Carryfast:
The idea that people like Farage and Davis want to return powers from EU federal rule to the national ‘parliament’,doesn’t seem like the same thing as wanting more powers for the CBI which is what you’re saying.IE if that was their goal they’d obviously be on the in campaign side in which it’s clear that big business is even more anti nation state than you are for the exact reasons you’ve given.
Big business is of two minds, partly because there’s no clear way out for them. If they stoke nationalism, some international interests will suffer, and there might be a clampdown on immigration which domestic bosses are hooked on, and the thing might get out of hand and turn into war (in which free market capitalism will be further discredited).
The alternative, to allow the EU to further unify, is precisely what they’re pulling back from, because political control over the economy will be strengthened, and working class interests will benefit. It will help solve the class war the rich are waging and rehabilitate the economy, but they don’t want any solution which involves lower rates of profit and less extreme personal wealth, and they aren’t yet convinced they must accept that solution.
The real sweet spot for the rich is to keep the working classes competing with each other, which keeps profits flying high and wages rock bottom, but not so much as to cause war or deglobalisation. The status quo in other words, which workers have put up with for 40 years, and are still putting up with even following the banking crash. This is what CBI interests want - business as usual, no change, or if there must be change then as little harm to profit as possible.
We both know that this style of low-wage, high-accumulation capitalist economy ultimately doesn’t work - it’s anti-Fordist, but not all bosses subscribe to Fordism, and neoclassical economics doesn’t deal with such structural defects. Economics stopped talking about economic structure in the 1970s, because doing so highlights the class war at the root of the capitalist economy (much as Adam Smith did in his time).
People like Davis who have ideological reasons for wanting state power dismantled, are not necessarily as cynical as the collective opinion of the bosses themselves. But, like the public at large, the bosses latch on to ideologues whenever it suits them, and simply abandon them when it does not - you don’t have to share an ideology, to support politician whose ideas go in the right direction for present purposes.
While then saying you’d be happy if EDF suddenly rebranded itself as EU energy.
No, I said I’d support the UK-CEGB if it suddenly rebranded as EU-CEGB and took responsibility for all of Europe.
You’ll recall I identified three features of the CEGB: a) public ownership, b) an agenda to maximise political goals not profit extraction, and c) democratic control (of sorts, because it’s political agenda was determined by Parliament).
I might even add a fourth, d) that it was publicly funded by raising capital through the general taxation of the economy which benefitted from electrical infrastructure, or by using the size and power of the state to borrow capital at a cheaper market rate than can ever be done privately.
EDF has only (a - public ownership) in its favour, but the “public” in that case means public bodies that represent only the French and Chinese public. It isn’t owned by any public body that even pretends to represent the British public.
In which case exactly what would have changed.The same contradiction applies within your obvious recognition that government along national parliamentary democratic lines is more democratic than transnational Federal rule while at the same time saying exactly the opposite.
There isn’t any contradiction. National governments do democratically represent their constituents - the point is that many questions concern more than one national constituency, and we need international democratic bodies to represent us on those questions.
The key defect with nationalism is either that it refuses to accept that some questions arise which do concern other nations as well as our own (such as the terms of international trade and access to natural resources which are only found outside our current borders), or (more typically) it seeks to impose an answer on multiple nations whilst only representing the interests of one nation (i.e. imperialism).
I know your answer is to make our nation (including its economy) insular and self-contained (and therefore render the answer to international questions moot), but this would lead to a much lower standard of living (perhaps even a primitive economy akin to the third world, since it has been centuries since Britain was economically self-contained). With the lower standard of living would come military impotence, so we’d probably be conquered soon after.
For the most part, even discussing these sorts of nationalist solutions seriously is likely to cause public opinion to collapse into the imperialist answer, so that 10% of workers must be shot to death again to break the spell again.
As for you wanting to impose undemocratic Chinese style planning policy locally I’d guess that’s yet more ideolically driven bs in which you think that it’s ok to bulldoze what remains of Surrey and turn it into even greater London because that supposedly suits the class war agenda.
No, it’s because Surrey is not a self-contained island, and it can’t expect to depend on our nation’s infrastructure as a whole, without out nation as a whole having a democratic say on what goes on in Surrey (including its provision for housing).
I’ll bet what Surrey wants is the benefit and the national standard of living from having jobs in London, airports in London, motorways to London, cement works in London, car factories in London, shipbuilding in London, teacher training in London, hospitals in London, but then wants a hundred mile view of bucolic countryside, without making their contribution to the housing, the infrastructure, and the land required for all this that they enjoy - this is, on a smaller scale, the same problem with the nationalist mentality where it concerns international issues.
But obviously double standards apply in the case of saving North Yorkshire and ■■■■■■■ etc from the rush to Chinese style urban hell.Here’s a clue wiping out villages and small market towns and countryside and transforming it all into an inner city type zb hole and suburbs just means that no one with any sense then wants to live there.Especially when it’s done on the typically zb’d up thinking of Socialists thinking that the solution to a housing affordability problem,caused by low wages,is to build loads of high density,supposedly low price,housing to match the zb wage regime 
.
It’s all very well talking about dire tower blocks which were put up on the cheap, and the brutalist architecture reminiscent of Clockwork Orange.
Even these failures were better than most of the squalid pre-war housing (now either renovated or long demolished) and the portacabins some people were still living in in the 1950s following the war. Most people who criticise the quality of public works and its planning, have no experience of the inferiority of private works and its planning (particularly private standards in the absence of public competition, when the private sector cannot stand on the shoulders of the public giant).
By contrast, the good council housing estates employing normal brick construction (which were more expensive per unit than tower blocks or prefabs, but far cheaper than private housing) are still some of the best houses available even today.
As for people like Farage ( or Hoey ) wanting us to ‘fight’ against the import of foreign workers to divert attention from the wage issue as opposed to solving it.The analogy is more a case of the homeowner inviting two East Euro workmen to do the job for a lower price than one Brit worker would charge.All on the basis of the lower wage expectations and difference in West Euro v East Euro economics and the East Euro workers predictably working in their own National interest.
Yes, but that still captures the essence of my analogy! The homeowner invited the East Euro workers to tender in order to undercut the Brits! So why attack the East Euro workers rather than the British homeowner, when the British homeowner is the one wilfully undercutting the going rate, whilst the East Euros are just working for their normal wage (or better!)?
It’s not as though the East Euros are coming over to compete vindictively and race to the bottom, or breaking the solidarity of their community like scab workers. They are, in a sense, already at the bottom and trying to climb up, whereas the British workers are at the top kicking their boots in the faces of those further down the ladder.
This is why I say, strategically, we must create solidarity by helping to develop Eastern Europe (and is why bosses have a contradictory interest in cheap immigrant labour - it’s good whilst it’s cheap, but bad once the immigrants develop and equalise and can then unionise with settled workers).
But this development does not need to happen suddenly, nor do individual workers in individual sectors need to bear the brunt, nor do bosses need to be allowed to low-road our skills and wages (as opposed to requiring that any immigrant is paid the going rate for the going conditions, and is therefore at least as good quality as a settled worker).
Although I do think they could be put to better use, as with a couple of boring machines like this, you’d have thought they could dig us some new trade route tunnels, possibly all the way to China! 
.While at the same time,obviously erroneously, 