British jobs and British workers……there’s actually nothing at all that anyone can do about this. Not one single thing, as Nigel points out:
And UKIP leader Nigel Farage said Acas would be powerless to help because European law barred countries from reserving jobs for its own workers.
“It doesn’t matter how many meetings are held, how much or how loud anyone shouts… we signed away our rights when we joined this prison of nations that is the EU,” he said.
This story is simply a symptom of a much larger one, one that has very serious implications for us all.
A series of unofficial strikes broke out across Britain today over plans by oil companies to give jobs to construction workers from Portugal and Italy. The contractors were to work on the giant £200m Lindsey oil refinery at North Killingholme, North Lincolnshire.
The basic background is that any contract over a certain size must be put out to tender right across the European Union. If a foreign company, employing foreign labour, makes the best tender, then they get the job. There’s no way that, in Gordon Brown’s words, we can have “British jobs for British workers”. Because the EU rules simply say that we can’t.
This is bad enough of course but think about what happens next. Alistair Darling is talking about spending tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, on infrastructure projects, shiny new trains, lots more windmills, perhaps a Severn Barrage and so on. And yes, part of the argument for this is to pull us out of the recession, to create jobs so that we don’t have millions upon millions of people languishing on the dole.
And it will be us taxpayers who have to pay for all of this of course. It might be paid for by borrowing now, but the bill will come home in the future.
Ah, yes, you’ve spotted it. We want to spend this money so as to provide those British jobs for British workers. That’s the whole Keynesian idea of a fiscal stimulus, of the infrastructure building. But under the EU rules, we can’t make these jobs only for the British. They have to be advertised right across the EU.
So what we’ll end up with is, as Godfrey Bloom has pointed out, “British taxes for foreign workers”.
It’s about time we left, don’t you think, and we ran our economy for us?
This story about Iceland maybe applying to join the euro is rather interesting. Even, perhaps, joining the EU itself….although most people seem to think that you have to join the EU to join the euro.
Olli Rehn, the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, said: “The EU prefers two countries joining at the same time rather than individually. If Iceland applies shortly and the negotiations are rapid, Croatia and Iceland could join the EU in parallel. On Iceland, I hope I will be busier. It is one of the oldest democracies in the world and its strategic and economic positions would be an asset to the EU.”
That actually sounds very much like the Commissioner floating an idea rather than an actual plan happening. The big problem for Iceland is of course that joining the EU would mean joining the most disastrous of all fishing regimes in the world, the Common Fisheries Policy. As, indeed, people are noting.
While there is support for joining the euro as a currency safe haven to protect Iceland from a battering by the markets, there is less enthusiasm for full EU membership, particularly among those in the vital fishing sector.
There are those therefore suggesting something very different indeed. Adopting the euro but not joining the European Union.
This factor has fuelled talk of “unilateral euroisation”, meaning that Iceland might join or use the single currency without being admitted to the EU. This is dismissed in Brussels as nonsense.
I do have to wonder though why people are dismissing this as nonsense. Joining the euro might not be sensible, but it’s certainly entirely possible. There’s absolutely nothing at all that Brussels or anyone else could do to stop Iceland simply declaring that the euro was the only legal tender on the island.
Anyone with an ounce of knowledge of how monetary systems work would know that it’s not in fact very difficult to do. After all, Panama does not have its own currency and hasn’t for decades. They use the US $. Ecuador abolished their own currency and moved to the US $ in the 1990s (I think that date is correct). I lived and worked in Russia when there were two currencies, the rouble and the dollar.
As I say, this might or might not be a sensible idea, but it’s most certainly not nonsense.
You really do want to read the comments section here.
Mary Honeyball gets a right talking to from the citizenry.
It’s worth noting that this is from a very sneior and very well respected economist. And that he’s been saying these things since at least 1992.
These proponents of the single currency said that a single currency was needed to facilitate trade and that a single currency would promote efficiency by permitting price comparisons. EMU advocates in Britain argued that these economic gains were worth the political sacrifices � the loss of sovereignty over monetary affairs and over other economic policies that would result from joining the EMU. But Britain already had the free trade advantages of being a member of the European Union. I argued that there were in effect no net economic gains � more likely a net economic loss — to compensate Britain for the political costs of joining the Economic and Monetary Union. Certainly there is nothing in economic theory or in historic experience to suggest that international trade requires a single currency. The argument that one market requires one money was the kind of political slogan that frankly bothered me as an economist. I was also not impressed by the idea that a single currency would facilitate price competition that would improve market efficiency. The housewife in Madrid buys her bread locally. So knowing what bread costs in Berlin or Rome is irrelevant. The industrial buyer who may already shop for steel or chemicals in different national markets could easily compare prices stated in different currencies with the help of a pocket calculator. In contrast, the economic costs of a single currency are very real. A single currency means a single monetary policy and a single exchange rate. A single monetary policy for a group of heterogeneous countries that experience different shocks cannot be optimal � the problem is that, when it comes to monetary policy, one size cannot fit all. If monetary policy has to consider unemployment as well as inflation, the average cyclical unemployment rate will be higher with a single currency. A single currency also means that a country that experiences an increased trade deficit caused by a reduced demand for its export products cannot be helped by a natural � i.e. automatic — exchange rate adjustment.
It’s worth reading the whole thing.
So our own Godfrey Bloom organises a conference on the thorny subject of smoking. Yes, all sorts of people have all sorts of views on the subject.
That’s what we have democracy for, so that we have a peaceful means of coming to a compromise between people and their very different views. And of course a key part of the system is that people are able, if not actively encouraged, to express those different views so that they can be taken into account when making said compromise.
Not, it appears, in the EU though. A decent overview is here.
Quite simply, because at this conference views which are not approved might be promoted, the conference was cancelled. By the authorities. By the Parliament authorities.
That is, the talking shop where compromises are reached is not willing to allow even the premises to be used to express non-compliant views.
Can we leave yet?
An excellent piece here on what membership of the euro has done to Irealnd. And would have done to us if we had been stupid enough to enter it:
Yes, Britain is losing 2,500 jobs a day and home repossessions have nearly doubled in a year. And indeed British banks are on death-watch, the economy is likely to shrink by almost three percent this year, and the high streets are desolate. Savers are being robbed of interest, and industry is in despair.
Still, I can offer you one light in the darkness. Just look across to Ireland and see how much worse things would be now if Britain had joined the euro.
What we have in Ireland is Exhibit A in the case against the United Kingdom ever surrendering sterling to Europe.
Ireland has been in the euro since it was launched ten years ago. During those ten years, the euro and its European Central Bank turned a healthy, growing Irish economy of the 1990s into a fake-boom economy of property bubbles, consumer debt and reckless bankers.
Now it has all crashed. The Irish are facing perhaps a decade of stagnation and high tax.
In 1997, Ireland was lauded on the front cover of the Economist as ‘Europe’s shining light.’ After ten years in the euro - with no control over its interest rates, and no influence over its exchange rates - Ireland now has the second worse economy in the EU, second only to Latvia.
Thank goodness we didn’t join, eh? And let’s make sure we don’t make that mistake in the future, either, shall we?
The European Commission has announced plans to artificially boost prices by buying up 139,000 tonnes of diary products at a cost to the public purse of £237 million.
Oh joy. We thought we’d got rid of that nonsense, didn’t we? But no:
Export subsidies and EU food stocks were last used in 2007 and the Commission last year tried to scrap such payments, a reform that was blocked by France and Germany.
Thanks guys.
So, in the middle of a recession, the EU is taking the tax money from our pockets, making us poorer, and using it to make food more expensive, making us poorer again. How to beat the bad times, make the citizenry poorer twice over. Sheesh.
Can we leave yet?
It’s the rule of law that’s important.
Yes, yes, I know, democracy is important, we do need to have a system in which we can decide who we’re going to hire to go and run the difficult things for us. And as Churchill pointed out, democracy is the worst of these except for all the others.
But the rule of law is even more important than that.
There was widespread anger last week when it emerged that the Government was planning to exempt MPs’ expenses from Freedom of Information legislation.
They are the people that have been democratically elected to write the laws so we can’t complain too much about their writing a law. However, this bit:
The measure would be applied retrospectively, thus blocking the publication of the receipts.
That’s the truly awful thing.
Leave aside all the arguments about whether we should see receipts, whether we shouldn’t. The law as it is right now says that, after various court cases, we can see them. To retrospectively change the law is to change the law as it was then, not just as it will be going into the future.
The danger is, of course, that we’ve a long standing idea that you can only be charged with a crime if that thing was indeed a crime when you did it. This is one of the great protections we have from the possible vindictiveness of those who have been elected. That they can’t turn around and make something we’ve already done illegal after the fact.
Something which all seems to have escaped the current government.
I’m not sure I understand this.
Employees should still accrue paid days off even if they are unable to work, the judgement said, because their rights and job benefits cannot be dependent on how well they are.
They must also be allowed to take time off that they built up while ill the previous year, and receive a payment in lieu of days off if they leave a job having been unable to take their full complement of paid leave.
The European Court of Justice declared: “A worker does not lose his right to paid annual leave which he has been unable to exercise because of sickness. He must be compensated for his annual leave not taken.
“The entitlement to annual leave of a worker on sick leave duly granted cannot be made subject to the obligation actually to have worked in the course of the leave year laid down by a member state.”
Seriously? I get holiday pay when I’ve been off sick?
Might we not think that this is a tad de trop? Has the EU decided that I should get a bonus for not turning up to work as well? Maybe I should get my lunch allowance for not having lunch? Or my train ticket paid for when I don’t commute?
Blimey, why don’t we go to a simpler system. One where people decide amongst themselves the terms upon which they’ll work and which they’ll be employed?