Owen Jones should read the small print
Owen Jones is on ‘cracking’ (his term, not mine) polemic form in the Independent, telling us:
Until now, Britain’s anti-austerity movement has been fragmented and lacking in direction. The new winds blowing in from the Continent could change all of that.
Fair enough.
But this bit makes my blood boil*:
Those calling for a “No” in the upcoming Irish referendum on the EU Treaty – slammed as an “Austerity Treaty” by opponents – feel momentum is on their side, too. “The people of France, the people of Greece are against the policies of austerity and it is now the moment for Ireland to add our voice to that,” declared Mary Lou McDonald, a leading anti-Treaty politician.
It makes my blood boil because it gives the completely wrong impression to readers that a “No” to what Owen (justifiably) calls the Austerity Treaty will actually change anything.
It won’t.
This is because this Austerity Treaty – officially the Fiscal Compact – is little more than a show of political strength cooked up by Merkel and Sarkozy as a late desperate attempt to ward off Sarkozy’s defeat.
If, as looks likely, it is not ratified by all the 27 member states, it doesn’t matter one jot, because (in Owen’s own terms), Keynesian fiscal expansion has already been made “illegal”.
Keynesianism was in fact made illegal on 16th November 2011, before Merkel and Sarkozy announced their grand new plan. It was made illegal when the European Parliament signed into law the ‘six pack’ of regulations for the renewed implementation of the original Stability & Growth Pact, put together in the 1990s but broken by Germany itself in the wake of its reunification spending.
All the relevant details are here, and my formal submission to the Party of European Socialists on what the Left should do about it is here.
It’s really, really, not that hard, and I simply can’t understand why the Left commentariat can’t get its head round the fact that the Merkozy Treaty is anything other than a diversion.
Read the bleeding small print, you leftie commentators. It’s what you’re paid to do (or it should be).
* Actually, it doesn’t make my blood boil at all. Owen has written a quite legitimate piece aimed at wider concientization rather than specifics of what we need to do next, but I thought if I pretended to launch a personal attack on him, someone might read what I had to say. Still, I do hope he reads this and writes something based on the details I seek to get across.
That I’d heard of the six-pack at all suggests someone in the leftie commentariat is doing their job.
But barring here and Paul Mason and Andrew Coates left blogs are indeed extraordinarily ignorant and at some profound level actually disinterested in events across the Channel.
There seems to be some inverse law operating here analogous to our general personal inability to relate the time we spend on any financial or life decision to its real magnitude – clearly we can only bear so much reality….