Europethree

IS EUROPE GOOD FOR TRADE?

What does Gordon Brown think.....?

"No business planning for growth in the future can ignore
the facts: 80 per cent of our potential markets are outside
Europe and a decade from now the Asian market will be 50
per cent larger than the European..."(Gordon Brown)

So.....is Europe really worth giving away our
democracy for?

We consider Britain's membership of the European
Community to be an important and significant issue, with
implications about our democracy.
The European Community is an economic trading
organisation with an undefined political aspect which is by
turns insisted upon and denied by ministers. This is
acknowledged by Gordon Brown who described the
intentions behind the EC;
"Indeed the assumptions that became rooted in the very
idea of European integration were that the single market
and single currency would lead to tax harmonisation, a
federal fiscal policy and something akin to a federal state".

We think that while it is reasonable to belong to a trading
block, - it is NOT reasonable to give away political power
to do so. Remember that political power means the power
to decide over our lives.

Does it matter where the political power is?

It is unwise to give away democratic power in fair weather
that cannot be easily regained in foul.
Our parliament is where the British people express their
political will. With each bit of power that is taken away from
Westminster and put in Europe, we must ask ourselves 1) if
we can afford to lose that power? and 2) how would we
ever get it back again?

We believe that Britain has to chose a path of retaining all
its own political power for the British people and no-one
else. This goes for all things, great and small, from our
weights and measures, to our criminal justice. We will
decide ourselves.

What sounds jingoistic and nationalistic now, will sound like
commonsense once we realise that we have unthinkingly
given away our freedom, but then it will be too late. There
is something plainly silly about giving away political power
which has taken hundreds of years to get, and which is
notoriously difficult to achieve and to retain. Does it make
good sense to allow a new upper class of political elites,
outside the reach of democracy, who live abroad, and rule
us from abroad?

While you read this you are possibly thinking "Yes, but its
not literally true". But European laws have to be obeyed,
and they are made in all areas except, so far, criminal law,
immigration, and taxation. And there are now moves to
extend European law into those areas too. Once this
succeeds, as it inevitably will, we will be completely subject
to European law in all areas of the legal system. How long
will it be then until there will be talk of scaling down the
British Parliament, as it will gradually become obsolete? 30
years? 20 years? 15 years? How long have we got?

It is bad enough to be told what to do by interfering
governments whose sole aim seems to be to legislate the
minute details of our lives, but to give the appointed
officials of Europe the right to do so is real folly.

The fact that most people still do not know how Europe
works ought to ring alarm bells.
It is most unfortunate that ignorance and complacency
about our own political system has reached such depths,
just at a time when we are in danger of giving it away to an
essentially non-democratic organisation, The European
Community. It is more important than ever to teach about
our parliament in schools , before we have bred a
generation who will know so little of its value that they will
give it away.

DO WE NEED TO SWAP DEMOCRACY FOR TRADE IN
EUROPE?
This is happening on a grand scale in terms of our very
participation in the European Community, where we are
asked to disregard democracy merely to belong to a
trading block. So imperious are the economic imperatives
that opponents of the European Community are painted as
being hopelessly petty and deluded, pathetic flag wavers
failing to see the bigger picture of what the markets tell us;
even though, in actual fact, the markets tell us to look
beyond Europe, as we always have done.

The benefits of a Europe-wide trading block are no doubt
great. Napoleon and Hitler offered us the same perks
although with rather more obvious political disadvantages,
but again a certain loss of political power. We felt at that
time quite able to decline, despite the considerable
inconvenience involved for everyone!

The same benefits are offered now by our friends, and are
naturally harder to resist. Britain , like any country has an
appetite and a need for trade with its neighbours, and we
naturally delight in the peace that now reigns in Europe. But
we do not need to give away democracy in exchange for
peace in Europe.

The greatest advantage to Britain in the trade block with
Europe is not trade with Europe but to be part of a trading
block which can better protect its interests vis a vis the
USA, and the Eastern countries. But Gordon Brown himself
has said that the endless rules and regulations hinder rather
than help our trade chances with the rest of the world.
There is no need to give away political power for that!

Britain's trade historically has been with the rest of the
world; it is there that we have our longest and closest links.
For a brief period, three decades, it seemed as if we were
about to pursue a new destiny in Europe, and this meant
not only trade links, it meant, according to the architects of
the European Community, political and cultural
convergence. Already their vision is seen to be out of date;
rejected by electorates around Europe who share,actually,
the British distrust of a federal vision, the narrower picture
of Europe trading with itself, dominated by its own internal
rules, and with its sovereignties constricted by tax
'harmonisation'.

This inward looking aspect of the European Community,
and the way in which it is, increasingly overwhelmed by a
flood of rules and restrictions and bureaucracy, actually
threaten trade with the East.

For the brief time has already gone when trade could be
imagined as anything other than global - the over regulated
inward-looking European Community is now a white
elephant in terms of global trade. Britain's future as a
trading nation lays precisely where it always used to - in the
east, with India and China and the far East,

This is how Gordon Brown put it;
"...moving from the trade bloc era to the era of Global
Europe requires a long term commitment to regulatory
reform that balances the need to lessen the burden of
regulation and enhance our flexibility while still ensuring high
standards.

In Britain I am determined that we not only impose a
competitiveness test to all new regulations but pioneer a
risk based approach to regulation - no inspection without
justification, no form filling without justification, and no
information requirements without justification."

...even Gordon Brown then, is aware of what a hindrance
to trade, the EC regulation neurosis has become. The EC
is now more or less an irrelevance, and that it is world
trade that matters, as for Britain it always has.
Gordon Brown went on to say;
"It is globalisation that is our greatest future challenge:
world trade doubling every decade, China's trade doubling
every three years, world trade now rising nearly twice as
fast as world output.
Two decades ago just 10 per cent of manufacturing exports
came from developing countries. Soon it will be 50 per cent.
China’s wage costs are still just 5 per cent of those of the
European Union. But we are not simply competing in low
skilled low wage mass production manufacturing.
With 4 million graduates a year from China's and India's
universities, we are now competing with Asia on high tech,
high skilled, high value added goods too.
And so no country or continent, however successful today,
can take its long term prosperity for granted."

... and in case there is any doubt left about how useful to
Britain's global trading the EC is;

"... in the move from trade bloc Europe to Global Europe,
old policies will not be just out of date but counter
productive for the global era."

This is how the Chancellor saw the future for Europe;

"... the question for us is how Europe can move from the
older inward-looking model to a flexible, reforming, open
and globally-oriented Europe - able to master the economic
challenge from Asia, America and beyond."

This has to invite the question; Is it worth being in it at all?

It is clear that Gordon Brown has a very different view of
what is necessary, than the rest of the EU. But because we
are part of the EU we are not free to follow our own
judgement, but have to obey European directives, not
matter how damaging to our economic prosperity.

The Working Class Party

Europe (contd)