Carryfast:
Rjan:
[…]
Assuming that you support the EU Federal government system over Nation State sovereignty by definition that puts you on the same side as Heath,Callaghan,Thatcher,Major,and Blair.and against Benn,Shore,Heffer even Foot and now Hoey.
As for the bs left v right argument it’s you who wants to make it such an issue and you can’t ( won’t ) even provide a clear answer as to how you can deal with the resulting contradictions that creates for you.
You haven’t shown where those contradictions arise. The subtle contradiction as far as I’m concerned arises on the old Eurosceptic left, where the real answer to any objection (as the Eurosceptic left argue) that the EU is not sufficiently democratic or that the distribution of economic rewards is not sufficiently fair, is that they need to be making the case that the EU become more democratic and socialistic! That being said of course, for me the issue is not totemic - I would support a left-wing Labour government regardless of their position on Europe.
For the centre-right who are pro-EU, there is no contradiction in their position on the EU in its current incarnation, because as far as they are concerned it is pro-business, pro-market, and any democratic deficit is immaterial because the economy is supposed to be governed by wealthy private interests who are in a market relationship, not by the people through the ballot box. The only contradictions for the centre-right are simply the inherent contradictions of free-market capitalism - which is why the so-called centre ground which they occupy is being evacuated by the masses of people whom the free-market economy is hurting. This is why the more Remain propaganda I hear, the dirtier I am beginning to feel.
The radical-right complain about the EU not because it is insufficiently democratic (good god, they certainly do not want businesses subject to the will of the people!), but because in immediate terms it imposes a set of common market rules that prevents them competing with other EU nations and profiting via the low road of abolishing standards, eroding workers’ rights and wages, reducing taxes (and smashing public services), and so on. Less immediately but more ominously, the EU project also represents a means by which division amongst the European working class may dissolve - I’ve said earlier that what the right-wing fear above all is that the EU may well become democratic and left-wing! No sensible worker ought to support this project, because there isn’t a worker in the world who ever became better off in the marketplace - no worker who escaped the economic hurt imposed by free-market capitalism - by driving their own wages down and eroding their own rights.
Now, you say I am in the camp with “Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, and Blair”, but quite clearly I am not. You say I am against “Benn, Shore, Heffer even Foot and now Hoey”, again clearly I am not. My political inclinations are quite clearly with the latter group and not the former.
The problem - and you catch a glimpse of it at the very end of the second part of the debate between Heath and Foot that you linked to - is that of reconciling left-wing internationalism with Euroscepticism. Foot, Benn, all the rest, they rehearse their objections against the EU in terms of it having too little democracy, and that it will have all sorts of implications because the distribution of economic gains between nations is not socialist enough (with some exceptions like agriculture). This is all left-wing bread and butter.
But then in other contexts they rather leave you with the impression that they wouldn’t agree to join the EU even if it was sufficiently democratic and socialistic - for a variety of basically nationalist reasons, including the exceptionalism of British institutions and political traditions, the loyalty of their current electorate, the instability of large political entities, and so on. As politicians who’d spent their lives at the top of the tree and had a grip on power, you might wonder whether they just didn’t want to vote their own roles away. I’m sure it wasn’t as cynical as that, but simply a reflection of their own muddled thinking, or hesitancy at the precipice of the political changes that their own ideology would eventually entail.
Of course, we’re 40 or 50 years on now since those debates were being had in the Labour party, and we have been inside the EU for quite some time, and the simple answer is that we must commit to being a member of the EU conditional on the principle that it reform so that it is democratically governed and that it be regulated in a way that ensures economic fairness between it’s constituent members.
If that demand is made but cannot be implemented (because of insufficient support in other nations), then leaving is an option that can be put to the public. But as in Greece, the likelihood that a preponderance of British people will simply opt to leave the EU (if it does not involve the bumper economic gains they have been falsely promised by the right-wing), is low I think.
And of course, for left-wingers, democracy is especially important, and current EU rules do constrain a left-wing government (although certainly not totally). If the EU will not reform, then I probably would vote to leave for the time being, albeit I would change almost none of the rules except for the pro-free-market elements of them, and the gains in living standards for British workers would not arise from the act of leaving, but from the act of hitting the rich even harder once there was access to the full spectrum of economic levers including tariffs, capital controls, commercial expropriation, and so on.
But it is not clear that Foot’s suicide note is any more popular today than it was in the 80s, and a left-wing Labour government can do a great deal for British workers even if it remains inside the EU and agitates for democratic reform, which is why left-wingers should not allow the issue to become fundamentally divisive, and allow the question to be settled by putting an honest case to the people about the options we have.
The more grave threat is from the dishonest case for Brexit being put to the people from the right-wing, and the far-right forces it will unleash - because if people will swallow lies once from the right-wing press and become habituated to that wrong-headed thinking, they will likely swallow lies again and carry on with the wrong-headed thinking that will run their standard of living further into the mire. It is apparent from 20th century events that only howls of agony and the deathly stench of defeat will dislodge such cancerous thinking once it is well underway, and we must ensure that it does not get underway.
The reason workers in this country, which is one of the richest and most productive in the world, do not have a sense of economic security (including the fact that most workers are one paycheque away from poverty, including visiting foodbanks, losing their homes, or running up grievous debts) is because of the ideology of our own ruling class and the excess of economic wealth and power that is concentrated in their hands and not ours.
There are countries in Europe that have half or even a third of our productivity, and still have comparable or even in some circumstances significantly better levels of social security and public amenity than Britain. So too countries like Germany and France have barely any better productivity or greater wealth, and yet have solid manufacturing bases and work appreciably fewer hours, because they consistently plough in capital investment - and have higher tax rates (Germany in particular had some of the highest corporation taxes in Europe until the 2000s, whereas Britain’s dropped in the early 80s following the neoliberal logic of the Thatcher government).
Other nations are not to blame for British woes - those to blame are Brits who keep voting for right-wing or centre-right governments, which has seen the wealth and power of the rich spiral, and then wondering why the hell everything keeps becoming more difficult for them. Countries like Germany that have more settled relations between bosses and workers (including better state regulation), will rightly ask why Britain has spent 30 years of gains on enriching it’s own ruling class and driving down their taxes, and then comes to Europe with the begging bowl demanding something extra for British workers.
When people like yourself complain that Germany has seized market share in manufacturing, the Germans will quite rightly counter that they have spent decades pouring billions into industrial investment and worker training whilst Britain lived high on the hog of selling off the family silver under Thatcher, so why the hell shouldn’t they have a better market share when they are doing all the right things for manufacturing and we are doing all the wrong (dictated not by any EU rules, but by political decisions made in Westminster and endorsed time and again at the British ballot box)?
When it’s clear that it’s all about ‘your’ personal view of what defines ‘left’ and not the idea of left just being what’s good for the working class.
I’m quite clear that your thinking is not good for the working class, but I don’t define mere Euroscepticism as right-wing. It is the iceberg of right-wing ideology that underpins the right-wing support for Brexit, as well as their mendacious case put to the British people, that if not avoided ahead of time will tear a hole in the side of the interests of the working class.
On that basis pro Nation State sovereign democracy,anti EU Federalist,anti immigration,being more ‘left’ than your mish mash alliance of exploitative Heath/Callaghan/Thatcherite/Blairite politics and you having the nerve to call that left.IE if you want to make it a matter of left v right then at least let’s define what we mean by left.With your idea of left clearly being somewhere/anywhere between Mao and Heath which obviously includes Callaghan and Blair.
Lumping Mao and Heath together is your most risible gambit so far! In your political lexicon, I’m clearly closer to Benn than Blair, but I’ve dealt with the rest of your pro-nation-state rubbish before.
While if you and all the other lying so called ‘democrats’ were actually democrats then you’d obviously all have no problem with a Confederal Europe.Which gives the national MEP groups the sovereign right of opt out over every and any decision and with it the required democratic control over that process.Which of course isn’t what Heath signed us up to nor what he ever intended and he knew it.Nor is it what you’re all about in wanting to use the Soviet style system which Heath provided you with to impose your inherently undemocratic anti nation state undemocratic form of so called ‘left’ wing politics on us all.
As I’ve said before, democracy is not the condition in which every single individual has a veto on every single issue - that is simply a tyranny of the minority, not appreciably different to how bosses exercise vetoes in the free market by controlling capital. It’s not to say that the very concept of a veto is undemocratic - some questions may be so sensitive as to require 100% (or nearly so) democratic consent, but it’s still up to the majority to decide (and be persuaded ahead of time) that certain classes of questions deserve a veto owing to the particular relations between people or groups.
As for the accusation again of moon landing ‘denial’.That’s just another example of your typical and as expected inability to accept dissent or opposition to anything which you personally believe in and expect everyone else to then rigidly adhere to without question.
I’m not rigidly adhering to a view. I wouldn’t criticise anyone for having entertained the hypothesis - to have investigated the very possibility. But no sensible person in my view - certainly not one intending to be serious rather than playing a devil’s advocate - would conclude that such a conspiracy exists. It is a hypothesis without any material support!
IE Stalinist by name Stalinist by nature and which is what Socialism is really all about.If only people like Benn,Heffer,and Shore had realised it instead of wasting their time and effort on the waste of space Labour Party and the failed,degenerate,lost cause of Socialism,in the realisation that protectionist Nationalism is the true definition of ‘left’ and we won’t find that in Socialism.Which,unlike those naive examples,is the conclusion I’d reached before the age of 20.If all that puts me on a collision course with those with your views that’s a bonus.
Your views are on a collision course with themselves - they’re contradictory. There’s nothing Stalinist about my views and I can give a perfectly consistent account of what a democracy ought to look like.
