Nick Clegg has given a speech at the National Liberal Club today to launch his third report in the Brexit Challenge series. In this one he looks at the impact of hard Brexit on food prices. Here is his speech in full:
Nearly 4 months on from the vote to leave the European Union, we are finally starting to understand the early consequences of Brexit.
In the last week we have seen the government on the back foot, pressed by Conservative MPs to give parliament a say ahead of the triggering of article 50.
We have seen Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, issue the hardest statement yet against giving the UK a sweetheart deal.
And we saw the strongest ripples yet in the currency markets and in business. According to the Financial Times the pound’s effective exchange rate, weighted to reflect the UK’s trade flows, fell to a 168-year low last Tuesday – weaker than the lowest point in the recent financial crisis, weaker than when Britain was ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, weaker even than when we left the Gold Standard in the 1930s.
Perhaps most significantly, the markets seem to have woken up to the looming danger of Hard Brexit, and investors are using their money to punish the government for every perceived misstep, while rewarding decisions that raise the chances of a better deal.
The markets are a powerful new player in this story. They are becoming increasing sensitive to relatively small policy changes. Hence the pound rallied sharply last week as soon as the Prime Minister announced there would after all be a debate ahead of the negotiations, but slipped back again when David Davis put in another Commons performance devoid of any meaningful content.
Let me set out my own position at this point.
Tim Farron has made it clear that the Liberal Democrats remain proudly pro-European. It’s in our DNA. The Liberal Democrats will respect the outcome of the referendum, but we’re not going to stop arguing for what we believe in. We’re not going to give up on this country’s proud history of liberal internationalism. And we’re not going to give up on the idea the Britain’s place is at the heart of Europe.
That’s why I have set myself the task of producing a series of papers which I’m calling the Brexit Challenge. The purpose is to explore and unpack the complexities of the process we’re now facing, in as dispassionate and rigorous manner as possible to understand the tensions and the trade-offs, and to pose the thorny questions that this Conservative government – having got us into this mess – now has a duty to answer.
And yet what we’re seeing is a rudderless government whose defining characteristic seems to be its determination to dodge the difficult questions. The only leadership provided by No 10 seems to consist of slapping down secretaries of state when they dare to say anything at all about the government’s objectives.
Into the vacuum occasioned by Theresa May’s iron silence come Davis, Johnson and Fox, who are driving this government towards the most extreme interpretation of the 23rd June vote.
Let’s be clear: the referendum provides a mandate to leave the EU, not a mandate to leave the Single Market. People voted for a host of different reasons, but they only spoke with one voice on the specific issue that was written into the referendum question. Leave we must, but that leaving could take several different forms, from the ‘soft Brexit’ option of joining Norway as a member of EFTA, to the ‘hard Brexit’ route of exiting without any alternative trading relationship in place and relying instead on WTO rules.
The most important decision of all is whether to remain a member of the Single Market, where we benefit from zero tariffs and can help to shape the harmonised non-tariff rules that ensure that goods and services can flow smoothly across borders. To reiterate: it is completely possible to be a member of the Single Market while standing outside the EU: Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway all do so.
The choice we make will determine the character and prosperity of this country for generations to come.
So who decides which version of Brexit should prevail? The Conservatives – extraordinarily – say it should be a handful of Ministers, acting behind closed doors, using medieval Royal Prerogative powers, and without reference to parliament.
Where is the mandate for that? The referendum doesn’t provide it, and their own 2015 election manifesto actually says the opposite, committing Conservative Minsters to “say yes to the Single Market”.
Can it really be that they have developed the ability to mind read on a mass scale, allowing them to know exactly why every leave voter made their decision?
Where there is such uncertainty, and where so much is at stake, parliament must be the arbiter. We shouldn’t be arguing about this: it is the essence of our parliamentary democratic system. What the Conservatives are doing is autocratic and unconstitutional, and totally contrary to the mantra of the Leave campaign that Brexit is about “taking back control”.
It is also richly hypocritical of the Conservatives. Let us remember the passionate radicalism of the “Parliamentary Control of the Executive Bill, 1999”, authored by one David Davis in an attempt to get rid of the very Royal Prerogative he now relies on as Secretary of State.
Or this from the Shadow Leader of the Commons in 2008:
“We should have a statutory scrutiny reserve so that ministers would have to gain parliamentary approval before negotiations in the Council of Ministers.
“The scrutiny reserve should be put on a statutory basis so that ministers are required to come to the committee before negotiations at the European Council and cannot override it.”
The speaker? Theresa May.
I confirmed yesterday that I will be working in the coming weeks with Ed Miliband, Kier Starmer, Nick Herbert, Stephen Philips and other senior figures across all parties to force a vote on the the government’s negotiating mandate before article 50 is triggered. In doing so we will be following ample precedent, including the example set by John Major in 1991 when he held a 2-day debate and vote ahead of the negotiations that ultimately led to the Maastricht Treaty.
And what of the preparations with other European countries to ensure we get the best deal when we leave? In France, Germany and Spain the newspapers are conspicuously not full of Liam Fox’s clever negotiating tactics, David Davis’ fine speeches, and Boris Johnson’s diplomatic prowess. Instead, they are looking on aghast at the clumsy and occasionally xenophobic rhetoric, not least at the Conservative party conference earlier this month.
The Government’s approach seems to be based on gridlock in Whitehall, secrecy in parliament and offending our partners around Europe. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Which is why it is all the more important to set out for the public what ‘hard Brexit’ would entail. Because if we want to stop it, we only have a few short months to do so.
In the first two papers of the Brexit Challenge, which are available on the Liberal Democrat website, I explained what leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union in 2019 will mean for trade.
The single most important thing to say is that the 2-year timeframe afforded to us by article 50 is woefully inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Article 50 is deliberately designed to make life hard for a member state that has decided to leave. It’s primary purpose is the negotiation of the terms of the divorce. While it requires any agreement to “take account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union”, it is essentially about unpicking the past, not formulating a new relationship for the future.
So while some outline may be reached in parallel with the article 50 talks on the priorities for a future Free Trade Agreement, the FTA itself will take much, much longer. Canada’s trade with the EU is far simpler than our own: their primary exports are raw materials where ours are services or complex manufacturing. If we want an indication of the time it will take to broker a comprehensive deal with the EU, remember that the Canada-EU process was launched in 2007, and nine years later it is still not ratified.
So what happens in the interim? In a word: turmoil.
Businesses that haven’t had to deal with customs checks for 43 years will suddenly have to navigate them.
Tariffs will be automatically slapped on exports to the Continent – something the Brexiteers will tell you isn’t going to happen when it is in fact a legal requirement once we stand outside the Customs Union.
Companies that have relied on the EU’s single rulebook to determine everything from labelling to safety standards will find that adherence to those rules is a precondition of trade, but will no longer be able to influence them.
And more than 50 trade agreements with other parts of the world will fall into abeyance, and will have to be painstakingly renegotiated – something that is only likely to happen once the EU talks are complete and we have established ourselves as an independent trading nation at the WTO.
Today I am launching the third of a series of Brexit Challenge paper, on Food and Drink – everything from farming and fishing to high value-added foods made with imported ingredients. It is our biggest manufacturing sector by value, larger than car and aerospace manufacturing combined, and employs 850,000 people. And it is highly dependent on access to EU markets and to EU migrant labour.
Seen through this lens, Hard Brexit is not a sunny upland; it’s a cliff edge.
First, exporters. Food and drink products are currently traded across borders with no forms or checks. Once we leave the EU, products will have to go through customs checks at the EU border which include applying for relevant import licences, costly export health certificates to show that the product meets EU public health standards, and veterinary inspections. Major markets for key exports like whisky (which brings in £4bn a year) will become more challenging as tariff-free EU-negotiated FTAs fall away.
For farmers, the next few years are extremely worrying. Profit margins are already squeezed to the barest of minimums. Come 2019, farmers will face average tariffs on their wheat, milk, and other agriculture produce of 22.3%, and the following year they will most likely lose some of the £3bn in subsidies they currently receive from the EU. In the face of stiff opposition from abroad, the logical conclusion is that smaller operators will go out of business, while only the larger more industrial farms are likely to survive.
Manufacturers further up the food chain face the prospect of big price hikes in raw ingredients, both from domestic production and from the increased cost of imports once tariffs are applied. 70% of imported food comes from the continent.
Consumers will inevitably have to bear the knock-on cost of these pressures, while also seeing the price of imported foods rise, including popular products which we are accustomed to buying cheaply.
For example, Chilean wine faces a 14% tariff, while for New Zealand Lamb the additional cost for importers will be 40%, while chocolate and beef will face whopping tariffs of 38% and 59% respectively.
These are daunting tariffs for importers and for consumers, but the problems start well before Brexit actually takes place. The recent drop in the value of the pound and its impact on sales of Marmite and PG Tips is only a foretaste of what is to come in the next 12 months.
There are two problems. First, many importers and producers reliant on imported ingredients are currently hedged against currency fluctuations, but those hedges will start to expire soon, exposing them to the full effect of the weaker pound.
Secondly, supermarket suppliers are tied into long-term contracts, usually for 12 or 18 months. Producers who signed contacts before the devaluation of sterling are stuck with fixed supermarket prices, while the cost of their raw ingredients has risen sharply. One shortbread producer in Scotland recently warned that he risked going out of business due to a 75% rise in the cost of butter since June. When those supermarket contracts expire, suppliers will be able to negotiate at a higher price. Good news for them, but bad news for shoppers.
Of course we don’t exactly know what effect all of these factors will have on supermarket prices. As Ian Wright, the chair of the Food and Drink Federation said the other day, retailers only have three choices: either absorb the costs into their margins (which is difficult given the ultra-competitive nature of the supermarket industry); pass it onto consumers (similarly unattractive when discount supermarkets are nipping at your heels); or stop stocking certain products altogether. No wonder the Federation also found in a recent survey that close to 70% of their members are pessimistic about the future.
Price rises therefore seem inevitable. One study conducted for the National Farmers Union in April this year estimated that Hard Brexit would lead to average food price increases of around 8% by 2025. And in May this year the Treasury predicted that a fall in the value of sterling of 12% caused by uncertainty after a vote to leave would mean that a family of 4 would see their bills go up by £123 after 2 years. Given the fall in the value of sterling is now 17%, the final bill will surely be higher.
Tariffs and transaction costs are not the only concern though. EU rules govern every corner of food and drink, from hygiene standards to nutritional labelling, disease control to animal welfare. Consumer confidence in the quality and safety of our food hinges on these standards. All of these rules will therefore need to be brought into UK legislation and some of them will be hotly contested, with consumer groups and industry arguing about the correct balance.
The heavily EU-dependent food and drink industry really is the bellwether for a successful Brexit. If the government can’t get it right for them, then they won’t be able to get it right for other sectors.
At the moment we are being led into a crisis of the government’s own making.
But there is an alternative. In fact, it is the only alternative to the scenario I have outlined today. That is for the government to opt to keep us in the Single Market by pushing for a Norway-style deal, either as an end point or as a transitional status pending the ironing out of all our new trading relationships.
That is not without its serious drawbacks, as I set out in my first paper in July, but it is by far the least worst of the options on offer. It would provide continuity of access to European Markets while opening up the ability to strike our own independent trade deals with third countries. It wouldn’t be popular with the Eurosceptics, and it certainly wouldn’t be easy to negotiate with our European partners. But this government has a duty to try.
So I call on the government to have the courage to stand up for the Single Market. If they don’t, then parliament may just force them to do so.
You can read the full report here.
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48 Comments
I am not persuaded that ‘leave we must’ following the referendum. The referendum had a binary choice, in or out. Yet out was, in reality, at least two options. Had multiple options been on the ballot some who voted leave in June might have preferred remain to some of the leave options. That is why it is important that parliament plays a leading role. Respecting the referendum means only that the government must bring forward its proposals for what it’s leave looks like. Then parliament, as the sovereign body in our system (after all wasn’t parliamentary sovereignty one of the points of the out camp?) must take a view on that. At that time, it must be for parliament to conclude, in the light of the evidence, that our national interest is best served by choosing to remain in the EU.
“(after all wasn’t parliamentary sovereignty one of the points of the out camp?)”
Yes it was,.. but the idea of the leave vote was to rescue our sovereignty, from Brussels, and *keep it*,… not for a sovereign parliament to then vote the very opposite of the leave vote, and to give it away again, to Brussels. Why are Lib Dems so fanatical in their desire to hand our UK sovereignty back to that unelected bunch in the EU again.? Utter madness.
Leavers,.. don’t want any further laws or interference from the EU imposed on the UK after April 2019. Simultaneously, we can re-badge all existing EU law, and directives, into UK law, and then, at our leisure, keep good stuff that our sovereign parliament agrees with, and throw the stupid stuff away.
There is something deeply flawed on planet Lib Dem. Why do Lib Dems hate the British population so viscerally, and also despise the idea of Britain making its own laws, independent of the EU, which is the very core of what Leave voters,.. voted for,.. and want.?
At last, ” But there is an alternative. In fact, it is the only alternative to the scenario I have outlined today. That is for the government to opt to keep us in the Single Market by pushing for a Norway-style deal, either as an end point or as a transitional status pending the ironing out of all our new trading relationships.”
We could have pitched this on the Friday following the vote and been seen to have been leading the way – three months before Labour started getting their act together and putting a wedge in between the two Conservative camps.
Still it is good to have this clarity of position however late in the day.
The WTO website has this to say,
With both of these services, users can obtain and compare two sets of customs tariffs:
the legally bound commitments on customs duty rates, which act as ceilings on the tariffs that member governments can set and are known as “bound rates”, with
the rates that governments actually charge on imports, which can be lower, are known as “applied rates” and have a direct impact on trade.
This seems to suggest that Britain would not have to apply the hefty rates listed on imports from outside of the EU.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Brexit, Parliament should ‘Take Control’. Jacob Rees-Mogg comments that the people have spoken. However the people also voted for their MPs to represent them in their constituencies. Therefore MPs should be involved in ALL decisions to get the best out of EU negotiations and World negotiations.
J Dunn, I have yet to meet any Leave voter who, when pushed on ‘terrible’ EU laws that actually affect them in any way, was able to come up with any concrete examples, beyond tabloid exaggerations about the shape of cucumbers.
Perhaps you’d care to prove the exception?
Personally, I don’t trust an unfettered Conservative government to ‘keep the good stuff’ on workers’ rights and paid leave. Or on environmental protection. Or health and safety. Or human rights.
Btw, I’d also suggest you look into the ‘myth of sovereignty’. And just how few (and what) laws really come from the EU.
CassieB
“Perhaps you’d care to prove the exception [with concrete examples]?”
There are many EU ‘interferences’ I could list, but for now I give you just two :
1. EU anti dumping tariffs on Chinese import solar panels meaning that UK consumers are being forced to pay up to a third more for their solar installations than they need to.?
2. The tampon tax. The tampon tax is of course indicative of the broader inability of the UK to decide its own levels of VAT, and on which products it can impose,.. or free up VAT on.?
‘Leave we must’.
I thought Lib Dems believed that we should stay in, or rejoin the EU. Has that changed now?
John Dunne – the Tampon Tax actually seems to be a good example of how Lib Dems and other pro-Europeans want our future relationship with the EU to be like. Cameron negotiated a deal with the European Commission to allow member states of the EU to extend the categories of item on which zero VAT could be levied. The fact that George Osborne failed to implement the change in VAT on tampons which he was entitled to make was a sovereign decision that he might care to explain. The UK has always successfully resisted EU attempts to get us to impose VAT on a wider range of printed products like newspapers and books. I don’t know much about solar panels, but anti-dumping legislation seems like a good idea to me. The Chinese tried this a few years ago with paper: had they succeeded, the result would probably have been the closure of a large proportion of the paper mills in Europe, something which would not have been in the long-term interests of European consumers.
Tony Hill
Re solar panel “dumping” – the problem with a “race to the bottom”, as we have seen with eg. steel is that a country’s workers in particular industries are badly affected. So while it is clear that wide competition often helps consumers by lowering prices, surely we want a society which balances the interests of different participants. It could be argued that the Lib Dem preamble explicitly states that a balance should be achieved between the interests of individuals and communities.
In the longer term, I believe we should be reducing indirect taxes like VAT, and increasing direct taxes, which are ultimately more progressive, and ensure that the better off in society pay a greater share than less well off people. I know that’s an easy statement to make, more difficult to pull off satisfactorily.
William asks the key question. But silence here. If ‘leave we must’ and Non-EU EEA/EFTA is now the policy (which I maintain it should be) then this should be made explicit.
Of course it means that between June and now the Party has marched its troops up the hill and down it is marching it down again.
The serious problem with your position, Bill, is that
a) it compromises the Lib Dems’ and Liberals’ very longstanding, and constitutionally declared stance.
b) At a time when “the world is so much a smaller place”, that we are reversing necessary thoughts on supranational democracy, and giving in to the forces of mean-spirited and small minded nationalism, instead of arguing full-heartedly for firstly, cooperative international working, but secondly, and vitally important, giving people the chance to express views on what is done internationally. This would expressly mean they could not and did not vote to break international democratic links.
It is possible that the EU is the wrong framework for European governance, but what has happened is that the (Liberal) baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. This party must take and use the chance to demonstrate what consequences this has, and where possible to allow those gradually seeing and learning those consequences to reverse that democratic decision. It is very difficult to declare UDI from a Europe of neighbours, and if you acknowledge as I am sure you do, the shared interests and heritage with other Europeans, and democracy at all levels, I cannot see how a reversal of the 1975 decision is something we can support as a Party. We cannot allow ourselves to be dominated by the Daily Mail / Express level of argument – sorry.
J Dunn: I think others have answered your examples. But:
1. do you accept that one argument used by Leave campaigners was ‘The EU won’t let us raise tariffs to STOP cheap Chinese imports’ (and protect domestic industry)?
2. Isn’t it a sovereign decision by the UK government to cut subsidies for renewables, thus increasing the cost for the public?
I am glad the cost of solar panels affects you personally, but in a country of low wages, high living costs, home ownership being replaced by rentals, and food banks, I’m not sure it was uppermost in many people’s minds on June 23.
Bill,
I think the top of the hill can easily accommodate both “Remain is best” AND “EEA is next best”
But what we MUST avoid is people arguing publicly that EEA is better than Remain… because that is not a consistent position for the Party, and just muddies the waters
CassieB
I think the crucial point of the argument is this :
Elected politicians, [should !], listen to *all* the concerns, of *all* their voters and manage the economy and legislation on that ‘best fit’ basis. If on balance the voters think that politics is working, then those politicians get re-elected, if not, they get sacked, and replaced. It’s proved to be very effective, FPTP notwithstanding.
1. That very process was impossible in the way the EU law making process was structured. Indeed, democracy had been designed out of the EU structure.
2. There was no indication that unelected EU political class, had any appetite to give the voters of Europe any true democratic possibility to sack them.
3. When we get back to full UK democratic accountability in April 2019, all sectors of industry can pitch their case for help from a UK government. The elected UK government of the day are then free to do things to help,.. that they previously couldn’t do before. Our elected government can never again say…. ” We would love to help your situation, but because of the EU we have to consider herding 27 other European cats which is nigh on impossible !!”
BIll, as I understand it, the party’s policy is – whilst there is a mandate for Brexit, which there is – to seek to advocate for a single-market solution.
BUT it will advocate – when and if the opportunity presents itself – for a mandate for re-entry or halting of the process.
This is not ‘marching its troops back down the hill’. It is playing out both sides of a balanced, nuanced position.
I don’t find this any more complicated than any other party’s position.
In fact, the only reason the other (OK, primarily the English-centric / London-based) parties have a less apparently complicated position is because they have calculatedly avoided stating their positions as clearly as we have and are trying to make the tensions in their support base go away by a combination of studied ignorance and ambiguity.
J Dunn – Here we go again. A key participant in the EU ‘political class’ decision to thwart moves towards greater democracy in the EU was our own country’s leadership under successive governments.
Why therefore, do you trust the Tory party and the UK civil service to deliver to you your carefully undefined and mobile concept of ‘democracy’ (without any parliamentary scrutiny) when they are effectively lying to you about their complicity in the historic situation you decry and bewail, which they had power and influence over in the past?
For years, Lib Dems advocated for a more democratic EU. Our own governments blocked it, in part because it prevented them from being held to account.
Its not a credible argument to complain about an unelected EU political class when the vast majority of legislators at Westminster are unelected.
When legislators from the UK political class are rejected at the polls, they simply move into the larger unelected chamber. There is no indication that the unelected UK political class, have any appetite to give voters any true democratic possibility to sack them. Democracy is designed out of the supranational UK structure. Westminster has shown itself time and time again to be unreformable.
@Matt (Bristol) “BIll, as I understand it, the party’s policy is – whilst there is a mandate for Brexit, which there is – to seek to advocate for a single-market solution. BUT it will advocate – when and if the opportunity presents itself – for a mandate for re-entry or halting of the process.”
I think there might be a problem with the way the party presents this “nuanced position” insofar as Farron appears to be the voice of one half of the policy while Clegg speaks for the other. This risks giving the impression of a divided party with key figures singing from different hymn sheets.
Al rightly points out :
“When legislators from the UK political class are rejected at the polls, they simply move into the larger unelected chamber. ”
I totally agree, it’s a disgrace.
If the UK electorate don’t want you, why do they then get given a lifetime job at £300 per day just for showing up.? I thought pension plans were invented for folk past their use by date.?
So,..now we are on our way to ridding ourselves of an unelected EU layer of governance, I suggest that getting rid of an unelected second chamber should be *very high* on all of our ‘To Do’ lists.?
J Dunn
What we are ridding ourselves of is our European Parliament, and any prospect of democratically influencing what goes on inside the EU. In terms of the Commission and Commissioners, these people are the civil servants of the EU. I suppose you could regard them as rather analogous to the US Federal Administration. They are not elected, but are chosen by people who have been elected. In the EC’s case, of course, many are former senior politicians appointed by their own countries.
Peter Watson — good point. But that is a point regarding communicating the policy, not about our not having a policy, nor as some have said, having a hypocritical policy.
“What we are ridding ourselves of is our European Parliament”
Exactly,… and it’s the best news we’ve had in 3 decades,.. isn’t it.?
“In the EC’s case, of course, many are former senior politicians appointed by their own countries.”
Wasn’t Guy Verhofstadt sacked by the Belgian electorate.? Strange don’t you think that the Belgians wanted shut of him, but now he’s lodged firmly like a limpet in the EU structures, …. none of us voters can be rid of him.? Seems democracy isn’t what it used to be.?
J Dunn – did you rise up in street protest against the appointment of Thatcher to the House of Lords?
See my comment above.
@J Dunn Wasn’t Guy Verhofstadt sacked by the Belgian electorate.?
He’s an ex-Prime Minister of Belgium, so he lost an election, yes. He’s currently an MEP, though, so he’s been directly elected by some (858,872, in fact) Belgians, so I think if they wanted “shut of him” they could have voted for someone else.
@Daniel Walker
Unless they use that affront to Democracy, the party list system.
Recent history has shown that the unelected chamber can’t be reformed let alone abolished even when all parties agree that it should be. Westminster is unreformable. That is just one part of why I am welcoming the independence bill my nation’s government will be publishing later in the week.
so he’s been directly elected by some (858,872, in fact) Belgians
But how many Britons has he been elected by? None. Ever.
@John Peters
They do use the party-list system, which I also don’t like, but no one forced them to vote for his party.
@Dav
The population of Wolverhampton don’t vote for the MP for Witney either.
@Dav also, any Britons resident in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium would have been able to vote in that election, so although the number of Britons who have voted for him is doubtless small, it’s probably not zero.
The population of Wolverhampton don’t vote for the MP for Witney either
The point, though, is that the populations of Wolverhampton and Witney are both part of the British people; just as much as those of Belfast and Bournemouth, Lossiemouth and Leeds, or Cardiff and Cambridge. The British Parliament is legitimate because it is accountable to the British people, just as the French Parliament is to the French people, or the Bundestag to the Germans.
The European Parliament has no similar legitimacy because it is not voted for by a people.
@Daniel Walker
EPP no doubt. The party of cosy chats and secret deals behind closed doors. The party which gave the EU Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz. The party which probably did most to ensure Brexit.
Dav — explain Belgium, then. Or Spain. Or Scotland and Northern Ireland, for that matter. Surely, peoples that agree to pool sovereignty with one another then confer joint leigitimacy on any co-elected body.
And really I doubt strongly that Ethno-nationalism is viable a legal principle in any constitutional law I can think of, certainly not ours.
The various EU treaties and the referendum of the 70s created (and the referendum of this year appears to have disassembled) a mutually intelligible agreement to commonly recognise the EU parliament as legitimate.
It was (and is until we formally withdraw from it under Article 50) legitimate. We could have reinforced that legitimacy in any of several ways, but successive governments decided it was more in turn with their short-term agenda to undermine it.
@John Peters No, he’s in ALDE.
@Dav We disagree on this, as I think you know. In short, I think a representative democratic body is legitimate as long as the population it represents freely and fairly votes for the members. You disagree, and fair enough, but I don’t think you and I going over it again is constructive.
Matt: All that proves is that all the de jure legitimacy in the world cannot confer de facto legitimacy, as the vote showed.
Peoples can merge, as in the gradual process over several centuries that created the United Kingdom, but you can’t weld them together into a single demos from the top down if they don’t want to be so welded. That’s what the EU tried to do, and that’s why it was always doomed to fail.
Matt (Bristol)
“J Dunn – did you rise up in street protest against the appointment of Thatcher to the House of Lords?”
I think we’re going to have to think much more intelligently, than street protests to get rid of that lot. I would suggest that first we ‘de-feudalise’ it..? The notion of Lords,.. Ladies and ermine robes give it [HoL], a faux gravitas and an elevated ‘theatre’, that it simple doesn’t deserve in the 21st Century.
To Do List :
1. Re-naming them all [Lords & Ladies], into Members of the British Second Chamber,[or similar], would bring them firstly into line with a realistic status befitting the 21st Century. [i.e. de-feudalised].
2. Removing of all bishops from the 2nd Chamber. We don’t vote for our MP’s on any religious basis, so why do we need to put up with bishops who do not represent any cohort of secular citizens.?
3. A parliamentary vote to create a ten year term for all new entrants to the 2nd Chamber. The PM of the day can still nominate, but the vote on who is appointed comes from a vote of the whole House of Commons.
4. As the older appointees [lords], die, there should be a limit of ~ 1(new elected) for 2(dead appointees) replacement policy, until the number of 2nd chamber members match the numbers in the Commons.
5. Over time the ‘elected’ will overtake the appointees, until the numbers match the same level of commons.
Feel free to add your own input to the list.
J-Dunn – Of course, we could have stayed in the EU and learnt from our European partners, most of whom have gone through this process already with their own second chambers. There are lots of models to choose from…
I have to admit your process does sound reasonable.
Dav – are you not rejecting the alternative that the body which conferred legitimacy (ie the British electorate, a more helpful term than ‘people’) has (as legitimately as could be contrived at the time) removed legitimacy?
The decision to withdraw legitimacy does not invalidate the previous legitimacy of the body, nor preclude any further decision to re-confer it.
I am rejecting that alternative; I deliberately didn’t use ‘electorate’ rather than ‘people’ as the two are not synonymous (an ‘electorate’ is just the set of people entitled to vote in a given election; they may or may not constitute a ‘people’); and I don’t believe the British people ever did confer legitimacy on the European Parliament (the European Parliament, as a directly elected body, didn’t exist until the first elections in 1979, long after the first referendum on jointing the EEC).
I don’t think the British people has ever seen the European Parliament as legitimate. They were willing to go along with it for a while as a novelty and an experiment, but it was always on probation and the way British votes went in European elections, culminating in the last ever British elections to the European Parliament in 2014 when an explicitly anti-EU spoiler party won more votes than any other party, shows that their patience with it had run out long before the referendum.
But isn’t the point, Dav, for all your arguing of this pseudo-intellectual case of “demos” etc, that it is hardly surprising that people vote in that way when organs of the press read by millions – Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph, just to cite 4, make little mention of the EP, apart from when they want to describe it as “a gravy train”. Yes, unfortunately UKIP MEPs have used it in that way, but our Lib Dem MEPs have always fought hard for issues concerning their constituents. You would find many former constituents of these people out there who know that, by the way.
You mention “the welding of peoples” – unfortunately welding has taken place usually under the anvil of conflict and bl**dy victory, or tyrannical power. I thought we were trying to move beyond that, and I am very sorry that you can’t feel able to join a journey to a better future. No-one is going to get everything right first time, but overall the EU is a noble enterprise, and is an effective antidote (on occasion, I grant you) to other powerful and potentially malign forces in the world.
So the people are just sheep, empty-headed until the big and powerful press barons who tell them what to think?
I don’t think so.
Actually I think it’s the other way around: the reason the press prints such stories is that they sell, and the reason they sell is that the British have always regarded the European Parliament as somewhere between a joke, a massive waste of money, and a power-grab.
The press didn’t turn the British Euro-skeptical; the British have always been Euro-skeptical, and the press responded to that. The British have always been detached from the European project, and have never bought into the starry-eyed idealism that seems to have infected you.
(Perhaps a better description that ‘Euroskeptical’, actually, might be ‘Eurocynical’.)
And if we step away from being the 51st US State for a minute, we could make that “Eurosceptic”. Or perhaps we might label it Europhobe. No I don’t accept your point at all, Dav. Most people don’t have time in their lives to think deeply about international politics – no, I do not think of people as “sheep”, but they are going to be influenced, as are we all, by things we read. The more we know of a subject, the more we would question other accounts. As a footnote on the European Parliament, the British Government were so frightened of the concept in the 70s that the first elections in 1979 had government nominees placed there! As far as I understand all other countries in the European Community at that time had elections as normal.
Of course, we could get on to the Blair Government’s change of the voting system…
Lib Dems were more than pleased when we heard that voting by proportional representation was to be adopted. When it was clear that this was to be by the Closed List system (where a Party lists its candidates in order, and people just vote the party list – a system most alien to British political culture), my thought was that Blair and his Cabinet were trying to show the British people how appalling PR can be! I still think that has alienated many people with the huge constituencies.
I wasn’t in favour of FPTP, but at least the 7 Westminster constituency format up to 1994 was manageable to run a campaign, and that year Lib Dems ran several good, and a couple of winning campaigns.
It is, of course, intellectually easier to say the EU is undemocratic if you can find, or invent, any way, however specious, of rubbishing the European Parliament.
J Dunn
Why do Lib Dems hate the British population so viscerally, and also despise the idea of Britain making its own laws, independent of the EU, which is the very core of what Leave voters,.. voted for,.. and want.?
Why do people like you make such untrue and insulting claims?
Let us consider one of the things Nick Clegg said “EU rules govern every corner of food and drink, from hygiene standards to nutritional labelling, disease control to animal welfare.” I believe it makes sense to have a common set of standards agreed with our neighbouring countries. It makes interaction with those countries much easier, we can buy their products and they can buy ours and we know they will keep to those standards. If there were separate standards in every country, the cost and bureaucracy of dealing with them would be much higher.
Would the sort of standards other countries want be so different from ours? Is the difference so much that it is impossible to come to a common agreement? On the whole I feel the advantages that come from having an agreed European-wide set of common standards more than balances the disadvantage that there may be some small aspects of them that we would disagree with ourselves.
If that’s one of my reasons for feeling that on balance remaining in the EU is the better option, you may disagree, fine, but why can’t you have the decency to accept that is my real reason rather than accusing me of holding to that position because I “hate the British population”?
why can’t you have the decency to accept that is my real reason rather than accusing me of holding to that position because I “hate the British population”?
That may be your reason, and it is a valid one and whether you agree or disagree with it will depend on how you balance the economic advantages and disadvantages of allowing us to have our own standards for goods which are not produced for export.
However, while it might not be true for you, it remains the case that there are some Liberal Democrats whose commitment to the EU does not come form a cost/benefit analysis of the economic case for common standards, but because they are starry-eyed idealists in love with the European Project of welding together the peoples of Europe into one great big nation, and for whom the economic aspects of the single market are only important insofar as they contribute to the furtherance of ‘ever closer union’ and integration towards their eventual goal of a federal Europe in which Britain would have the same status as, say, California does in the United States of America.
As several of those starry-eyed idealists have hitherto commented upon this article, whereas you have not, I think it would be reasonable to assume that the comment to which you replied was not directed at you but at them, and the problem is that it was lazily phrased: ‘Why do Lib Dems…’ should have been ‘Why do some Lib Dems…’ or perhaps even ‘Why do a great many Lib Dems…’, to allow for the existence of Liberal Democrats like yourself who are not devotees of the philosophical European Project but whose support for the EU is conditional on a cost/benefit analysis.
Dav
As several of those starry-eyed idealists have hitherto commented upon this article, whereas you have not, I think it would be reasonable to assume that the comment to which you replied was not directed at you
Sorry, no, that is rubbish and insulting nonsense. I do not know any Liberal Democrat who “hates the British population” as you allege. It is impossible to have a rational debate when evil eyed hate-mongers like you push that sort of line.
. It is impossible to have a rational debate when evil eyed hate-mongers like you
You know, Mr Rational, you might be right.