Tuesday 20 September 2016

Unless you understand why the EU is pointless there is no point in leaving


Brexit as a revolutionary instrument is going to fail. The media is full of speculation as to whether it will be a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit. Politics demands a hard Brexit, economics demands a soft Brexit. In the end, soft Brexit wins because it's purely a question of who has the power. That's not us. Now Mrs May is landed with the job of stitching up the Norway Option and making it look like something it isn't.

She'll get away with it too. Kiptards are now drifting back to the Tories because they're going to get grammar schools and a blue passport. They were never in it for democracy. They really did just want to wind the clock back. Even now the Brexit proposal on the hard right is based on a world that no longer exists. Technocracy has gone global.

Toryboys think that by leaving the single market they get to deregulate and business will thank them for it. They are not on this planet. As I have outlined time and again, the EU merely implements global regulation - but very often business is ahead of the curve. Insurance contracts now invoke global regulations long before the EU has chance to implement them. As I understand it, SOLAS regulations on container weighing have not been turned into EU or US law yet but shipping insurance companies are saying that if exporters do not comply with the "guidelines" then they are not liable. Contract law uphold such quasi-legislation as law.

And that's why leaving the single market is pointless. Quasi-legislation has more power than even the EU. Once an insurance company recognises a corporate authority then so does the contractor and in turn all of their suppliers. So this notion that only 6% on UK businesses export to the EU means that we can diverge in regulation is wholly wrong. Standards and methods go all the way through the chain.

And so in a nutshell, without entering into Brexit with a view to curtailing the power of quasi regulation and using our veto, it doesn't even matter if we leave the EU. Global law will still reach our statute book by way of statutory instruments and since we are cutting out the middleman we will likely adopt it sooner than the EU.

In a lot of respects, since the EU cannot change global regulation anymore the EU is wholly pointless. That's a good reason to leave it but unless you understand why the EU is pointless there is no point in leaving it. And Brexiteers don't.

So if there is any victory at all it is that the EU supranationalsim aspect has been resolved - and Brussels cannot tell us what to do but if you have a government that will happily do it without even being told then you haven't actually won anything. Effectively the Brexit we get will be the Brexit we most deserve since Brexiteers were fighting the wrong battle for the wrong reasons without any real intellectual foundation.

Brexiteers fought to leave the EU for the sake of being out of the EU. That's understandable since the EU is loathsome and pointless but campaigning for Brexit as an end in its own right has not been a worthwhile pursuit for some time.

You can waffle on about "democracy" til the cows come home but if this is about taking power back for the people then Brexit is just a symbolic opening gesture. If the Kiptards and the Tory grunters are going to shut up shop now that they're getting grammar schools and blue passports then they never understood why we needed to leave in the first place. As much as they haven't realised this is a matter of who has the power, they wouldn't have the first idea what to do with it if they had it.

Personally I voted for Brexit to end EU level political integration. The economic integration can stay as it is - but if we are not aware of why we took the power back then there is no real point in having it.

No comments:

Post a Comment