It's hard not to take pleasure in Tory disarray: that Cameron is going the way Major did and if anything more quickly than Major ever managed has to be a cause for pleasure. I'm just not quite sure that cutting the EU budget is right though.
Of course there us waste in the EU and the agriculture budget there is also serious fraud. We know that. And we know that CAP reform has defeated generations of politicians, just as the battle on fraud will be lost unless more spending on doing so is allowed. And I know some are using this as an excuse to put pressure on the EU from the left, but right now I don't buy this.
A seven year budget is about high level decisions on direction as a whole, not individual line numbers. My concern is that sending the message that the EU budget must be cut is simply an endorsement of the blanket thinking that the only way out of recession is by cutting spending.
The IMF have now said that is wrong. The logic that cutting pays is discredited. The IMF now say that the multiplier effect on cuts is that a cut in £1 of spending is now known to create cuts of at least £1.50 in growth. The left have rightly welcomed that. All serious left of centre thinkers have known this for a long time.
And yet Labour is now calling for cuts in the EU budget that will, therefore, deliver more recession in Europe as night follows day.
I don't for a moment say digging holes for the sake of it and filling them in again makes sense; of course it does not. But arguing, for example, for significant infrastructure and green energy spending within the EU budget, leveraged by incredibly cheap borrowing opportunities, has to be entirely the right thing to do now. Cutting instead makes no sense to me, economically.
This is a case where I fear politics has got ahead of joined up economic thinking.
It was right to oppose Cameron's policies. That I agree with. But arguing for overall cuts in the EU budget, especially when much of that will fall on already hard hit regions, seems illogical.
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Its not just a Keynesian issue its bad politically in the long run. I feel that it is wrong for Labour to be ‘perceived’ as attacking Europe in any shape or form. Ideologically it gives succour to the massive anti-European lobby of the Conservatives including their boorish anti-Europe press typified by the mad Daily Express. Each political shot at Europe is interpreted by the wider public as cause for leaving the EU which would be a nightmare scenario.
We all know who would suffer if we left Europe- its the working people as Anglo-Saxon Neo-Liberalism would have a field day tearing down all the social and economic gains working people have gained.
There is an equal contempt for the EU on the left who believe it to have been captured by the same anti-labour pro-capital beasts as the rest of the developed world. The free movement of labour and capital is not to the advantage of workers in the UK.
We have to look at the ‘balance’ of all these things and I think we have to agree in the long run and in the broadest sense when we look at Europe, we see more social justice, better education, welfare and health systems, progressivism, worker participation, and less inequality then we would see in say a raw Anglo-Saxon, Neo-liberal states like the USA or any emulation of that which some on the right would love to take us to.
@leslie48
But from the point of view of the UK, how much good has the EU done for workers? The tories went ahead with all their anti-TU laws despite the EU and the minimum wage was not introduced in order to comply with any EU directive. Indeed Germany does not have a minimum wage. The Social Chapter has not been applied here with any rigour when you compare it with all the pro-competition stuff which we’ve been told to put up with, including an inability to reverse privatisation of local govt services.
I detest the yah-boo of PM questions and I am no fan of the Conservative party. Sadly, yesterday I found myself watching David Cameron accuse Ed Milliband of political opportunism over Europe I am afraid I have to agree completely. He knows perfectly well that what Labour voted for will never happen.
Richard is more informed than I am, but I am finding it hard to see that the current Labour party has any credible vision or policy other than not being the Conservative Party. If the Conservative party comes out against bubonic plague, one wonders what position Ed Milliband will take.