elected president, maybe it should consider the advice of Vladimir Potanin, the oligarch featured in the Financial Times interview:

 Maybe this is why it is so difficult for the western world to understand Russia.   I return to this word: tolerance.   You guys finished with certain issues many centuries ago.  We are living through them.  Mine is a generation born in the Soviet Union, and you do not understand what that means.  You are asking from us certain behaviour.  But we were born in a concentration camp.  Do you really expect from us behaviour of kids born in London?  When you guys are teaching us, be careful, be polite.

Mike Ungersma, Cardiff, Wales, May 2018

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The Tory government is still entirely split on what type of Brexit Britain should have.

And if the government can’t now agree on what Brexit means, how on earth could the electorate have known what Brexit meant on 23 June 2016?

This weekend the Tory-supporting Telegraph reported that:

‘At least a dozen members of Theresa May’s Cabinet are lining up to block her plans for a new “customs partnership” with the European Union.’

The Telegraph added that it had established that:

‘12 out of a total of 28 individuals who sit in Cabinet alongside Mrs May oppose her favoured plans for Britain’s post-Brexit customs relationship with the EU.’

But government sources, reported The Telegraph, believe that as many as 15 cabinet ministers now oppose Mrs May’s Brexit plans.

• On the one hand, Mrs May supports a “customs partnership” whereby the UK would collect tariffs on behalf of the EU – but without the need for new border checks.
• But hardline Brexiters prefer a different system called “maximum facilitation” – or ‘max fac’ – based on using technology to minimise the need for customs checks after Brexit.

Sixty Tory MPs from the pro-Leave European Research Group (ERG) have written to Mrs May warning that her proposal for a “customs partnership” is unworkable and could cause the “collapse” of the Government.

However, EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has called both options “unworkable”.

Commented Luke Lythgoe on InFacts this weekend,

‘This rather predictable mess wasn’t mentioned, let alone interrogated, during the referendum campaign.

‘If the public don’t like the interminable mess the government has gotten itself into, they should demand a people’s vote on whatever Brexit deal our dithering prime minister eventually manages to produce.’

I agree. Brexit has become a shambles. Who voted for that?

It’s time the government asked ‘the people’ what is their will today, rather than relying on what they think it was yesterday (i.e. two years ago).

 

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It’s reported that police are investigating evidence that the chief executive of a key organisation that campaigned for Brexit allegedly committed criminal offences during the 2016 referendum.

This comes after the Electoral Commission fined Leave.EU the maximum £70,000 for multiple breaches of electoral rules.

The organisation is backed by Nigel Farage and funded by Arron Banks, and played a key role in campaigning for Brexit in the referendum.

The group failed to reveal “at least” £77,380 in its spending following the referendum vote, meaning it exceeded the legal spending limits for the referendum, as laid down by law.

The Electoral Commission has also referred a key figure in Leave.EU’s management team, Liz Bilney, to the Metropolitan Police due to “reasonable grounds to suspect” that criminal offences have occurred.

Mr Banks has refuted all the findings of the Electoral Commission.

The Electoral Commission’s director of political finance, Bob Posner, said:

“The rules we enforce were put in place by Parliament to ensure transparency and public confidence in our democratic processes.

“It is therefore disappointing that Leave.EU, a key player in the EU referendum, was unable to abide by these rules.

“Leave.EU exceeded its spending limit and failed to declare its funding and its spending correctly. These are serious offences. The level of fine we have imposed has been constrained by the cap on the Commission’s fines.”

The watchdog found the group had exceeded the spending limit for non-party registered campaigners by at least 10 per cent and said that the unlawful over-spend “may well have been considerably higher”.

A spokeswoman for Scotland Yard spokeswoman told The Independent:

“We can confirm that the Electoral Commission has referred a potential criminal offence under section 123(4) of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

“This matter will be subject to assessment by officers from the Special Enquiry Team.”

The Electoral Commission’s investigation also uncovered that Leave.EU did not properly report the receipt of three loans from Mr Banks, totalling £6m, with dates around the transaction and the related interest rate incorrectly reported.

According to ‘The Code of Good Practice on Referendums’ issued by the Venice Commission, if the cap on spending is exceeded in a referendum by a significant amount, “the vote must be annulled.”

The Code, which is a non-binding guideline, was adopted by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission in 2006/2007.

The Venice Commission is an advisory body of the Council of Europe, composed of independent experts in the field of constitutional law. It was created in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time of urgent need for constitutional assistance in Central and Eastern Europe.

The UK is a member of the Council of Europe and has signed up to the Venice Commission.

Members of the Commission are “senior academics, particularly in the fields of constitutional or international law, supreme or constitutional court judges or members of national parliaments”.

Representing the UK on the Commission is Jeffrey Jowell, Professor of Law and former Dean of University College London.

The work of the Commission in the field of elections, referendums and political parties is steered by the Council for Democratic Elections (CDE).

The CDE is made up of representatives of the Venice Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.

Their Code of Good Practice on Referendums states under clause 3.3. on referendum funding:

“National rules on both public and private funding of political parties and election campaigns must be applicable to referendum campaigns.

“As in the case of elections, funding must be transparent, particularly when it comes to campaign accounts.

“In the event of a failure to abide by the statutory requirements, for instance if the cap on spending is exceeded by a significant margin, the vote must be annulled.

“It should be pointed out that the principle of equality of opportunity applies to public funding; equality should be ensured between a proposal’s supporters and opponents.”

The Code, however, is a guide only, and not legally binding. It’s also not clear whether the referendum overspend by Leave.EU of “at least £77,380” would represent “a significant margin” to warrant the referendum vote being annulled.

However, it’s now becoming clearer that the referendum campaign was seriously flawed, with overspending by Leave.EU that broke election law, and allegations of criminality, on top of all the lies and mistruths that the Leave campaigns had to rely upon to win the referendum.

Anyone who believes in democracy, whether a Leave or Remain supporter, should now be seriously concerned about the validity of the result of the EU referendum of 23 June 2016.

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As we enter a period of heightened debate about customs arrangements, it’s useful to consider who holds what power in the Article 50 process.

As rational choice bods like to tell us, the more people who hold vetoes, the harder it is to please them all and more chance there is of non-agreement. However, in this case – and unlike most others – a non-agreement is not the same as the status quo ante.

Instead, Article 50 leads to the UK leaving on 29 March 2019 without a deal, unless something is agreed otherwise (either on the deal front or the date front, or both).

This matters, because it potentially changes the calculations within the UK about crashing the Brexit bus.

But first a quick word about why I’m going to focus on the UK.

The EU has always sought an orderly and speedy resolution of Brexit, both because it wants to maintain good relations and because this is the best way to get it off the table, to allow the EU to crack on with everything else it’s got to do. While it can live with a no-deal outcome, it has given no indication that it wants this and indeed been responsible for producing most of the detail that has been agreed so far. Even the stuff that hasn’t been agreed is largely framed by the EU – think of the Irish options – so bus-crashing is not going to come, in the first instance, from their side.

So back to the UK.

Let’s think about who holds veto powers over Theresa May, who we’ll take as the prime mover in advancing Article 50 on the British side. Clearly others are deeply involved, but as Prime Minister she holds the reins of power.

First port of call is Cabinet. If it presents a sufficiently unified front of opposition to May, then it leaves her with little scope to advance her agenda (whatever it might be). The Rudd-induced reshuffle last week has shown how this might work, with hard Brexiters gaining an upper hand. But likewise it also shows the limitations, with a Prime Minister and Chancellor willing to continue pushing a softer line. That suggests that removal of May would likely be necessary to effect a radical change of policy.

Which brings us to the Conservative party. MPs hold the power to remove May and cause a leadership election. However, some caveats apply here too. Most obviously, the parliamentary party has limited scope to control who replaces May: unless they can crown a unity candidate – unlikely, if they’ve kicked out May – they have to take their two preferred choices to the wider party. Secondly, replacing May means opening up a possibility of another general election, especially if Brexit policy changes clearly, and the farce of last year is still a bit too raw, even if Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t look quite as challenging as before. And thirdly, The only point of replacing May now would be to secure a different deal within Article 50, rather than killing it all off.

And that raises a different route for bus-crashing. If the party’s interest is in a hard Brexit, then it’s simpler just to try and frustrate the current leadership and play for time. As long as they can run it all out to next March, then the job’s done. Framed as May’s inability to lead/listen/reflect the will of the people/etc, that puts more of the blame on her and allows a new leader to come in and try to clear up the mess she’s made (sic).

However, all this depends on a third key actor: the Labour party.

If Labour decides to use the opportunity now or in the meaningful vote to wreck the Conservatives, then they make it much easier for hard Brexiters to secure a no-deal: there are more than enough of the latter to deprive the government of a majority to pass a package that the EU says it will not amend.

Of course, if Labour decide that an orderly – if imperfect – exit is more important than party politics (and their thoughts are very unclear on this right now), then the opposite applies: May can withstand hard Brexiter pressure much more effectively.

And in either case, Labour votes would swamp any effect of DUP ones, which would seem to render their role in supporting the Conservatives rather moot.

But, but, but.

Two thoughts occur here.

The first is simply that this arrangement of veto players has been in place for some long time now, certainly since the general election. And yet none of the bus-crashing options has taken place: everyone’s make lots of noise, but action has been short on the ground.

Given the time-bounded nature of Article 50, if hard Brexiters wanted a new leadership to negotiate a harder agreed deal, then sooner would have been better than latter. This suggests that either they didn’t feel confident they could remove May, or that she would succumb to pressure, or that they might better aim for the delay-to-cause-no-deal option.

All three of those still look possible, although as time passes the emphasis swings to the last one.

And this leads to the two thought, namely that May is well aware of the pressures and is seeking to play them off each other.

The prevarication over customs arrangements is very much a case in point. Neither the customs partnership nor the maximum facilitation option is currently acceptable to the EU, so this is much more about setting the tone for the future relationship. The former points towards staying in a customs union until the details can be worked out, while the latter suggests the UK leaves at the end of transition and then works to reduce the barriers that causes. In short, it’s the politics of the long transition once again, in different clothing.

For May, time is both a problem and a help. It’s a problem because she still needs to get to a deal by October – given the lack of movement on Ireland, that looks difficult – but it’s also a help in managing her domestic veto players.

The longer she can postpone a final reckoning, the less time is left for a new administration to change course, and the more costs any bus-crashers will carry: she can off-load more of the blame on to them, in effect. That can be seen in the likely timing of Parliament’s ‘meaningful vote’, which will come so late as to make it meaningless and allow May to ask opponents on both sides of the House whether they want to be the ones to wreck it all.

TINA will be the rallying cry: it’s not good, but it’s the only option on table.

That’s a risky game to play, precisely because Article 50’s default is exit with no deal. If this is May’s strategy, then she has to rely not only on a substantial section of her party not to eject her, but also on a Labour party that struggles to know how to proceed.

The bus is still on the road, but the hairpins are still to come.

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Group work can be very fruitful and engaging but there can be conflicts, disagreements and disengagement. Roskilde University students have to write six group projects during their BA degree, and will most likely experience group conflicts. It is, therefore, important to give the students the tools to manage group work.

It can be difficult for a supervisor to identify problems with group dynamics, especially when the group is not replying to emails nor turning up to meetings or only part of the group turning up for supervision. Whilst lack of communication also happens with supervision of one person, it is much easier to see that the student is struggling, whereas it is more difficult to identify what is going on with a group of three to six students. Thus, we have workshops, which focus on project work and group dynamics, thereby giving the students the tools to overcome inter-personal differences.

The workshops are taught in collaboration with the student guidance office. The student guidance office helps students overcoming group conflicts and in general advises the students on their study options. Lecturers and supervisors are not trained in conflict mediation and often advice the students to contact the student guidance office for help. Thus, the collaboration with the student guidance office enables us to highlight both academic and inter-personal dilemmas that might exist when you do group work.

In the first semester, the workshop introduces Belbin’s nine team roles, which gives the students insights into the roles they can have in groups and how these might change from group to group. In the second semester, the students have a workshop on how to manage group conflicts, where we draw on Belbin’s team roles and the students’ own experiences from their first semester group project.  Both first and second semester workshops discuss group contracts, which are agreements between the group members on how to work together. Group contracts can be written, verbal and they are sometimes very detailed (include social time together). The overall aim of the group contract is to manage expectations.

Group conflicts often arise either due to academically disagreement about the direction of the project, which leads to group split, or personal conflict, where one person in the group is seen as not contributing towards the shared project. Academic disagreements tend to lead to amicable splits. The personal conflicts are more difficult.  Often, a person is ‘kicked out’ or excluded from because the other group members think the person has not contributed to the project. The lack of contribution to the group project can be due to personal issues, e.g. health or family problems, or because the person is not meeting academic expectations. Most groups will solve the issues themselves without asking for help from the supervisor or the student guidance office.

Sometimes the relations within a group is beyond repair, then, the group can ask for formal permission from the team coordinator or director of study to split up. As a team coordinator for the BA International Social Science programme, I cannot fix things, but I can try to make sure the students depart on good terms, so they can face each other again in class the next day. There have been cases in the past, where a group has ‘kicked a student out’ and subsequently told everyone in the class about how ‘stupid’ or ‘difficult’ the person is, which has prevented the student from finding a new group. Ultimately this backstabbing can affect the student’s reputation throughout his/her studies.

Over the past two years, I have focused on preventing ‘bad break ups’ by talking to the students about group work during fresher’s week, project group formation and the students have worked on group dynamics in the workshops. Here I have emphasised that throughout our career we will all experience good and bad working relations. We do not always decide whom to work with, yet we still have to deliver a project and it is, therefore, important to manage expectations and keep a professional working relation. Overall, I have seen an improvement in how the students work together, they have become more aware of managing their projects, managing expectations, understanding the different group roles and how you switch between the roles thereby creating a good working environment in their group research projects.

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Esta reseña aparece publicada en la Revista Actualidad Jurídica Aranzadi y se enmarca dentro del Programa Leyendo en Clave Jurídica 2017-2018 de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Deusto.

 

Europa vive tiempos convulsos. La crisis del euro, los refugiados, el terrorismo, el Brexit, la extrema derecha, el populismo, el euroescepticismo o el fracaso de una Europa social matraquean los oídos de aquellos que trabajan en Bruselas. Es necesario reexaminar la idea original de Europa y, concretamente, el proyecto de los Padres Fundadores que inspiraron la actual Unión Europea (UE). Uno de estos líderes fue Alcide de Gasperi y a quien descubrimos en la obra “Europa: escritos y discursos” editada por Encuentro en 2011. Gasperi nació en Trento el 3 de abril de 1881. Fue Primer Ministro italiano, Ministro de Asuntos Exteriores y el primer Presidente de la Comunidad Europea del Carbón y del Acero. Gasperi experimentó de cerca las guerras mundiales y el fascismo. En 1919, el Partido Popular Italiano que cofundó fue ilegalizado por las fuerzas fascistas lideradas por Mussolini y, en 1927, fue encarcelado hasta que dieciséis meses más tarde fue liberado. Tras el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial se comprometió con el proyecto europeo dada su convicción de que el futuro no se construiría “por la fuerza ni por el afán de conquista, sino por la paciente aplicación del método democrático, el espíritu de consenso constructivo y el respeto de la libertad” (p. 196).

Las terribles consecuencias de la guerra y el fascismo determinaron queGasperi fuera el principal precursor de una política común europea de defensa y el desarrollo de un ejército europeo que garantizase la paz. Si bien su propuesta destinada a establecer una Comunidad Europea de Defensa fracasó, desde el año 2016 la inestabilidad en las fronteras exteriores de la Unión y la volatilidad del entorno geopolítico ha reactivado el debate sobre si debe crearse una autoridad europea de defensa en la que se integren las fuerzas armadas de los Estados miembros. Asimismo, Gasperi trabajó por frenar el nacionalismo y promover el entendimiento entre naciones. En su opinión, el éxito de la unidad europea pasaba por la formación de una mentalidad común y supranacional. De lo contrario, “las instituciones supranacionales serían insuficientes y podrían convertirse en una palestra de competición de intereses particulares, si los hombres propuestos para ello no se sintiesen mandatarios de intereses superiores europeos” (p. 199).

La actual UE acusa la falta de un proyecto político propio, fuerte e independiente. Como señala el propio Gasperi, “Europa existe pero está encadenada, son estos hierros los que hay que romper” (p. 215). La UE está hoy encadenada a medidas cortoplacistas que deben satisfacer los intereses partidistas de cada Estado miembro. No existe un proyecto europeo que rompa con la apropiación a nivel estatal de los éxitos derivados de la integración e impida la descarga de los fracasos nacionales en la UE. La Unión del siglo XXI ha de reencontrarse con la Europa concebida por Gasperi que no es otra que la fundada en “el espíritu democrático de las instituciones libres y la aspiración de realizar una mayor justicia social” (p. 188).

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Nobody gave ‘informed consent’ for Brexit. That’s because, in the 2016 referendum, the electorate was not sufficiently informed.

There was no blueprint, plan, proposal or manifesto for Brexit.

And there still isn’t. The Tory Cabinet is entirely split on what type of Brexit Britain should have.

And if the government can’t now agree on what Brexit means, how on earth could the electorate have known what Brexit meant on 23 June 2016?

We now know more about Brexit than we knew before. And in a few months time, we will know much more, including details of the final Brexit deal.

That’s why there needs to be a new vote on Brexit – so that this time, ‘the people’ can give their informed response.

The #PeoplesVote.

Based on the facts about Brexit, and not the falsities and flannel we were told during the referendum.

After all, when Parliament considers a decision, it’s allowed numerous debates, and multiple votes, over many months, and it can make changes, or abandon the decision, at any stage.

To allow ‘the people’ only ONE vote, on ONE day, on a vague idea for Brexit, without another vote on the actual final proposal, is not democratic. It’s tyrannical.

If our political masters are truly interested in ‘the will of the people’ they should have no hesitation in asking us what is our will today, rather than to keep relying on what they thought our will was yesterday (i.e. two years ago).

If the final details of Brexit are so good, then what have Brexiters got to worry about?

But if Brexiters have so little confidence in Brexit that they dare not let ‘the people’ have any further say about it, we should all be suspicious.

• As suspicious as we’d be about a double-glazing salesman who won’t let us get out of the deal, even though the deal isn’t anywhere close to what was originally promised.
• As suspicious as we’d be about putting an offer on a house, but not being allowed to cancel the offer when the surveyor’s report details serious problem after problem.

Because when buying a house, or ordering double-glazing, it’s ‘Subject to Contract’.

And that’s how it should be with Brexit.

Brexit is not yet agreed. And nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. So nothing is agreed.

Brexit is not yet a done deal.

If the details of Brexit had been agreed, we’d have voted on those details on 23 June 2016. But we didn’t have any details then. When we have the details, we need a new vote.

We need to insist that Brexit is ‘Subject to Contract’ – and that we, ‘the people’, should be able to express our view on that contract when we know what it is.

Remember, not one of the government’s impact assessments give any good news about Brexit. The government’s own ‘surveyors’ reports on Brexit detail serious problem after problem, and not one validated benefit.

Of course, Parliament should have the final say on Brexit – because Parliament is sovereign, and we live in a Parliamentary democracy.

But to help them to reach a decision, they should first ask us, ‘the people’, for our opinion on whether we really want to go ahead with Brexit, based on new facts we didn’t know before.

In a democracy, as in our own personal lives, we are allowed to change our minds.

The government should now say to ‘the people’:

‘This is the Brexit Britain will get. Now tell us, are you sure this is what you want?’

Only those who are against democracy will disagree.

Because a new vote on Brexit means more democracy, not less.

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One year after the disastrous TV debate, where does the Front National stand in spring 2018?

One year ago, on 3 May 2017, I watched the final debate between the two remaining candidates for French presidency. It turned out to be the most curious ‘Surreality TV show’ ever on French television. It was almost as if Marine Le Pen had entered the studio with the firm intention to reveal to the eyes of the nation that she was utterly incompetent on economic matters, embarrassingly overstrained on the intellectual level, and blatantly unsuited for any higher public office.

In spring 2018 she is still there, re-elected at the helm of the Front National at its national congress in March, imposing the party’s rebranding through a controversial name change, and organising a rather lacklustre May Day celebration in Nice this week, to which she had invited colleagues from the European Parliament’s ‘Europe of Nations and Freedom’ group.

The simple fact that a party that reached its best result ever – a spectacular 7.6 million voters in the first round of the presidential elections – feels to be in need of a re-boot is due to the dramatic structure of the 2017 French campaign. What would you do with a football manager who leads his team to the final and, just before the ultimate triumph, gets everything wrong in the decisive match? Exactly. It is therefore hardly surprising that Marine Le Pen’s authority and leadership qualities, according to several polls (see here or here) are contested even within the FN’s own ranks. Above all, it’s the TV debate of 3 May that still hurts.

Their doubts notwithstanding, members are expected to confirm the proposed re-branding to ‘Rassemblement national’, whatever the discredit of this name by those who used it in the past. The political connotation of the term ‘rassemblement’ – literally ‘rally’ or ‘gathering’, but in this context probably best translated by ‘alliance’ or even ‘union’ – is the coming together of different people under one roof. It thus subliminally signals an opening towards potential coalition partners on the right, and a recognition that given the French electoral system, it seems out of reach for the party to access power on its own.

There is a ‘déjà vu’ in this approach to woo willing renegades from the so-called moderate right in order to become acceptable as coalition partner. Whoever knows the history of the Front National, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, is reminded of 1998, when the proportional system of the regional elections turned the FN into the kingmaker in five regions, where conservative candidates, contrary to all their previous promises to resist temptation, were crowned president of their respective Conseil Régional with the votes of the FN representatives.

For what was then called RPR and UDF, and is now known as Les Républicains, this incident remains an original sin that has never been expiated. Their new leader, Laurent Wauquiez, visibly pursues the opposite strategy: he hopes to undermine the Front National by appropriating its topics, tone, and vocabulary. The same tactics that Sarkozy already played around with under the guidance of his own Steven Bannon, a grey eminence in the Elysée named Patrick Buisson, only to get his fingers burnt.

Those were the days: Le Pen and Mégret in 1998.

And a second ‘déjà vu’ is already looming: the defection of key members and the launch of spin-offs that might develop into splinter parties of their own. The first time this happened to the FN was precisely in the wake of the 1998 regional elections, when the party’s number two Bruno Mégret fell out with Jean-Marie Le Pen on the latter’s refusal to enter coalitions and repetitive use of anti-Semitic provocations. Mégret founded the so-called Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) and obtained 2.34% of the votes in the 2002 presidential elections. He never managed, though, to establish the MNR as a viable alternative to the FN, and his only success was to install his wife as mayor of a provincial city near Marseille.

Today, Marine Le Pen is under a similar scission threat. At the March congress, she managed to rally party members behind her with her well-tested anger rhetoric, but prior to the event she had to deplore the departure of some relatively prominent party members. Among them, the FN’s previous number two, Florian Philippot, to whom she owes much of the success of what is called in France ‘the de-diabolisation process’ of the Front National, and who has now launched his own spin-off Les Patriotes.

Philippot, who has been an MEP since 2014, does of course not have the infrastructural and financial resources to set up a full-fledged competitive party in no time. But Le Pen would be well advised not to underestimate him. Contrary to herself, Philippot, a graduate of the ENA just like Macron and Wauquiez, possesses economic expertise. He is a representative of the ‘social’ wing of the nationalists, for whom leaving the European Union is the cornerstone for their entire programme of radical change in France. And while Le Pen was destabilised by the unwavering support of the Euro by public opinion and changed her line on the common currency in a totally unconvincing manner, Philippot has remained true to his ideas (and is due to publishing a book named Frexit). On long-distance runs, consistency may well turn out to be a major asset! When questioned about the current state of his splinter party, he refers to … UKIP, ‘who also began as a very small movement!‘

The current leadership woes notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to attest the FN a diminished mobilisation potential. It still has three trump cards in its sleeves:

First, on the political spectrum, the removal of the traditional reference points ‘left’ vs. ‘right’ – presumably pushed by Macron’s steamroller towards the landfill of history – also benefits the nationalists. All of a sudden, it becomes credible to reject the ‘extreme-right’ label as no longer relevant and to position oneself beyond old party lines as the sole defender of blood, soil, and identity, against the unpatriotic servants of globalisation. The latter, embodied of course by Macron and the European Commission, are despicable representatives of what Le Pen now systematically refers to as ‘nomadism’.

Candidate in 2017. And in 2022?

Secondly, the Front National still has a personality with high leadership potential in reserve: Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine’s niece, currently ‘in retreat from political life’, is considered the greatest hope for the party’s future by many members. The time of the 29-year-old figurehead of the FN’s ‘identitarian wing’ will come, and she has the potential to become a charismatic leader, with the ability to make the party an alternative beyond the core of traditional voters.

Thirdly, there is no reason to believe that the background noise of cultural pessimism that feeds French nationalism will fade away any time soon. Macron’s astonishing aura of optimism may well attenuate globalisation fears, but it will not be able to delete key issues like migration, Islam and security from the agenda. Moreover, given Macron’s personality and style, the remaining years of his mandate will inevitably fuel latent attitudes like anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism in a significant part of society. And his policies are not likely to reduce the gap in self-perception between the dynamic regional hubs and the rural and small-town periphery.

French nationalist populism under Marine Le Pen may currently experience a little slump. But as Jean-François Sirinelli summed up 20 years ago in his cultural history of the 20th century, every period of relative weakness was followed by a new strengthening, each time ‘when the ferments of destabilisation were at work: a persisting stagnation of the economy, social tensions resulting from it, and an increasingly gnawing doubt about liberal democracy.’ [1]

The success of the Macron presidency will not least be measured on his capacity of lastingly defusing such ‘pathogenic situations’ (Sirinelli), during which a not insignificant part of French society becomes prone to identity fears of all sorts.

[1] Jean-François Sirinelli: « L’extrême droite à répétition »,
in : Jean-Pierre Rioux & Jean-François Sirinelli, La France d’un siècle à l’autre 1914-2000, Paris: Hachette, 1999, p. 891-899.

This post was also published in German
by the Berlin-based think-tank Zentrum Liberale Moderne.

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I’m being a bit of a dog with a bone on this one, mainly because no one else seems terribly interested in it.

As I’ve discussed before (here and here), the transition phase of withdrawal from the EU has been taken as a given. All parties were happy to sign up to the March text, it’s all highlighted in green, so job’s all done.

But as I discuss in the infographics below, there are lots of reasons why the transition period might not be long enough, plus various other reasons why extending it might not be an option.

In short, we might simply have replaced a cliff-edge in March 2019 with one at the end of December 2020.

So, some visuals for you, but not one on the consequences of falling off that new cliff-edge, because that’s essentially the same as all the stuff you’ve read about for ‘no-deal’ outcomes to Art.50 (like this).

Thanks to all my colleagues online who’ve helped shape these: any errors are mine.

 

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The Danish government published its long awaited energy plan for 2030 on 30th April. The plan reflects the government’s green realism (see previous blog post), where ‘more environment for less money’ translate into spending and tax cuts for the energy sector.

The plan aims to reduce energy taxes and charges, strengthen market regulations, support Danish energy technology export, and increase energy saving thereby achieve 50 per cent renewable energies in 2030 and a low carbon economy in 2050. There is no detailed strategy for how to achieve a low carbon economy and green transition in all areas of society, such as electrification of transport. The silo thinking is problematic from a climate perspective where everything is connected.

According to  the 2018 Energy Projection published by the Energy Agency in March 2018, Denmark will not achieve its 50 percent renewable energy target in 2030 instead it will only reach 39.8 per cent. Moreover, the report predicts an increase in energy consumption after 2020 due to new data centres, electrification of heating and transport, just as the energy companies’ energy efficiency scheme ends in 2021. According to the new energy plan, the government main energy investments is a new offshore Wind Park (2024-2027). Yet several green organisations (e.g. Ecological Council, Concito, Skovforeningen) argue this is not sufficient to ensure Denmark meet its long term climate and energy targets. It is, therefore, necessary with more and earlier investment in renewable energies, energy efficiency and emissions cuts for Denmark to achieve its climate goal in 2030.

Furthermore, the energy plan does not explain how the electrification of transport will influence the Danish energy system. The government’s transport policy favours private transport i.e. car ownership and investment in road infrastructure. Without any incentives, transport users are likely to continue to choose fossil fuel cars instead of public transport or electric/ hybrid cars. Indeed, the 2018 Energy projection states that fossil fuels in transport will fall from 95 per cent in 2017 to 93 per cent in 2030. Compared to other countries, such as Norway, the Danish government is not considering banning fossil fuel cars although transport is one of the main sources of pollution, especially air pollution in cities. Clearly, Denmark will not reach its 50 percent renewable energy or emissions reductions targets in 2030 without integrating transport into the energy plan.

One of the government’s central goals is to reduce taxes and charges for all areas of society. Indeed the energy plan wants to reduce energy taxes and charges for both private and corporate energy users, which is supported by several energy organisations (e.g.  Danish Energy, the Danish Chamber of Commerce and Danish Wind Industry Association), who want cheaper electricity. The energy plan wants to cut red tape to allow better use of surplus energy from especially smaller companies, this is clearly positive step towards better use of resources and the energy plan focuses on creating better business environments for business and industry. Moreover, the green think tank Concito acknowledges that reducing energy taxes can be positive, if these create a tipping point for renewable energies, nevertheless this is not the case in the energy plan. Instead, a general reduction in energy prices might lead to increased energy demand thereby jeopardising Denmark’s climate commitment vis-a-vis energy efficiency and reduction in emissions.

Overall, the energy plan is a clear example of green realism, which believes in bottom-up market driven innovation to energy transition. Crucially, the energy plan is likely to miss both the 2030 and 2050 climate targets. The energy measures are not ambitious enough for Denmark to achieve its climate goals, especially as the plan predominately focuses on renewable energies instead of incorporating energy efficiency targets and emission reduction targets for 2030 currently debated at EU level, where Denmark is not part of the climate coalition in the Council (Euractiv and Altinget). Significantly, the energy plan does not take into account all the different elements of green energy transition, e.g. transport decarbonisation. Indeed silo thinking does not lead to energy transition and a low carbon economy. Finally, the government plans to publish separate plans for transport and climate in the autumn, which begs the question of whether the government will coordinate the policy aims for these three policies to ensure Denmark will achieve its climate goals.

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Today in Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May said:

“We are committed to delivering on our commitment to having no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and that we have as frictionless trade as possible with the European Union.”

She added:

“There are a number of ways that can be delivered.”

The best way to deliver ‘as frictionless trade as possible’ and ‘no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland’ is to have what we’ve already got: full membership of the EU

Nothing comes even close to being as good as that.

Ever since the EU referendum, Mrs May has been telling Parliament that she aims to get the benefits of EU membership without being a member. It’s nonsense of course.

For example, on 26 October 2016, Mrs May told Parliament she wanted “the best possible arrangement for trade” with the European Union.

Which is exactly what we have now.

Two months later, Brexit Secretary, David Davis, also told Parliament that he wants to get “the best possible access for goods and services to the European market.”

Which again, is exactly what we have now.

Last year Mr Davis also told Parliament that he had “come up with” the idea of a comprehensive trade and customs agreement with the EU “that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have.”

Of course, he has not found a way to achieve that. But this all begs the question: if EU benefits are so important to Britain (and they are) why on earth are we leaving?

In America they have a saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. So why does Mrs May want to fix something that isn’t broken?

She says it’s because that’s what the British people want. Well, that’s a moot point.

Yes, 17 million people voted for Britain to leave the EU – but that’s 17 million out of a UK population of 65 million.

And two of the four countries that comprise our Union of the United Kingdom – Scotland and Northern Ireland – don’t want Britain to leave the European Union at all.

What’s strange is that Mrs May also didn’t want Britain to leave the EU.

In a keynote speech during the Referendum campaign, she said:

“I believe it is clearly in our national interest to remain a member of the European Union.”

During a private and secretly recorded meeting with Goldman Sachs one month before the Referendum, Mrs May warned that companies would leave the UK if the country voted for Brexit.

What’s more strange is that, including herself, 70% of Mrs May’s current Cabinet voted to Remain in the EU. All of them said during the Referendum that leaving the EU would be bad for Britain.

So now they’re going to take Britain on a path that they all claimed would be against the interests of the country.

Mrs May now says we’re leaving so that Britain can trade with the rest of the world. But we already do that now. The EU doesn’t stop us.

On the contrary, Germany exports much more than Britain across the world, without any complaints that the EU is holding them back. Indeed, the EU was set up to facilitate better trade across the world.

Mrs May now says we have to leave the EU, its Single Market and Customs Union, so that Britain can be free to negotiate its own trade agreements with other countries.

Precisely for what advantage?

Currently the UK enjoys trade agreements with over 60 countries across the world, which we helped to negotiate as a leading member of the EU.

Since the EU is the world’s biggest free trade bloc, and the world’s biggest exporter, and biggest importer, of manufactured goods and services, it has the muscle and size to negotiate the best trade agreements with other countries.

By contrast, the UK, on its own and as a much smaller trader, is unlikely to get trade agreements anywhere near as good as the ones we have now, let alone any better.

On leaving the EU in March next year, the UK will have to tear up those 60+ EU trade agreements and negotiate them all over again from scratch. It will take years.

And for what?

Just so the name ‘UK’ is on the front of those trade agreements, instead of the name ‘EU’?

Big deal.

Does any of this make any sense?

No. It doesn’t. The EU is the world’s largest free trade area. As a member, we receive huge benefits worth enormously more than the net annual membership fee of £7.1 billion a year.

As a member, we enjoy free, frictionless trade with our biggest trading partner by far, right on our doorstep, where almost 50% of our exports go to and over 50% of our imports come from. Nowhere else in the world comes close to that.

The UK government is desperate to continue to enjoy similar membership benefits of frictionless trade with the EU after we have ended our membership, because they know that our economy’s survival depends on it.

But the UK government has said it wants to continue to enjoy membership benefits as an ex-member, without being part of the EU Single Market or customs union, without agreeing to the rules of the EU and its market, without being subject to the European Court of Justice to oversee those rules, and without paying anything to the EU for access.

It’s not going to happen. Mrs May knows this.

Before the referendum she said boldly and strongly, “It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy.”

Yet that’s exactly what Mrs May now wants. She says she aims to achieve a new trade agreement with the EU that’s unique to us, that no other country in the world has ever achieved.

Of course, it’s not going to happen.

What’s the point of a club if you are going to allow non-members to enjoy the same or better benefits as members? What club allows that?

So here’s the bottom line:

 Britain needs frictionless trade with the EU.

We need free movement of goods, services, capital and people for our country not just to survive, but to thrive.

For the sake of peace, we need an entirely open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

To achieve this, we need to continue with the status quo: the arrangement we have now.

Has this sunk in yet?

We’re leaving all the benefits of the EU, only to desperately try and get back as many of those benefits as we can after we’ve left.

This is complete and utter madness. It will be much better to just keep the current arrangement. It will be cheaper, and we will all be better off.

Sometimes the truth hurts, but it’s time we faced up to it before it’s too late.

Brexit makes no sense.

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At the European Parliament in Brussels I interviewed LibDem MEP, Catherine Bearder, who gave a positive message: We can stop Brexit.

“Absolutely it can be stopped,” she said, “and I think that’s the message that I would like to get out.”

The LibDem MEP added, “It has to be done democratically.”

Ms Bearder said that voters need to be told that, ‘This is not a done deal, this is your choice. Is this the deal you thought you were going to get? You can change your mind if you want to.’

“Lots of people do change their minds,” said Ms Bearder. “Even Mrs May has changed her mind.”

Ms Bearder, who has been an MEP for almost ten years, has promoted a hashtag, #GiveUsASayMrsMay.

Ms Bearder told me:

“My message is that Brexit is not inevitable.”

“We can stop this, but we need the voices to come from the streets. We need people to be saying: ‘This is not what we voted for.’”

Please share this 7-minute video. Polls show that most of the country now thinks that Brexit is a mistake, but that it’s too late to stop it.

But as Ms Bearder says, Brexit can be stopped. “We need to demand a vote on the final deal,” she said.

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'We can stop Brexit' – Catherine Bearder, MEP

→ Give us a say, Mrs May – Please shareVIDEO: ‘WE CAN STOP BREXIT’ – CATHERINE BEARDER, MEPAt the European Parliament this month, Reasons2Remain founder, Jon Danzig, interviewed Catherine Bearder MEP, who gave a positive message: We can stop Brexit.“Absolutely it can be stopped,” she said, “and I think that’s the message that I would like to get out.”The LibDem MEP added, “It has to be done democratically.”Ms Bearder said that voters need to be told that, ‘This is not a done deal, this is your choice. Is this the deal you thought you were going to get? You can change your mind if you want to.’“Lots of people do change their minds,” said Ms Bearder. “Even Mrs May has changed her mind.”Ms Bearder, who has been an MEP for almost ten years, has promoted a hashtag, #GiveUsASayMrsMay. “My message is that Brexit is not inevitable,” Ms Bearder told Jon Danzig. “We can stop this, but we need the voices to come from the streets. We need people to be saying: ‘This is not what we voted for.’”Please share this 7-minute video as widely as possible. Polls show that most of the country now thinks that Brexit is a mistake, but that it’s too late to stop it.But as Mrs Bearder says, Brexit can be stopped. “We need to demand a vote on the final deal,” she said.• This video is now on the Reasons2Remain YouTube channel. Please share widely: youtu.be/lfYrwxl86Vw• Please re-Tweet:twitter.com/Reasons2Remain/status/990923564948901888********************************************► Watch Jon Danzig's video on YouTube: 'Can Britain Stop Brexit?' Go to CanBritainStopBrexit.com********************************************• To follow and support Reasons2Remain just ‘like’ the page, and please invite all your friends to like the page. Instructions to ensure you get notifications of all our stories:1. Click on the ‘Following’ button under the Reasons2Remain banner2. Change the ‘Default’ setting by clicking ‘See first’.********************************************• Please rate Reasons2Remain out of 5 stars. Here's the link: facebook.com/Reasons2Remain/reviews/********************************************• Follow Reasons2Remain on Twitter: twitter.com/reasons2remain and Instagram: instagram.com/reasons2remain/********************************************• Explore our unique Reasons2Remain gallery of over 1,000 graphics and articles: reasons2remain.co.uk********************************************• Reasons2Remain is an entirely unfunded community campaign, unaffiliated with any other group or political party, and is run entirely by volunteers. If you'd like to help, please send us a private message.********************************************• © Reasons2Remain 2018. All our articles and graphics are the copyright of Reasons2Remain. We only allow sharing using the Facebook share button. Any other use requires our advance permission in writing.#STOPBREXIT #EXITBREXIT #PEOPLESVOTE

Posted by Reasons2Remain on Monday, 30 April 2018

The post ‘We can stop Brexit’ – Catherine Bearder, MEP appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

  Last night Theresa May’s Tory (aka UKIP2) government suffered a major defeat in the House of Lords.

By a large majority, the Lords agreed to an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill to give MPs the power to stop the UK from leaving without a deal, or to make Theresa May return to negotiations if the deal is considered not good enough.

Supporters of the amendment said that Parliament, and not ministers, must “determine the future of the country”.

Government ministers have expressed anger at the Lords amendment, calling it a betrayal of ‘the people’s will’. Mrs May is now trying to persuade MPs to strike out the change.

But wasn’t one of the main points of the Brexit campaign to give our Parliament in Westminster ‘more sovereignty’?

Isn’t it the job of our Parliament to consider, in great detail, all decisions affecting the future of our country, and to hold the executive to account?

When making a decision, our Parliament has many debates, and multiple votes, over a period of time, often many months, and our Parliamentarians can reconsider, amend or reverse the decision at any stage of the process.

But in the referendum us, ‘the people’, only had one vote, on one day, on a simplistic binary choice, without any chance to reconsider, amend or reverse our decision, even though voting took place almost two years ago.

What sort of democratic process is that?

Furthermore, the referendum was seriously flawed. Here’s why:

Many people directly affected by the outcome of the referendum were denied a vote.

The referendum was, by Act of Parliament, advisory only and not binding, but a minority was allowed to ‘win’. (Yes, a minority: 17 million people voting for Leave is not a majority in a country with 46.5 million registered voters).

The margin between Leave and Remain was wafer thin – less than 4%, so well within the margin of error.

Two of the four countries of our Union of the United Kingdom did not want Brexit, thus literally splitting the UK in half.

There was no manifesto, blueprint or plan presented for Brexit (and there still isn’t). So, the 17 million who voted for Brexit didn’t all vote for the same Brexit.

No one could have given ‘informed consent’ for Brexit, because none of us were fully informed about the meaning of Brexit.

Some Leave voters thought we’d be staying in the Single Market after Brexit. (Yes, that’s what some Leave campaigners told us).

Some thought we’d be staying in the EU Customs Union, or at least ‘a’ customs union after Brexit. (Yes, that’s what some Leave campaigners told us).

Many voted for Brexit because they believed the lies of the Leave campaign (more money for the NHS; getting our country back; more sovereignty; control of borders; the EU is undemocratic; Turkey is joining soon.. all misleading and false).

Some voted for Brexit because they never imagined ‘Remain’ would lose, and so used the ballot box as a protest vote against Cameron’s Tory government.

There were many reasons people voted for Leave, but no single reason, and certainly no defined agreement on what Brexit would mean or entail. (We still don’t know).

So, frankly, it’s disingenuous to claim that ‘Brexit is the will of the people’. By no stretch of the imagination can Brexit be described as ‘the people’s will.’

And in any event, even if Brexit was ‘the will of the people’ on one day in June 2016, that’s almost two years ago, and multiple polls have since shown that the will of the people is not now in favour of Brexit.

But this is the problem of referendums. They are not democratic, and they are a lousy way to make a decision.

So far, this has not been a problem in the few referendums we’ve had in the UK, because referendum results have not produced controversial results.

But, for the first time in a UK referendum, voters on 23 June 2016 rejected the status quo, the advice of the government, and the consensus of Parliament.

The Brexit vote pitched ‘direct democracy’ against ‘Parliamentary democracy’, with potentially disastrous consequences.

And therein lies the problem now facing and fissuring the United Kingdom.

Direct democracy (referendums) and representative Parliamentary democracy can be dangerously incompatible.

They cannot co-exist without the potential of one damaging or even destroying the other.

The few referendums that Britain has held in recent decades haven’t caused such major problems because, until now, referendums were generally relied upon to return a result in accordance with the status quo and/or the will of Parliament.

Put simply, voters tended to dislike change.

But that ‘rule of thumb’ was dramatically and perilously turned around when Leave won. For the first time, ‘the people’ voted against the overwhelming will of Parliament.

So which ‘will’ has superior sovereignty: Parliament, or ‘the people’? The conflict has the potential to destroy the very core of our democracy.

This is a problem that has never happened before in Britain, but it should have been anticipated. After all, referendums are a relatively new phenomenon in our country, and many sage British politicians were, for good reasons, completely against them.

Labour prime minister, Clement Atlee, categorically stated that referendums “are just not British.”

He said:

“I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism.”

Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was also adamantly opposed to referendums. She said that they were the “device of dictators and demagogues”.

And it’s true: Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon III all used referendums to legitimise decisions they had made. They could go to the populace and ask them any question, and then interpret the simplistic one-word answer almost any way they wanted.

(Which is pretty much what our Prime Minister, Theresa May, and her Brexit ministers, are attempting to do.)

Of course, former Prime Minster David Cameron knew the dangers of referendums all along. But he never anticipated losing.

After all, he felt confident after previously ‘winning’ two major referendums in a row: a referendum to change the voting system (2011; answer no) and a referendum giving independence to Scotland (2014, answer no).

Since Mr Cameron was so convinced that there was almost no chance of losing the EU referendum, a potential clash between the ‘will of the people’ and the ‘will of Parliament’ was not going to occur.

How wrong he was.

What’s worse is that there was no need for a referendum at all. Mr Cameron only decided to hold one to resolve an internal dispute in the Tory party, rather than for the national interest.

Euroscepticism, and the call for another EU referendum after the one in 1975, had always been on the minority fringes of the main political parties, especially as around two-thirds of both houses of our Parliament strongly supported EU membership.

Mr Cameron not only gambled with our country’s future by holding an unnecessary referendum, but he also put at grave risk the foundations and established mechanisms of our traditional method of democracy.

Following the referendum result, MPs and members of the House of Lords felt stymied. The vast majority of their heads and hearts told them that Britain’s best interests are served by remaining in the EU, and that Brexit is likely to cause the country severe economic hardship and isolation.

After all, that’s what the vast majority of them told us during the referendum campaign.

Instead of the referendum giving our Parliament more sovereignty – one of the many disingenuous promises of the Leave campaign – the referendum result severely weakened and demeaned Parliamentary sovereignty and the function of MPs.

Even though it was decided by Parliament that the referendum should be advisory only and not legally binding, politicians have felt agonisingly compelled to obey the Brexit result.

Were it not for the referendum, by a huge majority, Parliamentarians would have strongly and unequivocally voted against Britain leaving the EU.

Instead of empowering Parliamentarians, the referendum result has turned them into puppets of ‘the will of the people’.

Unlike decisions of Parliament, which can be fully considered, amended, changed and reversed, the simplistic one-word answer of the referendum now appears to be cast in stone.

This is all a hopeless mess. The so-called ‘will of the people’ has trumped and thwarted Parliament’s sovereignty, even though that ‘will’ was based on a minority of registered voters, who voted for something that was not clearly defined or understood.

(Indeed, the promises and claims made about Brexit were based on shocking lies).

The simple fact is that referenda are only benign when they agree with the will of Parliament. But when a referendum returns a result that’s entirely the opposite to the will of Parliament, our democracy, and our country, are in danger of tearing themselves apart.

Prime Minister Theresa May must have realised this. She considered it necessary to resolve the very narrow margin for Leave in the referendum by calling a snap general election last year, with the goal of winning a huge majority to give her an unquestionable mandate to go ahead with Brexit.

But instead, the country rejected her plans, leaving her with no majority at all.

That should be the cue for Parliament to regain its confidence and to take back sovereignty that it imagined, falsely, had been removed from it by the advisory referendum of 2016.

We now need a return to fully fledged, representative Parliamentary democracy, that has served this country well for hundreds of years.

We now need Parliament to act in the best interests of the entire United Kingdom; not just the 17 million who voted for Leave, but for all the people of our country: the 65 million who live here, and who our Parliamentarians are supposed to represent, and protect. • Photo of the Houses of Parliament by Diliff (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

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The EU’s cohesion policy is 30 years old and now accounts for around a third of the EU’s budget. To celebrate, the European Commission has published a new dataset. This details annual payments to the EU’s regions since 1989.

The dataset covers most funds under the European Structural and Investment Funds umbrella. For the UK this covers the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD). This means some big areas of EU spending (such as payments made via the Common Agricultural Policy) aren’t included. The dataset also doesn’t include the territorial co-operation element of ERDF, such as Interreg.

This aside, it provides some interesting insights into how the EU has invested in the UK since 1989.

Between 1989 and 2016 the UK received a total of €37.4 billion from the three funds. There’s sometimes a popular assumption that the lion share of EU regional spending has been focused on central and eastern Europe, but over the long term the UK has done relatively well. The amount spent in the UK since 1989 is well above the EU-28 average of €28 billion.

This partly reflects that the UK has been a member state for a long time and so has been able to benefit from EU funds over a longer period. But it’s also important to remember that the UK pushed hard for EU regional policy to be adopted in the first place, mainly because many of its deindustrialising regions would be key beneficiaries.

The UK benefited most from the 2000-2007 programming period, which saw €16 billion worth of investment. Spending reached a peak in 2005. It then fell from the 2007-2013 programming period as funding shifted its focus to central and eastern Europe.

In terms of where EU money has been spent in the UK, West Wales and the Valleys have benefited the most. Merseyside, Northern Ireland, South West Scotland, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands have also seen high levels of investment. But something worth noting is that every area in the UK has benefited to some extent – EU investment has not just been the preserve of areas in industrial decline.

In the context of Brexit all of this leads to an obvious question: what will happen to this investment after the UK leaves the EU? The amounts spent are not insignificant. As austerity bites, localities have also become increasingly reliant on EU funding schemes to deliver projects.

During the 2017 general election the Conservative Party manifesto committed to establishing a “Shared Prosperity Fund” which would replace EU regional investment after Brexit. But there’s been little progress and clarity on this since the election. While the EU is preparing its proposals for the next cohesion policy programme from 2021, the UK has only got as far as guaranteeing to underwrite EU projects up to the end of 2020. For this reason, UK local authorities – the primary beneficiaries of EU regional funding – are starting to worry.

There are plenty of debates about how effective EU regional spending has been. But overall UK regions have seen sizeable investment from the EU, which the LGA says has been used to “create jobs, support small and medium enterprises, deliver skills training, invest in critical transport and digital infrastructure and boost inclusive growth”. The extent to which this support will continue after Brexit remains uncertain.

The post Exploring EU regional investment in the UK since 1989 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Inspired by the growing debate on critical approaches to European Studies, Vladimir Bortun adds his own perspective. He argues for class analysis which not only asks how to fix the EU’s specific problems but which takes a more holistic approach. Is the EU in its current form even worth fixing or do we need to think about a different kind of transnational cooperation?

© frittipix / Adobe Stock

I was pleasantly surprised to read the two recent articles on Crossroads Europe by Rachael Dickson Hillyard and Vanessa Bilancetti, both making the case for a more critical approach to the EU within the field of European Studies.

I must admit that, throughout my PhD, I have been struck by the virtually unconditional support for the EU that seems to prevail in the academic community, probably best highlighted by the debate and developments around Brexit.

The limited critical analysis that does exist is mostly local and targets one aspect or another of the EU. Some focus on the shortcomings of the Eurozone or others on the famous ‘democratic deficit’. However, hardly anybody in the field – with some notable exceptions such as Carchedi or McGiffen – challenges the EU as a whole. Nearly all debates are about “what’s wrong with the EU and how to fix it”, thus reflecting an underlying, undisputed consensus over the intrinsic value of the EU and the need to preserve it; maybe improve it or fundamentally reform it, but nevertheless preserve it.

In a context of multiple crises faced and at least partly caused by the EU, we need to bring to the fore the more fundamental debate on whether the EU is indeed worthy of such unconditional endorsement. This debate should be at the core of our field rather than confined to the rather obscure subfield of Critical European Studies. Its present marginality is not healthy for European Studies as a whole, which currently falls short, I believe, of the main duty of social researchers and intellectuals in general – to critically analyse the dominant structures, practices and discourses that shape the world we live in.

For too long, scholars of the EU have assumed that their object of study is intrinsically defensible or, at the very least, a neutral phenomenon that needs to be treated accordingly. Class analyses from Marxist or neo-Marxist perspectives have been largely dismissed as ‘ideological’, although the fundamental endorsement of this European integration is by no means any less ideological.

It would be impossible to fully develop here such a class analysis, but it entails going beyond the mere acknowledgement of the neoliberal character of the EU’s policies over the last few decades. It asks us to look at the more structural class character of the EU as a whole.

Such an analysis understands European integration not as the noble project for peace and prosperity in Europe but rather as a realignment of capitalist classes in Western Europe following the Second World War. These classes had come to realise – to the backdrop of developments such as the rise of the welfare state and the process of de-colonisation – that their interests could be best served through the establishment of a common market.

The subsequent, neoliberal, developments of that project only consolidated and furthered those class interests. Thus, from the design of the Single Market and of the Monetary Union to the management of the (still) ongoing Eurozone crisis, the EU’s neoliberalism is not some qualitative departure from its initial mission, but a rather logical continuation of that.

At the same time, as Vanessa correctly pointed out in her piece, the limits of European integration are set by the inherent limits of the cooperation among the various capitalist classes in Europe. In other words, European integration only goes as far as their common interests go, which means that when a capitalist crisis develops and the competition between (and within) national capitalisms enhances (as reflected by the current revival of protectionism), then European integration also enters a crisis.

This is reflected not merely by the growth of popular Euro-hostility but also by the increasing divisions among member states. What all this suggests is crucial: that genuine European unity is not possible on a capitalist basis.

In conclusion, a class analysis of the EU doesn’t merely ask “how to fix it” but whether it can be fixed and, indeed, whether it is worth fixing in the first place. These are crucial questions that our field, I believe, needs to address more explicitly.

Indeed, our field – which is called European rather than EU Studies for a reason – should try and escape the tacit TINA-like attitude currently prevailing; it should start envisaging alternatives ideas of transnational cooperation and internationalism that might be able to premise the kind of genuine European unity that many of us are committed to.

Please note that this article represents the views of the author(s) and not those of the UACES Graduate Forum, JCER or UACES.

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Shortlink for this article: http://bit.ly/2I0nfpn

Vladimir Bortun 
University of Portsmouth

Vladimir Bortun is a doctoral candidate at the University of Portsmouth. His research focuses on transnational cooperation of new left parties in Southern Europe since 2009.

 

The post European Studies Needs More Class Analysis appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

French society under Macron’s reform steamroller.

„I do think that we can build efficient politics; politics that escape ordinary cynicism and engrave in reality what must be the foremost duty of political action, I mean human dignity.”

Who would want to contradict Emmanuel Macron on this point? Certainly not the venerable ‘Episcopal Conference of France’, to whom he addressed these words on 9 April. And even less the German-born blogger, whose own Republic, after all, made human dignity (for good reasons) the top priority of its own constitution.

There is, however, a not insignificant number of French citizens who, the President’s noble words notwithstanding, feel violated in their dignity and are making it known on numerous parallel battlefields: from the train stations and universities to the slightly anarchist ecological guerrilla on the fields of the buried airport project in Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

Is it a first revolt against the uninterrupted reform stress after a year ‘en marche’ with Macron? Or is it an echo of the romanticised ‘Révolution’ of May 68, with which a vast majority of the French associates positive social change and the memory of which is currently celebrated on all media channels with great tenderness for those bygone days of innocence?

There is probably a bit of both in the current protest movements. True, the oft-quoted ‘convergence of social struggles’, invoked by the trade unions and conjured up by the Left around La France insoumise, does not seem to occur. Everybody remains focused on their own concerns and demands. Neither do the strikers represent a majority within the SNCF or among the students, quite the opposite.

Macron and his government know this, and they will emerge as the winner from the current battles. The railway reform will be pushed through rather recklessly – just watch the ‘No chance!’ of Macron when asked by Fox News whether he might give in to the strikers. And the universities will calm down again once an improvement of the admittedly imperfect admission procedures will have been commissioned. But it will be a very ambiguous victory, for it will leave behind losers who were not just defeated in a labour struggle, but will fill lastingly humiliated, violated in their dignity.

The key to understanding the sheer bitterness expressed by the railway workers and students lies in the immense perception gap between the citizens and the government. The latter sees itself as ‘pragmatic’, ‘steadfast’, and ‘honest’, since it was announced well before the 2017 elections that citizens would be confronted with a demanding ‘transformation of French society’ and that a high level of willingness for change would be requested. Its arguments are factual, buttressed by the technocratic shrug of those who ‘objectively’ know better.

As for the protesters, they moved almost instantly to a very different semantic field. They are mobilised by what they feel to be ‘contempt’ and ‘humiliation’, no matter whether the cause they defend is the civil servant status of the railway workers, the taboo of non-selection at university entrance, or the vision of a collectivist, ecological agriculture as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

The culture model by Geert Hofstede (1991).

They are in coherence with the inner core of Geert Hofstede’s famous ‘culture onion’, where the (most often unconscious) fundamental assumptions of a given (most often national) culture lie, shared beliefs about what is right or wrong, beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty, noble and debasing.

In several books based on his research in comparative anthropology Philippe d’Iribarne has convincingly demonstrated to what extent the perception of what is respectful or demeaning treatment, of what constitutes dignity or ignominy is determined by the ‘mental universe’ of a cultural community. He has been repeatedly perplexed to find out just how much French society represents a special case in this field. In his aptly titled book The French Strangeness (L’étrangeté française, 2006) he shows how French culture has, over centuries, formed a severe hypersensitivity for the ‘rank that is attributed to each individual in society’ (p. 85). A sector in which this is particularly visible is the ‘service public’, which is dominated by ‘the logic of honour’, more precisely: ‘a certain nobleness in being at the service of the common good without being enslaved to it’ (p. 124).

It is of course perfectly possible to shake one’s heads – as do most media in Northwestern Europe – about the eternal striking of the French, who simply don’t seem to get the rules of late capitalism. In Britain, there is always someone to observe that ‘what France needs is a Margaret Thatcher’. Meanwhile in Berlin, the political and economic elite condescendingly adds that ‘Germany has done its homework’…

But sorry, that’s simply beside the point. (And might well backfire one day). It makes much more sense to understand France in 2018 as the most fascinating experiment in cultural change, conducted in real time on a national scale. In this perspective, the current convulsions of a part of French society are a perfectly logical backlash against a major cultural disruption that is imposed on them.

The ‘Macron Project’, which, as Simon Kuper recently observed, seems to consist in turning one of Europe’s oldest nations in record time into a kind of ‘Scandinavia with sunshine and vineyards’, is an immeasurable civilizational stress test. In fact, it is astonishing that so many French citizens are indeed willing to complete this kind of demanding ‘homework’.

The open question is: for how long?

The final result of the experiment will depend on their stamina and their level of frustration tolerance. For the time being, the President, whose working capacity, tempo, and rhetoric brilliance in the face of adversity is even respected by the sceptics, seems to keep them on board. Yet, there are good reasons why his nordic-liberal revolution may still fail.

First, as outlined above, the flexibilisation of the labour market, the changes in the educational system, the modernisation of the public service, the transformation of fiscal policy, and the dismantling of corporatist privileges, are more than just reforms. They touch the cultural underpinnings of French society. But where fundamental concepts of honour and dignity are anchored, a violently bent twig – to borrow Isaiah Berlin’s famous metaphor – may spring back and lash out even more violently at the forces that bent it in the first place.

Secondly, Emmanuel Macron is finding himself, slowly but surely, entangled in the defaults and ambiguities of the political system of the Fifth Republic, which he so masterly used to his own purposes during the election campaign. The first-past-the-post system in two rounds provides incredible freedom of design, but it is a treacherous distorting mirror about the real balance of power in society. At the same time, the sheer extent of the power in the hands of the President, and the expectations that come with it, virtually force the Head of State to govern above the heads of a weak parliament, which in turn inevitably leads to the shifting of power struggles to the streets (or rails, for that matter). And the typically French technocratic centralism, cultivated and consolidated over centuries, which Macron’s vertical government embodies, is losing legitimacy by the minute in an age of increasingly horizontal and digital networks.

The so-called ‘pedagogical’ initiative launched by the President over recent weeks – with two long TV interviews on channels watched by ‘target groups’ plus a public debate and even a longer discussion with angry citizens in the street, reveals that he is aware of the dangers. Will his explanations and persuasions be sufficient to calm down the uncertainty triggered by the destabilisation of deep-rooted core values?

France in spring 2018 – the experiment enters its next stage.

This post was initially published in German
by the Berlin-based think-tank Zentrum Liberale Moderne.

The post The railwayman’s dignity shall be inviolable. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

It’s reported that record numbers of migrant nurses and midwives from EU27 countries left Britain last year, exacerbating fears that a Brexit ‘brain drain’ will worsen the NHS’s already chronic staffing crisis.

According to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, a total of 3,962 such staff from the European Economic Area (EEA) left their register between 2017 and 2018.

Reported The Guardian today:

‘The number of departures was 28% more than the 3,081 who left in 2016-17 and three times higher than the 1,311 who did so in 2013-14, the first year the NMC began keeping data on such departures.

‘At the same time, the number of EU nurses and midwives coming to work in the UK has fallen to its lowest level. Just 805 of them joined the NMC register in 2017-18. That total is just 13% of the 6,382 who came over the year before.’

Janet Davies, the chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing said, “It feels that efforts to boost the number of nurses are being dragged down by a botched Brexit.”

She added that the government’s refusal to detail the rights that the 3 million EU citizens living in Britain will have once the UK leaves the EU in March next year is a key cause of the loss of EU staff.

“Nurses returning home, or giving Britain a miss entirely, are doing so because their rights are not clear enough.”

In interviews conducted by the NMC, Brexit was cited as the main reason why EU-trained staff are stopping working in the UK. Almost 3,5000 people who left the register between June and November 2017 were included in the survey.

In addition, mistreatment of the Windrush generation by the British authorities is “raising anxieties” among EU citizens hoping to settle in the UK after Brexit, a group of MEPs warned British officials in Brussels,

The delegation, led by the European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, met officials from the Home Office to summarise concerns they have about transition and post-Brexit arrangements for EU citizens who wish to live in the UK after Brexit.

The European Parliament has expressed concern for some time about the provisions on citizens’ rights set out in the Withdrawal Agreement between the EU and UK, in particular about the difficulties involved in applying for residence.

Commented Mr Verhofstadt, MEP:

“The treatment of the Windrush generation under UK immigration law has unfortunately created renewed anxiety among EU citizens in the UK and shows why we have to get this right.”

Brexit is causing distress; it’s making migrants settled here no longer feel welcome.

‘You’re talking about us as if we’re not in the room’, is how many EU and non-EU migrants have expressed their hurt and alarm at how some British people have displayed dislike for them during and following the EU referendum.

Too many EU migrants was cited as one of the main reasons people voted for Brexit.

The feeling of not being welcome in Britain was compounded by the speech of Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, at the Conservative Party’s first annual conference following the EU referendum.

She announced that foreign workers should not be able to “take the jobs that British people should do”.

After Brexit, she said, companies in Britain could be forced to publish the proportion of “international” staff on their books. It was a proposal that would effectively “name and shame” businesses which fail to hire British workers.

This Tory idea represented discrimination plain and simple – something that’s not allowed under EU rules or principles.

And even though the policy idea was quickly withdrawn (because of public outrage) it told us something about the true feelings of those in the Tory regime

Both the Home Secretary, and Prime Minister Theresa May, pledged during last year’s general election to reduce net migration to just tens of thousands. The message was clear: we don’t want EU migrants here.

None of this makes sense. Why make EU migrants feel so unwelcome here, when they give and do so much for our country?

After all, these EU migrants represent only 5% of our population – that’s small, and can hardly be described as ‘mass migration’.

And almost all of the EU migrants here are at work, spending most of their earnings here, paying taxes, and making a substantial net contribution to our Treasury.

They enrich our country economically and culturally.

Britain has a record number of people at work, and record numbers of job vacancies – currently around 800,000 vacancies (source ONS).

That’s far more than can be filled by British workers, so EU migrants here are vital.

They not only help on our farms and in our factories, and care for our elderly and infirm, but they also do highly skilled work too.

Such as scientists, doctors, dentists, nurses, lawyers, accountants, teachers, pilots, engineers, architects – skills this country urgently needs.

Since we have more vacancies than can be filled by the indigenous workforce, and since most EU migrants are gainfully employed here, it must show that the numbers already here are about right.

EU migration to Britain is already efficiently controlled by the jobs market, and businesses want to be free to choose the best people.

That isn’t always necessarily a British worker. If it was, why doesn’t Manchester United only choose British footballers?

In summary, EU migrants are a boon to this country, not a burden.

They are filling job vacancies that mostly Britons can’t or don’t want to do. They are making a significant contribution to the wealth of Britain.

They have become our work colleagues, friends and partners.

If all EU migrants here took the day off tomorrow, Britain would come to a standstill.

Maybe that’s what’s going to happen with this Conservative government’s nasty, xenophobic, Brexit policies.

It’s time to appreciate EU and all other migrants here. Let’s hug them, not hate them.

The evidence is all around us that Brexit promotes hate. Is that really the kind of country we want Britain to be?

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Most Britons would now vote to remain in the European Union if there was another referendum held next week. That’s the result of a major UK-wide survey of more than 200,000 readers of local newspapers called The Big Brexit Survey.

The survey also revealed that a significant majority want the UK to stay in the EU Single Market, and that most people believe that Britain will be economically worse off outside the EU.

Almost 220,000 readers of newspapers belonging to publishing groups Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press, and Newsquest were surveyed in the study, which showed significant worries about the Brexit process across the country.

Just over half – 52 per cent of respondents – believe Britain would be economically better off inside the EU, with 56 per cent calling for a ‘soft Brexit’ inside the Single Market – including more than a fifth of Leave voters.

The survey also reported that Leave voters are twice as likely to have changed their mind since the 2016 EU referendum.

Local and regional newspapers across the country have been reporting the results of this major new poll:

‘Devon voters now want to Remain in Europe, major new survey reveals’

Reported Devon Live:

‘More than half of Devon now wants Britain to stay in the Single Market, according to a major new survey carried out by Devon Live – and 15 per cent of Leave voters would change their decision in a new referendum.

‘The latest Brexit survey shows 48% of Devon Live readers believe Britain will be better off economically inside Europe and 53% said Britain should continue to be part of the single European market.’

‘Majority of people in Wales think we would be better off inside the European Union, survey reveals’

Reported Wales Online:

‘Three-fifths of people in Wales think we would be better off economically in Europe – and a majority want to stick with the Single Market.

‘A new Brexit survey shows 59% of WalesOnline and Western Mail readers believe Britain will be better off economically inside Europe. As well as this, 62% said Britain should continue to be part of the single European market.’

‘Brexit: Over half the North East wants to keep the Single Market’

Reported ChronicleLive:

‘Almost two years since the region voted to Brexit, a new survey also reveals most people and aren’t happy with negotiations.

‘Half of people in the North East think we would be better off economically staying in the European Union – and a majority want to stick with the Single Market.’

‘Major survey finds Remain would win second Brexit referendum’

Reported The Scotsman:

‘Britain would vote by a narrow margin to remain in the EU if another referendum were held next week, according to a major UK-wide survey of more than 200,000 people.

‘The unprecedented survey, which included 17,000 responses in Scotland, shows that a significant majority want the UK to stay in the European Single Market and believe Britain will be economically worse off outside the EU.’

‘York Poll: Britain must stay in European market’

Reported The York Press:

‘A MAJORITY of York Press readers online want Britain to stay in the single European market after Brexit, according to a survey.

‘The study, run in partnership with Google Surveys, was completed by 1,600 people who visited the York Press website.

‘It showed that 56 per cent of readers believed Britain would be better off economically inside Europe, with 62 per cent saying Britain should continue to be part of the single European market.’

‘More leavers than Remainers in Cornwall have changed their mind and want the UK to stay in the EU, survey reveals’

Reported CornwallLive:

‘New figures have revealed that more than half of people in Cornwall think the UK would be better off economically in Europe – and a majority want to stick with the Single European Market.

‘The new Brexit survey shows 52% of Cornwall Live readers believe Britain will be better off economically inside Europe. As well as this, 54% said Britain should continue to be part of the Single Market.’

‘Almost two thirds of Scots believe we are better off in EU and want to stay in Single Market after Brexit’

Reported the Scottish Daily Record:

‘Most Scots believe the economy would be better off in the EU.

‘The result from a major Brexit survey also suggests a majority want to stay in the single market. The findings are in line with the EU referendum decision in Scotland and are higher than in the rest of the UK.’

‘One year to Brexit – this is what the people of Greater Manchester think’

Reported The Manchester Evening News:

‘Nearly three-fifths of people in Greater Manchester think we would be better off economically in Europe – and a majority want to stick with the single market, a new poll suggests.

‘Almost two years on from the EU Referendum a new Brexit survey suggests 57 per cent of Manchester Evening News readers believe Britain would be better off financially in Europe.

‘And more than six out of 10 (61pc) said Britain should continue to be part of the single European market.’

‘How Brexit opinions in Salisbury have changed two years on’

Reported the Salisbury Journal:

‘MORE than half of people in Salisbury think we would be better off economically in Europe – and a majority want to stick with the Single Market.

‘A new Brexit survey shows 56 per cent of Salisbury Journal readers believe Britain will be better off economically inside Europe. As well as this 59 per cent said Britain should continue to be part of the single European market.’

‘Brexit survey shows majority in Belfast think UK better off inside Europe’

Reported Belfast Live:

‘A new Brexit survey shows 65% of Belfast Live readers believe UK will be better off economically inside Europe. As well as this 66% said Britain should continue to be part of the single European market.

‘The figures show a split between those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain in the referendum. Among Leave voters, 11% think Britain is better off economically in Europe, while more than a quarter of these voters (28%) think we should continue to be part of the Single Market.’

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The tide is turning on Brexit. Steadily, and surely, more and more people across the country believe the Britain should remain in the EU, or at least, in the EU Single Market.

According to this major new survey, if there was another referendum next week, Remain would win.

No wonder Brexiters don’t want another vote.

They say that another vote would be ‘undemocratic’. But there is nothing undemocratic about asking people to vote again – more votes, mean more democracy, not less.

In a democracy, voters are allowed to change their minds. But it seems that some Brexiters do not want voters to be allowed to do that.

How democratic is that?

And if Prime Minister, Theresa May, is really interested to follow the ‘will of the people’ she should now take note that Brexit does not have majority support across the country.

Like a broken record, Mrs May keeps going on about the result of the referendum on 23 June 2016. But that was almost two years ago, and this is now.

Mrs May changed her mind once, going from supporting Remain to supporting Brexit. It’s time for Mrs May to listen to ‘the people’, and change her mind again.

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