Routinely we are told that trade liberalisation and openness is a universal good. Remainers will very often stick to the economic metrics rather than making the case for the European Union for what it actually is. I can't say I blame them. The "free trade" case for Brexit looks flimsier by the day. This is why I maintain the line that this is not primarily an economic question.
There are questions as to the legitimacy of the EU as a democracy and the wisdom of surrendering ever more powers to Brussels where there is inadequate scrutiny from media and little public interest. The EU has insidious effects, many of them unquantifiable and hidden from view - not least how it influences the culture of government.
But actually, the economic argument for remaining is not clear cut either. Both sides play games with statistics and issues are very often reduced to a single figure or GDP percentage which actually tells you nothing and is always arguable. Not least the net benefit of immigration. Often it overlooks that this is a question of what sort of society we want and whether the economic trade-offs are worth considering. In many ways radical changes have been made without a proper public debate and without consent.
Moreover when it comes to the single market we talk about the headline figure and its overall estimated value (£270bn a year). Even I do that when warning of the dangers of a no deal Brexit. The EU also pulls this trick when it talks about its free trade deals with third countries without being entirely honest about the losses and the domestic impact.
By keeping losses firmly in separate, unrelated categories, they can convince themselves that they are adding value. You never see them deducing the cost of negative externalities of trade and free movement. If you have a single market in goods, services and people then you also have a single market in crime - and one which asymmetrically affects the UK.
For instance, organised crime is difficult to quantify in terms of cost to the economy. It's not uncommon for organised crime to target music venues as part of a massive black market in stolen mobile phones. I've had particular experience of this having had a phone stolen at a death metal concert. The miscreant was apprehended but that cost me a hundred pounds in train tickets to go and retrieve it from Camden police station.
Then there's building site materials theft which is estimated at around £800m. For context that is worth more than the entire catch from the UK fisheries fleet (£774m). Not all of it will be attributable to migrants but the large scale organised crime very often will be, which in turn forces developers to beef up their security at enormous cost.
Meanwhile this report from the Department for Local Communities and Government on rough sleepers shows that second-highest majority after British nationals with 1,388 people this year is Romanians, closely followed by Poles and Lithuanians. The majority of rough sleepers are foreign nationals - and we can no longer deport them. This is where we see public spaces turned onto transit camps which diverts tourism. Organised begging is also a major problem. Ben Judah writing for The New Statesman describes his experiences masquerading as a migrant.
The worst-off migrants often spend their first nights like this – on the street. Today the majority of London’s 7,500 street sleepers are migrants, and a third of them are eastern European. Squats and doorsteps tend to divide into “English” and “Polish” zones. There are frequent fights.
How do you get into work if you arrive with nothing? No money or means, no proper address – and no proper address means no National Insurance number. This is why many head immediately to the illegal touting spots that mushroom outside the hardware stores along the North Circular ring road and the edge of London.
What Judah reveals is a black market economy based on exploitation. Then we have to look at the unmeasurable externalities. This report notes that around 9,000 illegal “beds in sheds” housing tens of thousands of people have sprung up across London over the last five years. This underpins an army of low wage workers placing stresses on infrastructure, not least London's sewers which weren't designed for these pressures. Investigations routinely show overcrowding in Houses of Multiple Occupation which allows foreign workers to undercut the market rate - especially when avoiding tax.
The Landlords Association confirms "Councils are dreadful at prosecuting rogue landlords. The prosecution rate in 2012 was less than 500 out of 1.5m landlords". Councils often won't do anything about it because if they evict they have a statutory obligation to house them, adding to an already acute problem. The overcrowding and consequent crime it brings is what generates a great deal of resentment. As much as these are economic issues they are also quality of life issues.
Much of this started to balloon long before the expansion of freedom of movement. Fresh flowers and vegetables from UK farms are harvested by illegal labour which is trend going back twenty years. We didn't get adequate legislation until 2004 which is only as good as the enforcement and intelligence networks. Being that employees are very often complicit, it is difficult to bring a case.
The UK boasts of its services economy but the low prices we presently enjoy (so we are told) are very much the result of massive exploitation, meanwhile UK producers are having to compete with low quality, low price imported goods often based on stolen intellectual property.
It can be argued that all of this is resolvable without leaving the EU and in some respects I would agree. All of it, though, requires vast improvements in crime surveillance and enforcement - and somebody has to pay for that. There are already major stresses in the system and the justice system is gradually collapsing.
What this government will not do, though, or indeed any, is take the necessary steps because as remainers constantly remind us, this low wage exploitation economy is the only thing propping up the NHS and social care.
Moreover, in the happy-clappy world of Westminster, immigration is a universal good and having taxpayer funded flats in central London, they will likely not see Afghan youths in Hounslow bashing each other with baseball bats in broad daylight. Just so long as immigration is still propping up anaemic GDP growth, they can keep telling themselves everything is fine and that a knife crime epidemic is culturally enriching.
In previous blogs I have noted how the fundamental of the UK economy are not sound and that we are storing up a perfect storm of deferred problems. That is the fundamental issue here. Our politics is unable and unwilling to address the issues or take any politically brave decisions - not least because we have a self-entitled public and an infantilised media. The public have been having these debates while our political class is absorbed by trivia and beset by irrelevant tribal infighting.
Even now our political class does not seem to have grasped the seriousness of Brexit and at this point I think it will not have their full attention until they are dealing with the consequences. That, to my my mind, is what makes Brexit so very necessary. As much as the current economic paradigm isn't working, we will very soon see it collapsing altogether (as indeed it was always going to) and we are going to need a series of debates as to our national priorities and whether we can any longer lie to ourselves about the sustainability of our national habits and entitlements.
The EU has only one real function for our political class and that is to sustain the status quo. A status quo which allows them to indulge in hobby horse politics and shirk their responsibility for governing. They need not think about trade, aid and foreign policy. They need not think about agriculture or fishing or technical governance of any kind. There is no political reward or incentive to engage in the adult business of government.
Before we can even begin to address our economic dilemmas we first need a major shake up of the political culture and to do that, only something as seismic as Brexit will do the job. This is why, incidentally, were there a re-run between remain and leaving without a deal, I would still vote to leave. Leaving without a deal will destroy the Tory party and that is no bad thing. If it takes a term of Corbyn for them to get their act together and present a serious proposition for government and ready to treat the public like adults then so be it. We need adults back in charge.
One had hoped that the long awaited no-deal technical notices would have focused minds enough for the media to treat them with the seriousness they deserve. Instead the media has reduced it to a potential shortage of sperm. This is the all pervasive juvenility that runs deep in our media. It is no longer capable of treating the public like adults because it is no longer run by adults. This tells us quite a lot.
The technical notices themselves have a number or important omissions which the media has thus far failed to detect. Moreover, it tells us a lot that it's only news now that the UK has published its own version of EU Notices to Stakeholders which have been online for a number of months. Nothing exists outside the bubble; not for our politicians and not for our media.
Over the last ten years of contributing to eureferendum.com, one of our chief complaints about the media has been how coverage of EU affairs is slender and very often treated as foreign news and EU measures are only ever reported when they are turned into UK law. Even the remainers have now clocked this dynamic as the Tory party tries to take credit for EU measures on roaming mobile charges. This is partly why the public and politicians alike have no real idea as to the the extent of EU integration or how much of our laws it makes.
And this is the real danger of EU membership. Our media, demonstrably, isn't interested. Nor are our politicians. The European Scrutiny committee is one of the worst attended and EU affairs don't feature except in a major crisis. Meanwhile, because the job of MEP has no real gravitas or prestige, any hapless biped who fills in the form can become an MEP. We tend to get Ukip knuckle-scrapers largely because the electors are a self-selecting minority and euro-elections are viewed as an opinion poll on the EU rather than elections of importance.
British politics is uniquely remote from the people is nominally serves and all the while the real business of government is conducted overseas by anonymous officials and the presence of voting rituals is merely a bureaucratic formality to maintain the outward illusion of democracy. We are therefore in a state of political paralysis while the real economy stagnates and the levers of power aren't attached to anything.
Ultimately media follows power and the media has failed to detect the shift of real policy-making power and so it the Westminster bubble has becomes a three ring circus - more akin with a politics theme park for ambitious social climbers. When remainers said we would become inward looking they failed to notice that we already are, failing to notice that our global presence is gradually erased as the EU takes primacy and pursues its own foreign policy agenda. We no longer have politics of consequence. Brexit is the inevitable consequence of a two decade long hollowing out of politics.
The technical debate in respect of how we leave the EU has been woefully shallow, lacking direction and we can see how badly competence has evaporated in the Westminster bubble. Our think tanks are rotten to the core and incapable of producing intelligent policy, our media is unable to prioritise and our politicians are coming to realise that perhaps they should have read the Lisbon treaty before ratifying it.
We should not be at all surprised that Brexit is going to cost us far more than it ever should. Intelligent execution of the referendum mandate is simply beyond their ken. We are out of the habit of good governance and our politics places a premium on conformity over knowledge. We cannot, therefore, expect our politics to deliver now or any time in the future unless we have a political reckoning. That's what Brexit is and no economic metric can persuade me that remaining is the better option. If we do not take this opportunity to arrest the decline then we never will.
No comments:
Post a Comment