Article: Blaming the EU is an easy way out. Leaving it would be bad for Britain by Phillip Souta director of Business for New Europe

Published on the Left Foot Forward website http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/05/leaving-the-eu-would-be-a-disaster-for-britain/ .


Mr Souta’s comments are in black, my responses are in blue.



For the last 40 years, the British people have always voted for parties in favour of our EU membership.

For the last forty years the political establishment has conspired to prevent the majority view on the EU being expressed in mainstream politics.



UK is a net contributor to the EU… that contribution gives us access to £11 trillion worth of economic activity and free trade which has generated around £3,300 per British household per year over the last 30 years.

This is a meaningless statistic. The benefits of the economic activity have not gone to British households but to corporate entities which have not passed on (through wage and salary increases, nor even through taxes) a fair proportion of profits. Also note that British households have had to pay a large proportion of VAT to the EU on everything they buy (apart from a small proportion of exempt items) and VAT falls disproportionately on consumers not corporations.



If we were to leave, we would no longer have unfettered access to the largest market in the world, and one that is on our doorstep.

Mr Souta overlooks the fact that a big part of this “largest market in the world” is the United Kingdom itself (still one of the major economies of the world despite the naysayers). In any case access to the EU market is not unfettered – it is extremely fettered and restrictive, except for large corporate entities that can lobby and manipulate the system to their advantage. This fusion of bureaucracy and corporate self interest is one of the most offensive aspects of the EU.



The UK is home to large numbers of foreign companies who choose to locate here to avail of the EU market access that our membership provides. If we left, so would many of those companies.

Unlikely they would leave as they would no longer have access to the United Kingdom market, which as stated is a big part of the EU market.



Departure would also jeopardise the 49 per cent of foreign direct investment in the UK that comes from other EU countries, worth some £351bn a year.

Why jeopardise? Presumably investment decisions are made on the basis of economic advantage, not sentimentality to EU institutions. In any case there will not be much in the way of growth from within the Eurozone area in the near future, so I suspect Mr Souta is just muddying waters here.



British goods would incur significant import taxes (55 per cent in the case of dairy produce) to reach the EU market, making them less competitive.

Tariffs are a game two can play. And surely we do not export much dairy to the EU (I thought we were a net importer of dairy produce)? Also I think Mr Souta overlooks the EU obligations under world agreements on tariffs and trade.



Everything we export into Europe would have to comply with the same rules as they currently do, except we would have no say.

“No say” is exactly the point Mr Souta. We have no say on the EU at the moment. A tiny elite of self-important poltroons ride around the various EU caravanserai pretending they are representing the ordinary people whereas all they represent is a pan-European autocracy that disgusts almost everyone.



When it comes to the crunch, the voting public are too clever to turn away from our most valuable relationship.

The voting public has been continuously lied to on the issue of the EU, and it has been a long process to get to where we are now (and no thanks to UKIP, who are just latching onto this). In many ways it represents the struggle of democracy against the forces of corporate autocracy. The lesson of history is that democracy will always triumph in the end.

*Note re use of the word "poltroon" - I am using this to mean lazy good for nothing, although the alternative meaning of coward is also applicable in a Euro context.

Article "UKIP: dumbed down Powellism" by David Osler

Disappointing article on Left Foot Forward by David Osler describing UKIP as "dumbed-down Powellism": http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/05/ukip-dumbed-down-powellism/

Unfortunately this article told us nothing about either "Powellism" or UKIP.

The reference to a "dumbed down" version of "Powellism" is mystifying.  "Powellism" (to use this anachronistic description) was an integrated view of the world, entire and complete of itself.  It was/is nothing if not intellectually coherent, and no part of it was/is superfluous, therefore to detract any part is to invalidate the whole.

Thus to talk of dumbing down in this context is contradictory.

Nor is it acceptable to call Enoch Powell a racist without any supporting evidence (unless we are just into meaningless name-calling in which case we can call David Osler a racist without any obligation to say why).

David Osler also needs to keep his reading up to date - to refer to Tom Nairn's partisan comments in the 1970s is hardly illuminating (perhaps Mr Osler should read Simon Heffer masterly biography of Enoch Powell as a general starting point before he advances any more of his speculations on "Powellism").

I think what David Osler is trying to say is that Powellism was just populism and as UKIP is (undeniably) populist Powellism is the same as UKIPism.  This is of course not a logical argument.  Blairism was populist so are we to assume that Blairism is the same as Powellism?

UKIP represents a nihilistic version of the anarchistic strand in the British character.  This anarchistic tendency is normally given a voice by the far Left, so to have a right-wing version of anarchism seems to be confusing people.  But the Right is just as capable of smashing up society as the Left.

At the moment a significant number of UKIP activists are Tories who have been chucked off the Candidates' List (this was done in a very heavy-handed way I understand) and thus want to smash up the Conservative party.  But the Labour party also has disgruntled supporters who are being siphoned into the UKIP anti-intellectual vacuum.  To just dismiss UKIP as "Powellism Lite" is not only false, but is a distraction to the real task that both Labour and the Conservatives have in neutralising UKIP.

Article: What is Thatcher's Legacy to Black and Ethnic Minority People in the UK?

Author is Claudia Tomlinson (a writer for the Huffington Post on the issues of health, education, and social care).


http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/claudia-tomlinson/margaret-thatcher-legacy_b_3063611.html

A disappointing piece of work. Claudia Tomlinson writes with considerable passion and commitment, but fails to prove her case. It is fine to make polemical statements, but if the polemics are not backed by supporting evidence and do not even seem logical within the terms of her own argument then one is tempted to dismiss this as just foamy froth from the mouth of yet another lefty suffering dyspeptic reflux from contemplating “Thatcher’s Legacy”.

For instance, it is possible that the 1970s were a period of widespread overt racism in which BME people were brutally attacked by extremist organizations, society in general, and a “rampant” police keen to make the situation worse. But Claudia Tomlinson gives no examples, we are just expected to take this analysis on trust. And if you stop to consider the claims they are clearly nonsensical – if society had been so mired in racism how do we account for the ever-rising rate of immigration by BME into the United Kingdom? (we would expect BME people to be leaving the country, with perhaps kindertransport organized to help the oppressed escape the attentions of the rampant racist police).

Margaret Thatcher’s duty in 1978 was to reflect the views of the majority and to implement the will of the majority. In a democracy this is the duty of ALL politicians. Is it possible that following her 1978 speech on immigration “her popularity soared” because the electorate recognized that at last they had a political leader who would not allow continuing social change against the wishes of the majority? (at no point in her article does Ms Tomlinson acknowledge the principle of no fundamental social change without informed consent of the people being “changed”).

What is the connection that Claudia Tomlinson is making between the election of Margaret Thatcher and the inner city riots two years later? I have not seen this claim made by any serious commentator, and the Huffington Post should be ashamed to publish such a slur. It is perhaps not surprising that these wilder (one can almost say crazed) claims are being made in respectable publications only after Margaret Thatcher’s death.

What possible motivation would the police of the 1980s have in “coercive policing”? She makes it sound as if the police were just motivated by prejudice. Were there no legitimate grounds for police scrutiny and intervention towards BME communities?

One sentence in the article is new to me, and is of interest: “She wanted to prevent any Asian immigrants being given access to council housing, ahead of white people”. There is a suspicion that Labour were (and perhaps still are) deliberately encouraging BME immigration because they saw it as a source of votes for their party. Commonwealth immigrants are immediately able to vote in British elections, with no qualifying period. In a Newsnight debate last year on immigration a BME person said “the first thing we were told was vote Labour”. We assume that the sale of council housing was to extend the concept of a “property-owning democracy”. Is it possible that the council housing stock was also sold off to prevent Labour gerrymandering and the buying of BME votes with public assets?