Labour

The road ahead for Sturgeon is fraught with danger

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For the second year in a row the prize for most spectacular self-inflicted political wound must surely go to the Prime Minister of the day. Despite having piled on support for the Conservative Party, Mrs. May severely underestimated her opponent (as, I am happy to admit, did I), who piled on more votes and so deprived the Prime Minister of her majority, and her authority.

However, Mrs. May is not the only politician who until recently was walking on water to have had a disastrous night on Thursday. In relative terms the biggest vote loser was the SNP, as well as the biggest seat loser in absolute terms. While it is certainly true that the SNP’s starting point was astonishingly high, in only two seats did the SNP start with a majority of less than 3,000. The average SNP majority was 9,966. Save for a handful of seats the SNP’s grip on Scotland looked solid for a generation.

While the expectation for Thursday’s election was that Labour would be squeezed from both sides; it was the SNP, in fact, who lost votes to both left and right. After Thursday’s mauling, the SNP have been deprived of 21 seats. In Angus, and Coatbridge, the Conservatives and Labour, respectively, overturned SNP majorities in excess of 11,000. The SNP’s overall vote share declined by more than 13 percentage points, with the Conservatives, in particular, but also Labour, adding hefty chunks of the vote to their respective piles. The average majority in SNP-held seats now stands at a mere 2,292.

The SNP’s impressive coalition of support in 2015 can broadly be broken down into three categories. The first is voters who aren’t nationalists, but voted SNP either because they had a decent local candidate and/or believed a vote for the Nats did not equate to supporting independence. The second is voters who are nationalists because they believed that Scottish independence was the most credible route to a more left-wing government. The third is existential nationalists, who support independence for Scotland above all else.

Having spectacularly misjudged the public mood in calling for a second independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon drove support in that first category away from her party and towards the Conservatives in the magnitude of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. However, provided that this was the only direction in which the SNP were losing support, their grip on Scotland looked safe enough.

Explaining the increase in the Labour vote is somewhat more difficult. In what were once Labour heartlands there was a palpable shift in anti-SNP Labour supporters towards the Tories, believing Ruth Davidson to be the most doughty opponent of a second independence referendum. In many working-class seats across Scotland the Tories more than tripled their vote, and a sizeable chunk of that was from voters who stuck with Labour even in 2015.

At the same time, having spent much of the past two months canvassing there is at least some anecdotal evidence of disquiet about the SNP’s record in government. Kenny Farquharson also posits that among the younger and more radical voters many now no longer see independence as the only road to a more just society. In any event, it appears that the SNP has begun to lose voters within that second category too, which goes some way towards explaining Labour’s increase in support despite discernible losses to the Tories.

Which is why the road ahead for Nicola Sturgeon is more dangerous than ever.

No fewer than 30 of the SNP’s 35 seats require a swing of less than 5% to fall to another party. The vast majority of these seats face towards Labour.

Nicola Sturgeon’s next step is critical. The expectation is that the First Minister does as many of her proxies have been hinting and takes a second independence referendum off the table in an effort to win back some support within the first category of voter. However, in doing so, she runs the risk that working class unionists no longer feel it necessary to lend their support to the Tories and shift their allegiance back to Labour. If even half of the 2017 increase (note, not the total, just the increase) in Tory votes in largely working class seats found its way into Labour’s pile then Labour could expect to pick up a further 11 seats from the SNP.

However, such a strategy also risks alienating those voters whose support for the SNP is motivated by a belief that independence is the most viable route towards a more socialist Scotland. Why on earth would such voters support a party who have just closed off that path to a more socialist Scotland when another, increasingly viable, alternative exists in Jeremy Corbyn?

Furthermore, such a U-turn by the First Minister may also risk losing support to the nationalist fringes. After all, if you can’t rely upon the SNP to push for independence then what’s the point of their very existence? Expect Tommy Sheridan to be licking his lying lips at that one.

It may well be that after a decade in power and with little to offer but a single issue the safest route for the SNP is to press on with the strategy that has cost them almost a third of their support and almost half of their parliamentary seats in two years. Either way, expect the next set of Holyrood elections to be very interesting…

Why I’m a reluctant left-wing Brexiteer

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To be lumped-in with the Faragian “Little Englander” stereotype of those who are extremely sceptical about the European Union (and who, admittedly, probably comprise the vast majority of such sceptics) is an extremely uncomfortable position for a socialist to find himself in. The belief that all humans are inherently equal and that accidents of birth should not predestine someone make us fundamentally hostile to nationalist notions of exceptionalism (whether explicit or implicit). We comfort ourselves with the fact that ours was once the prevailing opinion within the political left, championed by heroes like Tony Benn, Michael Foot, and my own particular favourite, Peter Shore (pictured above).

In the coming weeks, I intend to provide a left-wing critique of the European Union. Subsequent blogs will consider the role of the European Court of Justice, in particular, in entrenching a neoliberal ideology into the legal orders of EU Members States; the one-way street of privatisation and marketisation that is driven by the EU; and the EU’s ideological choice to impose harsh austerity measures in response to the Eurozone crisis. All of these, I believe, demonstrate that the EU forces Member States to adhere to conservative ideology.

I have never been a rampant Europhile (as a student, I regarded the Young European Federalists with considerable disdain), and have always looked upon the European Union with a critical eye, believing that significant reform was necessary, but possible. Two parallel processes have led me to conclude that such reform is not possible. The first, is that in becoming more expert in European Union law, as a student and then a lecturer and writer, I have come to conclude that only the wholesale revision of the core principles of the Union could transform the EU from a neoliberal, free-market union to a social union. Second, recent events in Europe have convinced me that no will exists within EU institutions to make such a change and, indeed, the institutional support for neoliberal free-market capitalism has become more trenchant, and more harsh. Both of these I intend to deal with more comprehensively in the coming weeks.

In essence, there are two orders of complaint about the path that the European Union has taken.

The first order complaint is fairly ideologically neutral: that the European Union deprives the citizens of Member States of any direct say over matters that would usually be the subject of political discourse and division. Invariably, the main proponents of this argument appear to be drawn from the right. Complaints about the surrender of sovereignty can frequently be heard from the Conservative benches of the House of Commons, but seldom heard from the Labour benches.

The second order complaint is distinctly partisan, and from a left-wing perspective more worrisome: that having been deprived of any direct say over matters that would usually be the subject of political discourse and division, we have had imposed upon us a free-market ideology from which we are not at liberty to depart.

Though the preference for free-market ideology has been evident, in particular in judgements of the ECJ, since the early days of the EEC, the abandonment of the façade of ideological neutrality came during the 1980s. During this period we saw the entrenchment of a consensus that arose in the 1980s, when almost every Minister in the Council was drawn from the centre right. This consensus led to both the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht. Unlike in domestic politics, that ideological choice cannot be undone by a majority, even a relatively sizable one. A similar uniformity of ideology as was evident in the 1980s would be necessary before a reversal of this ideological choice became possible, let alone likely. Such uniformity becomes less and less likely as more and more states are represented at the Council.

It is surprising, therefore, that so many on the Conservative benches are so antagonistic towards the European Union, relative to those on the Labour benches. If Conservatives don’t like that their political autonomy over the ideological direction of the country has been stripped away, they can at least console themselves with the fact that the levers of power of which they have been deprived are nonetheless being pulled in a manner that is, for the most part, to their pleasing. For example, John Major’s government actually quite liked the EU’s deficit-limitation rules because they represented the entrenchment of “good conservative values”. Arguably, John Major is the most successful Conservative Prime Minister in British history because he succeeded in entrenching conservative ideology in the British Constitution in a manner that no other politician in the history of the Kingdom had ever achieved.

By contrast, the more elitist elements of the left are quite at peace with not pulling the levers of power themselves provided that they are being pulled in a manner of their pleasing (the internationalisation of human rights is a good example thereof). But in EU Member States control over the levers of power has been surrendered and that power is being exercised in a decidedly right-wing manner. It is astonishing, therefore, that the Labour Party should be the strident defenders of the European Union, while it is the Conservatives who are amongst its harshest critics. The Labour Party has convinced itself that the European Union can be a vehicle for left-wing ideology when sixty years of evidence has shown that the opposite is, in fact, the case.

So my objection to the EU is not rooted in some intrinsic objection to the internationalisation of exercise of political power. My objection is that the internationalisation of that political power has been to entrench a conservative ideology to which I am fundamentally opposed, and to prohibit the governments of Member States from acting in any manner that departs from that ideology.

British Eggs for British Hospitals: Creagh Falls Fowl of Community Law

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Anyone who’s ever taught in a law school will be able to attest to how taxing it is upon your imagination to come up with problem scenarios for your seminars. It’s difficult, sometimes, coming up with scenarios that are so obviously in breach of the European Community treaties that even freshman undergraduate students can spot it.

Thanks, therefore, to Mary Creagh for providing me with just such a scenario for my classes this year! Yesterday, Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary proposed (and I shall ignore the fairly obvious devolution issues here) that British Schools and hospitals should be encouraged by Government to ‘Buy British’:

‘kitchens in schools and hospitals could be encouraged to buy British – something the RSPCA and other animal welfare groups have been calling for. […] she said what could be done was to insist on food produced to British welfare standards.’

Obviously, such a campaign would be illegal. In Case 249/81 Commission v Ireland [1982]] the Government of Ireland orchestrated a ‘Buy Irish’ campaign. It did so using similar methods to that which Creagh is proposing (‘encouragement’ rather than compulsion) and through a body that, though the court found to be largely backed by the Government, was far more removed from Government than a Health Board or a local authority. The court held that

‘it is not possible to overlook the fact that [those activities] form part of a government programme which is designed to achieve the substitution of domestic products for imported products and is liable to affect the volume of trade between Member States.’

Creagh does, at least, appear to be aware that the Commission might have a bit of a problem with such a policy, and therefore proposes that insisting upon higher animal welfare standards might be the trick Britain could use to get around it. Alas, however, Creagh has neglected again neglected a fairly obvious principle of Community law – the principle of mutual recognition. Case 120/78 Cassis de Dijon [1979], essential reading for any undergraduate law student, held that imposing higher standards that had the effect of restricting the availability of imported goods – whether actually discriminatory or not – was a breach of Community law. In effect, the only effective standard within the EU is the lowest one. This is ultimately why the UK has higher standards for the storage and treatment of animals within the United Kingdom, but cannot prohibit the sale of products from Member States with lower standards.

Creagh complains, with some justification, that other Member States are better at ensuring that their own products are served in their schools canteens. Aside from the fairly obvious answer to that complaint – that those states’ lower welfare standards make their products the cheaper option – the French, in particular, have been very good at enacting measures that surreptitiously favour domestic products over imports. Often times they’re caught out [see Case 216/84 (powdered milk) or Case 168/78 (grain spirits)], but on every occasion in which they are – they’re never so stupid as to openly admit that the true intention of their policy is to favour French products.

So if Creagh really wants to make British products as attractive to schools and hospitals as imported ones, she really only has two options: that a Labour Government would propose in the European Council to raise animal welfare standards across the European Union; or else to lower Britain’s standards to that of our Common Market competitors. Or if she does want to go down the French route, she’s going to have to learn to be more subtle about it – because if it’s the sort of dinger of a breach of Community Law that undergraduate students could spot it, you can guarantee the Commission would as well.