Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

But it's still the second biggest manufacturer in the world (with more than eight times the UK's output).

This is you at the moment - "I have apples, you have oranges - my apples are better apples than your oranges are apples!". How many destructive wars did the US suffer on its soil? How many times did it need to rebuild its cities? Nobody would think its a comparison that makes any sense, and that is before you start getting into the whole - one country vs 27 thing.

The Tories have done a great job destroying the one thing the UK people love, other than the monarchy, and that is the NHS. And you have been gaslighted into thinking the destruction of the NHS is somehow a great achievement. And the bonfire of regulations, what does that mean? You should force someone to work 12 hours a day for 7 days a week? Have no sick pay or annual leave? Because those are work regulations that people agree with. But let's all go with the US system, with its no paid maternity leave and letting mothers go back to work after a few weeks because they cannot afford to take the unpaid 12 weeks they are entitled to and not lose their jobs.

How about having no annual leave if you don't agree it with your employer. So you could be doing the same job as your colleague and because he asked for more AL he gets it and you don't. But maybe you don't mean those regulations. So what does it actually mean? Making sure your employer provides a safe working environment with fire prevention measures in the office? Those regulations? Or do you mean that they can now manufacture vacuum cleaners that make more noise for a population of 60 million and make a different model for the EU and its 500 million people?

Your post shouts out, tell me I read the tabloids without telling me I read the tabloids.

It does now, but that's not how it became an economic superpower. It did that, as others have pointed out, by exploiting vast natural resources, which the UK is not in a position to do, to accumulate capital and invest it. And it's worth pointing out that it did that while maintaining very high real wages, a very open immigration policy and a more or less permanent labour shortage, the polar opposite of the policies you are now advocating for Brexit UK.

To be honest, salonfire, I'm beginning to think your grasp of economic history is not that crash-hot. You've also posted about the "collapse" in the economy following the independence of the Free State. While the economy did languish after 1922, that wasn't a collapse; it languished just as badly before 1922. The main economic impact of 1922 resulted from partition; that devastated the border economy (on both sides) but of course that had more impact on NI, which is largely a border area, than on the Free State.

I'm getting the impression that you're just inventing "facts" of economic history to bolster a simplistic half-baked neoliberalism that you probably adopted in adolescence, and haven't really critically reappraised since.

Well, yes, and also by slaving. Which, of course, also has a certain amount to do with the American rise to prosperity.

But the point is not to bash the UK or the US. The point is that salonfire's grasp of the foundations of US wealth is, um, hazy, and he's using his misunderstanding of history to bolster his fairly extreme neoliberal views in a way that makes Trussonomics look like a model of sanity.

Interesting thoughts.

I think a crucial difference would be that America didn't do it in the way that the UK would have to. i.e., America didn't reduce workers rights, it didn't reduce holidays, it didn't eliminate huge public spending on health/transport/pensions etc. Because it didn't introduce these things in the first place.

So it was far easier for America to end up in it's current position than it would be for the UK. Once people have had something for a couple of generations (an NHS, 24 days annual leave, a subsidised transport system, a moderate pension from government money, food/work safety/standards, citizens rights) then it becomes exponentially trickier to take it away.

A very interesting comparison you made there at the start - since when Ireland initially gained Independence in 1922, it retained a dominian status within the Commonwealth, which amongst other things retained a common travel arrangement (still honoured), and free trade agreement, as well as agreeing to pay reperations to the UK for 19th century 'land loans' - so in other words we happily forewent 'sovereignty' for some level of stability.

It was only over the next few decades, as we found our feet did the Irish Free State take back more and more sovereignty. As in 1931, 1937 (after we'd felt strong enough to engage in an economic war) but still remained in commonwealth and finally 1949 when Ireland officially became a Republic outside the commonwealth.

So in contrast to the UK, Ireland was pragmatic enough to leave in stages as it found its feet

Yes indeed, the EU has no say whatsoever over the vast bulk of constitutional and criminal law in member states (this is yet another English Brexiteer myth). Although EU law invariably has the power to overrule national law, most of its actual laws are merely concerned with things like the environment, health and safety and working conditions / hours.

Nevertheless, the EU isn't going to start dictating the domestic constitutional arrangements of member states, still less of applicant states. An entry criterion requiring "a solid legal framework and reliable institutions [underpinning] a coherent policy of prevention and deterrence of corruption" is a pretty thin basis for the EU to start dictating, e.g., how a member state's legislature should be chosen; the EU won't go within a thousand miles of that.

And the UK is not the only European country to have nominated legislators, despite the potential for corruption involved. Do I have to remind boardies that eleven of 60 members of Seanad Éireann are political nominations? . Italy has a quota of senators nominated for life. No doubt other examples can be found. The requirement for a legal framework/institutions to prevent and deter corruption isn't directed at this kind of thing at all; it's directed at having clear anti-corruption laws, politically-independent prosecutors, independent courts. And the EU doesn't take a position on how these things should be structured; it looks at outcomes and, if they are unsatisfactory, points applicants to the need to address the problem by taking steps to make their anti-corruption framework/institutions more effective. But it's still up to the state concerned to determine what steps to take.

Were the UK to apply for admission — and, in the short to medium term, this is a pretty remote hypothetical — the EU would have political concerns, but they wouldn't be about corruption in the UK. They'd be about political stability. While the EU in principle would be keen to admit any European democracy, and especially a democracy of the UK's size and significance, they wouldn't want to admit the UK if, five or ten years down the road, we might find ourselves back in 2016, with an ill-thought-out referendum being touted as a solution to internal dysfunction in the Tory (or indeed Labour) party. There is a right to leave the EU and the EU will not make it a condition of admission that a state give guarantees that it will never exercise that right, but we do want member states to have a constitutional order and a political culture in which it is not exercised in the cavalier and irresponsible fashion of 2016.

This is probably more about political culture than about constitutional order. In Ireland, as we know, withdrawal from the EU would realistically require a constitutional amendment, which requires a referendum. But a simple majority in the Oireachtas can legislate to put a constitutional amendment to the people, and a simple majority of those voting in a referendum can approve that amendment, which in both cases is exactly what happened in the UK. So far as constitutional and legal measures are concerned, then, there's nothing in Bunreacht na hÉireann to stop the idiocy that the UK perpetrated in 2016 being perpetrated here too.

Of course, it wouldn't be. The glib explanation for that is that we're not idiots. The slightly less glib explanation is that we have a political culture that, for all its other faults, has much better understanding of (a) what EU membership means and what it doesn't mean, and (b) what referendums can and cannot do, and of when it's appropriate to put a constitutional amendment to the people and when it isn't.

The point I'm making here is that, even if the EU were minded to start dictating new constitutional laws for the UK, new constitutional laws aren't really what's needed ; they won't necessarily fix the underlying problem. The EU will be much more interested in looking at the UK's political culture. Is there a consensus in favour of EU membership that holds across the major political parties? Is that a settled consensus — has it endured for a while? Is it constructed on a realistic awareness of what EU membership means, and of what leaving the EU entails? Is there political honesty about this, and is the political culture intolerant of dishonesty on this question? Given the extraordinary strength of political parties in the UK system, do the political parties reward dishonesty or ignorance about the EU? I.e, is instability on the country's EU policy baked into the political culture? Etc, etc.

These are political judgments and, if and when the day comes, they'll be weighed with other political considerations. It's likely, as I have already pointed out, that this day won't come for quite some time. The passage of time, plus the very fact that the UK must by then have elected a government and parliament that feels able to apply for UK membership, will mean that the UK's political culture has already changed from what it is today, but the question will be whether it has changed in the right way, and to a sufficient degree.