.
With the UK careening towards the European Union (EU) referendum this June, perhaps the most surprising thing is that, despite the fierce bickering over the economic impact of a Brexit and how many decimal points of GDP growth might be at stake, the key messages each side is hammering home are not especially contradictory.
On the one side, the Conservative establishment is playing a similar game to their Project Fear in the Scottish independence referendum, arguing that the uncertainty that lies beyond a vote to leave is uncouth, and reassuring themselves that the British people have never been ones to choose political revolution. As for Vote Leave, talking heads have centered on the notion of control, which the EU has wrested from Westminster’s hands through an ocean of seemingly innocuous regulations, and that the vote is a chance for the country to once again become the master of its own destiny.
What is interesting is that Team Remain’s strategists have barely bothered to defend the notion of control, to push back against the idea that Britain’s elected lawmakers are becoming increasingly impotent. Rather, the Remainers have launched a series of more cynical arguments: that we are now living in a globalized world in which a small country like the UK does not have the heft to negotiate alone at the adults’ table and that Britain would have to comply with EU regulations even if it were to leave the Union. None of these arguments challenge the notion that the UK has indeed lost a great deal of control or, to put it more classically, sovereignty. They simply claim that the EU is too big to fail. If one accepts Remain’s logic, it is no wonder that so many are pessimistic about the future.
Moreover, accepting the idea that the only way Britain can maintain its quality of life in this day and age is to find strength in numbers, like a herd of antlered animals keeping the wolves at bay, would be more palatable if it actually had positive results. The reality is that negotiating regulation through supranational organisations not only dilutes Britain’s influence but it also supplants British authorities with an often unelected and highly-paid class of civil servants at the international level.
The predictable effect is ending up with agreements that resemble something the international class of bureaucrats wants more than something the British people need. A good example of this is the ongoing Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, “carried out mostly in secret between the EU and the US.” One of the more controversial elements of the agreement is that it could make the privatisation of the National Health Service (NHS) “irreversible”, according to a leading barrister. The fact that EU negotiators would even consider putting the NHS, the closest thing the English have to a national religion, as the saying goes, on the negotiating table shows how distanced the elites are from the British people.
Indeed, an often-underreported reality is just how isolated international civil servants are from the cares and concerns of average citizens. Whereas politicians at least have to stoop to visiting their constituency once in a fortnight, international civil servants have none of these trappings. They rarely pay taxes in the countries they live in and their children go to international private schools where they are constantly surrounded by their counterparts. They are the real winners of globalisation, for as jurisdiction moves from the national to the international level, power falls into their hands.
And this is not merely an EU phenomenon. For all intents and purposes, the World Health Organisation, a UN agency based in Geneva, Switzerland, could be just as much of a threat to the NHS as TTIP. Most of the time, the UN’s worker bees are so ineffectual that they don’t do much harm beyond the wasted taxpayer funds. In the aftermath of its disastrously inept responses to a series of global health crises, from Ebola to the Zika virus, however, the WHO has taken it upon itself to wrest more power from national health authorities across a variety of areas.
To take a particularly Orwellian example, the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and its ominous Article 5.3 seeks to exclude national health authorities from deciding how to tackle tobacco-related health issues. The argument is that national health authorities talk to the tobacco industry in deciding what course of action to take, a step that compromises the authorities’ ideological purity and zeal against tobacco producers. The answer is, of course, that these authorities talk to the industry because that’s how laws should come about in a democratic society.
The apathy of Britain’s political establishment, the heavily intertwined nature of global politics, and the dilution of sovereignty mean that control will continue to float to unaccountable international institutions whether or not Britain votes for Brexit. The answer therefore becomes that instead of running to the exit, Britain should strive for wide-sweeping reforms that would increase the ultimate legitimacy of such international institutions.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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Forget About Brexit, Institutional Creep Goes Beyond the EU
European union. Concept image.
May 21, 2016
With the UK careening towards the European Union (EU) referendum this June, perhaps the most surprising thing is that, despite the fierce bickering over the economic impact of a Brexit and how many decimal points of GDP growth might be at stake, the key messages each side is hammering home are not especially contradictory.
On the one side, the Conservative establishment is playing a similar game to their Project Fear in the Scottish independence referendum, arguing that the uncertainty that lies beyond a vote to leave is uncouth, and reassuring themselves that the British people have never been ones to choose political revolution. As for Vote Leave, talking heads have centered on the notion of control, which the EU has wrested from Westminster’s hands through an ocean of seemingly innocuous regulations, and that the vote is a chance for the country to once again become the master of its own destiny.
What is interesting is that Team Remain’s strategists have barely bothered to defend the notion of control, to push back against the idea that Britain’s elected lawmakers are becoming increasingly impotent. Rather, the Remainers have launched a series of more cynical arguments: that we are now living in a globalized world in which a small country like the UK does not have the heft to negotiate alone at the adults’ table and that Britain would have to comply with EU regulations even if it were to leave the Union. None of these arguments challenge the notion that the UK has indeed lost a great deal of control or, to put it more classically, sovereignty. They simply claim that the EU is too big to fail. If one accepts Remain’s logic, it is no wonder that so many are pessimistic about the future.
Moreover, accepting the idea that the only way Britain can maintain its quality of life in this day and age is to find strength in numbers, like a herd of antlered animals keeping the wolves at bay, would be more palatable if it actually had positive results. The reality is that negotiating regulation through supranational organisations not only dilutes Britain’s influence but it also supplants British authorities with an often unelected and highly-paid class of civil servants at the international level.
The predictable effect is ending up with agreements that resemble something the international class of bureaucrats wants more than something the British people need. A good example of this is the ongoing Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, “carried out mostly in secret between the EU and the US.” One of the more controversial elements of the agreement is that it could make the privatisation of the National Health Service (NHS) “irreversible”, according to a leading barrister. The fact that EU negotiators would even consider putting the NHS, the closest thing the English have to a national religion, as the saying goes, on the negotiating table shows how distanced the elites are from the British people.
Indeed, an often-underreported reality is just how isolated international civil servants are from the cares and concerns of average citizens. Whereas politicians at least have to stoop to visiting their constituency once in a fortnight, international civil servants have none of these trappings. They rarely pay taxes in the countries they live in and their children go to international private schools where they are constantly surrounded by their counterparts. They are the real winners of globalisation, for as jurisdiction moves from the national to the international level, power falls into their hands.
And this is not merely an EU phenomenon. For all intents and purposes, the World Health Organisation, a UN agency based in Geneva, Switzerland, could be just as much of a threat to the NHS as TTIP. Most of the time, the UN’s worker bees are so ineffectual that they don’t do much harm beyond the wasted taxpayer funds. In the aftermath of its disastrously inept responses to a series of global health crises, from Ebola to the Zika virus, however, the WHO has taken it upon itself to wrest more power from national health authorities across a variety of areas.
To take a particularly Orwellian example, the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and its ominous Article 5.3 seeks to exclude national health authorities from deciding how to tackle tobacco-related health issues. The argument is that national health authorities talk to the tobacco industry in deciding what course of action to take, a step that compromises the authorities’ ideological purity and zeal against tobacco producers. The answer is, of course, that these authorities talk to the industry because that’s how laws should come about in a democratic society.
The apathy of Britain’s political establishment, the heavily intertwined nature of global politics, and the dilution of sovereignty mean that control will continue to float to unaccountable international institutions whether or not Britain votes for Brexit. The answer therefore becomes that instead of running to the exit, Britain should strive for wide-sweeping reforms that would increase the ultimate legitimacy of such international institutions.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
