Exit Europe from the left

Most Britons dislike the European Union. If trade unions don't articulate their concerns, the hard right will

• 
• • Bob Crow
  • The Guardian, Friday 17 May 2013 21.00 BST

A protest in Brussels. 'Millions of personal tragedies of lost homes, jobs, pensions and services are testament to the sick joke of 'social Europe'.' Photograph: Thierry Roge/Reuters

For years the electorate has overwhelmingly opposed Britain's membership of the European Union – particularly those who work for a living. Yet while movements in other countries that are critical of the EU are led by the left, in Britain they are dominated by the hard right, and working-class concerns are largely ignored.

This is particularly strange when you consider that the EU is largely a Tory neoliberal project. Not only did the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath take Britain into the common market in 1973, but Margaret Thatcher campaigned to stay in it in the 1975 referendum, and was one of the architects of the Single European Act – which gave us the single market, EU militarisation and eventually the struggling euro.

After the Tories dumped the born-again Eurosceptic Thatcher, John Major rammed through the Maastricht treaty and embarked on the disastrous privatisation of our railways using EU directives – a model now set to be rolled out across the continent.

Even now, the majority of David Cameron's Tories will campaign for staying in the EU if we do get the referendum the electorate so clearly wants. And most of the left seems to be lining up alongside them. My union stood in the last European elections under the No2EU-Yes to Democracy coalition, which set out to give working people a voice that had been denied them by the political establishment. We also set out to challenge the rancid politics of the racist British National party, yet the BNP received far more media coverage. Today it is Ukip that is enjoying the media spotlight. Its rightwing Thatcherite rhetoric and assorted cranky hobby horses are a gift to a political establishment that seeks to project a narrow agenda of continued EU membership.

But the reality is that Ukip supports the EU agenda of privatisation, cuts and austerity. Nigel Farage's only problem with this government's assault on our public services is that it doesn't go far enough. Ukip opposes the renationalisation of our rail network as much as any Eurocrat. Yet Ukip has filled the political vacuum created when the Labour party and parts of the trade union movement adopted the position of EU cheerleaders, believing in the myth of "social Europe".

Social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment. Meanwhile, 10,000 manufacturing jobs in the East Midlands still hang in the balance because EU law demanded that the crucial Thameslink contract go to Siemens in Germany rather than Bombardier in Derby.

Today, unemployment in the eurozone is at a record 12%. In the countries hit hardest by the "troika" of banks and bureaucrats, youth unemployment tops 60% and the millions of personal tragedies of lost homes, jobs, pensions and services are testament to the sick joke of "social Europe".

The raft of EU treaties are, as Tony Benn once said, nothing more than a cast-iron manifesto for capitalism that demands the chaos of the complete free movement of capital, goods, services and labour. It is clear that Greece, Spain, Cyprus and the rest need investment, not more austerity and savage cuts to essential public services, but, locked in the eurozone, the only option left is exactly that.

What's more, the EU sees the current crisis as an opportunity to speed up its privatisation drive. Mass unemployment and economic decline is a price worth paying in order to impose structural adjustment in favour of monopoly capitalism.

In Britain and across the EU, healthcare, education and every other public service face the same business model of privatisation and fragmentation. Indeed, the clause in the Health and Social Care Act demanding privatisation of every aspect of our NHS was defended by the Lib Dems on the basis of EU competition law.

But governments do not have to carry out such EU policies: they could carry out measures on behalf of those who elect them. That means having democratic control over capital flows, our borders and the future of our economy for the benefit of everyone.

The only rational course to take is to leave the EU so that elected governments regain the democratic power to decide matters on behalf of the people they serve.

Closed drug trials leave patients at risk and doctors in the dark

 

Drug companies can hide information about their drugs from doctors and patients, perfectly legally, with the help of regulators. We need proper legislation

We need muscular legislation to ensure that all information about all trials on all currently used drugs is made available to doctors Photo: Alamy

By Ben Goldacre

8:13PM BST 25 Oct 2012

34 Comments

This week, Daily Telegraph readers have been astonished by revelations about the incompetent regulation of implantable medical devices. This paper has clearly demonstrated that patients are put at risk, because of flawed and absent legislation. But many of these issues apply even more widely, to the regulation of all medicines, and at the core is a scandal that has been shamefully ignored by politicians.
 

The story is simple: drug companies can hide information about their drugs from doctors and patients, perfectly legally, with the help of regulators. While industry and politicians deny the existence of this problem, it is widely recognised within medical academia, and meticulously well-documented. The current best estimate is that half of all drug trials never get published.
 

The Government has spent an estimated £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu to help prevent pneumonia and death in case of an avian flu epidemic. But the manufacturer, Roche, continues to withhold vitally important information on trials of this drug from the universally respected Cochrane Library, which produces gold-standard summaries on medicines for doctors and patients. Nobody in the Department of Health or any regulator has raised a whisper about this, though Roche says it has made “full clinical study data available to health authorities around the world”.
 

In fact, while regulators should be helping to inform doctors, and protect patients, in reality they have conspired with companies to withhold information about trials. The European Medicines Agency, which now approves drugs for use in Britain, spent more than three years refusing to hand over information to Cochrane on Orlistat and Rimonabant, two widely used weight loss drugs. The agency’s excuses were so poor that the European Ombudsman made a finding of maladministration.
 

Even Nice, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, plays along with this game. Sometimes chunks of its summary documents on the benefits and risks of drugs are redacted, because data has only been shared by companies under unethical “confidentiality agreements”. The numbers are blacked out in the tables, to prevent doctors seeing the benefits from a drug in each trial; and even the names of the trials are blacked out, as if they were code names for Russian agents during the Cold War.
 

This is a perverse and bizarre situation to have arisen in medicine, where decisions are supposed to be based on evidence, and where lack of transparency can cost lives. Our weak regulations have been ignored, and if we don’t act quickly, the situation will soon get much worse. The European Medicines Agency’s sudden pledges of a new era of transparency are no use: it has a track record of breaking such promises. We need proper legislation, but the new Clinical Trials Directive, currently passing through the European Parliament, does nothing to improve things.

Are you glazing over at the mention of European directives? This is where it all went wrong. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but these issues have been protected from public scrutiny by a wall of red tape, while the people we trust to manage these complex problems have failed us. Regulators have lacked ambition. Politicians have ignored the issue. Journalists have been scared off by lobbyists. Worst of all, the doctors in medical membership bodies, the Royal Colleges and the Societies, even the patient groups – many of them funded by industry – have let us all down.

This must change. We need muscular legislation to ensure that all information about all trials on all currently used drugs is made available to doctors. We need the members of patient groups and medical bodies to force their leaders to act. And we need EU medicines regulators to be held to public account, for the harm they have inflicted on us.

Ben Goldacre is a doctor and author of 'Bad Pharma’ (4th Estate 2012)