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Post by dodger on Dec 3, 2013 15:04:31 GMT
The Action for Rail campaign is targeting a European Union measure which, if introduced, would force the rest of Europe to adopt much of the failed fragmentation and privatisation that has plagued Britain – and also stop a future government from renationalising rail...
Rail unions resist the EU’s plans to hand control over to private companies
WORKERS, DEC 2013 ISSUE
One of the labour movement’s big successes has been Action for Rail, the TUC’s campaign to fight for a nationally integrated railway under public ownership. Supported by the rail trade unions RMT, ASLEF and TSSA, along with Unite, the campaign helped more and more people see the benefits of reuniting and renationalising Britain’s privatised railways, and stopping the publicly owned East Coast franchise from being re-privatised.
“Privatisation” is perhaps the wrong term. Encouraged by the EU, European publicly owned railway corporations have already established a massive presence in Britain’s rail industry, making profits that are being repatriated to pay for improvements to the transport services and infrastructure in Germany, France and the Netherlands in particular. It is no surprise that these foreign players are lining up to take over East Coast. Instead of making large contributions to the British Treasury, the profits would be siphoned off to benefit the taxpayers of other European countries!
Action for Rail has now recognised the threat posed by the European Union to its aims, and is targeting the EU’s Fourth Rail Package. This measure, if introduced, would not only force the rest of Europe to adopt much of the failed fragmentation and privatisation that has been such a disaster in Britain but would also stop a future British government from reuniting and renationalising the railways.
The TUC and the rail unions lobbied the European Commission on 9 October, recognising that the EU’s proposals to create a Single European Rail Market will entrench privatisation in Britain and will encourage a widespread attack on the jobs and conditions of rail workers and the use of “social dumping” to encourage a race to the bottom for rail workers' conditions.
But transport trade unions are seemingly oblivious to the dead hand of the EU also within the fierce debates about the building of a new high-speed railway in Britain, dubbed “HS2”, and issues associated with that project. And there is an immediate threat posed by the Fourth Rail Package, an obscure document published by the EU in October which should be equally worrying for the future.
What about HS2? There is no doubt that massive investment is necessary to improve and expand Britain’s railway network, with its infrastructure largely built in the 19th century to 19th century standards when steam trains rarely ran faster than 70 miles an hour. Despite rather than because of privatisation, these railways, severely pruned by Beeching in the 1960s, are now carrying more passengers than the much larger network that existed in the 1920s and 1930s when the railways had their last “golden age”.
Not surprisingly, the rail unions support the building of HS2 in principle though there are clearly doubts about the detail. Professor Henry Overman of the London School of Economics and a member of an HS2 analytical challenge panel, set up to provide independent expert scrutiny, said available evidence suggested the scheme was “not particularly good value for money” compared with other transport projects.
“It may well even be poor value for money compared to other alternatives that address exactly the same set of problems,” he said. “The case for improvements on the existing lines is actually pretty good in terms of the benefit-cost ratio, which is the way some of us like to look at these things.”
Control
The key question for Britain’s workers is who is to control this new infrastructure, in whose interests will it be run, and
who is really making the decisions about what enhancements are made to the country’s rail network.
The debate is currently around how HS2 could connect London with the Midlands, the north of England and Scotland, and the economic benefits that may flow from that. But the EU – with British government connivance – is making plans that would bring HS2, along with other key rail routes, motorways, ports and airports, increasingly under direct EU control.
Indeed, it may be the case that should Britain decide not to build HS2, the EU may nevertheless force us to do so. This is a takeover of the control of British transport by the EU on behalf of the state-run German, French and Dutch transport operations like DB that want to run it. (See article in Workers, February 2012.)
As the EU document puts it, “The new EU infrastructure policy will put in place a powerful European transport network across 28 member states to promote growth and competitiveness. It will connect East with West and replace today’s transport patchwork with a network that is genuinely European.” This is Euro-speak for the true aim – to have an EU controlled transport network that will facilitate a free market economy run in the interests of capitalists, not workers. The EU is less concerned about having Britain’s cities connected and more interested in how they can promote the free movement of goods and labour which, like the Fourth Rail Package, will mean social dumping and attacks on the pay and conditions of workers.
Britain needs investment in rail and other infrastructure in order to meet the needs of its people by improving mobility, and allowing the country’s industries to modernise and develop. We cannot allow the EU to prevent Britain’s rail network from being returned to public ownership, or to dictate that enormous sums of British workers’ money are spent on new transport infrastructure designed solely to benefit the EU and the capitalists it exists to serve. And we certainly cannot allow the EU to control Britain’s transport network. ■
Kilometre signs on the M25 mark the extent of EU control on our infrastructure.
Photo: Workers Brussels’ grab for our transport
The EU’s latest strategy on transport was announced in October and agreed to by British ministers – to little fanfare.
The EU has designated nine “core network corridors” that are seen as the transport network of the single market. Much of Britain’s long-distance transport network will fall into one of these corridors, the “North Sea–Mediterranean” corridor, which stretches from Ireland and Glasgow through Britain and down to the French ports of Marseille and Montpellier.
The North Sea–Mediterranean Corridor includes the whole of the West Coast main line and the high speed rail line between London and the Channel Tunnel (HS1). It's not just rail; key motorways are included, and the English Channel is now designated as a “Motorway of the Sea”. An EU tender document notes, “In the northern part of the corridor the main missing link is the cross-border rail connection between Dublin and Belfast which needs upgrading and the new high speed line 2 through Great Britain to improve travelling times between London and the North.” For more detail, see ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/infrastructure/news/ten-t-corridors_en.htm.
All nine core corridors are overseen by so-called “European Coordinators” appointed by Brussels. Since HS2 would be part of the North Sea–Mediterranean Corridor, it would fall squarely into the governance of the coordinator responsible for it – currently Karla Peijs, a former Dutch minister whose party, Christian Democratic Appeal, lost half its seats in the country’s 2010 general election. You get a flavour of the party’s politics from how it was formed in 1977: from a merger of three parties, including the Anti-Revolutionary Party.
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Post by dodger on Dec 19, 2013 10:01:12 GMT
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Post by dodger on Jan 2, 2014 15:27:19 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/news/news_0114/eurobriefs.html
EUROBRIEFS
The latest from the EU
WORKERS, JAN 2014 ISSUE No to treaty
Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia have rejected proposals to sign an EU treaty. They would rather join the Eurasian Customs Union with Russia, Georgia and Moldova than sign EU association agreements.
The EU has warned Ukraine that it faces a financial blockade if it refuses to sign. The EU and the USA also threatened Ukraine that it is unlikely to get IMF “aid”. But the IMF has already suspended a credit line worth $15 billion because Ukraine refused to stop subsidising household gas bills. The German Council on Foreign Relations has called for “stringent and very painful social adjustment measures”. EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton criticised Ukraine for not “becoming a predictable and reliable interlocutor for international markets”.
Pro-EU, “pro-democracy” campaigners have called for the EU to punish Ukraine, and for the overthrow of the government of President Victor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, which is supported by the Communist Party of Ukraine.
These campaigners include the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda (Freedom) party, led by Oleh Tiahnybok, who recently spoke against the “Jewish mafia in Moscow”. The pro-German Batkivschyna (Fatherland) party of Yulia Timoshenko, imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement, formed an electoral alliance with Svoboda before the last elections.
Hungarian Nazi friend honoured
In Budapest last month a new bust was unveiled to former Hungarian ruler Miklos Horthy. Marton Gyongyosi, a deputy of the far-right Jobbik, described Horthy as “a national saviour”. This was the latest in a number of commemorations to Horthy, who took that country into alliance with Nazi Germany. He also played a leading role in the counterrevolution and foreign invasion which in 1920 overthrew the communist government led by Bela Kun.
‘Nasty’ Britain?
THE BRITISH government has announced proposals to tighten immigrants’ access to social welfare, including a test that claimants should speak English. EU commissioners told Britain to avoid “hysteria” and called us a “nasty country”
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Post by dodger on Jan 10, 2014 2:29:31 GMT
Useful study of the implications of the September referendum, 9 Jan 2014
This Will Podmore review is from: Scotland's Choices: The Referendum and What Happens Afterwards (Paperback)
This excellent book is a study of the implications of the referendum for Scotland's, indeed Britain's, future. Iain McLean is a Professor of Politics at Oxford University. Jim Gallagher and Guy Lodge are both Gwilym Gibbon Fellows at Nuffield College, Oxford.
They point out that EU treaties oblige member countries to have a central bank. The SNP says the Bank of England would be Scotland's central bank.
The SNP says that its 3 per cent corporation tax cut would lift output by 1.4 per cent, jobs by 1.1 per cent (27,000) and investment by 1.9 per cent - by 2034! But to take advantage of lower corporation tax, all a company has to do is set up a shell company to move its taxable profit, not any jobs or actual production, to the cheaper country.
The Scottish government has made no effort to devolve labour market law. It clearly supports the present anti-trade union laws.
Under devolution, there are no UK-wide framework laws covering devolved matters, no insistence that citizens living in devolved territories are entitled to a minimum level of service provision or UK-wide common standards. Scotland has higher levels of public spending than the rest of the UK. Its domestic tax revenues per head are the same as the UK average. It relies on current oil revenues to support its current level of public spending. As the authors conclude, "with oil revenues at their 2009-10 level, an independent Scotland would have either to raise taxes or cut services, or both."
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Post by dodger on Jan 10, 2014 2:38:32 GMT
Helpful studies of Scotland's prospects, 9 Jan 2014
This Will Podmore review is from: Class, Nation and Socialism: The Red Paper on Scotland 2014 (Paperback)
Pauline Bryan is Convener of the Red Paper Collective, and Tommy Kane is Parliamentary Researcher for Neil Findlay MSP. The editors observe, "What is on offer in this referendum would break the class unity of working people across the nations of Britain without breaking the chains of economic control that bind them." There are not many nations in Britain; our one nation is Britain.
At its 2013 annual conference, ASLEF became the first trade union to back the No campaign. Its delegates unanimously agreed to work for a No vote and to affiliate to the Better Together campaign. Not one ASLEF branch in Scotland wanted Scotland to break away from Britain.
All of Britain needs economic and political change. So it is vital that our trade union movement, the most democratic of our institutions, strengthens working class unity. Workers need to organise to assert their power in our workplaces, not shift power to Westminster or Holyrood.
John Foster, Emeritus professor, social sciences, University of the West of Scotland, reminds us that the great Irish socialist and patriot James Connolly warned against `classless nationalism'. We need workers' nationalism, for all of Britain. Foster writes, "the challenge faced in 2014 ... will only be resolved by a movement that both seeks wider class unity to oppose British state power and draws on Scotland's radical tradition to do so. Like labour and reconquest in Ireland, Scotland's radical tradition cannot be severed from the class that gave it life on both sides of the border."
900,000 households in Scotland - more than one in three - can't afford to heat their homes adequately. Ofgem and Scottish & Southern Energy have both warned that the British government is `significantly underestimating' the scale of the capacity crisis facing Britain. But so is the SNP. Most of Scotland's generating capacity will close by 2028. The SNP has set targets for generating all Scotland's electricity from renewables by 2020, and it rejects all nuclear power. Energy bills will rise for Scottish families to pay for renewable energy.
Dave Watson of UNISON writes, "Scotland's energy trade unions have long argued for a planned energy policy that provides safe, secure and sustainable generation, which contributes to the economic future of Scotland and eliminates fuel poverty. While supporting the development of renewable energy, trade unions argue for a more balanced energy policy that will ensure Scotland is not reliant on a few energy sources."
If Scotland votes to break away, the SNP would form the first government and would introduce a written constitution, enabling it to set a neo-liberal stamp on Scotland's future. The SNP talks social democracy but walks neo-liberalism. Salmond appointed Sir George Mathewson, recently retired chair of the Royal Bank of Scotland, as Chair of his Council of Economic Advisers.
Stephen Boyd, Assistant Secretary of the Scottish TUC, notes, "one of the few clear policy priorities of the Scottish Government - cutting corporation tax - is likely to prove actively detrimental by further embedding short-termism and pressurising the investment subsidies which benefit manufacturing over finance. If the long-term future of manufacturing in Scotland is to be assured, a change in economic and industrial strategy is required, not simply a transfer of powers."
He notes `the inability of the financial sector to support the Scottish manufacturing industry'. In 2007-12, Britain's annual rate of business investment was less than 15 per cent of GDP, far lower than in any other OECD country. Manufacturing jobs in Scotland were slashed from 650,000 in 1979 to 179,000 in 2012. SNP policy would do nothing to change this.
As Boyd points out, "The share of domestic lending going to (UK) manufacturing fell from 5.2 per cent in 1999 to 2.3 per cent in 2007 while the share going to other financial intermediaries rose from 25 per cent to 31 per cent. Today patient investment in the companies of the future is an increasingly fringe activity compared with speculating on share prices, interest rates and currency movements. The financialised economy undermines the manufacturing industry."
John Foster and Richard Leonard, Political Officer, GMB Scotland, point out in their excellent essay, the SNP's "commitment to the EU would ensure that ... pro-big business policies became constitutionally mandatory." Rozanne Foyer of Unite the Union points out, "The preamble of the [EU's] Treaty on Stability states that where a country has a written constitution it would be expected that the terms of maximum fiscal deficit would be written into it. The SNP has openly stated its intention to have such a constitution. The impact of this and the fiscal compact would be like having the EU's neo-liberal economic policies and severe borrowing constraints imprinted on the new Scotland's DNA and would severely limit its ability to borrow to create growth, to implement progressive social policies, or to invest in the public sector."
The SNP likes to claim that an independent Scotland could be like Norway. But Norway is not in the EU. A country can no more be independent in the EU than it can be independent in NATO. Scotland would not be like Norway. The danger is that it would be more like Greece. Instead of pursuing the will-of-the-wisp of independence, Scotland would do far better by making its own unique contribution to our common task of rebuilding Britain.
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Post by dodger on Jan 20, 2014 12:12:59 GMT
Corporate Europe: how big business sets policies on food, climate and war, by David Cronin, paperback, 204 pages, ISBN 978-0-7453-3332-8, Pluto, 2013, £17.99.
Reviewed by Will Podmore
David Cronin is a journalist specialising in European politics. In this useful book, he shows how Europe’s giant corporations run the EU. In particular, he analyses how they secretively use lobby groups to draw up EU laws. He points out that BusinessEurope, an employers’ federation, is the most influential lobby in Brussels.
As a US Senator stated in 2009, “banks are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And frankly they own the place.” Increasingly, the EU too means the domination of finance capital, at the expense of industry and of its EU member states’ working classes.
The EU has lost all pretence of social policy. Its austerity programmes mean poverty. It attacks our welfare states and subsidises bankers, when it should do vice versa.The EU serves the big corporations.It is ever clearer that it is what trade unions have always called it – the Employers’ Union - and that it cannotbe reformed.
Cronin shows in detail how the EU helps Europe’s giant corporationsto increase their profits at the expense of our health and safety, to promotethe tobacco companies, and to increase pollution through itsabsurd emissions trading system. It also promotes arms sales to reactionary regimes. For example, governments always claim that Britain dependson arms sales, when in fact only 0.2 per cent of Britain’s jobs depend on arms exports.
The EU’s Free Trade Agreements back corporations’ economic imperialism against workers in all countriesand peasants wherever they are. These FTAs are supposedly conditional on respect for human rights, yet the EU has made an FTA with Colombia, where more than a hundred trade union members have been killed every year since 1992.
Cronin ends with a list of five demands - nationalise the banks, attack tax avoiders, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rethink economics and outlaw war. Oddly, he doesn’t call for the policy that logically follows from his whole book – leave the EU!
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Post by dodger on Jan 26, 2014 12:29:57 GMT
The best book so far on the vital September vote, 21 Jan 2014
This Will Podmore review is from: The Battle for Britain: Scotland and the Independence Referendum (Paperback)
This is by far the best book on the September referendum on Britain's future.
The 1707 Acts of Union established a new country `by the name of Great Britain', including Wales. The 1922 secession of the Irish Free State changed the state, which was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The concept that the UK comprises four `Home Nations' defines Northern Ireland as a nation. In fact, the UK is not a federation, informally or otherwise; it is a unitary state.
Salmond has admitted that "Scotland is not oppressed and we have no need to be liberated." This raised the obvious question, what then is the pressing need for independence? As Torrance observes, "there was no precedent for secession in a modern, successful (loosely defined) welfare state." It would be a leap in the dark.
Britain's institutions, especially Britain's trade unions, have a great responsibility here. We must all be saying to Scotland, `Don't go.' We are stronger together.
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Post by dodger on Feb 4, 2014 10:14:39 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_0214/eunhs.htmlIn theory our health service is safe from the European Union. In theory...
If you use the NHS, watch out for the EU
WORKERS, FEB 2014 ISSUE
The National Health Service is part of the culture of Britain. So it should come as a relief to note that the treaties underlying the European Union specifically leave health systems as an area of national competence. Brussels, you might think, can’t tell us how to run the NHS. Think again. The NHS is in fact under threat from the EU in at least three major ways. First, the EU’s policy of the free movement of labour has led to requirements on NHS hospitals to recognise nursing and medical qualifications from EU countries that are lower than existing British ones. It has also removed the requirement for incoming health professionals to prove to regulators that they have English to at least GCSE standard.
Some organisations have been speaking up about this, like the Patients Association. “We are concerned that some healthcare professionals from non-English speaking countries are not proficient enough in the English language to provide safe and effective care in the NHS hospitals,” it said in 2011.
Second, the EU’s free trade negotiations with the US threaten to allow US corporations to bid for any NHS contract. Worse, the operation of any trade agreement, once signed, will be taken out of the control of national governments and legal systems and handed over to secretive arbitration panels run by corporate lawyers.
All power to corporations
These so-called “investor-state dispute settlement” mechanisms will allow corporations to sue governments, bypassing the World Trade Organisation rules that only allow governments to sue governments. US health corporations would be able to sue for profits lost (now and in the future) if these panels rule the firms have been “unfairly” excluded, or challenge the NHS’s decision to remove them as a provider.
In practice, this is likely to mean that once a service is privatised, the government would be unable to take it back into public ownership. Parliament would be powerless.
What regulations are being discussed in the negotiations? Since the talks are secret, no one can be sure, but they will almost certainly include regulations that can prevent US-grown GM seeds and food being sold, and that allow countries to grant defence contracts to their own companies, or that determine how a health service might be run – and about the kinds of employees multinationals can shift around the globe without having to satisfy normal immigration controls.
Ominously for health, they include public procurement – whether a country can give preferential treatment to its own nationalised (or even private) suppliers – and which professional qualifications a country will recognise. Britain already has to recognise inferior European qualifications in health, but with the free trade agreement it faces having to recognise qualifications from anywhere in the world.
It’s no surprise that the threat of the free trade agreement is prompting concern and opposition around Europe. But what is a surprise – though perhaps it shouldn’t be – is the utterly supine and collaborationist attitude of Britain’s TUC. In August it gave written evidence to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills endorsing enthusiastically the surrender of Britain’s sovereignty in trade to the European Union.
Control over budgets
The third threat is direct EU control. Brussels has used the economic crisis it helped to make to set up new rules allowing it to pore over national budgets in great detail and force countries to follow its “recommendations”. It is doing this through the little-known “European semester”.
The European Union has a distinctive way with language. It takes a word you think of as meaning one thing, and uses it to mean another. “Semester”– to most people a university term – has become something completely different: it is now the EU’s principal mechanism for extending its control of national budgets well beyond the limits set in European treaties.
The process starts in November each year, and it works like this. First the European Commission presents its Annual Growth Survey, defining its economic priorities for the coming year. Then the European Parliament and the Council of Europe have their say, so that in March they set overall “policy orientations”.
In April national governments submit their plans to the Commission, which responds with country-specific recommendations on all budget areas, including those like health (and education) that are not supposed to be part of the EU’s remit.
Only then, and only after they have done the EU’s bidding, are Eurozone governments allowed to submit their plans to their own parliaments. Britain, being outside the zone, still has to submit its plans, but not before parliament has looked at them. Eurozone countries that ignore the recommendations can be forced to adopt them.
The result: “The health system is no longer viewed in exclusively national terms,” said Paolo Testori Coggi, Health and Consumers Director General at the Commission, whose tentacles now reach into every health ministry in Europe.
And if you think the European semester sounds ominous, then spare a thought for debt-stricken Portugal, Greece and Cyprus (and, until recently, Ireland). The semester doesn’t apply to these countries, because they are under what the EU coyly calls “financial assistance” and under direct rule from the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their instructions don’t even come under the cover of “recommendations”.
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Post by dodger on Feb 19, 2014 18:39:59 GMT
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Post by dodger on Apr 3, 2014 0:42:47 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/news/news_0414/pledge.htmlEUROPEAN UNION
Thatcherite pledge
WORKERS, APR 2014 ISSUE Ed Miliband has committed any future Labour government to completing Thatcher’s project of the Single European Market. In a speech in London he said, “We need to drive forward the completion of the single market in digital, energy and services. I am pleased to say the CBI has agreed to help develop proposals about how to complete the single market.”
Miliband pledged, “We should also use Europe’s strength to negotiate trade agreements with other parts of the world. As well as moving as fast as possible towards securing the Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the US.” Typically, this too echoes the position of the government.
He also said that the next Labour government will legislate for a new lock on any transfer of power to the EU (just like the Conservatives’ policy). He admitted that “it is unlikely this lock will be used in the next Parliament.” So, this is a promise that is not a promise. He offers a referendum and then takes it away. A referendum will not happen unless we make it happen
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