Changing States: A Labour Agenda for Europe

Citation

Rotherham, L. (1998), "Changing States: A Labour Agenda for Europe", European Business Review, Vol. 98 No. 1, pp. 75-75. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1998.98.1.75.6

This work was conjointly produced, the back cover tells us, by “eminent” Labour MEPs. More proof is required. Do not buy this book as a birthday present for your friends, or you will lose them. Your representatives at Strasbourg come across as independent advisers whose advice nobody has sought. It also comes as a divine gift for Conservative Central Office, in the unlikely eventuality of their ever reading it, with a stockpile of curses against the last government that so put a spanner into European integration, and how New Labour will soon fix such profoundly misguided policy.

Some gems on offer provide us with a useful insight into the federalist mindset. Europe’s “forward march” being inevitable, social policy is deemed a just companion to a Single Market. Eurosceptics for their part are portrayed as simple citizens who do not “understand” the institutions. The EU, despite its faults, is the great ideal whose role we are told “is merely to address common problems and to cajole member states towards common solutions”. Problems held by six countries need solutions in 15.

Confused sense (“effective withdrawal from further integration”) mingles with confused thought (German standards of training are not the same thing as EU ones); the UK’s “wealth rating”, laying aside the OECD figures, are surely per capita; the claim that Britain has not enjoyed sovereignty for the past 75 years is hare brained in its simplicity; government intervention principles are nonsensical (and this by a Socialist). Surely the introduction’s author does not really mean what she says when she states that “No one who was born after 1957 has ever been able to vote for a Labour government”?

The section on the EMU, unduly optimistic, fails to differentiate between ERM and EMU. It simplistically calls the projected world status of the Euro a benefit in its own right, bounding up and down at the prospect of it hobnobbing with the Yen and the Dollar. Moreover, the author falls for the old communautaire propaganda of seeing exchange rates as anything but a safety valve, while ignoring possible benefits to the City of life outside the Frankfurt zone.

On the section on employment, all credibility is lost by the author of this section happily using US job growth figures to suit the argument for more meddling, then saying that deregulation needs to be accompanied by regulation to protect.

The essayist on R&D is dirigiste, with hints of freezing out non‐EU countries. In terms of style alone, it evokes the Soviet movies of the technology cult of the 1930s. There then follows a party political broadcast on behalf of the Europe “des tres petites regions” Party. This fragmentationalist seminar ridiculously overlooks the minor detail that the UK budget rebate ought never to have wound up in the Brussels coffers in the first place, and is not a charitable gift by Brussels to Liverpool. The “undemocratic” Court of Auditors comes under fire for not holding any allegiances, much, indeed, to its credit.

And yet, there is some truth in these pages. The actions of the CBI do prove that economic union is pushing for political union, at least for certain of those huge companies which can afford to lobby and punch. And we can only applaud the observation that Europe is undemocratic, and that powers won in the nineteenth century have been meekly surrendered in the twentieth.

However, in short the verdict is damning ‐ buy it as a cure for insomnia, not for enlightenment.