BREXIT

If I had a vote in the Referendum on whether or not the UK should remain in the EU or leave, I would certainly vote Leave. This neo-liberal Germanic Union of ours, with its unnecessary and perverse austerity, its false pretence to promote investment and growth, its failure to protect both external borders and desperate refugees, its Potemkin façade, insistence in destructive so-called “structural” reforms, is no use for anything or anyone, including the Germans. There is no prospect of conceivable change for the better except under the duress of actual or threatened disintegration. One of my favourite comedians, John Cleese, has also declared himself for Brexit, for the same reasons: “If I thought there was any chance of major reform in the EU, I’d vote to stay in. But there isn’t. Sad.” And he added: “I feel terrible about being lined up with thugs like Murdoch and Dacre and Brooks, but I do think Stiglitz and Owen have got it right...” (@JohnCleese, June 12, 2016). After all, Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers has always known how to deal with the Germans. A strong case for Brexit is also made here.

Having said this, that option is undoubtedly costly, uncertain in its implications both positive and negative, habit breaking and very uncomfortable. I simply do not believe the polls predicting a substantial lead for Brexit (52% over 33% in the Daily Express latest poll), in spite of the significant contribution given to the LEAVE faction by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with their kiss of death endorsement of the REMAIN option. I believe that on 23 June the third of the voters still undecided will decide otherwise and tip the scales to REMAIN.

And if voters did choose to LEAVE overwhelmingly, it is no good pretending that the UK is a small Swiss canton voting in a mandatory referendum, for there is no such a thing in British constitutional documents or constitutional practice. David Cameron, having set up the Referendum to protect himself from Ukip’s threat, will be under great pressure to comply with the result and apply to leave under art. 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, but would not be in a hurry to make such a move. After all, he already said he will not serve another term, but he is still on course to serve until 2020, can rely on a solid cross-party pro-EU majority in Parliament, and might be able to obtain additional concessions from the EU on the strength of the vote, on top of the token ones he recently negotiated, sufficient to re-open the whole question.

But if Britain did leave, I would watch with Schadenfreude the impact of the vote on the further disintegration of the Union and the collapse of the German ruling parties. There is a group of distinguished academics, calling themselves EREP Economists for Rational Economic Policies, who have issued a “Remain for Change” Report, “Building European solidarity for a democratic economic alternative”, a generous but misguided approach. On 23 June, Vote, as the Irish saying goes, vote well, vote often.

Family loyalties, however, seem to be divided. My wife – a UK citizen who acquired double Italian citizenship through marriage  – tells me that if she had  a vote in the UK (which was removed under the Blair administration at the beginning of this century)  she would vote REMAIN:

“I would vote REMAIN because I live in Italy, a country that benefits enormously from EU membership as one of the original Treaty of Rome signers for,  and by whom, the Project was designed, (one of the defeated Axis powers seeking to remedy losing) and which benefits  currently and most specifically from the UK's membership.

Italy is a transit country for incoming migrants that it fishes out of the Mediterranean, and the closing of the borders of one of the main countries of migrant settlement (as opposed to migrant transit) in the EU would have adverse effects on the transfer of migrants northwards and generate serious conflicts with any attempting to stop here rather than transit to Germany, Sweden, France and the UK.

Italy exports also over a million Italian nationals to the UK for settlement and draws strongly upon welfare payments available there to all EU citizens.  Losing a settlement of choice venue for a million Italian workers would be intensely disruptive in Italy itself.

High-quality employment in UK services, academia,  culture, and local and international administration for Italians (and other EU citizens) as well as educational opportunity at low cost from primary to post-graduate levels  in the UK are also at stake with BREXIT.  UK means-tested and universally applied welfare benefits to Italian workers at all levels both in the UK and (as is the case with many children returned to Italy) at home are very valuable and not to be lost.

Italy may be a net contributor to the EU budget, but its contribution must be set against the direct beneficial transfers and subsidies drawn directly from the UK even though the UK is not a member of the Eurozone and pretends to its electorate that there is an 'opt-out' from such transfers.

Of course, if I were settled in England I would have a different view of the whole matter - a looking glass view it might be called.  But as an Italian citizen and resident the last thing I want to see is a goose leaving with its golden eggs”.

In conclusion, it is not at all a matter of divided loyalties, nor of indecision, but a conflict of interests between two different, alternative capacities. If you live in the UK, vote to LEAVE.

I'll Not Vote Brown's Labour

Remember Christopher Logue's poem "I shall vote Labour" (1966)? I remember reading his verses in The New Statesman at the time:

I shall vote Labour because
God votes Labour.
I shall vote Labour to protect
the sacred institution of The Family.
I shall vote Labour because
I am a dog.
I shall vote Labour because
upper-class hoorays annoy me in expensive restaurants.
I shall vote Labour because
I am on a diet.
I shall vote Labour because if I don't
somebody else will:
AND
I shall vote Labour because if one person
does it
everybody will be wanting to do it.
I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour
my balls will drop off.
I shall vote Labour because
there are too few cars on the road.
I shall vote Labour because I am
a hopeless drug addict.
I shall vote Labour because
I failed to be a dollar millionaire aged three.
I shall vote Labour because Labour will build
more maximum security prisons.
I shall vote Labour because I want to shop
in an all-weather precinct stretching from Yeovil to Glasgow.
I shall vote Labour because
the Queen's stamp collection is the best
in the world.
I shall vote Labour because
deep in my heart
I am a Conservative.

[ 'I Shall Vote Labour' from Selected Poems by Christopher Logue published by Faber & Faber.]

Contrast and compare with the following excerpt from Tony Wood's Editorial in the latest issue of The New Left Review, "Good riddance to New Labour":

"... is there any reason to find Labour preferable? Arguments for them as the lesser evil rest on a number of false assumptions.

First, the notion that there is any principled social or political basis for loyalty to Labour: whatever such attachments used to mean, the party’s own self-transformation in pursuit of power has emptied them of any real content, turning them into little more than sub-political badges of identity. There is no reason why voters should be any more sentimental about the Labour Party than it has been about them.

Second, the idea that rejection of New Labour necessarily means voting for the Tories: abstention, a spoilt ballot, or a vote for one of the minority parties denied representation by the British parliamentary system are perfectly honourable options. Within the present morass of British parliamentarism, any consistent left should not restrict itself to one enemy, but should rather engage in combating the entire putrid edifice, the better to carve out an exit from it.

Third, those who advocate yet another term for New Labour ignore the fact that, in a system where actual political differences are minimal, no government should be allowed to continue in power indefinitely, lest its corruption go unchecked. The notion that a spell in opposition might actually do a ruling party some good, though widespread in previous decades, is rarely voiced today—itself an indication of the system’s degeneration.

But surely the clinching argument against New Labour is one of simple democratic principle. Any government with a record as appalling as this one’s deserves to be punished at the polls, if accountability to the voting public is to have any meaning. The specifics of New Labour’s record—one murderous war after another; slavish devotion to finance; promotion of rampant inequality; repeated assaults on civil liberties; fragmentation and privatization of public services; outrageous corruption—make plain that they have fully merited being turfed out of office. Good riddance; this execrable government deserves to go."


I'll not vote Brown's Labour
because my balls would drop off
if I did and, above all, because
deep in my heart
I am a Socialist.


P.S. In fairness, I will vote Labour in my local elections, where clever and competent candidates committed to improving the life of their community innocently stand, unfairly handicapped by Gordo. They might have called for his demise before the elections, but nobody should be put in a position of having to be a hero.

Humouring Gordon Brown

On 6-7 November 2009, at St. Andrews in Scotland, the G-20 finance ministers and central bankers, “representing around 90 percent of the world's wealth, 80 percent of world trade, and two-thirds of the world's population”, were told by British Premier Gordon Brown that “it was time to consider a global financial levy, such as a tax on transactions or an insurance fee, to build up a "resolution fund" as a buffer against future bailouts. Banks needed "a better economic and social contract" that reflected their responsibilities to society. Any measures must be implemented by all major financial centers, Brown noted” (IMF Survey Online, 23 October).

The IMF Survey Online goes on to say: “The IMF has been working on suggestions for such a levy and plans to have some initial ideas by its Spring Meetings in April, to be held in Washington.” Was Gordon Brown so eloquent and convincing, then, winning over the attention and consideration of IMF officials and World leaders, wearing his Saviour of the World hat?

Absolutely not. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told reporters the IMF was considering several options for the G-20 to look at. "We can't go on with a system where some individuals take risks that finally all taxpayers, like you and me, have to pay for.” But he added in the same breath: “The financial industry has made such big innovations that it is probably impossible to find a transaction tax that will not be avoidable by potential taxpayers. So it will be based not on transactions but on something else." “He made it clear that there was no consideration of a currency transactions tax.” Brown was engaging in a familiar behaviour pattern - pretending an activity was at his instigation, and displaying his trademark ineptness in mis-representing others' activity.

Of course. In 1972 James Tobin first suggested a tax on financial transactions, with the dual purpose of reducing their size and volatility, and raising funds to finance investment and growth in less developed countries. He originally envisaged a tax rate of 1% on all foreign exchange transactions, but later reduced it to 0.1% to 0.4% (still a tidy sum if it worked, considering that the volume of financial transaction is of the order of ten times world GDP). At that time it might have been possible to introduce it effectively in economies that were still relatively closed to financial flows. Then the UK still had even a dual exchange rate, one for current transactions, and one for investment carrying an investment premium; an individual or company based in the UK could only invest abroad by borrowing from the holders of investment sterling and paying them back in the same sterling.

Given the very high degree of financial globalization today, such a tax could only be global: it is sufficient for one country not to introduce the tax, for that country to attract the bulk if not all of the global financial turnover thus offering the entire world the opportunity to avoid it. The trouble is that there are no global governance institutions that could institute it or enforce it globally. And even if the tax was genuinely introduced as a global tax, it could be avoided by transactions taking place in cyberspace: the argument that a tax levied at a small rate would be preferred to a tax-free but less secure transaction no longer applies today: financial transactions in cyberspace are much more secure than they used to be, and any large transaction can be fragmented into a large number of small sequential transactions, each taking place after all the earlier fragments have been successfully executed, in such a way as to minimize any associated risk. Internet is another country. Moreover, the objective of reducing the size and volatility of financial transactions might require, in times of turbulence, much higher tax rates than a fraction of a percentage, higher than any conceivable insecurity premium of unofficial market channels, again leading to tax avoidance. It is no accident that James Tobin ended up practically disowning his tax.

Moreover, as Charles Goodhart argues: “most serious advocates of a Tobin tax admit that it would have the effect of raising both the volatility and the costs of financial markets in the long run.” [Goodhart has a better idea and recommends “a tiny tax imposed on every individual addressee in an internet message, payable by the sender, and collected by the server from the sender. ... First, it would kill spam. Second, it would make senders think who really needs to receive the message. Third, the internet, being so much cheaper than any other current message service, would remain the preferred channel of communication, so the tax base would be immobile. Fourth, and most important, it would be a significant source of revenue.” Eurointelligence, 26-11-2009].

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said there were two possibilities for a financial sector tax, including a "possible windfall tax for 2009, a one shot thing." The other would be a more long-term tax, at a rate which could be inversely proportional to the degree of bank regulation in each country. “We don’t want an extra-simplistic solution that will not be effective. I am very pragmatic: I would prefer a second best solution we can all implement."

So the Gordon Brown inspired tax will be a transaction tax which “will not be based on transactions but on something else”. Which is par for the course for a democratic leader who has not been elected as such democratically, and a Labour politician who has not based his policies on Labour values and electoral promises.

There are two very good reasons for Dominique Strauss-Kahn not to have rejected Brown’s "extra-simplistic solution that will not be effective" outright. First, in English it is considered “rude” to say No, a restatement of one’s different view is preferred. Second, contradicting a madman only encourages him.