Nigel Farage MEP

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

Fair point, but do UKIP want to pull out of the UN and the WTO, too? Isn't the debate about decisions being taken at at such a level that effectively folk have no input.

In UKIP's case, I think that's basically window dressing, because their core issue is immigration. As such, they want to pull out of the EU and the ECHR. The UN, NATO, WTO, I don't think they have any beef with - but then, they're not really decision-making structures in the same way. Only the UN comes close, and the Uk is a Permanent Security Council member, so I don't think that one's a problem for them - they're able to veto other people's plans.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I think considering the concept of the EEA is interesting on this. Essentially, EEA countries have opted to just comply with whatever laws the EU produces. But they've no control over what legislative decisions are actually made. The equivalent would be something like Ireland saying we'll apply whatever laws are passed by the House of Commons, without electing any MPs. It's quite a stark assessment of the EU's legislative structures that participation isn't worth the candle.I'm sure there are.

It would be, if it were a reasoned critique of some kind. As it is, the main problem for UKIP is that it has no Westminster representation, and little or no hope of any, certainly no hope at all of forming a UK government, and so it has access only to a small part of the EU's legislative structures, while its opinions are sufficiently divergent from any mainstream within those structures that UKIP themselves certainly lack any real influence.

I don't think UKIP like the EEA, though - I think it's just held out as an alternative to those who would have concerns about leaving the single market and the EU. The EEA gets represented as something that's rather like the old EEC, but that's not accurate any more - access to the single market is what comes with some of the legislation UKippers object to (working time directive, free movement), and would be the same in the EEA as in the EU, except without any influence over legislation.

Which, coming back to the idea of EEA membership as representing a critique of EU legislative structures, allows us to determine whether such a critique really is valid. The Tories, who are hardly blindly europhilic, but who are in government, have no interest in leaving the EU and going beck to the EEA - and that suggests that for governments, participation is indeed worth the candle. Looking around the EEA, the majority of governments have also at all points expressed their preference for being in the EU rather than the EEA, but have been unable to persuade their public to allow them.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

But isn't the practical point that Ming is more confident that our political system is more likely to be supine on this point.

Ming may well be confident on that, but that demonstrates very little of value, I'm afraid. The Irish government is hardly supine - it ignores EU legislation, seeks derogations, or challenges the EU in court. What we're left with is that Ming believes the Irish government is supine because it won't stand up for what he wants. It's a not uncommon position.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

Indeed, but a simple assertion is no argument at all.

Keeping it brief, I'd see the problem of belief in the efficacy of trust is the implicit assumption that everyone's interests can be reconciled, if only we understood them. And I'm not sure if a lion can be trained to trust.

Trust isn't the same as believing that everyone's interests can be reconciled, though - something which is indeed often impossible. Trust is the belief that even though your interests can't be reconciled on any given occasion, the other party nevertheless wishes you well, and will happily seek future occasions where they can be.

Situations where everybody's interests can be reconciled don't necessarily require trust, or indeed any form of mutual regard at all, or even a relationship. I'd agree that it can often take trust to work towards the discovery of everyone's interests in the first place, but that doesn't mean that trust in each other is the same thing as the belief that there's a solution which will make everyone happy.

cordially,
Scofflaw

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I wouldn't have regarded the UN as the relatively more invasive body. In the old days at least, the NATO treaty obliged members to regard an assault on any other member as if they were being assaulted directly, while I think the WTO can actually place binding decisions on countries.

NATO still does mean exactly that, and WTO rules are indeed binding. But neither of those are about immigration, so they're not very relevant to UKIP.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

But isn't that another expression of the democratic deficit? Governments are all for it. But the people who elect those same governments don't. Taking a step back, and trying to forget our respective biases, that's a strange sight that requires more explanation than "I'm sure the governments/voters know what's right".

Oh be serious - can you find anyone saying that about anything? And everybody around them nodding seriously rather than snorting with derision?

But, yes, I do think there's a democratic deficit there - I don't think we control what our governments do in the EU at all well. Or in our case, at all, really. I go on about it at length, regularly.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

Just in passing, I've a memory of reading that, at one point, there was some public discussion in the Netherlands (or maybe it was Denmark) about leaving to join the EEA, on grounds that they'd feck all influence on legislation and, in the EEA, they wouldn't have to pay into the EU budget. I'm not saying it was a serious prospect - but just to point out that these ideas do get an airing.

Almost every idea, no matter how inane, gets an airing at some point in political life. After all, there's no idea so stupid that some number of people won't subscribe to it - and representatives are representatives, and votes are votes.

In this case, perhaps they gave up when they discovered they would have had to contribute to the EU budget.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I'm not actually using supine in that context. I was simply observing that Ming would probably be right if he felt that an Irish Government would be unlikely to initiate such legislation.

And I imagine Ming's Polish counterpart is equally critical of his government for their failure to initiate legislation on his pet political bête noire.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

And that's, absolutely, what I find hard to accept as realistic. It's like Sollozzo accepting that Don Corleone can't be of assistance, and leaving it at that. (What do you mean that was fiction?)

You find it hard to accept as realistic, I don't. That's not really a discussion, then. I'm just naive, and you're just paranoid.

cordially,
Scofflaw

McDave wrote: »

And therein lies your problem. Adherence to a simplistic one-size-fits-all ideology. And in your case, two. Precisely the kind of superficial sloganeering critics of the Euro level at the single currency.

As for low interest rates in the Eurozone, it's only a recent phenomenon. Throughout the lifetime of the currency crisis, and in particular at the time the Irish economy was going off the rails, EZ interest rates were anything but low. Current low interest rates are in part a response to the strength of the Euro, particularly in relation to other currencies which have debased their values through beggar-their-neighbour quantitative easing.

It is widely accepted that Eurozone interest rates were too low for Ireland's economy in the lead up to the crisis. Don't forget we had inflation of around 5% at the time as opposed to the ECB's target of under 2% (i.e. if the ECB were setting interest rates for Ireland's ecomomy alone they would have been much higher). It was bad timing as much as anything, with the German economy in the shitter just as ours was taking off. Though it looks like one of the positive outcomes of the recession will be a more integrated and convergant Eurozone, so I'd be optimistic for the future.

As for quantitative easing being classified as a "beggar thy neighbour" policy, that is highly debateable. The loose monetary policy adopted by the world's central banks in response to the crisis was probably the most important factor preventing the financial crisis from turning into a depression. Also, quanitiative easing, no matter who it is undertaken by, lowers global interest rates.

Nige got a bit of a roasting earlier today

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I suspect they would, as the UK actually does have a degree of influence on EU affairs. Ironically, probably what holds them back politically in Europe is the fact they're not in the euro. But that's a choice they've made For their own reasons.

Although, tbh, I think it's just the recent economic crisis that has really disrupted how Irish society operates. And, even at that, the place is struggling to keep the structure the way it is. At the risk of sounding like a Marxist rant, the EU didn't really do much to change who got what.

As View says, that's because the EU isn't set up to do so.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

Perhaps, but what bothers me is the slowness of the mainstream to publically acknowledge that the uneasiness has a basis. The reason folk are considering UKIP (or, to pick another reaction to the same uneasiness, posting on the survivalism forum) is because they sort of know that the "nothing to see here" line, beloved of the mainstream, doesn't wash.

A lot of men are uneasy with women as equals, too. People are free to be prejudiced, and uneasy because of it, but that doesn't make it something that deserves acknowledgement as anything other than a problem.

cordially,
Scofflaw

sock puppet wrote: »

As for quantitative easing being classified as a "beggar thy neighbour" policy, that is highly debateable. The loose monetary policy adopted by the world's central banks in response to the crisis was probably the most important factor preventing the financial crisis from turning into a depression. Also, quanitiative easing, no matter who it is undertaken by, lowers global interest rates.

Why I'd say it is a beggar thy neighbour policy is that recourse to QE is creating money and lowering the value of your currency in order to stimulate activity and buying off debt without addressing underlying problems.

Furthermore I'd argue that it only works (and temporarily at that) if certain other economies don't adopt the policy. If everybody adopts the same policy, the effect is cancelled out, and the net effect is a simple all round increase inflation.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I'm not especially suggesting any different. I'm simply commenting on what EU membership hasn't changed.Again, I'm not particularly being judgmental about the EU, or whatever majorities may want in democracies. That said, you do have to recall that what majorities have decided about the EU in Ireland hasn't always been accepted as definitive.

But that's not my point here. My point here is that people have reason to be uneasy, and to doubt the capacity of the EU to deliver a robust solution. That's what's making them look for alternatives, and makes them open to alternative interpretations of events - prehaps including negative interpretations of the experience of Romanian immigration.

I'd agree that the point is to find a positive way of responding to all that. Some of us have adopted going "off the grid" as a positive strategy. I'm not sure that works. I worry that the EU is built in such a way that it almost supports the problem. Our own political system hasn't been brilliant at pursuing positive agendas, either. And I'd interpret the mass of independents running in the local elections as an indication that its getting harder to mobilise a common understanding of collective issues.

All a bit worrying, and I've no solution. I'm just still making sense of it all. But, if I might be critical, there's no point coming out with the kind of "its for your own good" argument that your mother might have employed as she horsed the cod liver oil into you.

Yes, and no, to be as definitive as possible...to be honest, I tend to take claims that "the system is breaking down" with something of a pinch of salt, because I'd see them as mostly cyclical, and I've heard them every time the modern economic system delivers a pile of brown stuff instead of prosperity.

Then prosperity returns, or at least stability in which people can envisage prosperity, and the system goes on ticking over.

You don't have a 'solution', and neither does anybody else, because inchoate fear and anger about things not going well as they might is not something there is a solution to. It never does produce solutions, and tends to go away by itself, because being annoyed that things aren't as good as they could be isn't the same kind of clear and obvious injustice and oppression that produced yesterday's revolutions. It can produce some unpleasant outgrowths, but those aren't solutions either, just people cashing in on negative emotions - which, let's be honest, is exactly what that nice bloke Nige is up to, however one chooses to dress it up.

When one is dreaming of new structures of politics, new forms of democracy, I think it's possible to get carried a long way from the dull realities of what will truly be possible, because human politics has certain built-in limiting factors around which everything winds up getting built - we're social monkeys, the majority aren't interested in much beyond their own lives, nearly everything requires compromise, and complex civilisations are complex. And those are basically the things people are annoyed with.

A pity, but there it is.

cordially,
Scofflaw

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

There's no particular way of knowing they are cyclical or not.

Apart from history, obviously.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I think, because we're a small country, we're used to a mode of thought where these things are beyond our control. "Jobs" are like the rain. Sometimes they fall in abundance, and sometimes they don't. Hence, we're trained to accommodate. Here's your cod liver oil.

That's not just true for small countries, though. I think part of the long-term disillusionment with party and ideological politics has resulted from the realisation that economies to quite a large do their own thing, and are their own thing. They're sufficiently complex, and so many of their properties are emergent, that you can't just decide how they should operate, and then vote for the people who will operate the economy that way.

The general shape of "best economic outcome" is something there's now a broad consensus around. As a result, there's now a broad political consensus around policy to achieve that outcome. And as a result of that there's less and less difference between political parties, and less and less engagement with politics.

That's something that's OK as long as the policies are delivering, but the very policies that seem to deliver best growth also seem to deliver occasional massive blowouts - and the policies that avoid such blowouts are always rejected in favour of growth. The interesting question is whether the ongoing lack of engagement is more or less of a danger when things go pear-shaped.

cordially,
Scofflaw

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

No, not even from history. Like the ad says, past experience is not a guarantee of the future.

So that's how we manage to convince ourselves that the historical pointers to us having a housing bubble were irrelevant!

Seriously though, yes, history.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

Up to a point. Which means that, to an extent, the EU is a confidence trick.

Day to day life is a confidence trick.

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

I'd guess it's really whether the un-engaged can be mobilised in some new direction, and whether something like the new direction is achieved. In our own case, it would be interesting to see what results if Sinn Fein actually managed to get into Government.

It hasn't been all that exciting with them in government in the north, for pretty much exactly the reasons I outlined.

cordially,
Scofflaw

ewan whose army wrote: »

Kinda karma in a way, he turned the screws on Van Rumpuy in that infamous "Who are you speech" in Brussels and someone is doing it to him now

To be fair, I think most people in Europe's reaction to the Van Rumpuy speech was "who's Nigel Farage?".

cordially,
Scofflaw

By any chance, was that paper either the Mail or the Express? :pac:

ewan whose army wrote: »

Kinda karma in a way, he turned the screws on Van Rumpuy in that infamous "Who are you speech" in Brussels and someone is doing it to him now

Very good interviewer. The standard of political discourse is so much higher in England than here. I wouldn't share Farage's views, or even much respect his attitude, but even under substantial pressure he kept responding reasonably coherently. O'Brien was really good though, and didn't pull any punches the way so many do in the Irish media.

The problem for Farage as I see it is that his and UKIP's platform is largely negative, and more likely to succeed in unstable conditions. In that regard, while all isn't perfect in the UK or the EU, I think we've passed the high water mark of the financial crisis. UKIP will peak and then slowly decline.

Certainly, UK voter sentiment to the EU has improved in recent times. Once the EZ is seen to get back on track, I think a lot of British critics will see some more positives in EU integration, even if they prefer to stay at arm's length.