Abstract

© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Friday, 14 June 2013

Can and Should We Get Out of the EU?

The leaders of the three main parties, Labour, Tory and Liberal, remain allied in their determination to stay in the EU, despite the fact that a large majority of the British people are against. In mid 2012, 16 percent of the British trusted the EU while 75 percent distrust it. No other EU member country was so skeptical of the EU. To show how bad this is, compare it with the number who trusted the ConDem government—21 percent with 77 percent not trusting it.

An Opinium/Observer poll towards the end of 2012 found that 56 percent of people preferred to leave the EU, while half of that number 30 percent preferred to stay in (14 percent “don’t know”). The ratios of the original 1975 referendum have been exactly reversed. These figures included some who would “probably leave” or “probably stay”, but by eliminating these and going only by those with strong feelings either way, the ratio was 3:1 for those who felt strongly we should leave, relative to those who felt strongly we should stay in. Taking those who considered the EU very good and those who considered it very bad, the ratio was similar, around 3:1.

Yet the propaganda in favour still evokes the idea that the EU is a great progressive advance, a force for peace, a unity of the skills of all European people, a step towards world citizenship overcoming petty national bounds, an anticipation of a new technological age, a cure for Britain’s economic ills, and a safegurd against bad government at home. Who could oppose it? But never was a more reactionary idea dressed up in such fraudulent clothing. And regrettably, it is the young, the 18-24 age group, that believes it all.

It is not the embryo of a united Europe but of a permanently divided Europe, a Europe divided into the few haves and the mass of have nots. It is a gigantic operation in the interests of the exclusive profits of huge imperialist monopolies, increasingly operating across national frontiers and with world wide interests. Modern globalisation is old fashioned imperialism!

It is a shackle to a reactionary and imperialist Europe dominated by the West European monopolists and super trusts. The EU is a closed economic, capitalist, political and military grouping, the answer of West European imperialism to the threat to them of national liberation struggles and the power of socialism after the Second World War. So, it is anti-planning, anti-socialist, anti-working class.

Its economic motivation is so-called “free” competition for the economic domination of ruthless monopolies and financial trusts. Its bureaucratic supranational structure of Commission, Council and Court subordinates national states to the supranational interests of banks and corporations.

The EU, protected by a common external tariff, is the home base from which the monopolists reach out for world trade, with export of capital and neo-colonialism binding third world and Muslim countries into a subordinate status as suppliers of cheap resources and markets. Its political military expression is NATO, so it had a vested interest in maintaining the cold war and anti-Sovietism, and in bringing down the USSR via the USA led arms race, and more recently sybduing north Africa and the near East.

This set-up is against the political, economic, social and national interests of the British people. It ended British sovereignty. It therefore ended native British control over vital spheres of policy, especially economic. The advance to socialism, already rendered difficult by the dominating position of the British monopolies and right wing labour policy, would be almost impossible in the EU tailor made for neoliberal economics and monopoly business and finance. Harold Wilson eventually converted to favouring the EU, but in a speech in Parliament on 7 June, 1962, when he was opposed to entry, he said:

The plain fact is that the whole conception of the Treaty of Rome is anti-planning, at any rate anti-national planning… the title and chapter headings of Part 1 of the Treaty and the whole philosophy of the relevant articles show a dedication to one principle, and that is the principle of competition… what planning is contemplated—a tremendous amount of planning is involved in the Common Market—is supranational, not national, but it is planning for the one purpose of enhancing free competition.

The ultimate aim of the EU, no longer disguised, is the creation of a single federal state, controlling foreign and military policy as well, in which democracy will be abandoned or be merely cosmetic. No one aware of this litany of disaster could want to preserved our membership of the EU, or indeed the EU itself.

What is the EU?

The EU is a right wing neoliberal project. It was set up as the Common Market by the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25 March, 1957 by West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg (the Common Market Six). It began to function on 1 January, 1958. Edward Heath sought UK membership, John Major pushed through the Maastricht treaty and, following EU directives, started the failed privatisation of our railways.

The Treaty provided for three basic things—a customs union, an economic union, and certain common institutions. The customs union, eliminating all the tariffs between member States and introducing a common external tariff applying to imports into the community from outside countries, was quickly accomplished.

So the Treaty of Rome prescribed a series of measures of economic harmonisation, covering such matters as the free movement of capital and labour, a common transport policy, a common fuel policy, harmonisation of tax systems, a common commercial policy towards outside countries, and a common agricultural policy.

But from the beginning the Common Market was meant to be more than a free trade area. Obviously the Common Market always had big implications of political union or evolution into a single West European capitalist super state, and its founders actually declared this as an objective.

West German Professor Walter Hallstein, first President of the Common Market and previously West German Foreign Secretary, described the EEC as a three stage rocket—customs union, economic union, political union. Speaking at Harvard on 22 May, 1960, he said:

We are not in business to promote tariff preference or to establish a discriminatory club to form a larger market to make us richer. We are not in business at all. We are in politics.

Financial Times, 23 May, 1960

Ex-Nazi Dr Kiesinger, West German Chancellor, said just before Harold Wilson’s visit to Bonn in 1967, that “he would tell Mr Wilson that the Common Market was not a commercial structure only, but that it was a political community requiring a modicum of common foreign policy”. (Financial Times, 13 February 1967).

So it is more than a customs union. As Hallstein said in a speech in Brussels in July 1969, it is “an indissoluble union of European states and peoples… an economic area of continental scale. To this end the economic policies of the member states are merged into a Community policy”. No one now can pretend that this was not known. It was never hidden, except by the willful ignorance of those who did not, and still do not, want to know.

Aims

The main aims of EU general economic policy are quite specific—unimpeded economic competition by the monopolies. All economic measures decided by the EU are subjected to this policy, with the systematic encouragement of mergers to create super trusts. Every major decision of the Common Market authorities has been on these lines. National economic planning is out.

The Community’s Directorate General of Competition, Dr Pieter ver Loren van Thermaat, wrote in an article in the Statist, 16 June, 1962:

The keynote of the Treaty is that the desired economic expansion, stability, higher standard of living and full employment, in short, all that happens in the economic field in the EEC is to be the result of free competition and not of dirigist measures.

After a report by a committee on medium term economic policy set up in April 1964, the Commission adopted a watered down version giving only a vague declaration of intent with no targets. But it laid down that there was to be no state interference with the private sector, in other words with the monopolists. The only state intervention allowed was to ensure “free competition” and to remove obstacles to mergers.

So Britain in the EU cannot introduce any national economic plan, cannot control capital movements or introduce export and import controls, cannot take measures to control the cost of living or increase taxes against the rich, cannot pursue a policy of regional economic development with subsidies or other state means. We cannot control the main lines of the country’s economics.

Free competition also means wage freezes and other anti-social policies of the central banks, a major reason for the Confederation of British Industry supporting British entry. In its report on the Common Market, Britain in Europe, it declared that increased competition resulting from entry should have…

…a salutary effect in accelerating structural change in British industry, in bringing about a more efficient use of resources, and in particular a more rational market for labour, and in holding down costs and prices generally.

Nothing in the Treaty of Rome forbids nationalisation, but in practice it is impossible unless it is necessary overall to support the monopolies. In a letter to The Times (Sept 17, 1969), Professor Wedderburn quotes a recent case from Italy:

A Milan court, in Costa v ENEL (1968), Common Market Law Reports, 267, took the view that legislation proposing to nationalise the electricity industry in Italy offended against Article 37 of the treaty, which prohibits discrimination between nationals of member states. The nationalisation legislation was a nullity whatever the Italian Parliament said.

In an EEC booklet—Harmonising Taxes: a step to European Integration—Commission member Hans von der Groeben writes that freedom of capital movement, a key EEC aim, can “be created only if steps are also taken to remove the impediments which company and tax laws place on mergers and the acquisition of holdings across the internal frontiers of the Common Market”.

Maurice Corina, in an article in The Times Business Supplement (February 13, 1969), reports that the EEC Commission “has already submitted proposals to the EEC Council of Ministers to facilitate trans frontier mergers by changing existing company laws. The Commission in its proposals writes that the intentions of the common tax rules suggested are ’as an encouragement to forming larger groups better able to face competition inside and outside the Common Market’ “.

None of the Six countries, says the CBI report already quoted, operates legislation restricting mergers. The opportunity for “large scale operations” is another major reason given by the CBI for entry, and explains why nearly all the big British monopolies are fervent pro-Marketeers.

The big trusts are fundamentally imperialist. Most of them have heavy investments in colonial and previous colonial countries. Whether by means of direct colonial rule or neo-colonialism, they use these countries as a source of cheap raw materials, markets and exploitation.

Third World

One of the purposes of the EU is to maintain the developing countries, and particularly those of Africa, as agrarian hinterlands, providing minerals and agricultural raw materials for European industry and consumption. The French and German trusts which originally dominated the Common Market—such as Krupps, Mannesemann, Rothschilds, Pechiney—are the same giant monopolies which exploit Africa. African states have no power within the Common Market, but are only allowed “second class citizen” status as associated members, who have to accept the dictates of the EU Commission on which they are not represented.

The Development Fund, ostensibly created to assist the African Associated States, is controlled by the European powers. This ensures that the funds provided tend to go on agriculture and such things as roads, communications, etc, rather than basic industrialisation, and that the interests of the European monopolies in Africa take precedence over the development of the African states.

In addition, the African and Asian states suffer from the constant fall and fluctuations of the prices of the raw materials they export to the Common Market, while they have to pay ever rising prices for the manufactures and machinery they import from Europe.

The Commission frowns on a policy of subsidies for regional development of backward areas:

Member states must not entice firms away from other member states, nor must they try to outbid each other in the attempt to attract firms from non-member countries.

Von der Groeben

In other words even the inadequate fiscal measures to attract industry to Scotland, the North East, South Wales and Northern Ireland taken by the Labour government would not be allowed. The EEC had already pointed out in its Medium Term Plan of 1966/70 that the poorer regions in the individual EEC countries have got poorer still:

Disparities between certain regions of the Community have continued to get worse, some getting the full benefit of economic growth, while some of the least developed, or those hardest hit by technological change, remain to a great extent unaffected by that growth.

Institutions of the Common Market

The supranational apparatus and directing bodies of the Common Market are in effect a gigantic bureaucracy over and above the national governments with the elected Parliaments exercising no control whatsoever. The main bodies are the Council, the Commission, the European Court, and the so called European Parliament.

The European Council consists of a Minister of each of the member Countries, usually the Foreign Minister. It is important to distinguish the Council of the European Union or the European Council from the Council of Europe which is behind the ECHR. The European Union is not a party to the Convention on Human Rights and has no role in the administration of the European Court of Human Rights. The political right and the right wing media are always pretending the ECHR is an EU institutions to glean EU dislike into dislike of the ECHR.

The Commission consists at present of members appointed by the member governments, and fully independent of the Council of Ministers and their governments. In theory, they can be removed. If the so called European Parliament passed a vote of censure on it, the Commission has to resign as a body. In practice this is nigh on ompossible.

Powers of the Commission include the issuing of:

1. decisions which are binding in every respect
2. recommendations which are binding as to ends but not to means
3. opinions, which are not binding.

Acting at the request of the Commission, the Council gives its views on, or endorsement of, the Commission’s conclusions, and without this endorsement the Commission cannot act on certain matters.

Bureaucracy

In implementation of the Rome Treaty the Council and the Commission acting together issue:

1. regulations which are of general application and have the direct force of law in every member state
2. directives which are binding in the state to which they are addressed, but leave the way they are to be implemented to the state concerned
3. decisions which can be addressed to a government or an enterprise or a private individual, and which are completely binding.

They can also issue recommendations and opinions.

The powers of the bureaucratic Commission are considerable as the…

1. guardian and policeman of the Treaties
2. executive of the EEC
3. initiator of Community policy
4. exponent of Community interest to the Council.

As the Executive body of the EU, the Commission has particularly wide powers and is also responsible for the administration of Community funds. The Council of Ministers has to enact any particularly important or any measure of general application, but it can only proceed upon the proposal of the Commission. So, after extensive consultations with the national governments’ representatives:

• the Commission proposes
• the Council considers
• Council and Commission negotiate
• the Council decides
• the Commission applies the decision, combining its immense discretionary powers with more consultations with national representatives.

However, the Commission takes necessary decisions on its own, and supervises the observation of treaty provisions and decisions of the Community institutions by taking any government to the European Court of Justice, if such action seems necessary or desirable.

The crucial element of all this procedure is the negotiation between the Commission and the Council. Sometime Executive Secretary of the Commission, Emile Noel, wrote:

The Commission thus has a permanent duty to initiate action. If it submits no proposals, the council is paralysed and the forward march of the Community comes to a halt—in agriculture, in transport, in commercial policy, in the harmonisation of laws, or whatever the field concerned may be.

How the European Community Institutions Work

The Commission of the European Union also has considerable power in enforcing the decisions of the ECJ. The Maastricht Treaty in 1992 gave the EU and the ECJ considerable power to enforce decisions. It allowed the Commission to initiate action in the ECJ against any member state in noncompliance with an order of the ECJ. The member state is given the opportunity to explain why it has not come into compliance with EU law and must set a definitive time table establishing when and how it will come into compliance.

While the European Union, including the ECJ, has no police force of its own to enforce decisions on citizens of member states, it does have the power to require member states to force individual citizens into compliance with EU law.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ)

The European Court of Justice (ECJ), consisting of judges appointed by the common consent of the governments, operates from Luxembourg, and for long was little known, and still is! Most people, fooled by the right wing media, think it is the European Court of Human Rights. It is not.

The court of justice for the EU is the ECJ which serves to enforce the laws enacted by the EU, including those restricting hard won freedoms. The ECHR is actually directly concerned to preserve the freedoms we all consider to be human rights. The two courts could end up handing down contradictory decisions.

The ECHR, set up soon after WWII from the Common Market before it existed, is hated by capitalists, their EU bureaucrats and their dutiful media. Consequently the judgements of the ECHR which protect everyone’s basic rights, their human rights, have been presented by the media and the Tory Party as perverse and mischievous precisely because he ECHR stops authoritarian governments from doing whatever they want.

The press and the politicians will not clear up the confusion between them because it would reveal that the ECHR is the “good” court and the “ECJ” is the bent one. Yet it has been presented as an arm of Europe and an enemy of the British, thereby assisting the propaganda of UKIP. It will be interesting when someone takes the ECJ to the ECHR for its violations of human rights like the right not to be a slave.

The ECJ has nevertheless, over the past five decades, created for the EU an incredible amount of case law, which has laid the foundation for the continual increase in the EU’s power. It considers…

1. cases brought by the Commission against governments for infringements of the treaties
2. government appeals against the Commission
3. appeals from national courts in cases where Community law appears to conflict with the national law of the country.

In all cases the decisions of the Community Court of Justice are final, and overrule national law. The Court is biased in favor of the power and supremacy of the European Union and the ECJ itself. Britain has frequently been ruled against by the ECJ, and has generally accepted these rulings and complied with them.

The Court of Justice was quick to establish its supremacy and that of EU law over national law. In a 1964 preliminary ruling by the ECJ in which an Italian law contradicted an EU law, the case of Costa v ENEL, the ECJ argued:

By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own personality, its own legal capacity… the member states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and have thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves. The integration into the laws of each member state of provision which derive from the Community… make it impossible for the states, as a corollary, to accord precedence to a unilateral and subsequent measure over a legal system accepted by them on a basis of reciprocity.

D Dinan, Ever Closer Union, noted:

The Court pointed out that member states had definitively transferred sovereign rights to the Community and that Community law could not be overridden by domestic legal provisions without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question.

The Court later, in the case of Simmenthal v Commission (1978), increased its supremacy by ruling that every national court must apply EU law in its entirety and can not have any national law that conflicts with EU law. This supremacy of the Court of Justice has not been challenged, and is accepted as being integral to EU member’s national legal systems.

The Court created a precedent in 1991 in the case Francovich and Bonifaci v Italy by finding that citizens could sue their government for not implementing or complying with EU regulations or directives. So EU justice has a system now whereby citizens of member states will insure that member states will complye with EU law, and member states will insure that individual citizens comply with EU law!

Is the right to sue the natuional government of any value to the citizen? It might seem it, but it is an illusion. The litigant would need large amounts of money to bring a case before the ECJ, and who can do that other than the very rich? So, this right is at best a mirage with no real substance, and at worst it is a method of keeping intransigent member states in order.

On the other hand, member states can use ECJ rulings to implement unpopular policies. The ECJ is manipulated to give a ruling enabling the government to apply the policy because the Court obliges it to. The government of the EU member state simply blames the rulings of the ECJ to escape public censure.

In The European Union, James A Caporaso argues that the ECJ has penetrated and influenced not only the national legal policy of its member states, but the social policy as well. It has made influential rulings in the social realms of social security, pregnancy of workers, and equal pay and equal treatment for workers.

The (misnamed) European Parliament consists of members (MEPs) elected every five years from the member nations by universal suffrage in elections that began in 1979. Turnout at European Parliament elections has consistently been low—under 50 percent since 1999 and only 43 percent in 2009—under 50 percent in 18 out of 27 member states. Most MEPs are invisible, the electorate being completely indifferent to them. Such indifference and low turnouts show an astonishing disdain for the European Parliament, and it is understandable.

It is largely a talking shop, utterly useless. The European Union itself boasts in one of its booklets:

The Parliament also has a great deal of indirect influence, through non-binding resolutions and committee hearings, as a “pan-European soapbox” with the ear of thousands of Brussels-based journalists.

Doubtless that is a useful propaganda function! It is unable to initiate any form of EU legislation—that being a function solely of the Commission—though it can reject the EU budget. In theory, new Commissioners have to be approved by it, and only rarely are not, and the Commission is responsible to it, though in practice it is not. Only the Santer Commission of 1999 has ever been required to resign. As fraud was involved, anything other than resignation could have led to a huge scandal which the mass resignation avoided.

Critique

It is important to see what this maze really amounts to:

1. First, the bureaucratic and dangerous EEC institutions are essentially outside any democratic control. The decisions arrived at are supranational without consideration, debate, endorsement or control by the democratically elected national parliaments of the members. Yet, as Hallstein says, the decisions of the Community institutions are binding on the member states and its citizens:

   They have precedence over all national rules and have to be observed by all national authorities, including in particular the courts.

2. Second, the tremendous powers wielded by the Commission, an appointed bureaucracy which in practice cannot be sacked unless the sky falls. As Hallstein argues:

   The Commission is independent, particularly of instructions, from the member states.

   This independence, he argues, is indispensable for the working of the EEC. Only in a few exceptional cases can the Council act without the Commission, and he wants the exceptions abolished.

3. Third, the whole underlying basis of the economic decisions arrived at, the economic ideology of the Common Market, is for the so called free capitalist competition and promotion of the super trusts.

The Monopolies

The Common Market the pro-marketeers want us to uphold with enthusiasm is dominated by the huge imperialist corporations and finance houses, monopolies and banks. Banks and finance houses control vast swathes of European industry, such as the huge colonial mining businesses. Presiding over the whole scene, reaching even beyond the frontiers of the EU, are the Central Bankers. They included the Bundesbank, the Bank of Italy, the IMF and the Bank of England, invariably solidly conservative and opposed to progress. Guido Carlo of the Bank of Italy once said in a moment of openness:

The first quality of a central banker is to be cold blooded.

They have all lived up to this maxim with their ceaseless directions for deflation, wage restraint and reduced social services. They have largely dictated the economic policy of the Labour party, as well as of the EU. Their main political spokesmen are forces of the European right, and right wing social democracy, including the UK Labour Party, forces that are pretty uniformly militarist and reactionary.

Since the EU was inaugurated, a feverish programme of mergers has been pursued to build up super monopolies and cartels able to dominate the domestic economy and operate more effectively on a world scale. Mostly at first these were mergers within the old nation states but the EU authorities worked overtime to facilitate mergers across EU national boundaries, and that is evident now.

The reason for the pressure of the trusts for entry was not to facilitate trade but to facilitate monopoly growth by the mergers and acquisitions. The Common Market structure of supranationalism was tailored to suit the supranational activities of the monopolies. It paved the way to transnational monopolies on a Western European scale, the logical extension to a West European stage of the merger movement in Britain, Germany, France and Italy, the “European” finance capital answer to the American financial challenge—for the British trusts the next stage in the world conquest of British big business. That this is the aim has been made clear by Charles Villiers, formerly managing director of the government sponsored Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. Referring to the EU Commission, he said:

I believe it has a function in encouraging and promoting the integration and concentration on a transnational basis of European industry. For such a purpose, the Commission would need a new institution which could be created after drawing upon the experience of similar bodies to the IRC.

Times Business News, 19 Sept, 1969

Despite the illusions created by pro-EU propaganda much of the trade of the chief EU countries is still external to the Common Market, though intramarket trade has naturally increased.

British monopolists were entering Europe even before the politicians decided to take the plunge into the EEC. They simply opened British subsidiaries in the EEC countries and acquired other subsidiaries. That is just how other countries like Japan and the US have operated too. The US particularly like Britain being in the Eu because they can work with British based comapanies who themselves have EU connexions, so the Americans do not need to learn a lot of European languages and law. Servan-Schrieber in his book, The American Challenge, writes:

The Common Market has become a new Far West for American businessmen. Their investments do not so much involve a transfer of capital, as an actual seizure of power within the European economy.

Nine tenths of American investment in Europe is financed from European sources, so Servan-Schrieber remarks:

In other words, we pay them to buy us.

As early as 1963, ten per cent of British manufacturing industry was US owned. US firms in France controlled 40 percent of the petrol, 65 percent of the photo-film, 65 percent of the farm machinery, 65 percent of the telecommunications and 45 percent of the synthetic fibres. On a European scale they controlled 15 percent of the consumer goods, 50 percent of the semi-conductors, 80 percent of the computers and’ 95 percent of the new market of integrated circuits. It is no wonder that British monopolies are pressing for British entry into the Common Market.

But then, if we were to decide to operate outside the EU, we would trade with subsidiaries and acquisitions within it, so there is no compelling reason for trade to cease as pro-EU propaganda insists it would. If customs barriers were put up, we would put them up too, and that would curtail the operations of too many EU based monopolies, so it is unlikely to happen.

Immediately the British super trusts operating across the frontiers find their “national” governments, markets and financial and economic restrictions unsuitable for their needs. They began finding ways and means of bypassing them.

Charles Levinson, Secretary General of the International Federation of Chemical and General Workers’ Unions exposed their working in Britain (Guardian, 24 May, 1969). The monopolies price as low as possible parts, materials, etc, transferred from a plant in a country where taxes are high to branch plants in another country. The aim is to make the least possible profit with the object of minimising taxation. In return the monopoly will fix prices as high as possible in countries with low income taxes or profits taxes. Ultimately this process can end up in the collection or accumulation of profit in tax havens where profits can usually be hidden tax free. A substantial proportion of British exports are now accounted for by intracompany transactions and subject to transfer pricing. Levinson concludes:

Such activities by some of the major British companies like ICI, Dunlop, Bowater, etc, have contributed much more to the recurring weakness of sterling than any number of strikes or consumer buying.

Fiddling in corporate taxation has just drawn the attention of people in Britain, but it has been part of the EU multinational capitalist plot since before 1970. Nobody, except Mr Levinson, noticed, and nobody took any notice of him—after all, he was a trade unionist. The Common Market and its institutions are a monopolist’s dream, and their creation.

The European Union has many benefits for those who control the powerful corporations based in richer member states. Eliminating all trade barriers within the European Union allows the giant corporations to undercut smaller, more local businesses until they go bankrupt, thereby concentrating capital and power into fewer hands. The ECJ is a tool of the dominating monopolist class of capitalists used in the EU to control and exploit the underclasses in poor countries especially the the profit of the ruling oligarchs of the rich nations.

The pro-EU factions may acknowledge that some businesses will go to the wall, but they see it as how capitalism works—the less efficient or those giving poorer service losing custom and crashing. Despite this, and a certain amount of disruption and misery to families and persons by financial loss and particularly lay offs, they claim an overall benefit through free trade. Any such benefit experience shows soon disappears when the cartels control sufficient of the market to be able to fix prices.

Britain and the Common Market

Opposition to our being in the Common Market has constantly been formidable and widespread among the British people, and especially in the labour and trade union movement. If all the forces against were united into a single mass political campaign Briastsin could be made to pull out. It is important therefore to be clear regarding the major reasons for opposing our being in it.

We were told that in joining we would link up in a fast growing economic community, and that by some magic and undisclosed way British growth rates would start approaching those of the major EEC countries. These superior growth rates however were not due to these countries combining in the Common Market. They started in each country in 1953, four years before the Treaty of Rome and six years before the first stage of the Common Market.

Total growth rate for the Six as a whole was 9 percent a year during the years between 1948 and 1958. It fell to 7.2 percent a year between 1958 and 1965 and was only 2 percent a year between 1965 and 1967. (Kahn, Economie et Politique, June 1969).

Nor did Common Market membership stop economic fluctuations in the Common Market countries. Before the first stage of the development of the EEC was reached, France had a period of economic stress worse than our own with devaluation and deflation. She underwent a similar period of restriction in 1964/65. Italy went through the same experience in 1963. In 1966 both West Germany and Holland experienced economic difficulties similar to those of Britain which were met by similar deflationary policies, and in Germany the unemployment level was the same as ours. In the 60s France devalued again without consulting her Common Market partners, a violation of her Treaty obligations, and introduced a new round of deflation. Now the whole of Europe has blown away the magical growth nonsense. Capitalism is incapable of magical growth because it is intrisically unstable.

Britain, like the USA, has been too fond of military imperialism rather than economic imperialism—economic policy sacrificed capital expenditure abroad and military expenditure overseas. Hence the dreary rounds of taxation, wage freeze, economic restriction and low growth rate. Entry into the Market did not solve these problems. Harold Wilson made precisely this point in his Parliamentary speech he made when he was against entry:

The whole House knows… that in Europe or out of it this country can achieve economic strength and virility only by our own efforts, by our skill, ingenuity and our capacity for organisation and also by our sense of purpose and the ability to manage our national economic affairs with a good deal more intelligence and vision than have been manifest in the last few years.

It’s a pity he didn’t re-read his own speeches because the reason we got into a worse plight a decade later than in 1962 was because he implemented exactly the same economic policies as the Tories he criticised.

It was argued that in the EU we would have free access to a market of over 200 million—but required the breaking up EFTA and our “losing” a market of 110 million. Then also the whole system of Commonwealth preference had to be dismantled, creating new obstacles to British trade in a market of 700 million admittedly largely poor people.

It was even argued that non-membership excluded us from the 200 million of the Common Market. Yet, British trade with the EEC countries had grown significantly even before membership. British:

1. exports toWest Germany went up from £124m in 1958 to £323m in 1968
2. exports toItaly from £66m to £160
3. and in the same period increased to £253m to France.

West Germany became our second largest export market in 1968, ahead of Australia. France was our third best customer for capital goods. These arguments for entry were demonstrably phony. As Douglas Jay said in a speech at Oxford (Morning Star, 16 June, 1969):

Every informed person now knows that joining the European Economic Community in its present form, and with its present policies, would make much more insoluble precisely those difficulties from which Britain is now suffering.

The government was hell bent on joining, because it put the interests of the big monopolies in the growth sectors of the economy before the interests of Britain. They and they alone would benefit. They are the driving force for entry.

As an independent nation, given mass movements and struggle, we can utilise our system of political democracy, which the monopolies are trying to undermine, for action on the lines the socialist movement is fighting for.

Beginning within Europe itself, the EU has spearheaded the global drive for deregulation and privatisation. For that reason, many Tories and most sections of big business do not favour British withdrawal from the EU. Whatever suits the monopolists. It should be rejected by the British people.

EU Policies

As capital is international, the capitalists want to use it globally, and so set up institutions, such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NAFTA, and the EU. The Single European Act of 1986 was meant to remove all obstacles to the movement of labour, capital, goods and services within the EU. The prime movers of this were Margartet Thatcher’s Tories in the UK and Helmut Kohl’s German right wing government, the one aiming for a huge opportunity in Europe for City of London financiers and the other similar opportunities for German industry.

Monetary union was also put on the cards. The promise of the passage of this Single European Act was 5 million new jobs. We now know it was an empty promise intended to sway public opinion, and they never materialized, but all of that is now forgotten in the smoke of subsequent empty promises.

Among their aims was the restriction of future socialist governments’ ability to change the capitalist system. So state monopolies were trammeled and state aid for them impeded, and they were increasingly subjected to market regulation, even though an objective of state institutions is to remove them from the destabilization of market forces.

Labour mobility. Free movement of labour between Common Market countries was the target by the end of 1970. The general idea was that if a vacancy in a member country was not filled, it would be open to a worker from another member country. This worker would be able to renew his labour permit within one year, take any job for which he is qualified after three years, and after four years, any kind of paid job as if he were a national of the country concerned. Such labour would tend to be the unskilled and would be difficult to train and absorb. The implications of all this were such that a provision was left for the revoking of these measures if a recession occurred. In a pamphlet issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 1962, Val Schur commented…

…such an influx could clearly create problems in the United Kingdom. There could also be serious political repercussions if as a result of the Immigration Act, Commonwealth immigration is restricted while the movement oflabour from Europe is freed.

Labour in Britain and the Six

Trusts not only play off the workers of one region of the country against another as of now, but the workers of one country against the workers of another.

Taxation. One major EEC tax proposal was to introduce a uniform value added tax on all goods produced. It replaced the selective purchase tax which then operated in the UK. It shifted taxation hugely from direct to indirect taxation. In other words, it made the already retrogressive taxation system in Britain even more retrogressive, bearing even more heavily on the poor than the rich. And so it has remained, with scarcely even a peep of recognition.

UK Sovereignty: Parliament

We were told what the EEC meant. Within the Common Market the sovereignty of the British Parliament is savagely mutilated, as pro-marketeers, John Pinder and Roy Price, had predicted in their Penguin, Europe After de Gaulle, admit:

It is certainly the case… that membership even of the European Community as it exists today would mean a more formal pooling of sovereignty, and over a wider area of policy making. It would mean that a British government would be required—eventually, if not immediately —to accept majority decisions taken in the Council of Ministers. The British Parliament for its part would have no opportunity to amend or reject these decisions. British Courts, too, would be obliged to implement rules agreed to by the Community institutions.

Just what this loss of sovereignty would imply was also spelled out by Lord Dilhorne, then Tory Lord Chancellor, in a speech in the Lords in the Common Market debate of 2nd/3rd August, 1962. The Common Market organs of government “in the spheres in which they operate”, he admitted, have supernational powers which override those of each country’s parliament and law courts. Any regulations of the EEC must be given immediate effect in British law. Parliament would not even have the right to debate them. And the Chancellor warned “should they conflict with existing statute or case law, they would override it…”

In the case of directives, he said, Parliament would have to pass immediate legislation to make the directive operative. Lord Dilhorne concluded:

So, my Lords, to the extent I have mentioned, in the case of both regulations and directives, the legislative functions of Parliament would have to give way to that of the Council and Commission.

Our courts, he said, “would be called upon to enforce the decisions of the European institutions and the judgements of the European Courts… ”.

The cornerstone of Britain’s political constitution is the sovereignty of Parliament. Sir Ivor Jennings once said, “the supremacy of Parliament is the constitution.” The Treaty of Rome can only be applied to Britain by Act of Parliament.

Lord Dilhorne tied himself up in knots in his vain effort to reconcile the sovereignty of Parliament and the Treaty of Rome. He said:

But while Parliament’s power to repeal the Act applying the Treaty remains, and cannot be fettered, I am not implying that it would be right for us to repeal it.

When a lawyer uses “right” he means “legal right”. This is clear when he continued:

The Rome Treaty is not limited in duration, and there is no provision for its termination. Parliament could repeal the Act applying these Treaties. It cannot be prevented from doing so.

He went on:

But, it must be recognised that in international law, such a step could be justified only in exceptional circumstances, and if it were taken without such justification, and without the approval of other member states, it would be a breach of the international obligations assumed on entry into the Common Market. (Our emphasis)

The pro-marketeers and the profit patriots therefore seemed to sacrifice British sovereignty to enter the Market. For them profit comes before country. This is something the British people ought not to tolerate, but nevertheless seem to acquiesce to.

With vital economic levers in the hands of the Common Market, British control and direction of the economic life and functioning of the country ceased to exist. In other words, the type of economic counter programme now demanded by the left became impossible in the Common Market. We have lost the power to compel Parliament to change government policy in many fields decided by the EU Commission and approved by the Council of Ministers. What we need is the mass effort to win change. Within the Market Britain’s Parliament lost its exclusive control over these vital spheres of economic policy. They are vested in the EEC Commission and Council.

A Federal State

The federal state has always been the aim of the founders of the EEC, although resisted by de Gaulle’s France. What powers would a federal parliament in fact have? Precious few. The Commission-Council decision making machinery of the EEC is essential for the working of the Market. This machinery could never work if its decisions had to be referred back to a federal parliament. The essence of any modern federation is the concentration of power at the centre. Already the national parliaments have lost their competence regarding policy making vested in the EEC. If these powers were extended to include the budget, military and foreign affairs, the federal parliament would lack any real power at all.

This dream of “European unity” expressed in the slogan of the “United States of Europe” in the First World War, and later of Hitler’s “New Order”, is succeeded by the federal West Europe of the Common Marketeers. But uneven development is a law of capitalism, and whatever the form of the alliance, it will be dominated by the strongest power within it. Today that power is Germany.

The contradictions between the imperialist powers inside and outside the Common Market have been demonstrated at every stage of its development. In the beginning Britain contracted out, counterposing to the Common Market politics of France and Germany the so called Anglo-American special relationship, and building up EFTA. France and West Germany opposed British entry.

Now things have changed as the Common Market has consolidated. As West Germany gained in military and economic strength, they supported British entry. Germans were confident that they could control Britain within the Market. America encouraged British entry, amongst other things with the idea that Britain would be America’s Trojan horse within the Market. The British went in.

Strauss saw a West Europe Federation, with a “European” nuclear weapon under their control, a rival to the United States. In his Grand Design, Strauss visualised a European federation with “the reduction of national states to the standing of the present provinces of the German federation”, the purpose being to “provide a framework in the Atlantic and European context for a German policy”. Edward Heath and the Tories, speaking for British big business, supported the federal idea, and, needless to say, so did George Brown speaking for the Labour right.

The aim is to create a mammoth aggressive capitalist power grouping, menacing the socialist states, eXploiting hundreds of millions of European workers, Africans and Asians.

Stability, Co-ordination and Governance

A treaty for Stability, Coordination and Governance (TSCG) was signed on 1 March, 2012 by the Eurozone countries. Driving the treaty were the big two continental powers, France and Germany, whose unemployment levels were not so bad, but whose banks have lent a lot of money to the poorer countries of southern Europe, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece.

David Cameron took a stance against it, though its concluding protocols require all EU member states to make it law within 5 years. This treaty forces austerity on to the member states of the EU by binding them to achieve national debts of less than 60 percent by reducing their current debt, if over that and most are, by 5 percent of the excess pa. It means EU states in excess of the prescribed debt level have to suffer steep annual cuts until they reach the target 60 percent of debt or less. When this treaty was signed, the EU had overall unemployment of 10 percent (~25 million). Thereafter it could only get worse.

The aim was:

• demolition of the gains made by working class people in Britain and other European countries over two centuries
• the end of public ownership of transport, communications, energy and publicly owned banks
• the movement away from state to private pension schemes
• the abolition of local government direct labour departments
• an increasingly strong movement to the privatization of health services and education.

False Assumptions

Behind all of this was the full adoption of neoliberal economic policies across Europe, based on its wholly false assumptions:

1. that competition is free and open, when no one even denies, or can deny, it is highly monopolised, and monopolised in such a way that some countries specialize in particular types of profiteering, viz:

   • industrial goods in Germany, Sweden and Holland
   • luxury good in France
   • financial services in Britain.

   In practice, then, competition was not free and indeed actually added to the economic imbalances in the distinct geographical regions that the EU countries constituted in the north and the southern regions, the less specialized south building up its economic indebtdness to the specialized north.

2. that the EU would quickly secure mobility of labour across the EU nations, and this would seamlessly accompany the setting up of a single currency. The 1992 Maastrict Treaty set this out, by enforcing convergence terms whereby currency fluctuations were to be reduced, and harmonization of inflation ready for the single currency to be introduced in 1999. To achieve this the Stability and Growth Pact limited the amount any country could borrow to 3 percent of its GDP each year, but total debt could not exceed 60 percent of GDP, a figure commonly exceeded in the post_War years so as to stabilize the boom-bust cycle by Keynes’ method of borrowing to spend in bust years and paying back the debt in boom years.

   So all governments were stopped from practising the stabilising Keynesian policies followed until the 1980s. The objective was to create unemployment by imposing austerity to return us to the pre-WWII years when unemployment regulated wage demands leaving more capital for investment, theoretically! Necessarily accompanying it was the policy of free movement of labour, so that people in high unemployment, lowly paid countries could freely move to the countries lacking labour with low unemploymernt and therefore having to pay high wages. Thus immigration was absolutely central to EU wage and employment policy, and it is disingenuous of the political pasrties to pretend that migration withing the EU can be stopped or controlled. It is policy!

   In 1992, however, trade union agreements were widespread in European countries, and the union members were, through solidarity, able to defend them, spoiling the EI Commissioners’ neoliberal economic ideas. Consequently, the theory of free movement of labour was not working as intended.

3. that capital had become “financialized”—it was no longer increased most efficiently by investment in production but by speculation in risky derivatives and in leveraged borrowing to invest in formerly public sectors being opened up to privatization in pursuance of the neoliberal economics favored by capitalist governments. As the public bodies running these services usually could not borrow to invest but the private companies could, the market was skewed towards private ownership and away from public ownership, giving rise to such schemes as Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and Public and Private Partnerships (PPPs) whereby private capital is invested in public enterprizes at public risk and cost!

   In the EU, speculative money flowed into the Mediterranean economies’ housing bubble with southern European banks borrowing from northern financial centers to fund the vast sums being put into speculative housing. Capital seemed to be booming, and as neoliberal governments hate to regulate or limit “enterprize”, so capital for invesgtment was to be generated by bringing on a “flexible” labour market by holding back wages via labour competition, “flexible” in this context being a euphemism for “low wage”.

   Obstacles to the “flexibility” of labour were the “disincentives to work” that labour and trade unions had struggled to achieve over several centuries, like:

   • benefits
   • pensions
   • early retirement.

   The privatization of public transport, health and education offered a home for the newly liberated capital. The EU Stabilityy and Growth Pact was aimed at restricting public borrowing not private borrowing!

The EU leaders never thought much about the two capital assumptions, instead concentrating on what they euphemistically again called “reform of the labour market”. Thus the 2006 Public Services Directive required the movement of labour between countries to be improved to facilitate public sector privatization. When low wage workers could be brought in from other EU countries, local agreements could be overruled now by the new directive. That naturally invited strike action by working people aiming to defend their collective agreements, but now the Court of Justice of the European Union (or European Court of Justice, ECJ) stepped in to do its job of enforcing the new European Laws, and ruled that striking to defend long established agreements was against the “freedom of establishment clause” in the Treaty of Rome! The Laval, Viking, Ruffert and Luxembourg cases of 2007-08 showed that the EU was intent on attacking the right to strike, without which we are slaves. This present Tory coalition has simply dropped all subtlety and pretence, and is unreservedly implementing EU requirements.

Flexibility of Labour

In 2007, the EU issued a green paper on “modernising” labour law, proposing that contracts between workers and employers should be individual and “flexible” because collectively bargained binding contracts were the cause of unemployment! Employers could not set on new staff under such agreements, so it seems would rather stagnate than plan growth. Then with the crisis of the irresponsible bankers in 2007, the troika of the EU, the ECB and the IMF ordered indebted states to cut wages by as much as 25 percent in an attempt to make capital more profitable by cutting expenditure on wages. Governments were also required to cut pensions and welfare benefits so that more money could be channelled into profit by replacing the treasuries emptied by the financial giveaway to the bankrupt banks. Any governments that could not or would not do it were brought down by making it impossible for them to borrow at reasonable rates. The elected governments of these countries were replaced by bankers, bureaucrats and yes-men selected by the troika.

Regulations on “economic governance” introduced in 2011 forced governments to take steps to eliminate collective bargaining and proceed to labour “flexibility”. The aim is “internal devaluation” a euphemism for enforced poverty by devaluation of incomes, it being necessitated within the Euro Zone because the Euro could not be devalued. Lo1 The result is massive unemployment throughout the EU, including 27 percent in Spain.

The UK is not in the Euro Zone and did not sign the 2112 stability treaty, yet it is in the EU, having signed up to most other EU treaties up to the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. Moreover, British governments think they are important within the EU, and want it to be so for the sake of the ruling class’s main interest, the City of London Banks, insurance companies and finance corporations.

Meanwhile the push to EU political unity continues with the 2012 treaty which allows the EU Commission powers of supervision over nation state budgets further restricting any policies inclined towards socialism. When a government does not comply, Strasbourg will dismiss it and replace it with a compliant one. That, if you did not notice it, is not democratic, and it has already happened in Greece and Italy.

UKIP

The rich 1 percent of Britain need the European Union because their capital is largely invested in the finance houses of the City of London. Cameron and Clegg represent those interests. Nigel Farage (UKIP) represents another small faction of British capital, drawing much of UKIP’s support from the middle class and the anti-immigrant working class, just like the NAZI party in pre-war Germany.

As much of the economic climate today is bad because of the EU, not in spite of it, UKIP courts popular support by voicing opposition to our EU membership, but nevertheless supports the main items on the EU agenda—privatisation, cuts, and austerity. The British electorate need to know that UKIP is not in opposition to the principles of the EU. Nigel Farage’s only problem with this government’s assault on our public services is that it doesn’t go far enough. UKIP opposes the renationalisation of our rail network as much as any Eurocrat. Yet UKIP has filled the political vacuum created when the Labour party and parts of the trade union movement adopted the position of EU cheerleaders, believing in the myth of “social Europe”.

UKIP’s core is disillusioned Tories—disillusioned petit Bourgeoisie. The UK Tory party has always included small business people, professionals, farmers, shopkeepers and the self-employed (the middle classes or petit Bourgeoisie) having nothing in common with the modern Bourgeoisie, the global financiers and corporate bosses and shareholders on whose behalf the Tories actually aim to manage economics and society. Of course, they think they have a lot in common with the mega-rich Bourgeoisie. The petit Bourgeois, albeit usually reactionary, can be won for progressive policies when they realize that big business policies hit them as well as the employed class. At present they tend to be anti-EU but cannot see that the EU is not an aberration of their Tory leaders, but is entirely in line with big business and finance capital, and not therefore in the interests of small business.

These middle class may not, like many of the working class, been duped into thinking that there are no classes nowadays, but they have been duped into thinking their interests are those of the big capitalists. The Tories are pretending to represent the petit Bourgeoisie, but they are merely using them to stay in power, and the middle class inclination to opt for UKIP suggests that some have realised that the Tories are actually ignoring them. The next step in winning them for progress rather than reaction would be to show them that they are still being duped by the even more right wing party they are now opting for.

They have not realised that the welfare of the working class is of the utmost importance to them—they rely directly on employed people, the working class, for their own prosperity. They have economic interests in common, but as usual have allowed themselves to be distracted by chauvinistic and marginal issues like immigration, a dangerous precedent in the light of the tactics of Hitler and the Nazis in the economically parallel 30s of the twentieth century when Jews served the role of today’s immigrants. That is why so many people read “fascism” when they see UKIP.

Despite near universal professional opposition and strong political pressure, the Section 75 regulations of the UK Health and Social Care Act that explicitly open up the NHS to the EU competition law were approved in the House of Lords, enthusiastically by at least one ex-Labour Lord:

A three-line whip on Liberal Democrat peers ensured a majority of over a hundred, with Baroness Shirley Williams speaking warmly of “an exciting new direction” for the NHS.

Bob Hudson, Guardian

The neoliberal policies of the EU necessitate any British government privatising the NHS, and every other public utility and service that we valued after Attlee and Bevan had set them up in 1945-1951. We shall not be able to return to that while we remain in the EU, unless it became socialist, an unlikely short term scenario. But UKIP is not the answer because it is even more right wing than the Tory Dem government. Farage has already said he’d readily form a coalition with the Tories providing Cameron is not the leader.

Trade Unions

Trade unions were similarly duped into supporting the Labour Party on the EU, through the promise, or so it seemed, of a “social Europe”, a promise now dead and buried in the light of the austerity policies being pursued unrelentingly:

UKIP has filled the political vacuum created when the Labour party and parts of the trade union movement adopted the position of EU cheerleaders, believing in the myth of “social Europe”.

Bob Crow, RMT Union

Jacques Delors, Mitterand’s Minister of Finance invented the ruse in 1982, then torpedoed his own proposals when he brought neoliberalism to France and Europe. Lord John Monks, formerly General Secretary of the TUC and therafter of the European Trade Union Confederations now admits austerity has undermined the foundations of any social European structure that was supposed to have been built.

The European TUC is no longer fooled by the EU, stating in March 2012:

…currency devaluations—which are no longer possible inside the Euro Area—are to be replaced by a devaluation of pay in the form of deflationary wage cuts. To achieve this wage “flexibility”, labour market institutions which prevent wages from fallng are perceived as being a rigidity which should be eliminated.

This EU policy can only lead to the impoverishment of many working people, the enrichment of those holding capital, gross inequality, favoured nations and a discontent bringing the danger that people will turn to a party with populist, and perhaps fascist views, viz UKIP! The EU itself has to be seen as the problem, totally committed as it is to “the Market” with all its flaws, flaws that even Adam Smith foresaw. Capital can be nothing but dominant because because the rules prevent anything else.

It serves no purpose to accuse governments of being of bad faith in implementing EU policies. These governments are doing well by the EU criteria they gladly espouse. But these criteria are not our criteria. Trade unionists and others who resent austerity as being attacks on the working class must lose the idea that Bullingdon posh boys just do not understand how hard it is for the poor at the bottom of society, that politicians are just “out of touch”. They may be, but it is no misunderstanding—they are doing what the EU prescribes. The EU enshrines neoliberal and austerity policies. It is not that national governments are incompetent, though that may also be so, but that they will threats of being replaced as illegal by the EU if they tried to challenge what the EU prescribes. NATO is still practising in the background elsewhere should it need to act for the EU.

To leave behind EU policies, we have to leave the EU. Some trade unions sought to oppose the EU from the left by campaigning as “NO2EU-Yes to Democracy” in the last European Elections, but the media including the allegedly statutorily fair BBC spent more time and space covering the BNP. Working people and trade unionists must recognize there is a left alternative, but also recognize that UKIP is a dangerous diversion and distraction, for it is another capitalist party with aims that are more right wing than those of the Tories, except that they pick on the EU as being anti-British to feed the prejudices of their petty Bourgeois and racist supporters.

The EU is offered as a solution to globalization when it is really an arm of it. Iceland got through its crisis, the first of them, through being unencumbered by the EU, and so able to take its own measures. It wrote off its external debt, jailed irresponsible bankers and devalued its currency, with the outcome that is is no longer in crisis while the mighty EU still is. The BRICS countries are similarly not embracing neoliberalism and are dealing less traumatically with the global crisis of capitalism.

Britain, in particular, as guardian of the City of London stock market, is protecting many of the very global forces of capital that had overstretched and needed bailing out by the taxes workers had paid in to their exchequers. This wheeler dealing goes on in large office blocks just a few miles downriver from the Houses of Parliament which it supplies with servants—all bar a few—called MPs. The UK government is sovereign over these operators and the tax havens they use to squat their rich clients’ money. So the UK government can stop it. But none of the three main parties or UKIP, whose candidates as MPs tend to be either wealthy themselves or careerist gold diggers, have any people with the incentive to do so. Most are intent on representing themselves and their rich paymasters, not the constituencts that voted for them.

So representative democracy, such as it ever existed under this political economic system, no longer does. The people are not represented in Parliament, and have to use their right to withdraw power from that institution by direct action. The trade unions and their members need to know this and act on the basis of it.

Whatever the trade unions see as best will be impossible to implement while we are in the EU, as soon as it violates some treaty, or EU law or directive. The British trade balance looks reasonable when financial services are added in, but without them we are in the mire. The state cannot intervene to save or revive vital industries, so we have to rely on the City, and the ToryDems keep telling us of its importance, but little of these “profits” are spent in this country. They are transferred into accounts anywhere in the world, and spent there. They do not reach working people, but rather increase their costs because the limited number of highly paid servants of the system push up costs in the capital, impoverishing the workers evem more.

There are two essentially different economies, finance, and industry and services, and both need to be publicly owned if the people are to benefit, as the People’s Charter—supported by the main unions—proposes. But the EU forbids it. The trade unions and the people need to face up to that. And to this…

The very purpose of these policies, adapted by all European governments in the EU and enforced by the EU via the ECJ, is to destroy the power of the trade union movement and, thereby and otherwise, to cow the working class and oblige the people who constitute it to compete savagely with each other, quite contrary to our nature to help and care for eeach other (as taught by every major religion) with no safety net for those unable to compete or cope.

That is the be all and end all of it!

Austerity

The EU has changed post war objectives—which stood until the 1980s fairly intact—of a high wage, high productivity society to its opposite—an old fashioned low wage society for most people. It can do this because technology is making workers redundant everywhere. What manufacturing there is will be largely robotic, and those employed will be the technicians that program them. By impoverishing workers, the wealthy can turn their weekly wages from the national curent account to the global capital account. Manufacturing requires customers, people with money to spend, but the commodity production of the robotized factories will produce cheap goods for the poor. High class manufacturing and development will be concentrated in particular specialized nations, and expensive novelties will be available only to the rich until they are commodified and can be made available cheaply and shoddily but profitably to the poor. That explains the growing emphasis on financial manipulation and the need to concentrate capital. It suggests the world will become distinctly two tier—mega rich people and the global poor—emphasising the need for socialism.

The EU—and the US—is writing off the lower classes to grab and concentrate capital, so as to make more profit. The poor will get mass produced commodities while the rich will be buying high tech luxury goods. The poor will be doing menial jobs for menial wages while the rich will live off their stocks and bonds with a few employed as superior technicians. The poor will have cheap and shoddy commodity services like health, education and insurance because they will not be expected to live long lives as they do now. The poor will be fighting each other to get the few rotten jobs that there are, will buy rotten adulterated food or eat grass because seeds will all be genetically owned by rich corporations. Insectivoid drones will be humming around working class rooms and bigger ones droning around outside—the spies and assasins in the sky making sure there are no plots from below against the system.

It is a dystopic vision of capitalism gone mad. But those the gods wish to destroy they first send mad, do they not?

The trade unions need to put the EU at the top of its agenda to oppose, and to propagate more vigorously the truth about the EU in the labour movement.

NATO and the Common Market

From all this, any democrat should condemn the EU and its institutions—and definitely any socialist. It is the instrument of the super monopolies. The supranational decisions it takes reflect, not the interests of the common people concerned, but supranational monopoly interests.

Formally the military and foreign policies of Western Europe are not within the competence of the EU. They are controlled by national governments. The basis of western European military and foreign policy is NATO and formerly the cold war, and latterly the so-called war on terror. But NATO is also anti-working class, a buttress against the democratic and socialist advance of the working class and progressive forces in the world. Forty years ago, NATO was behind the military coup in Greece, and had plans for one in Italy. Having seen what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in the last decade or so, no one should doubt that plans exist for European countries. The imperialist economics of the monopoly capital implies an imperialist military and foreign policy. They call it globalisation. US imperialism is the main controller of NATO.

The logical extension of the EU idea is to a single West European capitalist state in which all aspects of policy, foreign and military as well as economic, are centrally controlled in the interests of international finance and monopoly.

Contra-EU Summary

The EU has been sold to us. The basic argument against from the outset was that it would remove our sovereignty. That is what is happening. We are obliged to apply EU laws and directives. Admittedly there have been some directives that have been useful, and some that have been offered as a sop, but EU advocates need to stop thinking wishfully, and to look instead at what is actually happening.

The 2012 Treaty for Stability, Coordination and Governance enforces austerity by restricting borrowing very severely. If any country has a debt higher than 60 percent of GDP—most do—it must cut its borrowing. The Lisbon Programme requires markets to be “competitive” and “flexible” innocent looking words, which translated amount to a ban on nationalisation. There is negligible democracy in the EU. Its “Parliament” is a sham with no powers except minor ones to object to commissioner appointments. Elected governments have been unilaterally replaced by bureaucrats and bankers. The commissioners are all bought men. Instead of believing implicitly everything that private and state media tell us, people must use their own senses, look at the shambles being created, and accept that the EU is, along with the IMF and the ECB, an instrument of control by very rich people for their own benefit.

The case of Iceland is well known now. They abhorred austerity, jailed the irresponsible bankers, and simply wrote off the debts to start with a fresh balance sheet. Now they are not in recession but we are! We ought not to be fooled by the propaganda any more. What has happened in Europe is plain, and unmistakeable.

Some think it is not a good time to leave right now because of the poor economic weather, and so we need the EU as much as they need us. But the economic climate stretches throughout the EU, and it is a consequence of its austerity policy.

Some say the EU is our best hope of protecting the NHS, but the EU has the central purpose of increasing competition, and that must mean privatisation of the NHS, and therefore its destruction as the united National Health Service we now have. Or had, as it is already partially privatized and is under constant disruptive interference by the government. Yet despite the incessant interference, our NHS is the most cost efficient in the world, while the private health care of the US is the most costly and partial in the world. Outside, we will be able to return the NHS to something closer to how it was and stop all the government interference over the last 30 years that has all been part of a long term aim of destroying it as a national service in readiness for privatisation. Now they have all but succeeded, and we cannot get back without breaking EU agreements. So we must leave the EU.

Some say the EU actually holds back dictatorial national governments like the Tories! But the EU is the source of their austerity policies and under those policies everything that might have seemed socially valuable has been tossed aside, because the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty and the findings of the ECJ have overruled them, or made them irrelevant.

Some people think the Human Rights Act is some EU plot when it has nothing to do with the EU other than that both are European, and despite its constant lathering at the hands of right wing biased reporting, it does what it says on the ticket—guards our human rights. Doubtless, no tabloid reader is the least bothered that Abu Qatada might be tortured in Jordan without cast iron assurances to the contrary, but the ECHR wants to see those assurances first. Tabloid readers would care about that when they are the ones threatened with torture. And that is the point—human rights are rights for all humans, even suspected terrorists, criminals and half wits.

Some people think the EU will stop price fixing, when a core function of the EU is price fixing in that it seeks harmonisation across member states.

Some think the EU has been socially useful. The European Working Time Directive limits weekly working time to a 48-hour week on average, including overtime. In the seventies, we were getting close to a 35 hour week. The Social Chapter of 1989 looked beneficial, but the Thatcher government wouldn’t have it and we signed up to a lesser protocol which amounts to a Social Chapter peculiarly for us. It is supposed to press forward inter alia:

Promotion of employment, improving living and working conditions, proper social protection, dialogue between management and labour, the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion…

All of it has been tossed aside under the austerity policies adapted more recently. Now we have 27 percent unemployment in Greece and Spain, and intolerable levels here even. What good does the Social Chapter serve to unemployed people?

Some say the right to free movement of people (workers) and free movement of goods is good, but when were goods not freely moved, and is the free movement of people necessarily good? Not surprisingly, it is good for those who benefit from it, and not good for those who do not. It is good for poor eastern Europeans who can move into western Europe and double their incomes, but not good for those in western Europe whose wages are halved or they lose their jobs as a consequence. It is bad for small craft and quality businesses losing out by the free flow of low priced goods and the declining market for quality in a low wage economy. But it is unquestionably good for monopolies that benefit by lower labour costs, and thereby greater excess profits for stockholders.

In summary, EU legislation is:

1. Undemocratic—only neoliberal capitalism is provided for, socialism and all forms of public ownership are ruled out in practice
2. Deflationary—requiring strict austerity. Public sector deficits beyond a certain historically quite low level are ruled out making austerity or cutbacks to public services obligatory. It rules out Keynesianism.
3. Anti-trade union—European Court of Justice rulings are based on the laws set up to promote the neoliberal capitalism already highlighted, and so curtails trade union rights won over centuries of struggle. Collective bargaining for better pay and conditions is illegal, and strkes to enforce it have been ruled illegal also by the ECJ. The Monti II regulations of March 2012 enshrined these rulings, introducing the additional notion of “proportionality”, by which a judge will decide whether any strike, even if legal, is “proportionate”. A strike judged to be disproportionate is jufged to be illegal!

Socialists and communists are not interested in renegotiating the terms of British EU membership. The whole philosophy of the EU is politically right wing and economically neoliberal, and its institutions are not democratic. The Tory proposal to renegotiate is merely to pander to those Tories impressed by the far right of UKIP. Any such renegotiation would be a combination of cosmetics and the removal of citizen’s particularly workers’ rights. A “renegotiation of the left” would be nothing less than to renegotiate ourselves out of this voluntary gulag. Its “business interests” are not the interests of small farmers, street corner grocers, artists and craftsmen, but the interests of transnational monopolies, and many middle class people now know it, and see UKIP as representing their interest but it does not. It remains a Tory party identifying itself with big business. That they have not yet realised. Their true interests are closer to those of ordinary folk. Such people should be sure to control the powers of these giant greed machines, not yield to them with a nod of the head. So the demand is to be out.

An act of Parliament was required to approve our entry into the EU. This act can be repealed, and then constitutionaly we are out of the EU, as Lord Dilhorne said. Big business and its army of lawyers and politicians would, of course, find every reason they could, legitimate or otherwise, to stop it, and the uncritical sections of ther British public would be ready as always to believe what the tabloids and TV tell them.

Why would unemployment be higher outside the market? It is about a quarter of the working populations in a lot of the EU member states, and over a half of the young. That is appallling, and it would be difficult to do worse given the work that needs to be done in our country. Why is it worse to escape from the gulag than to agree to stay inside voluntarily? The monopolies are happy to impoverish the working class so that they can make bigger profits by cutting labour costs. When some people speak of the UK having a significant say in Europe who in the UK do they mean? The only people to have a significant say (if it is significant) are the commissioners and members of the Council of Ministers. The EU Parliament is a way of bribing people into supporting the EU through large emoluments and expenses, and has no power other than the notional power to sack the Commission.

So how do we make a right wing, neoliberal, intrinsically undemocratic confederation of European monopolies work for us? We are being slowly enslaved voluntarily. There is a website called boiling frogs—a frog will try to escape while it can from hot water, but apparently will sit quiescently in cold water that is slowly warmed until the frog is boiled. That is what we are in relation to the EU, and indeed in repect of all the fear mongering about “terrorism” and its use to bring in fascism under the veil of secrecy of government.

The Socialist Answer

Instead of undermining British sovereignty and the power of Parliament, and giving up control over the most vital areas of economic policy, which the EU entails, we should, by mass political campaigning, ensure sovereign power is used to introduce an entirely new alternative economic policy in Britain. Such a policy has been advanced by almost the whole of the left.

1. We should ensure economic growth by heavier taxation of the rich, introducing a drastic wealth tax and an increased profits tax.

2. We should take necessary measures to control trade, reduce the export of capital and realise the overseas assets of the monopolies to liquidate our foreign debts and end dictation by bankers native or foreign.

3. We should not allow incessant merging of compaies which result in bigger and bigger cartels, closures and mass redundancies, and the social death of entire towns and areas. Above all, we cannot stand by and see these national giants become even bigger transnational giants, with the various national governments as their pawns, playing off the working class of one country against another. The Common Market paved the way to this danger. In the EU it has already happened.

4. These cartels make a farce of democracy and any social and economic planning. Economic and political power go together. The monopolies are opponents of democracy and the whole democratic process. More and more they and not the government are taking the main economic decisions that decree the economic and social future of the country.

5. Today the representatives of the big monopolies, who already occupy key positions on various state boards, are attacking the parliamentary system. They called for a coalition government, a government of “businessmen”, to sidestep the popular vote of “none of these”.

6. They see the trade unions and working class organisations as their main enemies and have been the driving force of the attack on the unions and the advocates of anti-strike legislation. They want to put the working class and trade union movement in a legal straitjacket.

7. Whatever the immediate measures fought for by the trade unions to prevent the consequences of these mergers for the working class, everything points to the need to nationalise these monstrous monopolies and make them the property of the people. Only by this means can we ensure the economic and political future of Britain in the interests of the British people.

8. The further development of monopoly power is incompatible with the further development of democracy. The issue is—who is to control our future? Shall it be big business, or are we going to fight forward to a democratic people’s Britain advancing on the road to Socialism?

9. In the meantime, the trade unions of Britain and Western Europe should co-operate for united action and a concerted strategy to defend and advance working class conditions against these trusts, which now operate across the frontiers of Europe.

Conclusions

• This, then, is the real answer to the Common Market, to all the spurious talk of European federalism, designed to perpetuate European disunity.
• It is a call for the ending of military economics and closed economic groupings, for real all-European co-operation, for peace, security and economic and social advance.
• It is a call for a new progressive economic policy at home.
• We appeal to all who realise that Britain’s best interests demand that we withdraw from the EU, and to unite as free people accepting our differences.
• Let us say No to the Common Market, but YES to Europe—all of Europe—to preserve peace, end militarism, end exploitation of others, and advance all-European social and economic co-operation irrespective of social and economic systems.

• The EU and Alternatives to Austerity, John Foster, CPB, 2012, ISBN 978-1-908315-09-0
• The Common Market. Why Britain Should Not Join, John Gollan, CPGB, 1969

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