Britain’s Democratic Failure

Ken Rogoff

The real lunacy of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union was not that British leaders dared to ask their populace to weigh the benefits of membership against the immigration pressures it presents. Rather, it was the absurdly low bar for exit, requiring only a simple majority. Given voter turnout of 70%, this meant that the leave campaign won with only 36% of eligible voters backing it. (Editor's note - Governments change on similar votes in first past the post systems)

This isn’t democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence – far greater even than amending a country’s constitution (of course, the United Kingdom lacks a written one) – has been made without any appropriate checks and balances. 

Does the vote have to be repeated after a year to be sure? No. Does a majority in Parliament have to support Brexit? Apparently not. Did the UK’s population really know what they were voting on? Absolutely not. (Editor's note - Should they be denied the vote?) Indeed, no one has any idea of the consequences, both for the UK in the global trading system, or the effect on domestic political stability. I am afraid it is not going to be a pretty picture.

Mind you, citizens of the West are blessed to live in a time of peace: changing circumstances and priorities can be addressed through democratic processes instead of foreign and civil wars. But what, exactly, is a fair, democratic process for making irreversible, nation-defining decisions? Is it really enough to get 52% to vote for breakup on a rainy day?

In terms of durability and conviction of preferences, most societies place greater hurdles in the way of a couple seeking a divorce than Prime Minister David Cameron’s government did on the decision to leave the EU. Brexiteers did not invent this game; there is ample precedent, including Scotland in 2014 and Quebec in 1995. But, until now, the gun’s cylinder never stopped on the bullet. Now that it has, it is time to rethink the rules of the game.

The idea that somehow any decision reached anytime by majority rule is necessarily “democratic” is a perversion of the term. (Editor's note - What is democratic - listening to the minority view? - upper class angst?) Modern democracies have evolved systems of checks and balances to protect the interests of minorities and to avoid making uninformed decisions with catastrophic consequences. The greater and more lasting the decision, the higher the hurdles.

That’s why enacting, say, a constitutional amendment generally requires clearing far higher hurdles than passing a spending bill. Yet the current international standard for breaking up a country is arguably less demanding than a vote for lowering the drinking age.

With Europe now facing the risk of a slew of further breakup votes, an urgent question is whether there is a better way to make these decisions. I polled several leading political scientists to see whether there is any academic consensus; unfortunately, the short answer is no.

For one thing, the Brexit decision may have looked simple on the ballot, but in truth no one knows what comes next after a leave vote. What we do know is that, in practice, most countries require a “supermajority” for nation-defining decisions, not a mere 51%. There is no universal figure like 60%, but the general principle is that, at a bare minimum, the majority ought to be demonstrably stable. A country should not be making fundamental, irreversible changes based on a razor-thin minority that might prevail only during a brief window of emotion. Even if the UK economy does not fall into outright recession after this vote (the pound’s decline might cushion the initial blow), there is every chance that the resulting economic and political disorder will give some who voted to leave “buyers’ remorse.”

Since ancient times, philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that informed parties get a larger say in critical decisions, not to mention that minority voices are heard. In the Spartan assemblies of ancient Greece, votes were cast by acclamation. People could modulate their voice to reflect the intensity of their preferences, with a presiding officer carefully listening and then declaring the outcome. It was imperfect, but maybe better than what just happened in the UK.

By some accounts, Sparta’s sister state, Athens, had implemented the purest historical example of democracy. All classes were given equal votes (albeit only males). Ultimately, though, after some catastrophic war decisions, Athenians saw a need to give more power to independent bodies.

What should the UK have done if the question of EU membership had to be asked (which by the way, it didn’t)? Surely, the hurdle should have been a lot higher; for example, Brexit should have required, say, two popular votes spaced out over at least two years, followed by a 60% vote in the House of Commons. If Brexit still prevailed, at least we could know it was not just a one-time snapshot of a fragment of the population.

The UK vote has thrown Europe into turmoil. A lot will depend on how the world reacts and how the UK government manages to reconstitute itself. It is important to take stock not just of the outcome, though, but of the process. Any action to redefine a long-standing arrangement on a country’s borders ought to require a lot more than a simple majority in a one-time vote. The current international norm of simple majority rule is, as we have just seen, a formula for chaos.

The British Parliament can ignore a Brexit verdict

Michael White in The Guardian


 

Brexiteers claim to revere the ancient British constitution, and ‘sovereignty’ is what it’s all about. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images


What if the Brexit camp wins the referendum on 23 June, as some polls are currently scaring sterling by suggesting? Could pro-remain MPs do as one anonymous minister told the BBC and use their parliamentary majority in a “reverse Maastricht” to protect UK access to the EU single market as part of the withdrawal?

They would do so, according to today’s enjoyable speculation, because they have an overwhelming cross-party majority to do so – 454 to 147 mostly rightwing Tories, on some calculations – and because they will be able to claim Brexit has not put up a coherent policy for Britain’s trade relationship with Brussels. It has put up many options, but has no mandate for many of them. 

The very thought of such defiance – here’s the BBC’s James Landale’s account – will have Brexiteers spluttering in their foreign coffee. How dare those MPs defy what will, they hope, be the sovereign will of the British people as expressed through the ballot box?

The short answer to that is simple: of course parliament can defy the referendum result, because the British constitution clearly states that “the crown in parliament” – ie a majority of elected MPs, subject to whatever the Lords tries to moderate – is sovereign.

Since Brexiteers claim to revere the ancient British constitution, and “sovereignty” is what it’s all about – not an excess of Polish plumbers or Bangladeshi restaurants – they can hardly complain about its correct and immaculate application.

There’s a second, telling point, which you will instantly remember when I point it out. Because parliament is sovereign, it can’t be bound, even by a referendum result. Legally speaking, the vote is only advisory.

So much for the legal situation by which many rigid minds think these matters are resolved. In the practical world of politics – politics is always more practical than theoretical – could it be done, if there was the political will among assorted parties to do so?

The short answer, again, is yes. Again the Brexiteers will cry outrage, but since they don’t have a coherent answer themselves it will be open to bold leaders to seize the initiative and sort things out the best way they can.

Remember, even the mud-splattered figure of Michael Gove admitted at the weekend that Britain would still be in the EU when the 2020 election takes place, and that withdrawal would be protracted and messy. Remember too that all sorts of awkward events would follow a Brexit vote.

Sterling would take a hit, so would inward investment and, probably, exports. The Bank of England is making plans. Foreign holders of UK assets – they hold a lot of cash and debt, lots of property of one kind or another – will look at the balance of payments on traded goods and levels of government debt and start moving on, as footloose foreigners do everywhere. They’re not here for the weather. Unions arerightly anxious.

So it would be stormy. “We would accept the mandate of the people to leave the EU,” says one unnamed minister, but everything else would be negotiable. Since they regard access to the EU single market as the most important component of the deal, that is what they would insist on. A majority of MPs from Labour, Lib Dem, Tories (not backbench Tories) and assorted nationalists, notably the 56-strong SNP contingent (suspended MPs included), could then insist on embracing the Norwegian model, one of the many mooted as the ideal relationship by the Brexit campaign.

Yes, I know, there are many others, including the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) open market scenario. But that is unlikely to stand up to much exposure to the sunlight that would pour through every British window every day after a Brexit triumph – east and west facing windows at the same time, too.

So it would be up to David Cameron and his advisers to decide how best to proceed. Yes, I realise that amateur plotters in the Tory ranks are planning to unseat Cameron if he loses, and some of them if he wins – Matthew D’Ancona is urging Dave to get tough. Does he have it in him? Not sure, but here’s hoping.

This has been a damaging period for Tory unity and many nasty things have been said on both sides. But come the day a majority of MPs will realise that their more swivel-eyed colleagues are best left to their own devices while the humdrum reality of day-to-day real life and government is resumed. If Brexit wins there would be much to do, all day and every day, and a country to run as well.

Cameron would look the best man to do the job and it would be his duty not to slope off because it was his decision alone that dropped us into this referendum shambles, done for party tactical reasons. In normal times that would be enough to finish him off, but these are not normal.

Jeremy Corbyn regularly shows how unsuited he is for any heavy lifting – he’s getting the worst of both worlds by campaigning only feebly against Brexit – and neither Boris Trump nor Govey have emerged with much dignity from the campaign. I’d watch that Theresa May if I were you, Dave, but why wouldn’t she want Cameron to clean up his own dirty kitchen before taking over and giving it a makeover?

Tory papers like the Mail and Telegraph are outraged by the attacks made over the weekend by the likes of Sir John Major. Norman Tebbit – the Tory Tony Benn, disloyal to the point of treachery but not quite crossing the fellow travellers’ Ukip line – is fuming. It would be funny if it were not serious.

Back to the Maastricht rebellion, which so disfigured and weakened decent John Major’s years in office in the 90s when, like Cameron now, he only had a wafer-thin majority. Actually Major did pretty well at the treaty negotiations, his opt-outs kept us out of the euro among other things. Were the ingrates grateful? Of course not. As Ken Clarke once witheringly put it, they are middle-aged (now elderly) men who feel their lives have not been sufficiently exciting.

The Maastricht years were a shambles, good sport for reporters like me, but grim. Yet it is diehard Maastricht disloyalists like Tebbit, John “Vulcan” Redwood and dear but daft Bill Cash who are now crying loyalty; Iain Duncan Smith, who inherited Tebbit’s Chingford seat, too. No wonder Major was so scornful.

Not since Jeremy Corbyn, serial rebel in 500 votes, appealed for loyalty from old comrades to whom he had shown little has there been such cause for dry mirth. Ah, but Iain and Jeremy were doing what they believe in and what their constituents want, will come the retort. And you think that pro-remain MPs can’t say that too?

So the “reverse Maastricht” tactic is both legal and politically feasible. All it would take – the Norway model or any that looks better on the day – is leadership and willpower. Nicola Sturgeon would be a more slippery but also more reliable ally for Cameron (pause for ironic laughter) than Corbyn-led Labour.

But what about the free movement of EU labour in and out of the UK, which Norway’s deal would require us to embrace as part of the price for access? Correct, but for all its populist talk and tabloid extravagance about immigration, Brexiters have not cracked that one either. And they’ve still got to win. Two weeks to go.

Voters believe that even if they did exercise their right to leave the EU, the politicians wouldn’t obey them.

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


 

‘Voters believe that even if they did exercise their right to leave the EU, the politicians wouldn’t obey them.’ Illustration by Matt Kenyon


Neil was speckled with paint from his trousers to his spectacle lenses, and had come straight from work to the vape shop. When I asked which side he’d be backing in the EU referendum, he projected as if addressing a rally. He wanted everyone to know he was damned if he was going to vote. “It’s an illusion that we’ve got a say in it. We don’t live in a democracy. The day of having a common working man standing for us here or in Europe – it’s over.”

We were in Pontypool, south Wales. As a valleys boy (“I smell of sheep”), Neil had been brought up Labour. But now, “It’s all lies, isn’t it?” Then came the sins: Blair “a big liar”; the political class in the pockets of the bankers.

It was the refrain I kept getting last week across south Wales – and have heard in many other regions too. That dissolution in old loyalties, that breakdown in trust, runs wide and deep – and it already marks the referendum on 23 June. Opinion polls show that voters believe that even if they did exercise their right to leave the EU, the politicians wouldn’t obey them. This is what a democratic crisis looks like.

Although journalists often remind us that this is the first vote the British have had on Europe in 40 years, they rarely dwell on what happened last time round. Yet the torchlight of history shows just how much has changed. While today’s polls show leave and remain neck and neck, the 1975 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Economic Community was as good as won before it was even announced. The then prime minister, Harold Wilson, led a coalition of the establishment – all three parties, the unions, the business lobbies, the press – and emerged with a 2:1 majority to stay in.

“Europhoria” is how the Guardian reported the results. Its leader began: “Full-hearted, wholehearted and cheerful hearted: there is no doubt about the ‘yes’.” Imagine anything even close to that being said in two weeks’ time – after months of sullen and sour campaigning, of close colleagues branding one another “liars”, “luxury-lifestyle” politicians and “Pinocchio”.

“Wilson would never have asked a question of which he couldn’t be confident of the answer,” says historian Adrian Williamson. Contrast that with David Cameron, who once claimed he wanted to be prime minister because he’d be “rather good at it”, but now resembles a short-tempered supply teacher struggling to control his own class.

Panicked by a fear of Nigel Farage and the ultras in his own party, the Tory leader has staged a referendum for which there was little public appetite and which he may now, incredibly, lose.

Months were spent trailing a deal that the prime minister was going to strike with Germany’s Angela Merkel and the rest – a rewriting of the rules that was going to form the basis of this referendum. You’ve barely heard about that deal since.
Posed a question few of them were actually asking, voters have wound up raising their own. Why haven’t my wages gone up? How will the kids get on the housing ladder? When will my mum get her knee replacement? All good questions, none of which are actually on the ballot paper. The likely result is that on 23 June, many of those who do vote will try to squeeze a multitude of other answers into one crude binary.

In 1975 Roy Jenkins, another son of Welsh coal and steel, explained the result as: “The people took the advice of people they were used to following.” Classic Jenkins, but also an expression of the classic role of mass political parties. When they had millions of members, both Labour and the Conservatives served as the brokers between the people they represented and the “experts”, the authoritative midpoint between ideology and empirics.

Neither party can claim to be mass any more, least of all the Tories – low on members, bankrolled by hedge funds and the City. This creates what Chris Bickerton, politics lecturer at Cambridge, calls “the crisis of political mediation”.

No longer claiming the same democratic legitimacy as their predecessors, Cameron and George Osborne have had to borrow their authority from other sources: Mark Carney and the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, the Treasury. These technocrats, much cited by broadcasters and jittery remainers, are one of the two main sources of authority in our democracy. The other is the post-truth brigade, as channelled by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who advise voters to ignore the nuance, trust their gut – and blame migrants or the Brussels fatcats.

British democracy in 2016 comes down to this: a prime minister can no longer come out and say something and expect to be believed. He or she must wheel out a common room-full of experts. He or she can expect to be called a liar in the press and by their colleagues. He or she can only hope that some of what they say resonates with an electorate that has tuned them out.

And mainstream politicians have only themselves to blame. Over the past three decades, Britons have been made a series of false promises. They have been told they must go to war with a country that can bomb them in 45 minutes – only to learn later that that was false. They have been assured the economy was booming, only to find out it was fuelled by house prices and tax credits.

New Labour pledged an end to Margaret Thatcher’s unfairness, except that – as the Centre for Research into Socio-Cultural Change has shown – the richest 20% of households scooped as much of the income growth under Brown and Blair as they had under the Iron Lady.

Britons were told austerity would last five years, tops – although we will now endure at least a decade.

And the people of south Wales were told new industries would replace the coal and steelworks. Looking out of the shop window, Neil remembered how Pontypool on market days like today would be “rammed”. Now it was half-empty. “It’s dead now, because they took what they wanted,” he said. “Thatcher smashed the unions. There used to be coalmines all around here. Boosh – we’re out of here. They’ve moved on.”

Cameron and the rest of the political class are learning a lesson the hard way. You can only break your promises to the public so many times before they refuse to put any more trust in you. After that, you have to rely on Threadneedle Street and the Treasury to corrode their own finite reputation for impartiality.

Whichever way the ballots go on 23 June, the public will continue returning a vote of no-confidence in Westminster for a long time to come.

The leftwing case for Brexit (one day)

Paul Mason in The Guardian

There are many good reasons for the UK to leave the EU. But exiting now would allow Johnson and Gove to turn Britain into a neoliberal fantasy island.

 

Jobbik on the march … all over Europe, the EU’s economic failure is fuelling racism and the ultra right. Photograph: Janek Skarżyński/AFP/Getty Images


 The leftwing case for Brexit is strategic and clear. The EU is not – and cannot become – a democracy. Instead, it provides the most hospitable ecosystem in the developed world for rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organised crime. It has an executive so powerful it could crush the leftwing government of Greece; a legislature so weak that it cannot effectively determine laws or control its own civil service. A judiciary that, in the Laval and Viking judgments, subordinated workers’ right to strike to an employer’s right do business freely.

Its central bank is committed, by treaty, to favour deflation and stagnation over growth. State aid to stricken industries is prohibited. The austerity we deride in Britain as a political choice is, in fact, written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation. So are the economic principles of the Thatcher era. A Corbyn-led Labour government would have to implement its manifesto in defiance of EU law.

And the situation is getting worse. Europe’s leaders still do not know whether they will let Greece go bankrupt in June; they still have no workable plan to distribute the refugees Germany accepted last summer, and having signed amorally bankrupt deal with Turkey to return the refugees, there is now the prospect of that deal’s collapse. That means, if the reported demand by an unnamed Belgian minister to “push back or sink” migrant boats in the Aegean is activated, the hands of every citizen of the EU will be metaphorically on the tiller of the ship that does it. You may argue that Britain treats migrants just as badly. The difference is that in Britain I can replace the government, whereas in the EU, I cannot.

That’s the principled leftwing case for Brexit.

Now here’s the practical reason to ignore it. In two words: Boris Johnson. The conservative right could have conducted the leave campaign on the issues of democracy, rule of law and UK sovereignty, leaving the economics to the outcome of a subsequent election. Instead, Johnson and the Tory right are seeking a mandate via the referendum for a return to full-blown Thatcherism: less employment regulation, lower wages, fewer constraints on business. If Britain votes Brexit, then Johnson and Gove stand ready to seize control of the Tory party and turn Britain into a neoliberal fantasy island.

Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders goes on trial for inciting hatred



They will have two years in which to shape the post-Brexit economy. Worse, the Tories will be free to use the sudden disappearance of our rights as EU citizens to reshape the UK’s de facto constitution. The man who destroyed state control of education and the man who shovelled acres of free land into the hands of London developers will get to determine the new balance of power between the citizen and the state. So even for those who support the leftwing case for Brexit, it is sensible to argue: not now. The time to confront Europe over a leftwing agenda is when you have a Labour government, and the EU is resisting it.

This is why I have refused to campaign for Brexit, and may even abstain on the day. I also want to see the final offer. As with the Scottish referendum I expect, if the polls show a lead for remain of less than 7%, there will be a politically orchestrated run on sterling; a string of CEOs paraded on to the BBC promising to quit Britain; then a a surprise “final offer” from either Jean-Claude Juncker or an influential group of heads of government. If this offer includes the suspension ofthe social chapter, or further opt-outs that favour the rich over the poor in Britain, then there would be little point in staying in for tactical reasons.

Already, thanks to David Cameron’s Brussels deal, the choice is between out and half-out. I do not think the concessions Cameron achieved in March were negligible. Though the emergency brake on in-work benefits for migrants was reactionary showmanship, the opt-out from “ever closer union” he gained was real. It means there will probably never be another 28-member treaty.

As the Eurozone consolidates, around banking union and cross-border transfers, the Lisbon treaty will be superseded by new, core-country agreements. If that happens, it is likely the UK will be able to legally retreat from some Lisbon commitments. Thus, even without a catastrophic disintegration, it is likely that the UK’s relationship with both the Eurozone and European law will remain negotiable.

All this suggests that those of us who want Brexit in order to reimpose democracy, promote social justice and subordinate companies to the rule of law should bide our time. But here’s the price we will pay. Hungary is one electoral accident away from going fascist; the French conservative elite is one false move away from handing the presidency to the Front National; in Austria the far-right FPÖ swept the first round of the presidential polls. Geert Wilders’s virulently Islamophobic PVV is leading the Dutch opinion polls.

Hungarian camera operator apologises for kicking refugees



The EU’s economic failure is fuelling racism and the ultra right. Boris Johnson’s comparison of the EU with the Third Reich was facile. The more accurate comparison is with the Weimar Republic: a flawed democracy whose failures fuelled the rise of fascism. And this swing to the far right prompts the more basic dilemma: do I even want to be part of the same electorate as millions of closet Nazis in mainland Europe?

The EU, politically, begins to look more and more like a gerrymandered state, where the politically immature electorates of eastern Europe can be used – as Louis Napoleon used the French peasantry – as a permanent obstacle to liberalism and social justice. If so – even though the political conditions for a left Brexit are absent today – I will want out soon.

This EU referendum doesn’t matter. But the next one will

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian

In 532AD the city of Constantinople was torn between two parties, the blues and greens. Everyone, aristocrat or slave, belonged to one or other. In January a chariot race between the two erupted into riots. Destruction was appalling. Half the city was gutted by fire, including the great church of Hagia Sophia. A green emperor was chosen to replace Justinian, who backed the blues and butchered 30,000 greens in response. That decided it.

Britain’s EU referendum is looking much the same. At first the pros and antis argued over tariffs and sheep meat premiums. Then they argued over top tables and “influence in Europe”. Now they pit salvation against damnation, national glory against famines, locusts, boils and immigrant hordes. The nation examines the entrails of heirs to the throne, actors and London mayors. Prince William,Emma Thompson and Boris Johnson claim meta-wisdom. On Friday the chariot race starts, and all hell breaks loose.

On Europe there is clearly no compromise between black and white, between yes and no. Yet the shallowness of the argument is shown in the antis’ neo-nationalism and the pros’ “Project Fear”. The antis are in denial over how to reconstruct a workable framework for a free-trade area after a no vote. The pros, notably the business community, have nothing to offer but “remaining in a reformed EU”.

David Cameron has laboured valiantly to deliver that reformed EU, but it was never in his gift. Nor has he done what he promised, which is materially to alter Britain’s relationship with Europe. He has probably won all that the EU could plausibly offer. But given the terms of the debate, I do not see how the reformed-EU party can honestly vote yes. The EU is unreformed. If politics were about truth, Cameron would stun the nation tomorrow by backing no.

To me the referendum as such is not the issue. The issue is the aftermath. I suspect the long-term outcome of the vote will be much the same either way. Two adjacent modern economies cannot co-exist without mutual accommodation, reflecting political and economic reality, not ideology.

During Scotland’s 2014 referendum, “independence-lite” drew ever closer in argument to “devo max”. However Scotland voted, there had to be a new deal between London and Edinburgh. The British government, threatened with losing the union, conceded half a deal, and won.

The EU cannot negotiate nimble-footed, as London did in 2014. It is too big and cumbersome, with too many national insecurities and battling lobbies. It cannot even control its borders. Already split by the eurozone, the EU could not stand more exceptionalism. Programmed to ever greater union, it has no gear-shift to “ever less”. Like Britain’s NHS, it has a dinosaur in its DNA.

Certainly a yes vote would change nothing. All that would result is that any future British government, seeking to resist Brussels power, will be hogtied by the result. The threat of Brexit, which Cameron has struggled to mobilise this past six months, will evaporate.

Instead a furious Conservative party would make the government behave ever worse towards Europe. Britain would continue to fend off immigrants, fawn on China and flog everything to east Asia. It would side with America in foreign and defence policy. Irrespective of Europe, its banks would launder money and evade tax with abandon. Britain would stay semi-detached.

On the other hand, a no vote would certainly be traumatic. It would send Britain’s pro-EU establishment into the mother of all huddles with a panic-stricken Brussels. Half of Europe’s democracies know they could lose an EU vote just now. No one really wants Britain to depart.

The dreaded article 50 of the Lisbon treaty on renegotiation would be activated. Fat-cat thinktanks would argue the Norwegian, Swiss, Australian, American and rest-of-world options. Euro-panic would morph into Euro-conspiracy. Power hates rebellion. Deals would be done.

My reading of lobbyist literature from both sides suggests that Britain would probably emerge from all this with a diluted version of associate EU membership. To ensure trade continuity – which is in everyone’s interest – it would accept much of the present EU regulation. It might even contribute to the EU budget. The UK would gain some discretion in picking and choosing. In return it would lose its present much-cited (though never specified) “influence”, through losing its vote in the council and parliament. The balance of advantage is here too opaque for anyone sensibly to call.

But if the outcome does not matter that much, what does? The answer is disruption versus inertia. Here the argument defaults to tribe. The yes tribe is composed of the insiders, the metro-progressives, the established order averse to change. The no tribe consists of the outsiders, the provincials, the instinctive radicals. On the left this is a divide between the old-style statist socialism and the new left of perpetual dissent. On the right it separates the “natural party of government” and the professional class from the grassroots, the insecure and the dispossessed.

Neither tribe is happy with the present EU, as it fails in its core purpose of holding together a disparate continent in the cause of liberal democracy. It made one mistake, the eurozone, and now faces another problem, the growth of rightwing separatism across south and east Europe. It has humiliated a British prime minister into traipsing round the capitals of Europe, pleading for help in a domestic election. It is a mess. This is the EU that would sigh with relief at a British yes vote.

A no vote would not “isolate” Britain from mainland Europe, whatever the howls of “Project Fear”. But it would traumatise EU complacency. It would press the reset button. A no vote would force the EU, or at least countries outside the eurozone, to seek a new balance between supranational regulation and free trade. However arrogant it might seem to others, Britain would have precipitated reform. That is surely what everyone wants.

There would have to be a new treaty between the EU and Britain, on whatever suite of options would emerge from negotiations. It would be tough. But since such a treaty would probably qualify the decision to withdraw, it would merit a new referendum. That is the referendum that really would matter.

I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in

George Monbiot in The Guardian

On jobs, health and wildlife, the European Union is often all that stands between us and unfettered corporate power

 

Slurry runoff polluting a river: ‘What Cameron described in parliament as “pettifogging bureaucracy” are the rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers.’ Photograph: Alamy



By instinct, like many on the left, I am a European. I recognise that many issues – perhaps most – can no longer be resolved only within our borders. Among them are grave threats to our welfare and our lives: climate change and the collapse of the living world; the spread of epidemics whose vectors are corporations (obesity, diabetes and diseases associated with smoking, alcohol and air pollution); the global wealth-grab by the very rich; antibiotic resistance; terrorism and conflict.

I recognise that the only legitimate corrective to transnational power is transnational democracy. So I want to believe; I want to belong. But it seems to me that all that is good about the European Union is being torn down, and all that is bad enhanced and amplified.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the draft agreement secured by David Cameron. For me, the most disturbing elements are those that have been widely described in the media as “uncontroversial”: the declarations on regulations andcompetitiveness. The draft decisions on these topics are a long series of euphemisms, but they amount to a further dismantling of the safeguards defending people, places and the living world.

What Cameron described in parliament as “pettifogging bureaucracy” is the rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers and workers from being exploited by their bosses. What the European commission calls reducing the “regulatory burden for EU business operators” often means increasing the costs the rest of us must carry: costs imposed on our pockets, our health and our quality of life. “Cutting red tape” is everywhere portrayed as a good thing. In reality, it often means releasing business from democracy.

There is nothing rational or proportionate about the deregulation the commission contemplates. When Edmund Stoiber, the conservative former president of Bavaria, reviewed European legislation, he discovered that the combined impact of all seven environmental directives incurred less than 1% of the cost to business caused by European law. But, prodded by governments including ours, the commission threatens them anyway. It is still considering a merger and downgrading of the habitats and birds directives, which are all that impede the destruction of many of our precious places and rare species.

Alongside such specific threats, the EU is engineering treaties that challenge the very principle of parliamentary control of corporations. As well as theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), it has been quietly negotiating something even worse: a Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa). These claim to be trade treaties, but they are nothing of the kind. Their purpose is to place issues in which we have a valid and urgent interest beyond the reach of democratic politics. And the commission defends them against all comers.

Are such tendencies accidental, emergent properties of a highly complex system, or are they hardwired into the structure of the EU? The more I see, the more it seems to me that the EU’s problems are intrinsic and systemic. The organisation that began as an industrial cartel still works at the behest of the forces best equipped to operate across borders: transnational corporations. The commission remains a lobbyists’ paradise: opaque, sometimes corruptible, almost unnavigable by those without vast resources.

People such as the former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson, who claim the EU is a neutral political forum – “simply a place we have built where we can manage our interdependence” – are myth-makers. They are the equivalent of the tabloid fabulists who maintain that European rules will reclassify Kent as part of France, force people to trade in old battery-operated sex toys for new ones, and ensure that dead pets are boiled for half an hour in a pressure cooker before they are buried.

So should those who seek a decent, protective politics vote to stay or vote to leave? If you wish to remain within the EU because you imagine it is a progressive force, I believe you are mistaken. That time, if it ever existed, has passed. The EU is like democracy, diplomacy and old age: there is only one thing to be said for it – it is not as bad as the alternative.

If you are concerned about arbitrary power, and the ability of special interests to capture and co-opt the apparatus of the state, the UK is in an even worse position outside the EU than it is within. Though the EU’s directives are compromised and under threat, they are a lot better than nothing. Without them we can kiss goodbye to the protection of our wildlife, our health, our conditions of employment and, one day perhaps, our fundamental rights. Without a formal constitution, with our antiquated voting arrangements and a corrupt and corrupting party funding system, nothing here is safe.


Though the EU’s directives are compromised and under threat, they are a lot better than nothing

The UK government champs and rears against the European rules that constrain it. It was supposed to have ensured that all our rivers were in good ecological condition by the end of last year: instead, lobbied by Big Farmer and other polluting businesses, it has achieved a grand total of 17%. On behalf of the motor industry, it has sought to undermine new European limits on air pollution, after losing a case in the supreme court over its failure to implement existing laws. Ours is the least regulated labour market in Europe, and workers here would be in an even worse fix without the EU.

On behalf of party donors, old school chums, media proprietors and financial lobbyists, the government is stripping away any protections that European law has not nailed down. The EU’s enthusiasm for treaties such as TTIP is exceeded only by Cameron’s. His defence of national sovereignty, subsidiarity and democracy mysteriously evaporates as soon as they impinge upon corporate power.

I believe that we should remain within the union. But we should do so in the spirit of true scepticism: a refusal to believe anything until we have read the small print; a refusal to suspend our disbelief. Is it possible to be a pro-European Eurosceptic? I hope so, because that is what I am.

David Cameron's ever-shifting view of Britain's place in EU

Long before current renegotiations, PM made series of half promises and pledges that never materialised. Here is a selection

 

David Cameron speaks to factory staff at the Siemens manufacturing plant in Chippenham on Tuesday. Photograph: Ben Pruchnie/AFP/Getty Images


Alberto Nardelli in The Guardian

David Cameron has come a long way in how he views Britain’s place in the European Union. Over the years, long before the current renegotiations even started, the prime minister has made a series of bold comments, half promises and pledges.

Tuesday’s draft agreement demonstrates that only a handful of his commitments have been delivered. Here is a selection of some of them:

• In 2009, he promised that a Tory government would stop the European court of justice overruling UK criminal law by limiting its jurisdiction. The government has since opted back in to 35 justice and home affairs measures, including the European arrest warrant.

• In 2012, Cameron said that the government was “committed to revising the working time directive”, a set of EU-wide working standards. However, last December, George Osborne, told the Treasury select committee that this formed no part of the negotiation. Back in 2007, before becoming prime minister, Cameron had even pledged to pull Britain out of Europe’s social chapter on workers’ rights.

• The prime minister also promised in the Conservative manifesto last May to push for further reform of the EU’s common agricultural policy. This promise was not part of the renegotiation as it was likely to face fierce opposition from some member states.

• Cameron said in early 2014 that he would put in place treaty change before the referendum. Tuesday’s documents make it clear that there will be no changes to the EU’s governing treaties – including its headline principle of “ever closer union” – ahead of the vote because this would not be feasible in the referendum’s timeframe.

In any event, Tusk said in Tuesday’s letter that the principle of ever closer union is already not equivalent to an objective of political integration, and the substance of this will be incorporated into the treaties when they are next revised.

• Last year Cameron said that he wanted EU jobseekers to have a job before they come to Britain. Such a measure is contrary to the principle of free movement and as such was also not part of the negotiations.

• When the renegotiations formally began Cameron started by asking for a cap in the number of EU migrants allowed into the UK. That idea lasted the length of a phonecall to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in 2014. She was not very impressed.

• The prime minister had to think of a new idea and proposed – in writing this time – that people coming to Britain from the EU must live in the UK and contribute for four years before they qualify for in-work benefits or social housing. It has proven to be the most controversial – albeit the most precise – of Cameron’s demands.

What he is set to get is the dilution of an already diluted idea: an “emergency brake” on in-work benefits for up to four years. The one-off restriction would not amount to an outright ban on benefits either but would be graduated. That means that EU migrants would receive no benefits upon arrival but would get an increasing proportion each year – another piece of complexity for an already over-complex benefit system.

When it came to the formal negotiations, Cameron’s other requests included:

• Ending the practice of sending child benefit overseas. This was also watered down. The UK will be allowed to index the payments to the country where the child is based.

• On measures to crack down on the abuse of free movement, members states will be able to take action against fraudulent claims and sham marriages, as well as against individuals who pose a threat to national security. None of these measures would appear to be new, but are simply based on the interpretation of current rules.

• On “economic governance”, Cameron had asked for a series of principles to be recognised ranging from a simple recognition of the idea that the EU has more than one currency, and that taxpayers in non-euro countries should never be financially liable for operations to support the eurozone as a currency.

Here Cameron did better, although only because Tusk clarified, in effect, that all these things are already covered by existing rules and principles.

• As part of the competitiveness basket, Cameron had said he wanted the EU to be more competitive. In response, Tusk has committed the EU to increasing efforts to enhance competitiveness. It is probably not surprising that the contents of this basket proved the easiest to agree on.

Nevertheless, however much has been negotiated away, Cameron has still won some important concessions. Take the emergency brake: just a month ago the measure seemed to be off the table but now it is a centre piece of his pitch to the British people. The European commission has accepted that the UK is facing exceptional circumstances due to high levels of immigration and must be allowed to do something about it – assuming the British people vote to stay in the EU.

However, the vast majority of the words in the draft agreement are dedicated to clarifying how existing rules and principles can be applied to ease British fears. The achievement is somewhat distant from the grander aspirations set out by Cameron over the past five years, but in the end it may be enough.

Two-thirds of Tory MPs want Britain to quit European Union

Toby Helm and Henry McDonald in The Guardian


Party sources say Brexit support is rising – despite David Cameron’s preference for staying in EU – but U-turns are possible

 

David Cameron with the European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Photograph: Ints Kalnins/Reuters

Two-thirds of Conservative MPs now support Britain’s exit from the European Union, despite David Cameron’s clear preference for staying in, according to senior sources within the party.

Key figures in Tory high command say analysis of public statements and private views expressed by their 330 MPs shows that at least 210 now believe that the UK would be better off “out”.

The surge in support within the parliamentary party for leaving will greatly encourage “out” campaigners, who believe many people will take their lead from local MPs when they decide which way to vote. However, party managers say the total number of Tory MPs who will join the campaign to leave could turn out to be significantly fewer – around 110 – if in the next few months opinion polls begin to point towards a close result or a win for the pro-EU side.

“Certainly at least two-thirds want to leave as it stands,” said a senior party figure. “But if things are very tight some will be bought off by offers of patronage and will be reluctant to take a different line to the prime minister. Plenty will not want their careers blighted by being on the wrong side of such an important debate.” The Observer has also been told that soundings taken by MPs show the “vast majority” of grassroots activists now want to quit the EU – and that most will not be swayed by whatever deal Cameron achieves in his attempt to renegotiate UK membership.

EU referendum expected in September as hopes fade of deal next month



Last week Cameron, in effect, conceded that his party was split from top to bottom over Europe when he agreed that members of his government, including cabinet ministers, would be allowed to speak out against the official line during the campaign, which is expected to be later this year.

While the holders of the top offices of state – including the chancellor, George Osborne, the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond and the home secretary, Theresa May – are likely to back staying in, other senior ministers, including the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of the House of Commons, Chris Grayling, and the Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, want to campaign to leave.

The spotlight will inevitably now turn to Boris Johnson, who attends cabinet in his role as mayor of London and sees himself as a future leader of the party. A longstanding critic of the EU, Johnson has yet to indicate whether he will campaign to stay in or leave.

The ability of Villiers to remain as Northern Ireland secretary if she sides with the “out” campaign was being called into question on Saturday night as opposition MPs said leaving the EU would not be in Northern Ireland’s interests, could harm the peace process and damage Northern Ireland’s economy. The Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder, who speaks for her party on the referendum campaign, said Villiers should stand down, saying a Brexit would not be compatible with her role. “It would be highly inappropriate for Theresa Villiers to remain in her post while campaigning to leave the EU,” Bearder said. “Leaving Europe would risk stoking sectarian tensions and undoing years of peace-building, much of it funded through EU peace programmes.

“It would also fundamentally transform the UK’s relationship with the Republic of Ireland and put at risk the open land border we currently share. Government ministers should not be able to campaign for an EU exit if this completely goes against their role and responsibilities.”

Osborne: PM giving ministers free rein on EU referendum is not a U-turn



The only Irish nationalist party represented in the House of Commons also questioned whether Villiers could remain in her post. Colum Eastwood, new leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party, said Britain’s departure from the EU could put at risk Northern Ireland’s £1.6bn of trade with the Irish Republic. “While Theresa Villiers is obviously entitled to engage in the internal and long-running Tory battles over Europe, her role as secretary of state for Northern Ireland places upon her a separate responsibility. That role should require her to represent the best interests of people in the north. A Brexit is not in our interest. It is not in the interest of our economy or in the interest of our society,” he said.

“All the evidence, all the major voices in our agricultural and business communities, have warned that a Brexit would devastate the fundamentals of our economy.”

Meanwhile, the EU spokesman of the strongly Eurosceptic Danish People’s party, Kenneth Kristensen Berth, said he did not believe the UK should leave. “I fully understand the British people’s scepticism, but the answer is not to leave now. The answer is to work within the EU framework to slim down the EU cooperation, and that’s a job that will be significantly harder without the British.”

James McGrory, chief campaign spokesman for Britain Stronger In Europe, said: “It shows how isolated Ukip and the Leave campaigns are when even rightwing Eurosceptics in other countries are arguing that Britain should remain in Europe.

“Europe needs reform, but leaving altogether would take us to very extreme fringes of the international community, where even far-right outfits like the Danish People’s party don’t want to be.”

There’s method in Greece’s madness – it could pay off

Iain Martin in The Telegraph

In the upper reaches of the Euro elite, where leaders are forever driving up to summit meetings in shiny German cars and looking grave and self-important for the cameras, where smooth diplomats know that the way to get business done is to do it discreetly with fellow officials, there is no surer sign that a colleague has gone stark raving mad than him announcing that he is going to hold a referendum on matters European.

It is bad enough that David Cameron has decided to put Britain’s future in the EU to the voters. But at least the UK Prime Minister has given warning several years in advance and has enlisted the support of the British business establishment to win his vote in 2017. By contrast, the Greek leader, Alexis Tsipras, announced on Friday that he wants to hold a referendum in Greece on the eurozone crisis on July 5.

In the eyes of the Euro elite, this momentous decision made Mr Tsipras the instant winner of the European madman of the year competition. Several years ago, when his now forgotten predecessor in Athens attempted a similar manoeuvre, demanding a public vote, the Germans ordered Georges Papandreou not to be silly. Indeed, the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, told President Obama that the Greek leader was a “madman”. Truly, that was the pot calling the kettle noire.

Now, Mr Tsipras wants his own vote. What does he think he is doing? Does he realise that this is not how the eurozone and the European Union work? Who knows what will happen if Greek voters are asked whether they approve of the final offer of new terms from stricken Greece’s creditors. Goodness, the voters might say no. So exasperted were the other Eurogroup leaders that on Saturday they decided that the referendum move means their latest offer is void and Greece is on its own. It looks as though the referendum will go ahead regardless.

That fear of referendums on the part of EU leaders and officials is rooted in bitter experience, of course. The messy attempt to smuggle the integrationist Maastricht Treaty past European electorates in the early Nineties was followed by the long-running wrangle over the abandoned EU constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. Voters are awkward. Sometimes they do not do as they are told by the leaders and officials who do the deals. Why take the risk?

But Mr Tsipras is certainly not mad, or not in the sense that he has lost his marbles. Despite his Marxist beliefs and trainee demagogue antics, there is something rather compelling about the cunning way in which he has handled this crisis and declined to be railroaded by the corporatist EU powers-that-be, even though he has been slapped in the face (literally, last week) by the atrocious Jean Claude Juncker, the president of the EU commission. This is to say nothing of the ineffective behaviour of the over-rated German chancellor, Angela Merkel, cooed over by diplomats and the foreign policy community despite no one ever being able to name a single great achievement or convincing act of leadership in her career other than the knifing of her mentor Helmut Kohl.

But surely the real madmen here are not the Greek Marxists at all. The real madmen are those who created the euro, this cock-eyed construct, who thought political dreams and vanity could trump economic sense and cultural and national differences, by creating a currency union on a vast continent without the necessary safeguards.

Yet instead of facing these realities, and accepting that the EU model as currently constituted has had it, the Europhile leaders intone pompously about European Union values being agelessly sacrosanct. It is as though these men and women believe themselves to be functionaries of the Holy Roman Empire, rather than representatives of a modern botched-together political experiment that was only created in its latest form when German and French politicians misdiagnosed the consequences of the end of the Cold War as recently as 1989 and prescribed the euro.

This weekend, as those in the markets brace for the likelihood of Grexit, and a mammoth default on debts of more than 300 billion euros, it seems likely that Mr Tsipras has wanted Greece out of the eurozone all along, pretending throughout the negotiations that he is trying for an accommodation and debt relief when really he wanted to leave. That is what observers of Syriza, his party, believe.

But Mr Tsipras had a problem when he came to power. Although many Greek voters like his style, they also liked the euro because it meant membership of a supposedly democratic club that confers respectability. That is why he had to be seen to try for a deal, to create the illusion of good faith, so that he can say to the Greek electorate that while he did his best, the wicked architects of austerity – the central bankers and International Monetary Fund technocrats who want to make poor Greek pensioners (age: 57) homeless – would not see sense.

Now, Mr Tsipras may win either way. Either the creditors retreat in the next few days, because European financial institutions are exposed and the IMF is looking at a giant hole in its books, thus enabling Syriza to proclaim victory. Or, much more likely, Greece defaults on its debts and reintroduces the drachma as its currency against a backdrop of grievance and anti-German feeling that will serve the Greek Left well for generations to come.

The Greek people certainly won’t be winners, or at least not in the short term. On Saturday they were jogging to their banks in preparation for a full-blown bank run, in the expectation that the government will have to introduce capital controls, restricting the flow of money out of the country. If it does not do this, then the banks will have to close their doors. On Tuesday, Greece will start defaulting on the first chunk of 9.7 billion euros it owes the IMF this year. And that is all before the expected referendum on Sunday, which is a vote on a deal that eurozone finance ministers are declaring void already. What a mess.

Leaving will not be easy, contrary to the predications of British Eurosceptics, or at least not straight away. The experience of previous major defaults and hasty reorganisations suggests that it is extremely difficult to hold down inflation. It is also unlikely that the high-taxing socialist Mr Tsipras will introduce the capitalist policies and reforms that will attract inward investment and grow the economy.

At this late hour, in the final act of the Greek drama, enter David Cameron, like a man who arrives at a pub when the other customers and staff are administering the kiss of life to a regular who has collapsed on the floor next to the bar after consuming way too much ouzo.

Mr Cameron clears his throat and asks if someone wouldn’t mind awfully getting him and his British friends a pint. There is silence, until someone points out that they have their hands full at the moment.

In a similarly fraught atmosphere, Mr Cameron was given a few minutes to read out his proposals for reform to EU leaders last week as they grappled with Greece and the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. His demands – on benefits and the promise of a post-dated cheque guaranteeing who knows what from the other countries after the referendum – are pathetically small.

There remains one fascinating other possibility, however, which may get the escapologist Mr Cameron off the hook in that style of his to which we have all become so accustomed. If Greece does leave and the effects are explosive, then it might – just might – finally persuade the Euro elite that their approach is bust, and that what is needed instead is a way for Europeans to trade and be friends without the architecture of an integrationist, incompetent, failed super-state.

A yes vote in Scotland would unleash the most dangerous thing of all - hope

Independence would carry the potential to galvanise progressive movements across the rest of the UK

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 9 September 2014 18.58 BST

"It’s no surprise that the more the Scots see of their former Labour ministers, the more inclined they are to vote for independence." Photograph: Mike Finn-Kelcey/Reuters

Of all the bad arguments urging the Scots to vote no – and there are plenty – perhaps the worst is the demand that Scotland should remain in the union to save England from itself. Responses to my column last week suggest this wretched apron-strings argument has some traction among people who claim to belong to the left.

Consider what it entails: it asks a nation of 5.3 million to forgo independence to exempt a nation of 54 million from having to fight its own battles. In return for this self-denial, the five million must remain yoked to the dismal politics of cowardice and triangulation that cause the problems from which we ask them to save us.

“A UK without Scotland would be much less likely to elect any government of a progressive hue,” former Labour minister Brian Wilson claimed in the Guardian last week. We must combine against the “forces of privilege and reaction” (as he lines up with the Conservatives, Ukip, the Lib Dems, the banks, the corporations, almost all the rightwing columnists in Britain, and every UK newspaper except the Sunday Herald) – in the cause of “solidarity”.

There’s another New Labour weasel word to add to its lexicon (other examples include reform, which now means privatisation; and partnership, which means selling out to big business). Once solidarity meant making common cause with the exploited, the underpaid, the excluded. Now, to these cyborgs in suits, it means keeping faith with the banks, the corporate press, cuts, a tollbooth economy and market fundamentalism.

Here, to Wilson and his fellow flinchers, is what solidarity meant while they were in office. It meant voting for the Iraq war, for Trident, for identity cards, for 3,500 new criminal offences, including the criminalisation of most forms of peaceful protest. It meant being drafted in as political mercenaries to impose on the English policies to which the Scots were not subject, such as university top-up fees and foundation hospitals. It meant supporting every destructive and unjust proposition advanced by their leaders: the brood parasites who hatched in the Labour nest then flicked its dearest principles over the edge. It’s no surprise that the more the Scots see of their former Labour ministers, the more inclined they are to vote for independence.

So now Better Together has brought in Gordon Brown, scattering bribes in a desperate, last-ditch effort at containment. They must hope the Scots have forgotten that he boasted of setting “the lowest rate in the history of British corporation tax, the lowest rate of any major country in Europe and the lowest rate of any major industrialised country anywhere”. That he pledged to the City of London “in budget after budget, I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”. That, after 13 years of Labour government, the UK had higher levels of inequality than after 18 years of Tory government. That his government colluded in kidnapping and torture. That he helped cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands through his support for the illegal war on Iraq.

He roams through Scotland, still badged with blood, promising what he never delivered when he had the chance, this man who helped unravel the social safety net his predecessors wove; who marketised and dismembered public services; who enriched the wealthy and shafted the poor; who pledged money for Trident but failed to reverse the loss of social housing; whose private finance initiative planted a series of timebombs now exploding throughout the NHS and other public services; who greased and wheedled and slavered his way into the company of bankers and oligarchs while trampling over the working people he was elected to represent. This is the progressive Prester John who will ride to the rescue of the no campaign?

Where, in Scotland’s Labour party, are the Keir Hardies and Jimmy Reids of our time? Where is the vision, the inspiration, the hope? The shuffling, spineless little men who replaced these titans offer nothing but fear. Through fear, they seek to shove Scotland back into its box, as its people rebel against the dreary, closed future mapped out for them – and the rest of us – by the three main Westminster parties.

Sure, if Scotland becomes independent, all else being equal, Labour would lose 41 seats at Westminster and Tory majorities would become more likely. But all else need not be equal. Scottish independence can galvanise progressive movements across the rest of the UK. We’ll watch as the Scots engage in the transformative process of writing a constitution. We’ll see that a nation of these islands can live and – I hope – flourish with a fully elected legislature (no House of Lords), with a fair electoral system (proportional representation), and with a parliament in which only representatives of that nation can vote (no cross-border mercenaries).

Already, the myth of political apathy has been scotched by the tumultuous movement north of the border. As soon as something is worth voting for, people will queue into the night to add their names to the register. The low voter turnouts in Westminster elections reflect not an absence of interest but an absence of hope.

If Scotland becomes independent, it will be despite the efforts of almost the entire UK establishment. It will be because social media has defeated the corporate media. It will be a victory for citizens over the Westminster machine, for shoes over helicopters. It will show that a sufficiently inspiring idea can cut through bribes and blackmail, through threats and fear-mongering. That hope, marginalised at first, can spread across a nation, defying all attempts to suppress it. That you can be hated by the Daily Mail and still have a chance of winning.

If Labour has any political nous, any remaining flicker of courage, it will understand what this moment means. Instead of suppressing the forces of hope and inspiration, it would mobilise them. It would, for instance, pledge, in its manifesto, a referendum on drafting a written constitution for the rest of the UK.

It would understand that hope is the most dangerous of all political reagents. It can transform what appears to be a fixed polity, a fixed outcome, into something entirely different. It can summon up passion and purpose we never knew we possessed. If Scotland becomes independent, England – if only the potential were recognised – could also be transformed.

Scots voting no to independence would be an astonishing act of self-harm

England is dysfunctional, corrupt and vastly unequal. Who on earth would want to be tied to such a country?

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 2 September 2014 19.06 BST

Alex Salmond (R) first minister of Scotland and Alistair Darling chair of Better Together. 'To vote no is to choose to live under a political system that sustains one of the rich world’s highest levels of inequality and deprivation.' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty

Imagine the question posed the other way round. An independent nation is asked to decide whether to surrender its sovereignty to a larger union. It would be allowed a measure of autonomy, but key aspects of its governance would be handed to another nation. It would be used as a military base by the dominant power and yoked to an economy over which it had no control.

It would have to be bloody desperate. Only a nation in which the institutions of governance had collapsed, which had been ruined economically, which was threatened by invasion or civil war or famine might contemplate this drastic step. Most nations faced even with such catastrophes choose to retain their independence – in fact, will fight to preserve it – rather than surrender to a dominant foreign power.

So what would you say about a country that sacrificed its sovereignty without collapse or compulsion; that had no obvious enemies, a basically sound economy and a broadly functional democracy, yet chose to swap it for remote governance by the hereditary elite of another nation, beholden to a corrupt financial centre?

What would you say about a country that exchanged an economy based on enterprise and distribution for one based on speculation and rent? That chose obeisance to a government that spies on its own citizens, uses the planet as its dustbin, governs on behalf of a transnational elite that owes loyalty to no nation, cedes public services to corporations, forces terminally ill people to work and can’t be trusted with a box of fireworks, let alone a fleet of nuclear submarines? You would conclude that it had lost its senses.

So what’s the difference? How is the argument altered by the fact that Scotland is considering whether to gain independence rather than whether to lose it? It’s not. Those who would vote no – now, a new poll suggests, a rapidly diminishing majority – could be suffering from system justification.

System justification is defined as the “process by which existing social arrangements are legitimised, even at the expense of personal and group interest”. It consists of a desire to defend the status quo, regardless of its impacts. It has been demonstrated in a large body of experimental work, which has produced the following surprising results.

System justification becomes stronger when social and economic inequality is more extreme. This is because people try to rationalise their disadvantage by seeking legitimate reasons for their position. In some cases disadvantaged people are more likely than the privileged to support the status quo. One study found that US citizens on low incomes were more likely than those on high incomes to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary.

It explains why women in experimental studies pay themselves less than men, why people in low-status jobs believe their work is worth less than those in high-status jobs, even when they’re performing the same task, and why people accept domination by another group. It might help to explain why so many people in Scotland are inclined to vote no.

The fears the no campaigners have worked so hard to stoke are – by comparison with what the Scots are being asked to lose – mere shadows. As Adam Ramsay points out in his treatise Forty-Two Reasons to Support Scottish Independence, there are plenty of nations smaller than Scotland that possess their own currencies and thrive. Most of the world’s prosperous nations are small: there are no inherent disadvantages to downsizing.

Remaining in the UK carries as much risk and uncertainty as leaving. England’s housing bubble could blow at any time. We might leave the European Union. Some of the most determined no campaigners would take us out: witness Ukip’s intention to stage a “pro-union rally” in Glasgow on 12 September. The union in question, of course, is the UK, not Europe. This reminds us of a crashing contradiction in the politics of such groups: if our membership of the EU represents an appalling and intolerable loss of sovereignty, why is the far greater loss Scotland is being asked to accept deemed tolerable and necessary.

The Scots are told they will have no control over their own currency if they leave the UK. But they have none today. The monetary policy committee is based in London and bows to the banks. The pound’s strength, which damages the manufacturing Scotland seeks to promote, reflects the interests of the City.

To vote no is to choose to live under a political system that sustains one of the rich world’s highest levels of inequality and deprivation. This is a system in which all major parties are complicit, which offers no obvious exit from a model that privileges neoliberal economics over other aspirations. It treats the natural world, civic life, equality, public health and effective public services as dispensable luxuries, and the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor as non-negotiable.

Its lack of a codified constitution permits numberless abuses of power. It has failed to reform the House of Lords, royal prerogative, campaign finance and first-past-the-post voting (another triumph for the no brigade). It is dominated by media owned by tax exiles, who, instructing their editors from their distant chateaux, play the patriotism card at every opportunity. The concerns of swing voters in marginal constituencies outweigh those of the majority; the concerns of corporations with no lasting stake in the country outweigh everything. Broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, retentive: you want to be part of this?

Independence, as more Scots are beginning to see, offers people an opportunity to rewrite the political rules. To create a written constitution, the very process of which is engaging and transformative. To build an economy of benefit to everyone. To promote cohesion, social justice, the defence of the living planet and an end to wars of choice.

To deny this to yourself, to remain subject to the whims of a distant and uncaring elite, to succumb to the bleak, deferential negativity of the no campaign, to accept other people’s myths in place of your own story: that would be an astonishing act of self-repudiation and self-harm. Consider yourselves independent and work backwards from there; then ask why you would sacrifice that freedom.