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Independence referenda
It may be that in a few months the UK will vote on the question of whether to remain in the EU. If David Cameron fails to negotiate strong national controls against immigration or welfare for immigrants then there is the prospect of a vote to leave. That would probably provoke another vote in Scotland about remaining in the UK, with the
I like the idea of being able to move to somewhere like France or Germany though it now looks less likely to ever happen. I would like my children to have some stability during their full-time education. Perturbations of the current situation could be a great inconvenience for me: my position at work is funded largely by UK and European Union sources and I have no reason to expect Scottish government funding to replace that so I may find either vote being for independence to be deleteriously life-changing.
While I am hardly an expert on European governance I am disappointed by having the distinct impression that many people don't know who their parliamentary representative is partly because it matters little as in practical terms the European Parliament is underpowered in comparison with the European Commission. I am also disappointed by the great diversity in how assiduously member states actually enforce European law. Voting for membership of the EU could unfortunately seem like an endorsement of the EU as it presently is. Though, not so badly as a vote for independence for Scotland from the UK could be interpreted as a feeling that the Scottish National Party should have their hands even more strongly on the Scottish levers of power.
A greater source of conflict is the sense that the European Union as it is is a mess: the member states are too strong and separate for the EU to live long and prosper. The Eurozone crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis have definitely been throwing some of the faultlines into sharp relief. If the cultural differences can tolerate it then I believe the EU would do better as a superstate with more fiscal and political integration to make it more like the USA than a free trade and visa area. The UK may be as a millstone impeding the EU in finding its way to that workable state.
So while I would like Scotland to remain in both the UK and the EU I wouldn't want that to be taken as support for the EU as currently realized and I wonder if the UK's influence isn't overall a bad thing for the EU.
novotes boosted by those wishing to remain in the EU. It is plausible that Scotland will no longer be in both the UK and the EU.
I like the idea of being able to move to somewhere like France or Germany though it now looks less likely to ever happen. I would like my children to have some stability during their full-time education. Perturbations of the current situation could be a great inconvenience for me: my position at work is funded largely by UK and European Union sources and I have no reason to expect Scottish government funding to replace that so I may find either vote being for independence to be deleteriously life-changing.
While I am hardly an expert on European governance I am disappointed by having the distinct impression that many people don't know who their parliamentary representative is partly because it matters little as in practical terms the European Parliament is underpowered in comparison with the European Commission. I am also disappointed by the great diversity in how assiduously member states actually enforce European law. Voting for membership of the EU could unfortunately seem like an endorsement of the EU as it presently is. Though, not so badly as a vote for independence for Scotland from the UK could be interpreted as a feeling that the Scottish National Party should have their hands even more strongly on the Scottish levers of power.
A greater source of conflict is the sense that the European Union as it is is a mess: the member states are too strong and separate for the EU to live long and prosper. The Eurozone crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis have definitely been throwing some of the faultlines into sharp relief. If the cultural differences can tolerate it then I believe the EU would do better as a superstate with more fiscal and political integration to make it more like the USA than a free trade and visa area. The UK may be as a millstone impeding the EU in finding its way to that workable state.
So while I would like Scotland to remain in both the UK and the EU I wouldn't want that to be taken as support for the EU as currently realized and I wonder if the UK's influence isn't overall a bad thing for the EU.
no subject
no subject
We don't have a written constitution in the UK, but we do have an overarching sense of propriety.
If I lend you my lawnmower, you make sure you can return it when the time comes. You don't give it to a Belgian.
Similarly, when we elect a government, it should make sure that when it leaves office it can return to us the powers that we have temporarily vested in it. Saying "sorry, we signed those powers over to the EU" is unacceptable.
And yet, that's what happened with the Maastricht Treaty, which is the point at which I started to feel we ought to leave the EU. The Lisbon Treaty fiasco cemented this view.
We are faced with an EU that wants to take powers from our national government, and a succession of national governments that are willing to hand them over. Sure, we could try to put things on a legislative footing where that can't happen any more, which requires a referendum before powers are ceded, but I'm worried about remaining in a political union which has such intent. We don't want to spend our lives fighting bureaucrats who are looking for loopholes.
The late great Tony Benn put it rather well: "The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights."
Unappealing medicine
no subject
So it wouldn't be a theft of public rights, it'd be moving and consolidating those rights at a higher level, hopefully with popular approval first.
Fundamentally it's whether you stick to seeing yourself as British, French, Polish first, or move to seeing yourselves as Europeans.
Of course, it'd help if the EU were more democratic and less a coalition of governments, but the fundamental problem seems to be that the citizens of European countries don't want to see themselves and each other as Europeans.
Re: Unappealing medicine
It's instructive to look at Greece to see how badly things can go wrong if a government tries to borrow and spend its way out of a crisis. Greece has the impediment that it's in the Eurozone; we don't have that problem, but we have the rather bigger problem that international finance is a major component of our economy.
If you look at this graph, there's a major step in our net debt. OK, it's not as ruinously vast as that caused by two world wars, but the current blip looks a lot more like an unforced error to the financial markets. And, of course, the current government now has to service that debt as well as keep the lights on in various government departments.
It feels to me as though the present Chancellor has done a pretty good job of juggling several very angry weasels. The cuts may be very high profile, but they're actually a lot shallower than by rights they should be. Our creditors haven't quite come banging on the door.
We're treading water and gambling that we can fix things properly when the recession is over and the next boom comes. It's been a long, long wait.
That doesn't feel like ignorant idiocy to me…
no subject
I, a voter, have vested power in my MP. In due course, my MP must give that power back. It's not his to consolidate it to a higher level without my permission and a vote for him in a General Election is not permission. (Not that I voted for him, anyway.)
But now, because politicians have abused the public trust in that way, as and when there is a referendum, I will vote to leave the EU. I feel we're better off without an institution that has so little respect for the people of Europe that, when their plan for a European Constitution faltered in referenda, they decided to re-brand it as a "treaty" and cajole national governments into rubberstamping it without a plebiscite.
Re: Unappealing medicine
On this occasion I'm happy for us to agree to differ: I don't especially seek to persuade people and am certainly not a credible economics pundit. But, that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things to learn. It's probably most helpful if I lay out a bit of background of where I'm coming from. It took a few days for me to get the available headspace together.
First, judging by things like long-term gilt prices, the creditors are very far from coming to bang on the door, and from looking at how the markets have responded via similar measures when the US laid on more stimulus, that didn't bother them either. Compared with the size of its economy Greece was left with staggeringly much debt denominated in a currency of which it couldn't print more; you do mention the Eurozone, but I'd suggest more strongly that it makes a massive difference that we're not in that position. Francesco Saraceno has a great low-traffic blog that often discusses the Eurozone situation. Also, letting the currency fall has done great things for countries like Iceland which on paper were in an enormous pickle.
Second, this was an unusual recession: it was a balance-sheet crisis (as described by Richard Koo) wherein the paradox of thrift turns orthodoxy on its head. Simon Wren-Lewis' blog has done a good job of explaining this with reference to the UK and Osborne. In our post-crisis situation (and I wonder if your mention of our being a center of international finance implicitly summons a model element that contradicts this) public spending mostly just moves debt from us to the government at least while demand is depressed while constrained households deleverage.
Either way that debt needs paying, but the economy gets moving far better when people feel as if they have manageable enough debt against their income that they can spend again, then business has income and can keep people employed, and we can collect income tax from them instead of paying them benefits, then with GDP finally improving then debt-per-GDP (which austerity hasn't done much for for many countries) looks far healthier. And, especially given the low rates at which the market is willing to lend to us, we can spend that money on infrastructure, etc. that brings both short-term jobs and decent long-term benefit. I'd rather that than having austerity keep demand depressed (though austerity was rather reduced after the first couple of years which has helped since), then interest on the national debt just compounds while our productive capacity shrinks (years of poor employment has very lasting effects) and we become less able to pay it off.
My story about the debt simply moving and being at low cost admittedly stops being true in more normal times when employment is healthier or non-commodities inflation is rising beyond a few percent or interest rates aren't near-zero or the problem is more supply-side or limited to specific sectors of the workforce. A corollary of this is that if we were to let inflation ride at a good few percent usually then we could use that to deflate household debt and when we were at risk of slowing the economy from reducing spending then we could cut interest rates a bit to compensate without having to spend our way out of that kind of slump. Part of our problem now is that interest rates have already been very low.
I mention those bloggers because what they describe keeps seeming the most credible to me: the graphs seem appropriate, the explanations of why they disagree with, er, those with whom they disagree seem good, and the mechanisms they describe make sense, at least to me. In referring to these, I'm hoping it's useful shorthand for where I'm coming from and why I'm thinking as I am.
Perhaps more familiarly and credibly, I've tended to buy Martin Wolf's take on all this too (he's also written plenty on Greece of course); most of his more interesting recent stuff is behind the FT paywall but I can link to an older summary. I've also been influenced by the occasional paper from sources like VoxEU.
Naturally there are plenty of eminent scholars and writers who strongly disagree with the above, I've just found the rebuttals of their rebuttals generally persuasive. (-:
no subject
It certainly doesn't help that, despite the UK apparently veering to being quite near voting to leave the EU, the EU seems to have continued to consistently behave as if they're trying to add straws to that camel's back: I can't quite tell if they want us to stay and realize they're saying and doing annoying things and are simply constrained to do so because of other political forces, or what.
Re: Unappealing medicine