More Tory Lies

Quote: Cronus "
But your last 2 paragraphs do show a difference in our mindsets. Just because 'right now' your preferred political people stand less chance of getting into power, you prefer to align yourself permanently to the EU - whose aim is to weaken the power of the nation state and gradually bring us all to closer union and centralised political, fiscal and military power. I'd rather take the bold plunge of extricating ourselves from the web while it's still possible, with all the risks that holds.

FWIW I certainly don't see Europe and 'them' and 'us'. Very simply, I don't want to be ruled by the EU, and want no part of their long-term goals.'"

This is a very relevant point which is central to the whole debate about trade.

The reality of any trade arrangement (the EU is basically a very deeply integrated form of trade arrangement) is it involves a trade-off of some national sovereignty in order to facilitate easier trading arrangements.

When laws are aligned it makes commerce easier. We share the same rules and standards in Leeds as we do in London so trade is completely frictionless. If Leeds split off from the rest of the UK somehow and gained the 'sovereignty' to have different regulatory standards from the rest of the UK, it would pay a price in trading costs eg if Leeds permitted p1ss in its bitter, and the rest of the UK did not, then every barrel of bitter exported out of Leeds would be subject to additional checks to make sure it wasn't the stuff with p1ss in it.

So the high level question about trade is what are you willing to trade off in terms of sovereignty over your own rules, and with who. Leeds and London we agree to share sovereignty as we have a long history of being part of the same nation state, its not a problem. Sharing some sovereignty with outside countries becomes more of a problem the more rules you agree to align, but if it's a key market and worth a lot in reduced trade costs then you're willing to accept more than if it's a market you don't trade with. The EU provides much deeper alignment than any other trade block which both carries bigger trading benefits than any other trade deal in the world but also involves transferring more sovereignty away.

In practice though, a lot of peoples' positions on whether they are for or anti the EU are clouded by whether they think rules made at the EU level are more in line with their own preferences than what they think the UK government would do. The whole argument about the EU protecting workers rights is based on this - people think that the UK is more likely to be governed by Conservatives who will remove workers' rights and thus better to have the constraint on them placed at EU level to stop them doing it. It is inherently an antidemocratic argument.

The flipside of this comes when we look at doing the trade deal with the US. Although a trade deal with the US won't nearly involve the same deep integration as EU membership would, the US is very aggressive in making sure countries that sign up to trade deals with it do so on terms that are tightly controlled by the US and in the US favour, and that do constrain national governments. Typically they are very aggressive on rules around patents and intellectual property, on food and environmental standards, product safety and on drug pricing. On the issue of standards they aggressively limit the extent to which countries can introduce regulations that could rule US food/products as unsafe for purchase. They are also aggressive against labelling, they don't like you being able to clearly identify which products are produced in a particular way (that you might think are more dangerous etc).

Now this is also a real compromise on democracy, because if we sign up to a US trade deal it will bind future UK parliaments from being able to introduce safety or environmental standards that would restrict US products from the UK market. In practice the way they do this is through the ISDS (investor-state-dispute-settlement) rules which are external courts (heavily influenced/dominated by the US) through which US firms can sue a foreign government for bringing in regulations that could reduce their profits. This is anti-democratic for the same reasons that I argued before about the working rights: if UK voters elect a government that wants to bring in those safety regulations, they should be able to do it and not be blocked by the US.

Where you see an inconsistency, is where some of the Conservative Eurosceptics will stand very strongly for 'democracy' and 'taking back control' when it comes to repatriating powers from Brussels, but who would be eager to see the UK bound by a US trade deal that restricted the ability of future UK governments to regulate because they see deregulation as a good thing ideologically and would rather a future Labour UK government was constrained from bringing regulations in.

That kind of position makes sense ideologically, but we shouldn't pretend its about taking back control for UK citizens - its about political tactics to try and achieve the ends they want.

If UK politicans are really consistent about taking back control, making sure the UK isn't bound by vassalage to the EU, they will be as strident and willing to 'just walk away and trade on WTO terms' with Trump as they are with the EU.