Leavers on the 'left' - Main arguments and analysis please...

[treelover]

I like the EU, but I’m voting out

Patrick Collinson
There are lots of positives about being part of Europe, but the impact on working people’s rents and wages is not among them

The EU has given us cheap mobile phone roaming charges, cheaper flights and proper compensation when things go wrong. It has helped clean up the environment, improving our rivers and beaches. It has given us unprecedented freedom to travel visa-free across the continent. And I’m voting out.

Why? I know a painter/decorator who has not been able to raise his wages for 15 years. There’s always someone else, he says, willing to work for less. A driver who arrived from Turkey 18 years ago, who says the bus companies used to pay more than £12 an hour, but can now pay £10 or less because they have so many takers (and yes, the irony is noted). A care-home cleaner in a rundown seaside town who reckons her hopes of ever getting more than the minimum wage are zero. Each blames an influx of workers from the EU. Each of them are voting out. Tell them the EU protects workers’ rights and they just laugh.

This is surprisingly the Guardian Money expert.

 

[Spymaster]

^^^^ Coming over here taking our jobs.

 

[CNT36]

Which website, Jacobin or Malik's? Either way I had no problem get accesses

I edited to say Jacobin. Half asleep today. Thanks.

 

[ska invita]

Theres been little confident pronouncement so far on this thread: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/would-europe-be-better-off-without-the-eu.345071/...Id really love to hear people who feel strongly against the EU's thought on that. My feelings towards it are more emotional and anecdotal rather than fact-based.

I think if people feel UK should leave the EU for lexit reasons, they should wish for all countries to leave it.

I'm an internationalist - my considerations in this vote are not just how it will effect the lives of workers in the UK but also the rest of Europe (and beyond). Europe (not the EU) as an entity has all kinds of serious and growing problems going on, financial and cultural. The wider effect of what happens in our referendum also has big implications for the rest of Europe. I agree with LBJ that the Union is very fragile and there are faultlines coursing through it.

To take it up another level of drama: WW2 (and other episodes from recent european history!) are not a distant past for me but feel a present living 'memory'. I agree with Varoufakis in regards this when he says at the forefront of our minds in the referendum should be the 1930s.

The Left should never lose sight of the history of the 1930s. After 1929, the Left failed to create the coalition with other democrats that was necessary to prevent the descent into the abyss of the 1930s.

Now, I see such an abyss opening up in front of our eyes in the centre of Europe today. And if it does, we are going to unleash very vulgar and brutal ultra right wing forces throughout Europe, and various xenophobic tendencies that will be turbocharged by the disintegration of the European Union.

Brexit would speed up the disintegration of the European Union and in the end the only beneficiaries will be those ultra-nationalists, xenophobes, racists everywhere, including in Britain.

My understanding is this is why the people of Greece didn't ultimately want to leave the Euro (and the Union) - through their own direct experiences and shared memories of fascism.

If you believe that neoliberalism is deeply and fundamentally flawed then it should follow that you can see another financial crisis is on the near horizon. I certainly do. The stakes of that couldn't be higher. Rightist separatism is growing through Europe and the UK vote would have a massive influence and impact, particularly on the poorest European countries and their governments. This is serious stuff and warrants treading very carefully.

 

[butchersapron]

What role do you see the EU as having in driving the growth of the far right in europe then? None? And given your avowed internationalism why are you supporting what amounts to EUKIP against the workers of the rest of the world. That is exactly what it's for - to compete better with the US and the south east asia in a drive to worsen workers conditions. And to keep out foreigners.

 

[DotCommunist]

Our sweet, darling bits of paper, apples of my eye? How dare you!

mah love is like a ten pound note

 

[ska invita]

A great way to help win a fight is to demand your already bigger better armed opponent ties your arms behind your back.

I'm not convinced that Exit sufficiently unties our arms to be ready to fight the next round of attacks that loom on a post-EU horizon, brought on by rampant UKIP right forces fresh from a victory.

What role do you see the EU as having in driving the growth of the far right in europe then? None? .

Financial collapse born of capitalisms internal failures is the key seed...is that unique to the EU existing, or how might Europe looks today if the EU was never formed? How might the former eastern bloc countries look now? I really don't know - I'd love a speculative answer to that.

There are two options on the table: total separatism - no Union - all countries on their own (which is the logical end point of Lexit), or Union. I would love to hear peoples opinions about how separatism/national sovereignty across Europe might look and if it would be a better deal (on that other thread). So far no one has said it would be. I'm totally open to that future, but I'd like to hear the argument for it. Ive no emotional connection or defensive feelings to the EU - it would be pushing at an open door to hear it.

And given your avowed internationalism why are you supporting what amounts to EUKIP against the workers of the rest of the world. That is exactly what it's for - to compete better with the US and the south east asia in a drive to worsen workers conditions. And to keep out foreigners.

Im not "giving support" to the EU...its not proactive. (As it stands I cant actively bring myself to vote for either side - I expect Ill spoil my ballot)

I could only agree with the above if it were proven that having no EU would be better for poor european countries...that conditions wouldnt be even worse...I can easily imagine an even deeper race to the bottom in those countries within the globalised market outside of the EU.

I repeat what Ive said all along here - this isnt a vote in a vacuum, its not one about whats Platonicaly better or worse, its not a vote FOR a neoliberal EU - for me its about what works "best" (and obviously there is no "best" option here, just lesser evils) for the situation we face.




I think another parallel here is the recent US/UK invasion of Iraq. After some time of occupation there were calls to Bring All Our Troops Home Now.
I couldn't have been more against the invasion, more disgusted with what happened and my complicity in it (my taxes, the government of a country of which i was a citizen) - but I disagreed with the calls for an immediate withdrawal.

Once you are in there are massive repercussions from just disappearing again - namely leaving an enormous power vacuum. That power vacuum is far more dangerous than maintaining a managed occupation and slow managed withdrawal. Staying in occupation was the better of the two terrible options I felt.

In my opinion, at least in part, it was the withdrawal too soon that has created the devastating madness of the current situation in the middle east. Invasion and war radicalises many and to step away leaves those radicalised, as well as other nasty power hungry players, room to run rampant.

And I fear a similar thing with leaving the EU. We've gone in to it. Successive UK governments have committed us to neoliberalism with the EU. Leaving needs to be managed in a way that doesn't leave behind a power vacuum, that doesnt throw peoples lives on the fire, and that does unleash forces which cant be put back in the box - both in the UK and across Europe I fear exit can be exploited in many ways.


*cant post anymore for a while! back to work...

 

[hermitical]

There are two options on the table: total separatism - no Union - all countries on their own (which is the logical end point of Lexit), or Union.

But that Union of which you speak need not be the European Union we have today, a new one could be forged from the ashes.

 

[Coolfonz]

Theres been little confident pronouncement so far on this thread: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/would-europe-be-better-off-without-the-eu.345071/...Id really love to hear people who feel strongly against the EU's thought on that. My feelings towards it are more emotional and anecdotal rather than fact-based.

I think if people feel UK should leave the EU for lexit reasons, they should wish for all countries to leave it.

I'm an internationalist - my considerations in this vote are not just how it will effect the lives of workers in the UK but also the rest of Europe (and beyond). Europe (not the EU) as an entity has all kinds of serious and growing problems going on, financial and cultural. The wider effect of what happens in our referendum also has big implications for the rest of Europe. I agree with LBJ that the Union is very fragile and there are faultlines coursing through it.

To take it up another level of drama: WW2 (and other episodes from recent european history!) are not a distant past for me but feel a present living 'memory'. I agree with Varoufakis in regards this when he says at the forefront of our minds in the referendum should be the 1930s.



My understanding is this is why the people of Greece didn't ultimately want to leave the Euro (and the Union) - through their own direct experiences and shared memories of fascism.

If you believe that neoliberalism is deeply and fundamentally flawed then it should follow that you can see another financial crisis is on the near horizon. I certainly do. The stakes of that couldn't be higher. Rightist separatism is growing through Europe and the UK vote would have a massive influence and impact, particularly on the poorest European countries and their governments. This is serious stuff and warrants treading very carefully.

Agree. The near-complete absence of he financial crisis in the debate is deafening. Both/all sides are wedded to an economic system that has been failing for a couple of decades (at least) and they colluded in myths like `immigration pulling down wages`, brussels red tape, etc etc to deflect blame from themselves, when the crisis reduced the national avg wage, the crisis cut working hours, cut the tax take, hiked the deficit, led to cuts in public services, and it has never gone away.

 

[hermitical]

Just come across this from Jonathon Cook and I think it has stiffened my resolve - off to the polling booth

 

[BigMoaner]

No, it stems from you talking bollocks about something you either don't understand or believe your audience doesn't understand.

All of the four largest European parliamentary groups are neoliberal by any meaningful definition of that term. Your attempts to exclude one of them, the Social Democrats, from that category is simply obfuscatory. Further this shit about "popular will across Europe", a strong (neoliberal) "social democratic bloc" in the largely decorative parliament and "powerful mandates for change" is bollocks. None of that allows the Treaties to be changed. That could all be true for the next thousand years and it wouldn't change the basic reality of the EU. It wouldn't change anything even if the former "social democrats" were actually still social democrats. The EU can only be substantially changed, not by "powerful mandates" or "strong blocs" or anything similar but, by all 28 countries simultaneously electing meaningfully left wing anti-neoliberal governments, drafting new Treaties and ratifying them. Even one country can block any such change indefinitely. There has never once in history been left wing governments elected in every single state simultaneously and there is zero prospect of that happening in the reasonably forseeable future, particularly now that the former social democrats are among the keenest neoliberals.

You know that this is true, which is why you don't talk about the actual process that change would have to involve and instead stick to vague waffle about powerful mandates. It's cynical shit, relying on a general ignorance of the actual EU institutions and treaties to persuade.

I think this is why I didn't vote. I have zero understanding of any of it, and I don't trust any of the politicians preaching on either side.

 

[SaskiaJayne]

We need to start turning the theory into reality.

 

[ska invita]

We need to start turning the theory into reality.

Seems to me Boris and Nigel have just done that