GasGas:
I think you may rather have missed the point, Harry!
It’s the Brits leading the race to the bottom in the EU, and the French and Germans pulling the other way.
Example: France and Germany clamping down on the practice of stationing drivers from low wage economies in their cabs in high wage economies by preventing full-length weekly rests being taken in the cab.
Example: Insisting that drivers working in other EU states are paid at least the NMW for the state they are working in, irrespective of where the company that employs them is based.
The effect of it is still to partially stop bosses inducing mass movements of people to undercut pay. Why then are we still defending the single market principle that capital, labour, and economic products should move freely? That just gives an advantage to the member state with the most right-wing government who succeed in attacking their workers the most.
The tactics you highlight will only protect workers whose jobs are inherently local and must be done nearby, or whose “cultural capital” provides them with an advantage over migrant labour. It will not defend, for example, manufacturing workers whose entire factory can just be moved elsewhere where labour is cheap, and the products imported back in tariff-free.
Limiting the number of workers from the accession countries that were allowed to enter the ‘old’ EU. The UK opened its doors to all and sundry even before the accession countries had joined. It’s not Brussels which is to blame for the influx of cheap workers, it’s something that successive British Governments chose to do all by themselves.
In truth it is both. The Tories have ramped up non-EU immigration instead, but they can be voted out. We can, and do, tariff non-EU imports of goods and services.
The EU single market has provided the excuse that nobody can do anything about these things when they arise from movements within the EU.
It is the single market itself, which has allowed Thatcherite economics here to have an adverse effect on France and Germany - without which, every time the Brits cut pay, they can just put up their tariffs on Britain and deprive us of any exports won on the back of cuts and low-road competition.
The reforms of social security in Germany around 2003 (called the Haartz reforms, iirc), were on the back of the fact that German workers were being forced to compete with low-road competition in Britain and elsewhere.
In general, German and French businesses like things done well, British businesses like things done cheap.
Bosses are the same everywhere. France and Germany simply have stronger working class solidarity, and they too have turned against the single market. The million refugees that Germany took in, were said (even by German left-wingers) to be a ploy to give a dose of discipline to the German working class, whose strength was starting to make German exports less competitive (and therefore the profits of German bosses lower).
And if you think things are bad now, wait until we leave the EU and open up our nation to cheap labour from India, China etc while getting rid of all that EU ‘red tape’ covering ‘workers rights’ and other things that Rees-Mogg and his posh chums regard as ‘tiresome.’
But if you’re accepting these arguments, then why are you favouring the EU single market which is doing exactly the same?
You’re tacitly accepting the argument that all those working class “xenophobes and racists”, worried about their “identity” and “culture” (as the Blairite Remainers argue), actually have a legitimate grievance grounded in economic concerns about unbridled market forces.
It’s quite correct that the radical Tory right be exposed for what they are, but there’s no point defending the status quo with the EU single market in the same breath, because then people may as well take their chances with the radical right.
