Sam Fowles « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Sam Fowles’

It’s about democracy, stupid: Why Remainers and Leavers should both support amending the Repeal Bill

07/09/2017, 07:30:23 AM

by Sam Fowles

The EU Withdrawal Bill (formerly called the “Great Repeal Bill”) continues its passage through Parliament this week. Theresa May claims she is delivering the “will of the people”, yet she is doing the opposite. The Bill will grant the government such egregious powers that, in relation to a swathe of vital legal rights and protections, it no longer has to take the “will of the people” into account.

The bill is fixable. This should unite both “leavers” and “remainers”. Both claim to support democracy. The “leave” campaign based their referendum pitch on restoring the sovereignty of parliament. If they were serious then they should unite in supporting amendments to the Bill.

The British constitution offers us, as citizens, two avenues for holding the government to account: Elected representatives in Parliament make decisions about which laws should govern us and what powers the government should enjoy. The courts allow individuals to hold the government to account for misuse of its powers. The Bill closes off both avenues of accountability. The Henry VIII powers allow the government to overturn primary legislation, the sort that must usually be approved by both the Commons and the Lords, without winning a vote in Parliament. Often a law containing such extensive powers will include a legal “test”, ensuring that the powers can only be used if certain conditions are met. In other words: when it is really necessary. If ministers use the powers without meeting the test, the courts can step in to protect individual rights. This Bill allows ministers to use Henry VIII powers, effectively, at their own discretion. As a result, there is no way for individuals to seek redress in the courts if the powers are misused.

By choking off these avenues of accountability, the government can remove important individual rights and protections without any democratic scrutiny. This means that key protections for workers, the environment, human rights, and consumer protection could disappear overnight. If the Bill is passed in its current form, there will be little that ordinary people, or even elected representatives, can do about it.

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Umunna, Reeves et al are wrong on free movement. Its bad politics and worse economics

22/09/2016, 10:18:57 PM

by Sam Fowles

For Rachel Reeves, immigration from the EU has caused a “slight drag” on wages. So Labour best represents the working poor by calling for an end to free movement. This is both simplistic and wrong. It represents only the loosest grasp of political strategy and no grasp of economics at all.

Labour will never win the fight to be “tough on immigration”. If voters want to kick out immigrants, they’ll vote for the parties that have been dog whistling about immigration for years. No one buys the cheap knock off when they can get the real thing for the same price. Labour must address the real causes of the low wage crisis. This strategy has two advantages: It targets voters that might actually vote Labour, and it’s not economically illiterate.

The overall impact of immigration on wages is generally positive. By contributing more in taxes than they take out, EU immigrants ease financial pressures in the public sector. Immigration can create downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled workers. But this is negligible. Reeves relies on a study that found a 10% increase in immigration creates a 1.8% drag on low-skilled wages. To put that in perspective: the largest increase in immigration since 2006 has been around 7%. This works out as costing low skilled workers 1p per hour.

But immigration is equally likely to have a positive effect on low-skilled wages. Migration increases demand: The more people in an economy, the more goods and services they need: The more goods and services required, the greater the demand for labour to provide them: The greater the demand for labour, the more employers are prepared to pay for it.

But this hasn’t happened in the UK: Why?

Because successive governments have chosen policies that drive down wages.

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What The Keystone XL Case Tells Us About TTIP

21/01/2016, 10:21:33 PM

by Sam Fowles

Last week TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, filed notice that it intends to sue the USA, demanding $15bn in compensation for President Obama’s decision not to grant a permit for the pipeline. But this is not just a piece of trade litigation on the other side of the Atlantic, the Keystone arbitration should serve as an indication of what we can expect if the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is passed un-reformed.

1. This is not just about protection for western investors in developing states

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) tends to dismiss concerns about the treaty with the, somewhat airy, assertion that, despite being signed up to 93 similar treaties, the UK has never been successfully sued. Yet the more you increase your exposure, the more likely you are to get sued. When combined with the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA – the equivalent deal between the EU and Canada) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP – the equivalent between the USA and pacific-rim states), TTIP will increase the coverage of trade with Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) by over 300%. While most of the UK’s existing treaties are with states which provide little investment into the UK (thus minimal risk of action), TTIP will extend the same right to the top provider of investment into the UK.

Like the UK, the US has never lost a case in ISDS but the Keystone arbitration looks likely to end that streak. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA – the treaty on which TransCanada are basing their suit) prohibits discriminatory or arbitrary treatment of investors. TransCanada’s notice of action asserts that the Obama Administration rejected the Keystone permit despite awarding permits for almost exactly identical projects, that it ignored its own environmental impact reports and that Administration officials appear to have openly admitted that the decision was made for political rather than environmental reasons. If TransCanada’s lawyers can prove the truth of any of these assertions, the Administration will struggle to defend the suit.

2. TTIP isn’t just about nationalisation

When challenged in the EU Select Committee by Geraint Davies, Lord Maude claimed that investment protection provisions in TTIP would only apply to nationalisation without compensation. The Keystone arbitration shows his understanding is outdated. TransCanada claim that, in denying them permission to build the pipeline, the Obama Administration has deprived them of profits they may have made in the future. This isn’t an absurd claim in the context of ISDS. When a similar claim was made in Ethyl v Canada, the company won.

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Sorry Nigel, nationalisation is not against EU Law

02/10/2015, 05:25:51 PM

by Sam Fowles

Nigel Farage thinks EU law prevents nationalisation. Ironically he seems to have got this from a recent post on Left Futures by Westminster University’s Danny Nicol. Professor Nicol argues that the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) and EU liberalisation directives prohibit renationalisation of energy utilities, as proposed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Professor Nicol raises an important point. The EU probably encroaches on the sovereignty of member states to its most egregious degree when it comes to market liberalisation. Art. 176 TFEU commits member states to the expansion of markets.

I have a lot of respect for Professor Nicol and recommend his excellent book. But I can’t help but feel that, in this instance, he has reduced a complex area of law to a zero sum conclusion. There are many forms of “nationalisation” that would never be touched by the TFEU (such as taking utilities into municipal control, as has happened in Germany). Furthermore, EU law wouldn’t prohibit the sort of nationalisation proposed by Mr Corbyn.

Let’s be clear, the Corbyn plan isn’t for complete nationalisation. Mr Corbyn wants to nationalise the grid (the infrastructure that transports gas and electricity from generator to supplier), the “Big Six” energy companies and the railways.

EU law explicitly protects the right of member states to nationalise industries. Art. 345 TFEU states “The Treaties shall in no way prejudice the rules in Member States (MS) governing the system of property ownership.” In his book Professor Nicol argues that this provision has recently been ignored by the ECJ. This is largely correct but it does not justify the conclusion that it will always be ignored.

Art. 345 remains in the treaty. It is possible to generally promote liberal markets and operate some industries as national monopolies. Arts. 176 and 345 are not mutually exclusive. The ECJ has often been tolerant of member states accused of violating the treaties if their actions are “proportionate“, i.e. for a legitimate aim (which would include one endorsed by the electorate) and effective, but not excessive, in achieving that aim. Assuming that nationalisation was prominent in Mr Corbyn’s manifesto, conducted on a transparent timetable and proper compensation was paid, Mr Corbyn would have a strong case based on Art. 345.

But even without Art. 345 EU law would not prohibit the Corbyn plan. Professor Nicol relies heavily on Art. 106 TFEU. But this provision doesn’t ban nationalised industries. It simply regulates how they can behave in relation to other enterprises. In essence, enterprises with a dominant position in the market due to state action cannot use that position to behave unreasonably. The ECJ will only intervene if Art. 106 is breached.

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The Queen’s Nazi salute shows how fragile our liberty has always been

24/07/2015, 10:33:18 AM

by Sam Fowles

History is power. Control of history means control of the political battleground. If we remembered how often the powerful have betrayed the principles for which they claim to stand, we may be less inclined to meekly accede to their wishes.

I’m sure the young Princess Elizabeth had no idea what she was doing when she performed the Nazi salute but members of her family (and other leading Establishment figures) did. As a nation, we suffer from collective amnesia concerning the rise of Hitler. In some cases we have even used pop culture to re-write history. In “The Kings Speech” the royal family are depicted voicing their concern to Timothy Spall’s Churchill in the early thirties. Something that, all reliable accounts suggest, absolutely did not happen.

History isn’t inevitable. We are not swept along on an unstoppable tide of events. History is determined by the actions of individuals. The depression, German politics, the repercussions of the Versailles Treaty all played a part in the rise of Hitler. But so did the contribution if the British Establishment. The European elites supported Hitler because they saw him as a better alternative than a left wing party. In the UK Conservative MPs organised in groups like the January Club to promote Hitler’s politics in the UK (even after Kristallnacht). After Germany invaded Czechoslovakia the Bank of England facilitated the transfer of its sovereign wealth fund to the Nazis. The Royal family’s censors prevented plays criticising Hitler from showing on the London stage as late as 1939.

One of the most significant supporters of Nazism was Prince Edward, later the Duke of Windsor, who appears in the footage released by the Sun. Recent evidence suggests that Edward passed information to Nazi agents including the suggestion that London should be bombed. He did this while a serving officer in the Grenadier Guards. He was assisted by other aristocrats such as the Countess of Athlone. Yet Edward was never court martialled. He was never tried for treason. Would an ordinary citizen, perhaps one of the many killed by the bombing that Edward supported, have received the same leniency?

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Why Dapper Laughs is not the same as Charlie Hebdo

20/01/2015, 09:41:21 AM

by Sam Fowles

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre everybody wants to remind us that they support free speech.

But the new vogue for Article 10 has its drawbacks. Mehdi Hasan calls them “free speech fundamentalists”. I’d call them apologists for racism, sexism and homophobia, but I lack Mehdi’s pith. These people equate the denial of a platform (often for the most extreme and offensive views) with the denial of the right to free expression. Brendan O’Neill of Spiked.com argues that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was a more violent symptom of a general intolerance for free speech which stretches across Europe. Mr O’Neill was one of those scheduled to speak at the Oxford University abortion event blackballed for not including a single woman on its panel. He cites social media campaigns against Dapper Laughs and Page Three of The Sun as evidence for his theory. Spiked has even starting its own campaign, “Free Speech Now”. In the Times Education Supplement Claire Fox, Director of the Institute of Ideas, argues that policies like NUS’s “No Platform”, which bans individuals who are racist, misogynist, or homophobic from speaking at member institutions, represent an attack on freedom of speech.

Mehdi is astute to point out that the right to freedom of speech does not create a duty to be offensive. But there is a more important distinction to be drawn: “Expression” (which is a right) is not the same as “platform” (which is a privilege). Having a right to free speech means that one cannot be punished for one’s expression or coerced into changing that which one chooses to express. The obvious caveat is the prohibition against using one’s expression to incite violence against others (In much the same way that one can’t use one’s freedom of movement to commit violent acts). This is different from having a platform. While freedom of expression requires protecting all individuals equally against coercion, the issue of platform revolves around questions of who gets to use their freedom of expression from a more privileged position than others.

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History tells us not to trust GCHQ’s Robert Hannigan

12/11/2014, 09:54:09 AM

by Sam Fowles

When it reopened in March after a £40m revamp the Imperial War Museum was applauded for it’s “judicious choice of […] fascinating, and frequently heartbreaking, exhibits”. So when I visited last week I was looking forward to a nuanced and informative account of Britain’s conflicts since 1914. But I was disappointed. The exhibition, as a whole, often presented a one sided and, at times, inaccurate view of history.

The cards telling the stories of the individual tanks, planes and boats were, themselves, fascinating and informative. What was worrying was the story that the IWM wove around them. Displayed on giant notice boards putting exhibits in context, this was a peculiarly conservative account of history. The exhibit on the early years of the war told us that Britain increased arms production in the late 1930s, but not that the Chamberlain government delayed this despite the repeated warnings of the Labour opposition, military leaders and their own backbenchers. The exhibit on MI5 told us all about the targeting of Communists and Fascists (simple “villains” we can all identify) during the interwar years. But it omitted that the security services had also spied on Trade Unions and the Labour movement and masterminded the Zinoviev letter (a plot to ensure that Labour lost the 1924 general election by implicating them in an – imaginary – communist coup).

The exhibition captures the individual horrors and heroisms of war with aplomb but refuses to acknowledge that war itself is the result of the (often self interested) decisions of those in power.

Why is this important? Surely the notice boards are just there to provide a small amount of information, not to pursue a political agenda?

But it could not be more important. The way we understand our history defines the way we understand ourselves as a nation and our history is under threat. Michael Gove’s attempts to eliminate historical debate from the National Curriculum, use of the bully pulpit to condemn interpretations of history which the government doesn’t like and commemorations of the First World War which eschew analysis for incoherent national “mourning” all teach us to accept a sanitised view of “historical fact”. We should be questioning and debating. Control of history has always been an ambition of despots. It should not be the goal of democratic governments.

Charles De Gaulle rebuilt France after the Second World War with the help of the “resistance myth” – the idea that France as a nation had resisted Nazi occupation, conveniently forgetting the mass collaboration of the Vichy regime. De Gaulle’s willingness to ignore history helped him unite his country. But ultimately deep fissures in French society, based on race, fear and authoritarian leanings, were papered over rather than healed and still divide France today.

This is not just an argument of vague aphorisms. We can’t learn from the mistakes of the past if we allow them to be forgotten. The security services willingness to spy on and sabotage peaceful social movements that challenged the (Conservative) establishment in the 1920s and ’30s could not be more relevant. Last week the director of GCHQ (backed by the Prime Minister) demanded we sacrifice privacy and trust him to protect us from “terrorists”.

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The Tories Don’t Understand Human Rights

08/10/2014, 10:33:42 AM

by Sam Fowles

Forced to abandon NHS bashing for the sake of the election, David Cameron needed to feed the right some red meat. He chose the European Convention on Human Rights, promising to repeal the Human Rights Act, which allows English judges to incorporate the dicta of the Strasbourg court into their rulings, and allow Parliament to ignore the European Court of Human Rights. This is more than simply wrong; it shows a fundamental failure to understand of the role human rights play in international law and politics.

The international law of human rights is based on the premise that there is something fundamentally valuable about each individual human. In this light Cameron’s idea of a “British Bill of Rights” seems absurd. People are not inherently valuable because they are British or French or Afghan. We are valuable because we are human. For this reason that the ECHR applies to British troops fighting abroad. To suggest that people should lose value in our eyes because they are non-European is an attitude redolent of the 13th Century not the 21st.

The ECHR is itself based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It doesn’t invent “European Rights”. It allows citizens of European states direct access to universal rights. It’s worth noting that the UK would remain bound by a plethora of international human rights conventions even if it were to secede from the ECHR (as the Conservatives threaten). The government’s legal obligations wouldn’t fundamentally change; they would just get more complex.

In practice human rights law protects the vulnerable from the powerful. This is why a bill of rights decided purely by the parliamentary majority is so dangerous. Human rights act as a check on the majority. Courts should make decisions (such as giving prisoners the vote) with which most of us disagree. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be a check on the majority.

This is important because, in a democracy, the majority should be able to change. If the power of a majority is not checked then there is nothing to stop that majority taking steps to make itself permanent. Cameron is asking us to trust to powerful to set limits to their own power. For a man who supposedly venerates the Magna Carter he sounds suspiciously like Prince John.

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Ukip’s electoral success is not good news for Labour

04/09/2014, 07:33:53 AM

by Sam Fowles

Last week Nigel Farage announced his ambition, not just to be David Cameron’s “worst nightmare” but Ed Miliband’s as well. The general perception amongst the progressive media appears to be that Ukip’s increasing threat (aptly illustrated by the, suspiciously timely, resignation of Douglas Carswell) will be a net positive for Labour, making it more difficult for the Conservatives to win the next general election. This is a mistake.

All too often we see politics as being only about the next election. It’s not. Politics is about the sort of nation we want. Winning an election is a means to an end. That end is the principles we support becoming the principles that govern our nation. Elections themselves are not defining moments but the inevitable products of public debates. They are won and lost in the collective consciousness, not at the ballot box.

Margaret Thatcher she defined the public discourse. Although she herself lost office, every government since, including those comprised of her political opponents, have pursued policies based on the ideology she espoused. They view the world according to the paradigm which she established.

Here’s an example: Most good economists will argue that the financial crisis was caused by a failure of the (private) financial sector. Yet all economic arguments in our public debate are based on the premise that we must cut back on the state. We don’t discuss the logic behind this; it’s become an irrefutable “fact” of British politics. The “private: good/state: bad” paradigm is unsupported by history or economics but every political party conforms with it because it is the paradigm which defines our public debate.

To win elections but, more importantly, to see their principles realised, a political party needs to define the debate. Unless it can do so (as I have argued before) it will always be arguing according to it’s opponent’s terms and thus will always lose.

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There are not two sides to every story. We should not have entered the First World War.

08/08/2014, 02:36:55 PM

by Sam Fowles

The “balance fallacy” in the commemorations of the First World War means we forget the real reason millions died.

“There are two sides to every story and this is my side. The true side.” said Emma Stone at the beginning of the (highly underrated) teen comedy “Easy A”.

The mantra that “there are two sides to every story” is embodied to a fault in the anniversary coverage of the First World War. This is dangerous. January’s controversy about the origins of the war has been smoothed over with references to “complexity”. Every mention of tragedy is mitigated by the platitude that “no one” was expecting the nature of the war. Apparently it was no one’s fault.

Except that it was. To say that the slaughter was senseless and some were more to blame than others isn’t to ignore the complexity of diplomatic and military history. Sometimes history is not balanced. Sometimes the merits of one side of the argument so monumentally outweigh the other that the imbalance must be acknowledged.

In a History Today blog in January I said that the study of history is the search, not for truth but, for understanding. But the belief that the sun orbits the earth does little to advance one’s understanding of the solar system.

Understanding history is important because history is inherently political. Imagine historians agree that “A happened, therefore B action was taken and C was the catastrophic result”. The next time A happens we, as a voting public, will be understandably skeptical of anyone who suggests doing B or of anything suggested by the people who suggested B in the first place.

This creates a problem for those original decision makers (or their political descendants) who don’t wish to lose power. Or if doing B again remains in the interests of certain powerful groups despite its catastrophic consequences for society in general.

There’s a fable amongst lawyers about the Harvard Civil Procedure professor who tells his students: “If the facts are on your side argue the facts, if the law is on your side argue the law and if neither the facts nor the law are on your side bang your fist down on the defence table and make enough noise until everyone forgets you’re in the wrong.” If you want history to forget how you screwed up, create enough contradictory accounts that it looks like a debate with “no right answer” rather than a cataclysmic failure of judgment. Create legitimacy with noise rather than academic rigour.

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