Workers of Europe unite

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

 

 

Almost 97pc of the European Union’s population is now governed by conservative or Right-leaning coalitions, or EU-imposed mandarins. All that is left to social democrats is Austria (8.4m), Denmark (5.5m), and Slovenia (2.1m).

 

The whole machinery of the European Union (EU) system is under the control of the Right, with variants of Rhenish corporatism in the Council, and pre-modern Hayekians at the European Central Bank (ECB). Whether you regard this Hegelian ascendancy as good or bad, it certainly has profound consequences.

 

For just as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher protested at Bruges that “we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level”, the Left might equally protest that they have not fought the long, hard struggle for worker rights in their own democracies to see social welfare rolled back by Brussels and Frankfurt.

 

In Italy, EU viceroy Mario Monti has more or less been ordered to reform the labour code, to break union power by shifting to “firm-level” wage deals and rewrite Article 18 that protects workers against sacking for economic reasons – the issue that led to the assassination of two labour reformers by the Red Brigades since 1998.

 

No doubt Italy should confront its trade unions if it hopes to compete in the world, but my point is a different one. Who decides such matters? Why would the Italian Left think it desirable to concentrate further power in EU hands when it will without question be used against them? They might win control of Italy. They have no chance of taking control of policy levers in Europe in the foreseeable future, if ever.

 

David Begg, head of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, said his encounter with the (EU-ECB-IMF) Troika now restructuring Ireland was a sobering experience.

 

“The man from the IMF was very helpful, but the officials from the EU were neo-liberal ideologues. We had a very fraught meeting, almost a shouting match,” he said. “It would have been better if we had never have joined the euro.”

 

The consequences of this Rhenish Right ascendancy in EU institutions – not the same as Anglo-Saxon or Burkean “small platoon” conservatism, by the way – was in evidence at the Merkozy summit in Brussels. As the BBC’s Paul Mason put it, the deal has “outlawed expansionary fiscal policy” by enshrining near-zero structural deficits in international law, with constitutional debt brakes, mandatory sanctions and budget commissars for delinquent nations.

 

The 26 states that went along with this Merkel plan have given up the right to pursue counter-cyclical Keynesian stimulus, and have agreed to do so in perpetuity since it is almost impossible to repeal EU “Acquis”.

 

Personally, I am not a Keynesian – nor are many Daily Telegraph readers – but this strikes me as a mad commitment to make. For the Left it is surely an unmitigated disaster. They cannot pursue their economic agenda ever again. Fabians feared long ago that such an outcome was built into EMU. They called the euro a “bankers’ ramp”, but somehow their warnings were drowned out in the mass hysteria of monetary union.

 

Owen Jones at the New Statesman said it is baffling that socialists have been so slow to recognise the threat. “The proposed EU treaty is perhaps the biggest catastrophe to befall the European Left since the Second World War. After this stitch-up, the Left really needs to have a long, hard think about its attitude to the EU as it is currently constructed. There’s still a sense that any criticism of the EU puts you in the same box as swivel-eyed Ukip-ers. It is a travesty that highlighting the EU’s palpable lack of democracy has become a Right wing issue.”

 

Well, yes, we’re all swivel-eyed now. It should indeed have nothing to do with Right wing or Left wing affiliation. Besides, if you listen closely, angry talk is simmering across Europe, in the ranks of the French socialist party, in Germany‘s Linke, in Italy’s Rifondazione, and Spain’s newly-liberated Socialist Workers Party (PSOE).

 

Note the outburst last week by Pedro Nuno Santos, socialist vice-president in Portugal’s Assembleia. “We have an atomic bomb that we can use in the face of the Germans and the French: this atomic bomb is simply that we won’t pay. Debt is our only weapon and we must use it to impose better conditions. We should make the legs of the German bankers tremble,” he said.

 

The sacrosanct 40-hour week is being stretched to 42 hours in Portugal. Manuel Carvalho da Silva, head of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers, said pay-cuts for public workers under successive austerity packages will amount to 27pc.

 

This is an “internal devaluation” of epic proportions. 

Much has been written in recent weeks of Europe’s swing to the far Right, of the rise of Geert Wilders in Holland, or Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, or – quite different – the black-shirt Garda Magyar of Hungary’s Jobbik party. The echoes of the 1930s are loud, and will become louder as combined monetary and fiscal contraction entrench depression.

 

Yet there is another parallel of equal resonance: the election of the Front Populaire in France with Communist support in May 1936, the cathartic rejection of deflation policy. Whether or not Leon Blum privately wanted to leave the Gold Standard – that inter-war replica of Europe’s unemployment union – the logic of his policies forced the outcome. Orthodoxy was overthrown.

 

The question for today’s Left is whether it is in their interests to keep apologising for an EU monetary regime that has pushed the jobless rate for youth to 49pc in Spain, 45pc in Greece, 30pc in Portugal and Ireland, 29pc in Italy and 24pc in France – yet 8.9pc in undervalued Germany – and that offers no credible way out of the slump for the Southern half.

 

Comrades across Europe, come over to the eurosceptic side. You have only your euro chains to lose. Telegraph