People living in poorer areas of the UK were more likely to vote to leave the EU. This wasn't the strongest predictor of voting Leave, but it was pretty strong.
A question many people, particularly pro-Remainers, are asking is why this should have been the case, given that most economists predicted that leaving the EU would be financially damaging, and given that the EU has been better than the UK government at redistributing funding to poorer areas (and not in the form of soul-destroying benefits handouts, but in the form of large-scale infrastructure investment).
Any suggestion that people were ill-informed in voting to leave the EU will be met with accusations of condescension from pro-Leavers. But some statistics in Andy Beckett's excellent history of early 80s British politics Promised You a Miracle provide an eye-opening illustration of how difficult it can be to deliver information to the public.
In a section on the 1979 Tory government's Right to Buy scheme, which enabled council tenants to buy their homes at a discount of between 33 and 50 per cent, Beckett relates how a 1988 report found that, five years after the scheme had been in place, and had been advertised on TV and via posted information leaflets, 45 per cent of tenants who knew about the scheme didn't understand whether or not they qualified (the vast majority did) and 10 per cent of tenants "were completely unaware of the scheme at all".
This is a scheme that could have saved tenants up to half the cost of buying their home, and 10 per cent of them were unaware that it existed.
In light of that, does it still seem unlikely that a large proportion of people who voted to leave the EU were unaware that trading with it from outside the single market could mean having to adopt many of its rules while relinquishing any say in what those rules would be, for example?
The right balance of representative and participatory democracy is difficult to find. But reducing a question as complex as a country's membership of the EU to a binary choice is certainly looking to have been a horrible misstep.
Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 October 2016
Sunday, 11 September 2016
Friday, 3 June 2016
Brexit #2: what is and what might be
Vote Leave figurehead Boris Johnson has been taking flipflopping to new lows in his hijacking of the EU referendum, but even the most decided of the rest of us would probably admit to thinking there are pros and cons to being in the EU (although for us those pros and the cons will be different things).
I wonder though how many of us would admit that at least part of our inclination to vote one way or the other is due not to some fixed aspect of the EU's setup, but to our desire to either keep or change some temporary political circumstance that just happens to be the way we do or don't want it to be for the time being?
For example, I'm more in agreement overall politically with the current inhabitants of the EU institutions than I am with the current Tory UK government, due to our stances on issues like the refugee crisis, climate change, workers' rights, etc, and I can't deny that that's one of the attractive prospects about voting to remain. Of course if we were to vote to leave the EU then the UK government could theoretically reinstate many of the things I like that the EU currently gives us, like the maximum 48-hour working week, but would it?
In this FT article Joshua Chaffin wrote about how "Cornwall took in more than €654m from Brussels during the EU’s 2007 to 2013 budget cycle" (as part of the EU's scheme for taking money from wealthier areas and giving it to more deprived ones), and whether that's having an impact on Cornish residents' voting intentions. Boris has said the UK could redistribute money like this on its own without cycling it through Brussels first if we vote to leave, but one resident told Chaffin that "The EU’s been a much better mechanism for getting money from the wealthier parts of Britain to the poorer parts than our own government’s ever been”.
Likewise, when I spoke to an academic for a Brexit piece I contributed to for work, and put it to her that the UK government could, if we vote to leave, choose to more-than replace the research funding we currently receive from the EU with the money leavers claim we'd save, she said: "Nobody can convince me that if we weren’t part of the EU then the amount of research funding that’s available for the humanities around minorities or marginal groups would be increased under the present government. That’s absolutely inconceivable.”
In both of these examples, short-term thinking brushes up against long-term, and pragmatism up against wishful thinking. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about these situations.
In his book And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes about how "Greek and Italian politicians [...] extended an intriguing offer to voters fed up with them" when their countries were considering joining the EU's single currency: "Keep voting for us and we shall soon rid you of ... our rule! Once monetary union is complete, our country will be administered de facto by Northern Europeans [...] Most Greeks I know secretly welcomed that offer [...]"
And look where that got them...
Maybe it isn't wise to make long-term decisions on the basis of short-term circumstances.
Right now I dislike Tory austerity (with the UK not in the Eurozone, we don't have to worry about Eurogroup austerity) and like EU's stance towards online privacy protection, for example, but in the future might I lament a more left-wing UK government being unable to introduce a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions because a more right-wing EU doesn't want one?
I think the best thing on June 23 will be to vote in line with whether you think the fixed aspects of EU membership or non-membership are good or bad: having a continent-wide system of governance, being able to influence that governance, being in some respects controlled by that governance; free movement; free trade.
But I suspect transient concerns will end up playing as big a role, if not bigger.
I wonder though how many of us would admit that at least part of our inclination to vote one way or the other is due not to some fixed aspect of the EU's setup, but to our desire to either keep or change some temporary political circumstance that just happens to be the way we do or don't want it to be for the time being?
For example, I'm more in agreement overall politically with the current inhabitants of the EU institutions than I am with the current Tory UK government, due to our stances on issues like the refugee crisis, climate change, workers' rights, etc, and I can't deny that that's one of the attractive prospects about voting to remain. Of course if we were to vote to leave the EU then the UK government could theoretically reinstate many of the things I like that the EU currently gives us, like the maximum 48-hour working week, but would it?
In this FT article Joshua Chaffin wrote about how "Cornwall took in more than €654m from Brussels during the EU’s 2007 to 2013 budget cycle" (as part of the EU's scheme for taking money from wealthier areas and giving it to more deprived ones), and whether that's having an impact on Cornish residents' voting intentions. Boris has said the UK could redistribute money like this on its own without cycling it through Brussels first if we vote to leave, but one resident told Chaffin that "The EU’s been a much better mechanism for getting money from the wealthier parts of Britain to the poorer parts than our own government’s ever been”.
Likewise, when I spoke to an academic for a Brexit piece I contributed to for work, and put it to her that the UK government could, if we vote to leave, choose to more-than replace the research funding we currently receive from the EU with the money leavers claim we'd save, she said: "Nobody can convince me that if we weren’t part of the EU then the amount of research funding that’s available for the humanities around minorities or marginal groups would be increased under the present government. That’s absolutely inconceivable.”
In both of these examples, short-term thinking brushes up against long-term, and pragmatism up against wishful thinking. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about these situations.
In his book And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes about how "Greek and Italian politicians [...] extended an intriguing offer to voters fed up with them" when their countries were considering joining the EU's single currency: "Keep voting for us and we shall soon rid you of ... our rule! Once monetary union is complete, our country will be administered de facto by Northern Europeans [...] Most Greeks I know secretly welcomed that offer [...]"
And look where that got them...
Maybe it isn't wise to make long-term decisions on the basis of short-term circumstances.
Right now I dislike Tory austerity (with the UK not in the Eurozone, we don't have to worry about Eurogroup austerity) and like EU's stance towards online privacy protection, for example, but in the future might I lament a more left-wing UK government being unable to introduce a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions because a more right-wing EU doesn't want one?
I think the best thing on June 23 will be to vote in line with whether you think the fixed aspects of EU membership or non-membership are good or bad: having a continent-wide system of governance, being able to influence that governance, being in some respects controlled by that governance; free movement; free trade.
But I suspect transient concerns will end up playing as big a role, if not bigger.
Sunday, 29 May 2016
Book review: Democracy Without Nations? Pierre Manent, 2006
In Democracy Without Nations? Pierre Manent poses an interesting and important question, fails to answer it convincingly, but in tackling it leaves it all the more interesting.
The question, more fully articulated than in the book's title, is essentially: can Europe survive without its nations?
Manent's answer is no. Manent loves nations, and admits as much: "my own national passion, which is undoubtedly quite real". But why does he think Europe can't do without them?
He gives three reasons.
The least convincing is that "After more than half a century of trying, the European enterprise, the effort "to construct Europe", has not succeeded in overcoming our old nations."
The easiest demonstration that this is unconvincing is that Manent has felt the need to write his book: he feels the nation needs to be defended. Nations can't be both weak enough to be in existential crisis and strong enough to necessitate their continued existence. Manent is trying to have his cake and eat it.
Second, he likes the size of nations - they're "at once quite ample and neatly circumscribed". They're "the middle ground between the puny and the immense, the petty and the limitless".
That's a more reasonable point, but it overlooks the fact that China is a nation of about 10 million square kilometers and 1.3 billion people, whereas Luxembourg is a nation of 2.5 thousand square kilometers and half a million people.
Perhaps these nations are absurd outliers - the federal nature of the USA and India points to that - but the fact remains that China, Luxembourg, the USA and India are all reasonably well-functioning nations. There's nothing necessary about the size of the UK, France and Germany.
Manent does ask whether Europe can become the new nation that subsumes existing European nations, as I'm implying is a viable course, but he seems to reject the viability of this possibility simply because it hasn't happened yet, as in point 1. He criticizes Europe's "refusal to define itself politically", or in terms of either a territory or a population.
Although I find this unconvincing in terms of the answer to the overarching question, I think Manent has a point, and this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. He says "Europe cannot construct itself meaningfully unless Europeans in the various nations identify themselves with a common European political action", and I agree with him; but he ends the sentence with "and for the foreseeable future that means with the common action of European nations", and there I disagree.
Firstly: has Britain defined itself any better than Europe? Has France? Second, take the Pirate Parties, which are uniting people worldwide around a single thread of causes.
Manent touches on this - on how globalisation is allowing or causing people to identify with each other across the world based on shared interests and experiences - but he says that "Communication by itself does not create a true bond among people [...]", and here again we diverge.
Although I agree that "Today's popular term identity is a terribly impoverished substitute for the older term community", I think he's mistaken that nations can any longer be the site of community, if they ever were. Do I really identify more with a British criminal in Newcastle or a British Baron in Cornwall than I do with someone from another country who lives alongside me in London and shares my work ethic and lifestyle? Non, nein.
The scale of community is dozens or hundreds, or a few miles, or dozens of conversations; the scale of politics ...? For me, as is enshrined in the EU's subsidiarity, it depends on the scale of the problem.
Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, Manent criticizes the effectiveness of the EU's instruments, which he says "prevent any individual or collective action that is not the simple application of a rule or regulation authorising rights". Unfortunately he provides no examples and barely elaborates; the argument is the most convincing of the three because of what has happened in Europe to countries like Greece since the financial crisis, but DWN? was written before the crash, and I don't know enough about institutions like the European Central Bank to be able to judge whether their weaknesses are terminal or skin-deep. That's covered by the next book I'll read; for the time being all I can say is that Manent is too brief on this point.
So DWN? failed to convince me that the nation must remain the primary site of politics, although I'm happy to concede it could well remain a secondary or tertiary one. Questions about the level at which democracy works best and about how people will associate in this globalised age are fascinating ones, and DWN? is a fairly though-provoking read even if far short of being the definitive text. Probably no such text exists yet...
The question, more fully articulated than in the book's title, is essentially: can Europe survive without its nations?
Manent's answer is no. Manent loves nations, and admits as much: "my own national passion, which is undoubtedly quite real". But why does he think Europe can't do without them?
He gives three reasons.
The least convincing is that "After more than half a century of trying, the European enterprise, the effort "to construct Europe", has not succeeded in overcoming our old nations."
The easiest demonstration that this is unconvincing is that Manent has felt the need to write his book: he feels the nation needs to be defended. Nations can't be both weak enough to be in existential crisis and strong enough to necessitate their continued existence. Manent is trying to have his cake and eat it.
Second, he likes the size of nations - they're "at once quite ample and neatly circumscribed". They're "the middle ground between the puny and the immense, the petty and the limitless".
That's a more reasonable point, but it overlooks the fact that China is a nation of about 10 million square kilometers and 1.3 billion people, whereas Luxembourg is a nation of 2.5 thousand square kilometers and half a million people.
Perhaps these nations are absurd outliers - the federal nature of the USA and India points to that - but the fact remains that China, Luxembourg, the USA and India are all reasonably well-functioning nations. There's nothing necessary about the size of the UK, France and Germany.
Manent does ask whether Europe can become the new nation that subsumes existing European nations, as I'm implying is a viable course, but he seems to reject the viability of this possibility simply because it hasn't happened yet, as in point 1. He criticizes Europe's "refusal to define itself politically", or in terms of either a territory or a population.
Although I find this unconvincing in terms of the answer to the overarching question, I think Manent has a point, and this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. He says "Europe cannot construct itself meaningfully unless Europeans in the various nations identify themselves with a common European political action", and I agree with him; but he ends the sentence with "and for the foreseeable future that means with the common action of European nations", and there I disagree.
Firstly: has Britain defined itself any better than Europe? Has France? Second, take the Pirate Parties, which are uniting people worldwide around a single thread of causes.
Manent touches on this - on how globalisation is allowing or causing people to identify with each other across the world based on shared interests and experiences - but he says that "Communication by itself does not create a true bond among people [...]", and here again we diverge.
Although I agree that "Today's popular term identity is a terribly impoverished substitute for the older term community", I think he's mistaken that nations can any longer be the site of community, if they ever were. Do I really identify more with a British criminal in Newcastle or a British Baron in Cornwall than I do with someone from another country who lives alongside me in London and shares my work ethic and lifestyle? Non, nein.
The scale of community is dozens or hundreds, or a few miles, or dozens of conversations; the scale of politics ...? For me, as is enshrined in the EU's subsidiarity, it depends on the scale of the problem.
Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, Manent criticizes the effectiveness of the EU's instruments, which he says "prevent any individual or collective action that is not the simple application of a rule or regulation authorising rights". Unfortunately he provides no examples and barely elaborates; the argument is the most convincing of the three because of what has happened in Europe to countries like Greece since the financial crisis, but DWN? was written before the crash, and I don't know enough about institutions like the European Central Bank to be able to judge whether their weaknesses are terminal or skin-deep. That's covered by the next book I'll read; for the time being all I can say is that Manent is too brief on this point.
So DWN? failed to convince me that the nation must remain the primary site of politics, although I'm happy to concede it could well remain a secondary or tertiary one. Questions about the level at which democracy works best and about how people will associate in this globalised age are fascinating ones, and DWN? is a fairly though-provoking read even if far short of being the definitive text. Probably no such text exists yet...
Sunday, 22 May 2016
Brexit #1: sovereignty
In my flat we have a cleaning rota. There are five of us, and every ten days one of us has to clean all of the communal areas. The others don't have to do anything. And then we rotate.
In flats I've lived in previously we've done it differently. In my last place there were three of us and every two weeks we each did one of the three communal areas. When I lived with an ex we did everything between us once a week. In another place we had a cleaner.
My point is that nobody tells us how to clean up after ourselves: we get to decide for ourselves. The Mayor of London's office hasn't decreed that crumbs must be swept on Thursdays and hobs de-greased on Sundays. Boris didn't care, and neither does Sadiq.
But Islington North, the constituency I live in, can issue fixed penalty notices for littering. Islington North Council has decreed it doesn't want some streets deciding that the gutters are a good place to dispose of rubbish while other streets opt for the bushes. Everyone has to use the bins provided.
What you have there is an example of subsidiarity, a principle the EU runs on. It basically says that rules should get made at the lowest level that makes sense. At some point in time every nation on Earth decided that murder shouldn't be allowed, so they all made that illegal at the national level. In London, for example, I can't just wait for you to cross over to Islington South and Finsbury and then crossbow you with impunity. And not even Zac Goldsmith was campaigning to change that, even if only because he wouldn't have had the power to follow through.
We've been hearing a lot about sovereignty in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. "Vote leave to reclaim Britain's sovereignty", outers say. And yes, EU law does override British law, and yes, according to Full Fact, somewhere between 15 and 50% of new British laws are made in Brussels.
But are we all running around trying to remember whether murder and sweeping up crumbs on Tuesdays are illegal? No, we're not, because EU laws mostly involve trade - the EU's main reason for existing is the single European market - and the environment. Enough people have agreed that starving due to climate change is a bad idea for the EU to decide that Europe-wide laws are necessary to stop a few bad apples smothering the rest of the barrel in fumes.
Did you get a say in that? Well, you had a say in it in the same way you had a say in your local council's littering policies, or the nation's stance on murder. You got to vote for an MEP candidate for the European Parliament, and you got to vote for your national government, which is represented on the European Council, and together these are the two bodies that decide on EU laws. And the group of MEPs that got the most votes picked the head of the European Commission, which is the body that drafts the laws for the Parliament and Council to shape. And if you don't like what any of the candidates are saying, well, don't worry, because you get to run as one yourself if you want to.
Does Britain have more of a say over EU law than Germany? No. Can Britain be outvoted by the other EU nationals collectively? Yes. Do I have more of a say over my flat's cleaning rota than any of my housemates? No. Can they collectively outvote me? Yes. That's democracy and that's subsidiarity and that's sovereignty in a globalised world where the challenges we face are no longer confined to 50-odd other tribe members. And if you ask me, that's a good way of doing things.
In flats I've lived in previously we've done it differently. In my last place there were three of us and every two weeks we each did one of the three communal areas. When I lived with an ex we did everything between us once a week. In another place we had a cleaner.
My point is that nobody tells us how to clean up after ourselves: we get to decide for ourselves. The Mayor of London's office hasn't decreed that crumbs must be swept on Thursdays and hobs de-greased on Sundays. Boris didn't care, and neither does Sadiq.
But Islington North, the constituency I live in, can issue fixed penalty notices for littering. Islington North Council has decreed it doesn't want some streets deciding that the gutters are a good place to dispose of rubbish while other streets opt for the bushes. Everyone has to use the bins provided.
What you have there is an example of subsidiarity, a principle the EU runs on. It basically says that rules should get made at the lowest level that makes sense. At some point in time every nation on Earth decided that murder shouldn't be allowed, so they all made that illegal at the national level. In London, for example, I can't just wait for you to cross over to Islington South and Finsbury and then crossbow you with impunity. And not even Zac Goldsmith was campaigning to change that, even if only because he wouldn't have had the power to follow through.
We've been hearing a lot about sovereignty in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. "Vote leave to reclaim Britain's sovereignty", outers say. And yes, EU law does override British law, and yes, according to Full Fact, somewhere between 15 and 50% of new British laws are made in Brussels.
But are we all running around trying to remember whether murder and sweeping up crumbs on Tuesdays are illegal? No, we're not, because EU laws mostly involve trade - the EU's main reason for existing is the single European market - and the environment. Enough people have agreed that starving due to climate change is a bad idea for the EU to decide that Europe-wide laws are necessary to stop a few bad apples smothering the rest of the barrel in fumes.
Did you get a say in that? Well, you had a say in it in the same way you had a say in your local council's littering policies, or the nation's stance on murder. You got to vote for an MEP candidate for the European Parliament, and you got to vote for your national government, which is represented on the European Council, and together these are the two bodies that decide on EU laws. And the group of MEPs that got the most votes picked the head of the European Commission, which is the body that drafts the laws for the Parliament and Council to shape. And if you don't like what any of the candidates are saying, well, don't worry, because you get to run as one yourself if you want to.
Does Britain have more of a say over EU law than Germany? No. Can Britain be outvoted by the other EU nationals collectively? Yes. Do I have more of a say over my flat's cleaning rota than any of my housemates? No. Can they collectively outvote me? Yes. That's democracy and that's subsidiarity and that's sovereignty in a globalised world where the challenges we face are no longer confined to 50-odd other tribe members. And if you ask me, that's a good way of doing things.
Saturday, 13 February 2016
More is less
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| Photo by Maciek Lulko |
It's people I'm thinking of. A city is nothing without its people, and so more people means more city - and we all know London's population is growing daily. More London.
But London is also shrinking. Not in physical size, and not in density, but in another way: culturally and civically.
Every time another cultural space gets converted into a block of luxury flats, London gets a little smaller.
There is less physical area in a way: less space that isn't roped off for a select wealthy few. But the range of behaviours and freedoms of expression open to us also shrinks, making London that little bit less interesting, that little bit less ours.
It's ironic then that More London should be the name of the "visionary business development" on the south bank of the Thames, just west of Tower Bridge.
You probably know More London as the site of City Hall, the shiny glass building shaped like a motorbike helmet - or, to former London mayor Ken Livingstone, like a testicle. But there are 13 buildings in total, on 13.5 acres of land.
Why is the name of this "professionally managed, high quality estate" ironic? Because on this site, More very much means less.
Less freedom. Less democracy. Less community.
Exploring how More means less was the purpose of a guerrilla event called Space Probe Alpha that took place at More London on 13 February, without permission.
The brainchild of Bradley Garrett and Anna Minton, Space Probe Alpha was an opportunity to protest the creeping privatisation of public space in London and the UK more broadly. More than 100 people congregated on More London's private property, which runs right up to the banks of the city's greatest asset - the Thames - on land that offers views of Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast and the City, to hear from speakers such as Mark Thomas and Will Self about how this corporatisation is gradually diminishing the spaces in which public activity is constrained only by the law and allowing companies to impose their own rules.
It's not just antisocial behaviour that's being clamped down on. As I mentioned, More London is the site of City Hall, the seat of London's democracy. And what did members of the London Assembly find when they moved into their shiny new home in 2002? That they weren't allowed to be filmed for interviews outside it, former Deputy Mayor Jenny Jones told those gathered for Space Probe Alpha.
After much complaint, each political party was eventually given a single pass allowing them to be filmed on More London's land one at a time, but all other forms of commercial photography remain banned without prior permission. Skateboarding isn't allowed either, and you won't find many homeless people sheltering from the rain under More London's swooping arches.
As well as being educational, Space Probe Alpha was interventional: those in attendance were encouraged to take photos and sell them to each other for a penny a pop, in deliberate contravention of More London's rules. Throughout the event, More London's security guards watched on, occasionally joined by the odd policeman.
This event was allowed to proceed uninterrupted, but then it featured two peers and one of the UK's finest writers among its roster. Whether it would have been tolerated had such luminaries not been involved is anybody's guess.
What I do know is this: the more these kinds of spaces are allowed to proliferate, the less London belongs to the people who make it a place worth living in.
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