No Free Movement Rights for the Working Class?

The debate over the free movement of people is continuing to grow. It's worth remembering that EU citizens currently have the right to reside in another Member State for 3 months to look for work, with no obligation on the host Member State to provide benefits (Citizen's Directive, PDF). They can stay longer than 3 months if they are employed, self-employed, or have the resources to support themselves. When they're a worker (an employee), then they have access to the same social and tax advantages as the host country's nationals (Directive 1612/68).

In the UK, some Tories are calling for a 2 year period before EU citizens will have access to the welfare system. That's 2 years of living, working and contributing in a country without being able to draw on the same support open to other citizens. Given that so many supported by the welfare system are in work (an indication of how wages have stagnated and the worrying necessity to support those in work to ensure that they can actually make a living), such a long period would greatly disadvantage poorer people from exercising their Treaty rights in practice.

Labour appears to be thinking of controlling intra-EU migration for the skill levels of the migrant, as Chuka Umunna said on the BBC's Question Time last Thursday:

"Umunna said the EU should change its rules to prevent citizens from travelling to other member states in search of work, with a focus on banning highly skilled workers from less affluent EU members taking low-skilled jobs in richer member states.
[...]
He said this would revive the spirit of the EU's founding fathers, who wanted to encourage freedom of movement for highly skilled workers to highly skilled jobs."

I'm not sure what founding father he's talking about; he didn't quote any and I can't remember any famous quotes about Europe only being for graduates. Labour's position is very confusing. They seem to be talking about preventing movement to other countries to find work (so you'd already need to have a job before you move), preventing highly skilled workers from the new accession countries from taking lower-skilled jobs in the older Member States (which sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare to define and enforce, never mind getting all the Member States to sign off on it), and limiting the free movement rights to the highly skilled.

This last point, which seems to be the most likely, is an odd position for the Labour party. So the highly skilled (presumably also those from more privileged backgrounds) should have these rights but the less well skilled shouldn't (which is hard to define and probably just means "poor")? It's a sad state of affairs when the Labour party is for disenfranchising the poor in Europe rather than opening up more opportunity and creating work and security...

Even the Liberal Democrats have voiced support for limited access to benefits. Perhaps someone can explain the electoral rationale behind this move, because I can't see it. Nobody who wants a tough stance on immigration is going to vote for the Lib Dems over the Tories because of this. The net result is that there's no real political voice that is speaking out in defence of free movement rights.

It's widely reported, and accepted by supporters for tougher immigration controls such as Migration Watch, that EEA migrants claim less than locals, and contribute more to society and the economy than they receive in social welfare. The political weather has changed so much that even the politicians that make this argument are supporting a dilution of free movement rights. This political cowardice just lets the panic over immigration to grow. Without dissenting voices, the political culture as a whole shifts in an ever more anti-immigrant direction - you could say that it's a microcosm of the overall EU debate in the UK.

Political attitudes of the CSU in Germany are also hardening on this, though opinion polls suggest that a majority thinks that Germany has benefited from immigration and that it has benefited from EU membership overall.

Why not have a referendum on justice co-operation?

In the UK the Conservatives have been blundering about with EU policy again. Home Secretary Theresa May, who talked about rolling back the free movement of people not so long ago, is now talking up the possibility of the UK opting out of the area of freedom, justice and security altogether. The coalition LibDems have not exactly killed the idea, but pulled the rug from under May when he said that no decision had been made, leaving May to provide the House of Commons with an empty statement about the government's "current thinking".

There's a lot of comment about how short-sighted it is to pull out of justice co-operation, and on how the Conservative approach to the EU has been a shambolic case of issuing announcements with little thought and then scrambling to deal with the aftermath. While I agree that opting out of the JHA area en bloc is a terrible idea that would weaken the UK's security, I'm confused over why the Tories have been so inept over this issue: why not have a referendum on justice co-operation?

Seriously. If Nick Clegg will only go as far as saying that nothing has been agreed yet (suggesting that the LibDems might be reconciled to the opt-out if the UK opts back into several JHA measures), and ministers are going to engage in such policy kite-flying, then why not put the issue to the people or make noises about doing so? It would give the people a referendum on the EU, let people express an opinion on at least one aspect of the EU relationship that the Conservatives want re-balancing (and why not gauge opinion on what aspects of the EU the public want to buy into?), and would allow the Conservatives to partly deliver on their promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (in this case opting in or out of the post-Lisbon justice area).

The Home Secretary would not have been able to make a statement straight away, but the Conservatives could have started agitating for a referendum, and there is general agreement that some EU referendum has to happen sometime soon. It would have given the Conservatives space to test waters and refine their position and avoided statement grandstanding while winning a political point on the issue. Sounds like a better strategy than the current farcical posturing.

So why not have a referendum? Perhaps it's because it would be awkward for the party of law and order to campaign for opting out of law and order co-operation - maybe it's just simply politically uncomfortable as a gamble, with little likelihood of success. It's hard to sell the idea that the justice system won't suffer from the opt-out because we'll go back to the EU and negotiate specific opt-ins: not exactly a great rallying cry. And even a total opt-out with no subsequent opt-ins would be a hard sell.

In other words, if you hold a referendum on justice co-operation, the Europhiles would probably be the winners. Now that would be a Tory nightmare worse than their own bungling.

BBC Radio Four: Britain and the Human Rights Act

The Human Rights Act 1998, which transposes the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, is controversal in British politics: the Liberal Democrats and Labour are for the HRA, while the Conservatives are against. The Conservatives want to bring in a British Bill of Rights, but it has never been spelt out what this means in practical terms. Will it contain less rights than the ECHR? More? Would the UK leave the ECHR (and therefore the Council of Europe - which only junta Greece has ever done)?

BBC Radio Four has produced an interesting programme this week on Britain and Human Rights, and what the practical legal implications of moves to change it are. You can listen to it here.

If the link doesn't work, try looking the programme up on the BBC Radio Four website - though you have to be in the UK to use the iPlayer, but I've been able to listen to BBC radio programmes through their websites from outside the UK before.

ELDR Conference 2010

ELDR, the pan-European Liberal party that is part of ALDE in the European Parliament (and counts the UK Liberal Democrats, Irish Fianna Fáil and Dutch VVD among its ranks), is holding its last day of its annual congress in Helsinki today. I've only found out about it today, due to a blog post disappointed that the pro-European Liberal Democrats have not sent some MPs to the congress, and EUobserver's reporting of ELDR unease with the VVD-led government's reliance on Geert Wilders' PVV party in the Dutch Parliament. Recently I haven't been that attentive to Twitter, so I may have missed any party buzz from it, but a quick look at the ELDR Twitter account shows that there have only been 12 Tweets since the start of the congress, at the time of writing.

Still, now that I had discovered the ELDR Congress, I went to their website to check up on any news. So far there have been 3 news articles - on the opening of the congress, on the increased turnout at the congress, and one congratulating the VVD on becoming the senior governing party in the Netherlands. Not only is there no press release so far on discussions about the congress's theme - Demographic Change - but there seems to be no mention of the congress on the party's blog, or any of the blogs linked on its blog page, apart from a short descriptive one in Swedish.

The theme of the congress is one that's very relevant today, as immigration and welfare state reform in the face of the economic crisis are clearly the major issues, so it's disappointing that so far little has emerged on the Eurozone economy, the welfare state, or immigration. It's important to have a coherent position on this, given the free movement of workers within the EU, and that the Lib Dems in the UK and (more pressingly) the VVD in the Netherlands have to deal with demands for restrictions on immigration. Indeed, Geert Wilders has supposedly vetted the new Dutch immigration minister. The ELDR leader, Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck, said that she was sure that the VVD would stick to liberal principles, but also supported the mooted banning of the burqa in the Netherlands (Neyts-Uyttebroeck is from Belgium) - something that I consider to be an illiberal position.

The last day isn't over yet, and some news and party positions - or even a clearer overview of what was discussed - might emerge after the Congress ends. It seems unlikely that anything very interesting will suddenly come to light when everyone has packed up and gone home, however. Even if interest in the ELDR Congress would have been low even if it was more open and accessible, ELDR have missed a chance to promote themselves as a party online, and I wonder at the political will of a party that seems to not even bother to reach out with such an event.

[In other news, I've just noticed that ALDE's website has undergone a redesign].

UK Election 2010

It's polling day in the UK for the 2010 general election. The 3-way race between Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (itself a surprise outcome from the televised leaders' debates) has widened, and it looks likely that the Conservatives will "win" in terms of seats, even if it fails to secure an overall majority in the House of Commons. If the result is a hung parliament, then the Conservatives (or perhaps, wildly unexpectedly, Labour) could try to govern as a minority government (which is what the Scottish National Party has been doing in the devolved Scottish Parliament), or form a coalition.

So what coalitions are on the cards? The party in the strongest coalition-forming position is the Liberal Democrats, the centre-left pro-European party. Though the third largest party in a 2-party system, they're set to increase their share of the vote even if this doesn't translate well into an increase in seats due to the First-Past-the-Post system. Their natural coalition partners would be Labour, but it would be politically difficult for them to support a government that seems to have lost the support of the public, and Nick Clegg (the LibDem leader) has said that the LibDems couldn't support Gordon Brown as Prime Minister if Labour come third in the popular vote (though this could translate as second or even first in terms of seats).

It's a strange way for the LibDems to think about coalitions if they want to break the old system, as they've claimed. In a proportional representation voting system, coalitions are likely to become the norm, and the test of legitimacy would be whether the coalition had the majority of voter support, rather than that of the leading party, which is the old logic that the LibDem's language seems to indicate they follow. Still, they have left the possibility of a coalition with Labour open, even if Brown's head is the price. Such a coalition would make more sense than that of one with the Conservatives since they're both progressive, centre-left parties that are more supportive of working within the EU than the Tories, and have similar philosophies on the approach (if not detail) on how to deal with the economy and tackle the deficit.

Yet they still might form a coalition with the Tories (which I think would alienate a lot of their voters - after all, if they are taking support mostly from Labour supporters, how long will their supporters stick with them if they are keeping a, perhaps Thatcherite, Tory-LibDem government in power?).

Apart from the LibDems, the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties would be likely to support any government on a case-by-case basis, based on whatever concessions they can get out of Westminster. In terms of the Northern Irish parties, the unionist parties would be natural allies of the Conservatives, while the nationalist SDLP, a left-wing party, would be more likely to support Labour/Labour-LibDems. Sinn Féin would be a big opponent of the Tories - but they don't take their seats in the Westminster Parliament in protest against the Union and the Oath to the Queen.

The ideal outcome for me is a Labour-LibDem government, so I hope people will be voting tactically to ensure that the centre-left get as many seats as possible (though I want the LibDems to do really well in order to boost the chances of electoral reform).

I'm against the Conservatives for several reasons:

1. I find them grossly and dangerously constitutionally illiterate. Their opposition to the Human Rights Act (with no clear explanation for what they'd do differently) is populist and their attacks on judicial power are something I cannot support given the lack of constitutional checks on the Parliament. The judiciary have proven to be better defenders of rights than the Parliament under the Tories or Labour, and I doubt the wisdom of diluting their power further.

2. Their Euroscepticism. It's unclear what powers they want to repatriate, how, and what difference this will make. Nick Clegg highlighted the advantages the EU brings to policing cross-border crime, etc. It is likely that Cameron would be more pragmatic in government, but then again I cannot trust a party which cannot clearly argue for the good points and against the bad points of a project. I don't see any clear vision, and suspect that the populist posturing will make it harder to be pragmatic, and policy will be confused and even hostage to backbench MPs (who are very Eurosceptic in the Tory Party).

3. I believe a more gradual reduction of the deficit is better for the economy. Basically I'm agreeing with the Labour/LibDem assessment here. Additionally, though it has a few (lonely) good points in it, Cameron's "Big Society" appears to merely be a salve for Tory consciences as they cut deep into the public sector. A culture of mass volunteerism won't spring up overnight, and I don't believe that a Tory government has the time, policy consistency, money and vision to nurture such an expansion in civil society. He's effectively asking people to volunteer to do some of the government's job for them. (Though obviously the point is that they think that the government shouldn't be doing it anyway). Again, I can't support this.

However, I live in a difficult constituency. The 2 leading candidates are a joint unionist one (likely to be pro-Tory), and a Sinn Féin one (anti-Tory, but won't take the seat if she wins it). Therefore, the pro-Tory forces will be added to, or we'll get a vacant seat which will reduce the majority number the Tories need to get to form a government.

I guess I'll just have to vote with my conscience to boost the vote of a party I support, but who probably won't win, and keep my fingers crossed that a Labour-LibDem government will be the result of today's voting...