Euro musings, round 2
May. 26th, 2014 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rich_jackoNigel Farage, for all his faults (of which there are, oh, so very many...) was right about at least one thing. A couple of years ago, he said that when politicians don't listen to the people, extremism rises.
I didn't vote for UKIP last Thursday, but I don't think them topping the poll is a sign of the coming apocalypse. To all those moaning about how the result makes them somehow ashamed to be British, please don't be ridiculous. For a start, we should be celebrating the fact that the BNP got wiped out. For another thing, look at who the French voted for, FFS!
A large chunk of the electorate did not suddenly turn into racists overnight. Instead of blaming the voters, maybe we should think about the reasons why people across Europe voted in the way they did.
Being anti-EU does NOT make someone stupid, extremist, racist, a xenophobe, or a Little Englander ( / Frenchman / Danishman / Grecian / etc.). 'Against the EU' is emphatically not the same thing as 'against other Europeans'.
Yes, the EU has done some good, but it meddles far too much and it's disastrous currency union project has brought an awful lot of misery, particularly to Mediterranean countries. The answer to every crisis is more centralisation and integration. The Commission is on a continual power-grab and utterly ignores its own principle of subsidiarity (decisions taken at the most effective level - be it local, national, or supra-national).
Unfortunately, the EU's main unifying influence seems to have been to unite everyone against the EU...
Increased devolution, as well as independence movements in Scotland, Catalonia, Belgium and elsewhere, show that what a lot of people want is smaller government, closer to home and more in touch with their concerns, not some distant, centralised, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.
Tony Benn's 'five questions for the powerful' are always worth repeating:
"What power do you have? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system."
When all the mainstream political parties are pro-EU; where we had an EU constitution rejected again and again in referenda, only to be re-badged and implemented anyway; when all the candidates for Commission President are pro-integrationist fanatics who think, "The day of the nation state is over"; is it any wonder that voters seek out alternative parties to make their discontent known?
This can go one of two ways now. The EU elite can finally admit that these results are the death knell of 'an ever closer union', and start to listen. If they do, this election may turn out to have been a very good thing, the start of proper reform of the EU so that it works for everybody. Alternatively, they can dismiss the results as domestic politics and fringe extremism, and plough on regardless. In which case, things will only get worse.
Let's hope they listen.
(I originally posted this to Facebook, where the UKIP-related hysteria has got a little, well, hysterical.)
I didn't vote for UKIP last Thursday, but I don't think them topping the poll is a sign of the coming apocalypse. To all those moaning about how the result makes them somehow ashamed to be British, please don't be ridiculous. For a start, we should be celebrating the fact that the BNP got wiped out. For another thing, look at who the French voted for, FFS!
A large chunk of the electorate did not suddenly turn into racists overnight. Instead of blaming the voters, maybe we should think about the reasons why people across Europe voted in the way they did.
Being anti-EU does NOT make someone stupid, extremist, racist, a xenophobe, or a Little Englander ( / Frenchman / Danishman / Grecian / etc.). 'Against the EU' is emphatically not the same thing as 'against other Europeans'.
Yes, the EU has done some good, but it meddles far too much and it's disastrous currency union project has brought an awful lot of misery, particularly to Mediterranean countries. The answer to every crisis is more centralisation and integration. The Commission is on a continual power-grab and utterly ignores its own principle of subsidiarity (decisions taken at the most effective level - be it local, national, or supra-national).
Unfortunately, the EU's main unifying influence seems to have been to unite everyone against the EU...
Increased devolution, as well as independence movements in Scotland, Catalonia, Belgium and elsewhere, show that what a lot of people want is smaller government, closer to home and more in touch with their concerns, not some distant, centralised, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.
Tony Benn's 'five questions for the powerful' are always worth repeating:
"What power do you have? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system."
When all the mainstream political parties are pro-EU; where we had an EU constitution rejected again and again in referenda, only to be re-badged and implemented anyway; when all the candidates for Commission President are pro-integrationist fanatics who think, "The day of the nation state is over"; is it any wonder that voters seek out alternative parties to make their discontent known?
This can go one of two ways now. The EU elite can finally admit that these results are the death knell of 'an ever closer union', and start to listen. If they do, this election may turn out to have been a very good thing, the start of proper reform of the EU so that it works for everybody. Alternatively, they can dismiss the results as domestic politics and fringe extremism, and plough on regardless. In which case, things will only get worse.
Let's hope they listen.
(I originally posted this to Facebook, where the UKIP-related hysteria has got a little, well, hysterical.)
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no subject
Date: 2014-05-26 11:52 pm (UTC)Note that I don't think all decisions should be made by a single all-encompassing bureaucracy, but I think that there are some decisions that would benefit from that. Giving everyone the same rights, and subjecting everyone to (basically) the same set of laws, would seem to be a good idea. So centralising legislation gets my vote. On the other hand, it makes sense to enforce the law as locally as possible, escalating only where the crime itself becomes non-local.
I think a centralised currency is a good idea too. Do you think the USA would be better off if every state had its own currency, and US citizens had to exchange New York Dollars for New Jersey Dollars or California Dollars (with a percentage going to the exchanges every time around) to do business across state lines? I think that'd be a massive drain on their economy, and they'd be crazy to do that. By analogy, you could say that the problem with the Euro isn't the Euro, it's the lack of a centralised monetary policy. So why don't we look at fixing that instead?
Now, I realise that this is not something that can necessarily be done immediately, but I think it should be something we're working towards. If monetary policy realistically can't be centralised soon, and the Euro is causing too much pain without it, then maybe it might be a good idea to temporarily revert that particular bit of integration. The operative word here is "temporarily"; and the principle is that even if the Euro is before its time, that doesn't automatically negate the benefits that we do get from the EU.
What's the alternative? Undo all the work that's been put in already, break it apart, and start from a clean slate?
Whenever you have a system that's grown over time, it's easy to spot the flaws and say "It's a big hairy mess [...] I'd like nothing better than to throw it out and start over." It's so tempting to bulldoze the place flat and build something new. But it's harder to see what's working, because those parts just melt into the background. When you throw away [a system] and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of [...] work.
So I'm tempted to say let's get in there and put in the effort to make it work, one problem at a time.
[0] OK, a united world/solar system/galaxy. Humanity vs. the black.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-28 06:51 pm (UTC)The problem is that it only works if people want it to. This isn't like forming the USA, building a brand new country from scratch. Hardly anyone, besides the politicians whose pet project it is, really wants a United States of Europe. No one asked them to put all that work in.
The other point is that the 28 member states have wildly different economies. What works for some doesn't work for the rest. I agree there is an argument for keeping the EU, and deciding certain things at that level, but a lot fewer things than are done at that level now.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-27 09:19 pm (UTC)Apart from that, general UKIP policy is appalling and hate based, and they attract the worst hate-motivated people. If you'd voted for them I might have never spoken to you again.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-28 06:55 pm (UTC)Dismissing all UKIP votes as hate-based is part of the problem. No doubt some of them are, but there are lots of other reasons why people voted for them too. Those reasons need to be properly addressed, or they will only get more votes in future.