Though Cowards Flinch

Martine Aubry, a big player in Francois Hollande’s presidential campaign, gave a newspaper interview yesterday.  It marked a real step forward for the campaign, but I hope it will also embolden the British Labour party.

Central to the interview is Aubry’s attack on Sarkozy’s scapegoating strategy:

Avec son interview au Figaro Magazine, M. Sarkozy commence sa campagne de 2012 comme il a gouverné depuis 2007: en voulant désigner des boucs émissaires - les chômeurs, les étrangers, les homosexuels, les professeurs, la gauche…- qui seraient les responsables de tous les maux du pays. Une nouvelle fois, il cherche à diviser les Français au lieu de les rassembler.

[Trans:  With his interview in Le Figaro, Sarkozy begins his 2012 campaign as he has governed since 2007: by creating scapegoats - the unemployed, foreigners, gays, teachers, the left - whom he would have us believe are responsible for all that is wrong with the country.  Once again, he seeks to divide the French people instead of bringing them together].

Sarkozy’s interview in Le Figaro (a key rightwing newspaper) does indeed reflect a lurch for the dog whistle, as he tries to shore up his vote against Le Pen’s Front National, which may not yet be surging but certainly isn’t retreating as a threat to Sarkozy even making the second round (assuming Le Pen makes it onto the ballot paper with the 500 nominations she needs).  His suggestion that allowing immigrants from outside the EU to vote would result in “des cantines scolaires hallal” (Halal school canteens) all over France, for example, gives us a pretty good indication of the votes he’s pitching for.

The Sarkozy interview is also notable for the quite bizarre idea that if re-elected he might put vocational education (formation professionelle) policy to a full referendum, and when the interviewer then follows up with two questions about whether other matters would need a referendum, it feels as though he’s mocking Sarkozy.  It’s so odd a move that even the Daily Mail has noticed.

Sarkozy may be getting desperate already, so it can be argued that it’s all easy enough for the Hollande campaign team, and that they can well afford (and need) to court the leftwing vote even at the expense of the few that might go missing as a result of their approach.   Even so, it’s good to see  Aubry, on Hollande’s behalf, calling out Sarkozy so directly on his scapegoating strategy. 

From a British left perspective, there is inevitably a sense of regret that the Parliamentary Labour Party lacks the confidence, as yet, to speak out firmly on the right side of the argument.  As I said back in July:

If Labour keeps on trying to scare the shit out people on things like crime and immigration, as a way of getting Labour votes, it’s making a big mistake; it’s really just doing the Tories’ job for them*.

Hopefully, as Hollande maintains his lead and goes on to become President, Miliband and team will learn that constant rightwards triangulation is less effective as a route to electoral success than doing the right thing.

*George Monbiot made much the same point  last week, claiming that only he and Charlie Brooker had realised what was going on (perhaps he’s just not reading the right blogs):

Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”. They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

Aid to India is back in the news.  Following so-called “revelations” in the Telegraph  about the Indian government’s attempts to bring UK aid to an end –  in fact the Financial Times covered the story 18 months ago – the Daily Mail’s headline runs:

A £2bn space programme and Swiss bank accounts: I’ve seen how aid to India is wasted.

The Sue Reid piece below opens, almost inevitably, with a lie:

A picture on the Department for International Development’s website shows a 20-year-old named Meenakshi polishing the new solar panel on the roof of her village shack in Orissa, on the east coast of India.

This gleaming piece of kit to provide electricity has been paid for by you, the British taxpayer.

By the end of this year our Government will have shelled out £1.5billion since 2009 to pay for solar energy and other grand schemes to combat climate change in foreign countries, including India.

Let’s leave aside the fact that most of Orissa, and all of the bit DfID has any engagement with, is many miles from the coastal strip.  The main lie here is that Meenaksi is not actually “polishing the new solar panel on her village shack”. 

Had Reid been inclined to read any of the words around the picture and the associated article, she would know that Meenakshi is not in fact pictured next her own household’s solar panel, but next to one which she installed for the whole of a village, to bring electricity to it for the first time.  She would know that Meenakshi is employed under the State of Orissa’s Tribal Empowerment and Liverlihoods Programme as a solar power engineer delivering and maintaining to install and maintain solar technologies across a range of villages and train other women in the same field, that DfID contributes to her salary (not to the actual panels), and that the whole programme is much more about female empowerment and basic services than it is about climate change, which Reid appears to think shouldn’t happen in “foreign countries” (because carbon dioxide obeys border controls, obviously).

Of course, Reid is happy to portray Meenakshi as the passive recipient of solar panels, whatever the facts, because it fits with her broader narrative about how all aid to India is wasted (she knows this for sure because she’s been to a school classroom in Bhopal).  Reid’s main energies in the piece are then devoted to pointing out that we shouldn’t give aid to India because it has a lot of rich people who drive Rolls Royces and have Swiss bank accounts, and because India has a space programme.

Whether we like it or not, though, Reid is tapping into a powerful narrative.  In particular, the mantra that the poor in India don’t need aid because the Indian government has a space programme has become lodged in many people’s minds, trotted out regularly by Newsnight’s rightwingers.   In June it was Hitchens, and last week it was the turn of the TPA representative to lap up the applause for her extraordinary insights.

The big question for those on the Left who are interested in the 350 million or so Indian people who live far below the poverty line (that’s around 5% of the world’s population) is how we counter this narrative most effectively.  That question seems particularly pertinent today, as officials negotiate in Delhi over the final ”political settlement” details of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which will consign many of this 350 million to an even more uncertain future.

Increasingly though, I think Reid, Hitchens et al’s  narrative cannot be countered effectively simply by pointing out – as Development Minister Andrew Mitchell has done – that there are still poor people in India.  Most people living in Britain today have no real conception of poverty and hunger in the third world.  Given this, the consistent messaging from the right, that the Indian (or any other government) could look after their populations properly if only they pulled their finger out, dovetailed with the old “charity begins at home” message ideally suited to time of self-imposed austerity, means that simple appeals to humanity are unlikely to have any great effect any time soon.

What is needed instead is the development of a new, distinctively leftwing narrative about why the Indian government in Delhi is not in any kind of position to assist properly in the development of its massive rural hinterland (even if it wanted to be), and how the only way 5% of the world’s population can be properly assisted in the long-term is through a total re-evaluation of why aid is still needed and how it can be re-engineered.

This means going back to some starting principles about why India is where it is now.

The crucial thing to recognise is that India is not a complete state, at least in the European liberal democratic sense of the term, and that for the right (or anyone) to base their argument on assumptions about state capacity is entirely invalid.

At one level, this means simply that the central government of India is, in terms of domestic policy implementation, only a relatively small player.  Most of the responsibility, and some of the funding, lies with the 33 fairly autonomous states - to a much greater extent than in, say, the Lander in Germany.  Thus, while the right-wing papers talk of British aid as though it is delivered in a big brown envelope to a corrupt high official in a plus New Delhi office, the reality is that, national level permissions aside, it is agreed at state level through partnership agreements.

Sensibly, DfiD now provides its aid only to the poorest 8 of the 28 Indian states, mostly to the East and North, and in which 65% of India’s poor live.

As the Southern and Western states do grow their way out of poverty (though inequalities remain), these poorest 8 states are being steadily left behind, not least because the central state has dramatically withdrawn its financial support since 2005/06, when the Twelfth Finance Commission recommended a process of “disintermediation”, a euphemism for cutting states adrift from the Centre and leaving them at the mercy of the markets.   This means that all States are now borrowing at rates over 9% (seen as unsustainable in the Eurozone) and this, combined with reductions in States’ income from the National Small Savings Fund, means that the poorer States, with their lower tax base growth projections, face a very uncertain fiscal future, especially from 2017/18 as many of the recent loans come to maturity*.

In this macroeconomic context it surely makes sense, for those who support the idea of 350 million people having more secure livelihoods, to promote their position by making as clear as possible that aid is not in fact going to the Indian State at all, but to areas which are effectively, and increasingly as a result of central policy, “countries within a country”.

Yet this is only the first part of the “incomplete state” narrative that the left needs to develop in defence of the 350 million.

The more important element comes when we consider not just the way in which the Centre is steadily withdrawing  from its responsibilities towards it States, but also the fundamental incompleteness of government at the level below the State.  It is this incompleteness which requires such a thorough evaluation of what development aid can and should be for.

In many rural areas of India, government administration still exists on paper only, and in the minds of the officials at State headquarters.  It doesn’t administer anything in the real sense. A tax economy, and the administrative capacity that goes with that, does not exist in areas where most people live subsistence farming lives.  Law and order as we recognise it in western liberal states, and as it is experienced in more urban areas of India, has not reached these parts.

That is, the process of state formation that took place between the 16th and 18th century in Europe, and earlier in Imperial China, has simply not taken place in India. 

In Europe, as historian and sociologist Charles Tilly has demonstrated, the process of state formation was a long and complex one, in which governments moved from a position of reliance on local “magnates” for their indirect rule – under which huge discretion was granted at local level for fear that these same magnates might turn swiftly from supporters to rebels – towards:

two expensive but effective strategies: (a) extending their officialdom to the local community and (b) encouraging the creation of police forces that were subordinate to the government rather than individual patrons, distinct from war-making forces, and therefore less useful as the tools of dissident magnates (p.175).

Ultimately, with the means of violence firmly under their control, states could become open to the rise of the kind of civil institutions we enjoy in western liberal democracies today.

In India, this necessarily long process of state formation did not take place, because colonial rule happened instead (again, cf. China).   As Tilly notes:

Whether forced or voluntary, bloody or peaceful, decolonization simply completed that process by which existing states leagued to create new ones.

The extension of the Europe-based state-making process to the rest of the world, however, did not result in the creation of states in the strict European image. Broadly speaking, internal struggles such as the checking of great regional lords and the imposition of taxation on peasant villages produced important organizational features of European states: the relative subordination of military power to civilian control, the extensive bureaucracy of fiscal surveillance, the representation of wronged interests via petition and parliament. 

On the whole, states elsewhere developed differently. The most telling feature of that difference appears in military organization. European states built up their military apparatuses through sustained struggles with their subject populations and by means of selective extension of protection to different classes within those populations. The agreements on protection constrained the rulers themselves, making them vulnerable to courts, to assemblies, to withdrawals of credit, services, and expertise. To a larger degree, states that have come into being recently through decolonization or through reallocations of territory by dominant states have acquired their military organization from outside, without the same internal forging of mutual constraints between rulers and ruled (p. 185-6). 

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that state legitimacy should continue to be actively contested.   The ongoing Maoist insurgency may rarely reach the Western media, but it continues to be very real, and is being conducted in precisely those places – the remote, mountainous and forested areas - where State government is weakest.    In these areas, the state does not necessarily exist as prima facie legitimate power, and the Maoists are often in a position to impose their own legitimacy – effectively their own alternative state form.

It is strangely symbolic that the central state’s latest attempt to deal with it involves the purchase of a drone to track Maoist (Naxalite) movements – it is almost an admission that the state can not reach these places by conventional state means, and must resort to copying the air war tactics of the US, as though the areas concerned really are foreign countries.

This may all seem a strange digression, but if the 350 million people now at risk of total abandonment by whatever exists of the “official” Indian state are to be aided properly, it is important to recognise exactly why simply banging on – as the right do – about the Indian elite’s responsibilities will not get us anywhere; the Indian state cannot reach out to the poorest, even if it wanted to.

Moreover, it increasingly looks as though the Indian elite is no longer interested in a total state, in which everyone – rich or poor - has a place.  As noted, the centre has already withdrawn its borrowing powers from State governments, but there are clearer signs than that.  Take the EU-India Free Trade Agreement, where the Indian negotiating team’s biggest “aggressive interest” is to secure Mode 4 concessions from the EU, allowing India’s middle class to work within the EU for Indian multinationals.   To secure this, they are quite happy to grant tariff removal on agricultural products which will almost certainly lead to the loss of livelihoods for millions of their semi-citizens on the margins.

Taken together, the effective abandonment of whole-state formation by the Indian elite which controls the central state, and the evolution of  impoverished “countries within a country”, demands, as noted, not simply a narrative in defence of current aid provision, but a total re-evaluation by the left of what aid should be about. 

This is not easy. On the one hand, it might be argued DfID’s current half-focus on working with State governments to allow them to “state-form”, in a way which might have happened had colonial rule not intervened, might be the best practical way forward. 

On the other hand, Tilly’s work suggests that simply to support the formation of states which have not gone through an evolutionary pattern of settlement between those with the means of violence at their disposal, such that civil institutions develop safely, may end up being counterproductive.  It may simply lend false, short-term legitimacy to governments unfit and unable to govern without resorting to violence and exploitation.

Perhaps the most we can say is that this is a debate the left needs to have urgently, and in a spirit of solidarity with the 350 million Indians who are effectively “stateless”, and of course with all those others around the world whose interests have been similarly damaged -first by colonialism, then neoliberalism, and now by the new post-neoliberal phase, in which they have become, in the eyes of a flourishing elite, simply expendable.  Once, the poor were seen as possible resources if only development could happen effectively.  Now, they’re just not worth the effort.

And this new expendability of the poor , it seems to me, is the key rationale for a new international solidarity, or in this case solidarity between the British left and the Indian poor (and the organisations that represent them). 

For this is a truly global phenomenon. In Britain, as I’ve set out, we are now ruled by an elite whose high politics-low politics operational code actively requires that those on the margins should simply be disregarded as far as possible, with inconvenient matters such as the NHS and education delegated to efficient (in their own terms) free-marketeers.  In all Western states, the ideological clock is being turned back to a time when liberalism carried within it its own exclusionary logic (see Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History for the details**). 

In India and other post-colonial creations (for the very idea of India as a state is a British imperial one), that process is easier because there is, by and large, no complete state to “uncomplete”, but the interests of a new global elite  – the 1% – create the same driving force.

The conditions are ripe for new stage of international solidarity.  One route to its development is for a rational defence of aid – to India and elsewhere – in the face of the right-wing thugs who currently dominate the media debate with their simplistic warblings about India’s space programme.  In Britain, the Conservatives have conspicuously failed to counter the Daily Mail’s aid bullshit, despite the faintly laudable efforts of Andrew Mitchell and others to defend the status quo, so Labour and the left must take up the challenge.

* The 11 “special category states” of India, primarily in the far North and East and defined as such largely because of their remoteness and geopolitical importance (bordering Pakistan and China) are currently benefiting from lower rates because a much larger amount of their State income comes from the Centre and the markets appear to be pricing in this “stability”.  This suggests that the poorer states in the heart of India may in time face even higher rates as they become increasingly decoupled from the rest of the more prosperous Indian economy.

** I cover the development of this New Liberalism in more detail in my forthcoming book, The Sixth Tradition.

When Cameron vetoed the ‘Merkozy treaty’ in early December, it meant that the deal could not be signed off as a variation to the Lisbon Treaty, and that any deal would need to be an intergovernmental treaty of the 26 participating countries.  As such, any deal is separate from the workings of the European Union.

This threw into doubt whether the 26 countries signing up to the Merkozy “non-EU” treaty could legitimately use the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to police the deal and punish states which failed to abide by the proposed fiscal rules.  At the time, Cameron threatened legal action to stop the other 26 governments trying to use the ECJ in this way.

Unsurprisingly, now that he’s gained cheap political brownie points from using the veto, Cameron’s not bothered about pursuing this threat.  Diplomats are calling it a “heat of the moment” thing, and it’s being dropped as quietly as possible. 

This does, however, raise an intriguing possibility.

If the 26 member states now do go ahead uninterrupted and sign offtheir economically absurd pact, and include within it provision for ECJ ruling authority, it sets an important precedent for any set of European countries to come together, bash out a deal, and then call on the ECJ to do its thing.

Logically and legally, what could stop Francois Hollande, coming together with other like-minded European countries to sign a pact running entirely counter to the Merkozy pact, and asking the ECJ to be the binding arbiter on that too? 

After all, Hollande has already set out a clear manifesto promise around the need for a new ‘pact’.

Je proposerai à nos partenaires un pacte de responsabilité,de gouvernance et de croissance [growth] pour sortir de la crise et de la spirale d’austérité qui l’aggrave. Je renégocierai le traité européen issu de l’accord du 9 décembre 2011 en privilégiant la croissance et l’emploi, et en réorientant le rôle de la Banque centrale européenne dans cette direction. Je proposerai de créer des euro-obligations [Euro-bonds]. Je défendrai une association pleine et entière des parlements nationaux et européen à ces décisions. Cinquante ans après le traité de l’Élysée, je proposerai à notre partenaire l’élaboration d’ un nouveau traité franco-allemand.

Why would this new pact have any less legal weight than the one now being rushed through before Sarkozy is sent packing?

The  like-minded countries Hollande needs for such a scheme might include Spain, whose (rightwing) government is now calling for a ‘new realism’ about how to manage the economic crisis in light of its descent into economic chaos, and Greece,  fuming at Germany’s proposal to make its government subservient to an EU budget commissioner. 

It might, in 2015, also include Britain (or England/Wales/NI & Scotland) if Labour were minded to push for an entirely new approach to the European economy, something Ed Miliband at least hinted at in Davos this week (though clearly ideas on what to do are not yet formed).  If Labour has its wits about it, it should see jumping on the Hollande bandwagon, in a common drive to reorientate the EU towards the welfare of its people, as a very attractive proposition.

The alternative ‘Holliband’ pact might include shared commitments to investment in jobs, with targets for the reduction in unemployment levels, as a mirror to the stupid fiscal targets advocated by Merkozy, and call on the sanction of the ECJ for countries that failed to meet the employment and other needs of its citizens.

Clearly, two diametrically opposed  intergovernmental pacts, formed outside the EU but calling on the same EU institution for their operative legitimacy, would create a legal and institutional crisis at the heart of the EU that Cameron could never possibly have dreamed of when he stook his foot in his mouth in December, but that might well be better than simply allowing the current rightwingers in France and Germany to carry through their plans for the outlawing of  socialist econmics in Europe.

And what better payback for Cameron’s arrogant but wholly ignorant politicking with the EU than for him, in time, to see it used as the opening for a few Left front for a new Left ascent in Europe.

Guest post by John McDonnell MP

Yesterday, in a parliamentary debate on UK-India trade, I found myself in the somewhat unusual position of quoting Peter Mandelson approvingly.  Writing for the FT in advance of the major IPPR report on globalization (published today), Mandelson argues:

[L]iberalisation of trade and financial markets requires a careful parallel process of building domestic institutions and capabilities. It is not the absolute level of openness in the global market that matters for growth so much as the fact that it is governed by shared rules and sustainable practice.

I agree. 

Sadly, when it comes to the EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), negotiations on which began when Mandelson was still EU Trade Commissioner, the reality falls a long way short of his aspiration. 

As a result, many millions of Indians stand to be driven towards poverty and hunger.

The sudden removal of import tariffs, especially on dairy and poultry products, and the consequent flood of imports from the EU, is likely to have a devastating effect on millions of marginal and landless farmers, who will suddenly find their markets swamped by produce – notably skimmed milk and poultry meat deemed unsuitable for the European market – which remains heavily subsidized through the European Common Agricultural Policy. 

The European Commission’s own Sustainability Impact Assessment calculates that the FTA may be of benefit “in the long run to those “who are able to participate in evolving supply chains“, but it acknowledges that  “integrating small farmers and producers into the supply chains is a daunting task which is only possible through domestic policy measures only.”  A subsequent Right-to-Food Impact Assessment, conducted in 2011 by NGOs, came to very worrying conclusions about the impact of the FTA on the Indian poor, some 27% of whom already live with chronic hunger.  

Similarly, if multi-brand retailing is suddenly and without safeguard opened up to EU retailers such as Carrefour, Metro and Tesco, 1.8 million jobs may be created, but at the cost of up to 5.7 million people working as street vendors.

In other words, Peter Mandelson’s condition for good globalisation – well-developed  “domestic institutions and capabilities” which allow the poor to engage on something like equal terms – has clearly not yet been met in the case of this EU-India FTA.

This is precisely why the European Parliament resolved, in December 2010, that the European Commission should carry out impact studies on human rights in addition to those on sustainable development.  To date, the Commission has completely failed to act on this resolution, even though the FTA is due to be agreed and ratified by member states during 2012.

The European Commission currently appears unwilling to listen to the views of its own Parliament, so it is up to the UK Parliament to ensure that the human right are not trampled on in the rush towards global trade. 

I reiterated this call for a full Human Rights Impact Assessment in parliament yesterday, in support of a broad range of EU and Indian civil society organisations (including Traidcraft), who are doing the same.

In his FT piece Peter Mandelson goes on to say:

Globalisation is a means, not an end. This way of seeing things challenges equally the political right and left. The anti-globalisers of the left have always underplayed or ignored what is good about the expanding reach of global markets by focusing on the (legitimate) grievances of the short-term losers. The right has too often shrugged off the negative social effects of global markets as unavoidable or even a price worth paying for the benefits of ‘liquidity’.

Mandelson’s analysis may be astute, but it skirts round the brutal reality – that these “short term losers” are hundreds of millions of men, women and children going hungry for want of a fair free trade policy, and for whom being a “short term loser” can be the difference between life and death.  These people are as much a part of the 99% as those now occupyingSt Paul’s.

Time is short.  I hope we can build a coalition for the defence of the Indian 99%.

John McDonnell is the Member of Parliament for Hayes & Harlington. You can read his full speech in the UK-India Trade debate here.  If you would like to help, please ask your MP to sign John’s Early Day Motion 2645, calling for a Human Rights Impact Assessment on the EU-India Free Trade Agreement.

(This article is cross-posted from Liberal Conspiracy, though we’ve got a slightly fuller version.)

In this post, I set out the risk to the livelihoods of millions of the Indian poor from the proposed EU-India Free Trade Agreement.  Below is my letter to my North West MEPs (excluding Nick Griffin), seeking their support and action for an ex-ante Human Rights Impact Assessment before a potentially disastrous agreement is signed.

I hope some readers might copy and paste (or adapt) and send on to their MEPs. I’ll also be approaching friendly MPs for their informal support.

Dear [name of MEP]

EU-India Free Trade Agreement

I am a constituent of yours, resident in Bickerstaffe, Lancashire.

As you will know, the European Commission is currently in the final stages of negotiation with the Indian government on the EU-India Free Trade Agreement.  The Agreement could be in place as soon as February 2012.

You will also be aware that many Civil Society Organisations in India, along with their international non-governmental partners, have grave reservations about the likely impact of the Free Trade Agreement on the poorest in India.

The most complete assessment of the likely impact is contained in a new report, A Right-to-Food Impact Assessment of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement published jointly by a group of Indian and European non-governmental organisations.  It is available online at http://www.boell.de/downloads/2011-12-ecofair_rfia.pdf

The report provides an assessment of the likely or possible impacts on the food security of the population most at risk (those suffering from chronic hunger already make up 29% of the Indian population), and is based both on detailed desk research and field research in areas and communities most at risk.

While budget constraints on this research meant that only a few areas currently under negotiation for the FTA could be assessed, the findings are striking.  

The researchers find that in terms of the poultry products, for example, there is a ‘toxic’ combination of the rural poor’s major dependence on poultry as a means of livelihood, the rural poor’s lack of access to producer technologies and efficiencies, consumer trends around poultryconsumption, and the support offered to European farmers through the Direct Payments system of the Common Agricultural Policy.  All these factors combined mean that the tariff reductions proposed under the FTA are likely to have a very deleteirous effect on millions of people in India, and make existing chronic hunger problems even worse.

Given this context, it is appropriate to take note (as the research report does) of the duties of the European Union and its member states, set out both in international law and in the Lisbon Treaty in respect of human rights, including the right to food.

The human right to adequate food forms part of Article 25 of the General Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of the United Nations (UN), which became effective in 1976. All EU Member States and India have ratified this Covenant and hence obliged themselves to realise the right to adequate food in all policy areas, including trade policy.

When it comes to the EU, ‘respect for human rights’ is one of the fundamental values ‘on which the Union is founded’ (Article 2).  Article 3.5 also elevates these values, making them the basis for the Union’s ‘relations with the wider world’. This is reaffirmed in Article 21, which states explicitly:

‘The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided by the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity, and respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law.’

Article 21 expressly obliges the EU to ensure ‘consistency’ with these principles in all areas of its external action. Moreover, concerning the common commercial policy of the EU, Article 207 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union refers directly to these values and principles of the EU, and clearly stipulates: ‘The common commercial policy shall be conducted in the context and principles of the objectives of the Union’s external action’.

This is the background to my principle request to you.

The research report referenced above makes a key recommendation. This is that the European Commission should take seriously its human rights obligations, and commission a full ex-ante Human Right Impact Assessment of the proposed Free Trade Agreement, before it goes forward for ratification, with changes made as appropriate in light of that Impact Assessment. The report also calls for a post hoc report on any FTA implementation after a specified period.

This seems to me like a sensible approach, which potentially fosters free trade but provides appropriate safeguards.   Such calls for a full impact assessment have, however, not been well received by the Commission as yet, and I therefore turn to you, as my elected representative in Europe, for support. 

When you have had time to digest both this letter and the report, perhaps you would respond with answers to the following questions:

1) Do you agree that a full Human Rights Impact Assessment on the EU-India Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation is appropriate?

2) If not, why not, given the EU’s (and by extension your legal obligations in this respect?

3) If you do agree, what steps do you propose to take to seek to ensure that a Human Rights Impact Assessment is commissioned by the European Commission?

4) How will you measure any success you have in your efforts?

5) How will you keep me, and other interested parties (including the NGOs who undertook the research report I have referred to) informed of your progress?

I will look forward to your answers.

Let me stress that I have no problem, in principle, with the development of global free trade.  However, any free trade agreement must ensure that what is agreed is fair to all partners not just in terms of the reduction of formal tariff barriers but also as regards the need to address pre-existing inequalities between trade partners.  In this case these inequalities include the fact that, technologically, Indian producers are often far behind the cost-efficiencies of European producers, through no fault of their own, and also that Europe, through its Common Agricultural Policy, is able to subsidise its agriculture at a point before tariffs come into play.

Most importantly, though, any free trade agreement must ensure that the human rights of the populations concerned are protected, as set out under international and European law.  In the case of the EU-India FTA, there is a risk that, were it to come into force as currently proposed, the EU, and its MEPs, would be failing to abide by these laws.  I am sure y0u do not want to be in this position.

 I think, given the relative urgency and importance of the situation, a response with 14 days will be appropriate.

Best regards

Yours sincerely

Paul Cotterill

There’s been little coverage in the UK blogosphere of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), due to be signed off in February 2012 after 5 years of negotiations.  What coverage there has been has tended to focus on the possible impacts of the WTO Mode 4, built into the FTA at the demand of the Indian government, will have on the terms and conditions of British workers.  This is a relatively insignificant part of the whole.

Economist Left Outside (LO) does provide a decent overview of some of the real issues:

Will the trade help poor countries restructure their economies in productive ways or will it retard or reverse that process.

I’m tempted to believe it will with respect to India’s already well established services sectors. Demand from Europe should swell employment in the relatively high productivity service sector, which is what we want to see.

Even LO, though, expresses doubts:

However, investment in agriculture will probably become depressed in India as competition from subsidised European crops depresses returns in this sector. This could increase low-investment subsistence farming and decrease large scale efficient farming methods.

Sadly, it’s an awful lot worse than that.  Unless the European left acts quickly in concert with Indian colleagues, there is a very real risk that the Trade Agreement now in its final stages of negotiation will consign millions of already impoverished Indian villagers to further destitution.

An important new document, A Right-to-Food Impact Assessment of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement by an NGO Consortium, finds that the sudden arrival of subsidised food imports from an EU desperate to increase cheap exports in the light of falling domestic demand is likely to have devastating consequences on local producers, and on their ability to feed themselves and their families.  This is in a country where 224 million (26.9%) of the population already live with chronic hunger.

Because of budget constraints, the report focuses on two agricultural areas, milk and poultry. In both areas, it provides convincing evidence that small-scale farmers will be hit hardest by cheap imports and increased price volatility in circumstances that are already heavily debt laden.   When it comes to poultry meat, we find that domestic producers (amongst them 50% of all landless and marginal farmers) will suffer because chicken legs that would otherwise head for waste disposal, because Europeans prefer fillet, will instead be heading for urban India.

Perversely, the impact will be greater because, while India looks like it will agree to the abolition (over the next seven years) of import tariffs, the Common Agricultural Policy Direct Subsidy arrangements will remain untouched.

Even more perversely, these new developments come at a time when India is being urged to buy European sovereign debt to keep the world economy going.   Effectively therefore, the Indian government appears to be on the verge of agreeing to subsidise the EU’s continued support for its farmers, so that EU farmers can then export food to India, which in turn will mean that poor Indians do not get to eat.

The Impact Assessment report is long and detailed, but is well worth reading.  Of particular interest is the forensic scrutiny of the EU’s own formal obligations towards the people of India, which are currently being ignored. 

[The Lisbon] Treaty defines ‘respect for human rights’ as one of the fundamental values ‘on which the Union is founded’ (Article 2). Article 3.5 also elevates these values, making them the basis for the Union’s ‘relations with the wider world’. This is reaffirmed in Article 21, which states explicitly:

‘The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided by the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity, and respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law.’

Article 21 expressly obliges the EU to ensure ‘consistency’ with these principles in all areas of its external action. Moreover, concerning the common commercial policy of the EU, Article 207 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union refersdirectly to these values and principles of the EU, and clearly stipulates: ‘The common commercial policy shall be conducted in the context and principles of the objectives of the Union’s external action’.

The Impact Assessment report calls on the EU to respect these obligations by carrying out its own, more extensive, ex-ante Right-to-Food Impact Assessment before the FTA is signed, followed by a further post-hoc assessment after a specified period. 

To date this call has fallen on deaf ears.  I’ll be writing to my MP/MEPs about the matter, urging them to do what they can to ensure that millions of rural Indians do not simply become the latest collateral damage of the latest drive to globalisation in the interest of those with the global power.

Sunny thinks Ed Miliband should now:

[A]sk Cameron if he will call for a referendum on the EU itself to clarify whether the UK stays in or out.

He says this because:

[C]alling for a referendum would expose the fact Cameron doesn’t want to be out of the EU despite the crumbs he has thrown at his Eurosceptic MPs. It would put him in a bind and expose the farcical situation that Britain is in now.

I disagree with Sunny on this one. 

I think raising the possibility of a referendum will make Miliband looks like he’s playing silly party politics. 

Cameron will get all the favourable media exposure he wants over the next week or two on this, as he struts around, doing the British Bulldog.  That image is all over the rightwing press this morning.  By comparison, Miliband asking about a referendum will look like an annoying little chiwawa snapping petulantly at Cameron’s heels.

Instead, Miliband should focus on what’s important.  Strategy, not tactics.

Miliband should ignore Cameron as far as possible, other than to point out how much he has sided with the fund managers, and how very typical that is.  The main message should be that Cameron is now an irrelevance.

Miliband should get on with setting out clearly how the removal of the fiscal stimulus option, under the proposed Treaty, would be an unmitigated economic disaster both for the Eurozone and for the UK as a key trader.   He should be pointing out that Germany’s economy has remained fairly strong till now precisely because:

a) Back in 2002, Germany broke the same deficit rules now proposed under the Treaty, but then set out under the European Growth & Stability Pact, using its political weight to have the rules ignored;

b) Germany, now calling for fiscal restraint, has itself used a bigger stimulus  to keep its economy going than any other European country since the 2008 crash.

Miliband should be in Europe every other weekend, talking to Centre-Left and Leftwing leaders about developing coherent alternatives to the proposed Treaty, following on the lead given by François Hollande.  He should not be afraid to go for Merkel’s jugular, calling her out on her hypocrisy.  The message he should try to get over is that Merkel is the important player, not Cameron.

He should be using his Labour MEPs to the maximum to ram home the message that Labour is interested in finding workable, long-term solutions to the European crisis. This will send a strong message, to LibDems in particular, about where Cameron’s tactics have got us, without ever having to mention Cameron, other than as an irrelevance.

Finally, he should recognise that if Francois Hollande does become French President in May, the whole political landscape in Europe will change, and that there is a chance the disastrous Treaty could effectively be stopped in its tracks (even if it has been signed, implementing it is another matter).

He should be talking to the Labour NEC this week about how the Labour party can get behind the Socialist Campaign in France, getting resources and volunteers over in numbers; this campaign is more important now than the Obama campaign in 2008, which saw lots of willing young Labourites lend a hand.

It’s time for Miliband to stop shouting from the sidelines, brush Cameron aside, and get on with the real business of social democratic politics in Europe.

Owen Jones has a short piece up at the New Stateman in which he says, quite rightly, that the focus of the British Left should be less on the domestic politics of the Euro summit, and more on the way the new 26 county intergovernmental agreement effectively bans leftwing economics (though I don’t care much for the way the young whippersnapper instructs me to pay attention to what I’ve already been paying attention to for some time now).

In the piece Owen says:

François Hollande — the Socialist candidate for the French Presidency — has already spoken out against a treaty cooked up by Europe’s overwhelmingly right-of-centre governments. If we’re going to listen to European leaders, Hollande is a sounder bet than avowed right-wingers like Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

The link he provides, though, is a few weeks old and doesn’t really mention Hollande speaking out. 

Given ths, and given a tweet request, I thought I might usefully translate something Hollande did say a few days ago, and which I posted here last week. 

I think the piece, from a French paper interview, is as good a reflection as there is at the moment of where Hollande is coming from – basically a straight down the line Keynesianism with a call for a European New Deal.  As I’ve argued, it’s an approach Miliband would do very well to copy in the next few weeks.

Of course, Hollande’s position is vital, as he takes on Sakrozy for the Presidency in May,and it is not out of the question that support now from Miliband, and other European leaders, could galvanise a real leftwing alternative to the Merkozy plan and stop the Austerity Treaty in its tracks. Here’s hoping.

Here’s the important bit translated (original below). I’m not a professional translator so apologies if it’s a bit clunky – I wanted to do it more or less word for word rather than risk misrepresenting:

We can’t wait.  I propose a responsibility pact, for governance and growth.  Today, if we’re to mount a struggle against the crisis of the Euro, we don’t do it by announcing a machinery aimed at convincing the markets and citizens.

Confidence can return quickly, and speculation can be conquered, if the European Central Bank relaxes its interventions, by statute, if the European Financial Stability Fund is transformed into a bank which can come to the aid of the most vulnerable country, if the European Investment bank engage in a policy of large scale public works, and if the European budget gains new resources, through the establishment of a Financial Transaction Tax and the launch of Eurobonds.

Nous ne pouvons pas attendre. Je propose un pacte de responsabilité, de gouvernance et de croissance. Aujourd’hui, pour lutter contre la crise de l’euro, ce n’est pas l’annonce d’une machinerie qui convaincra les marchés et les citoyens.

La confiance peut revenir rapidement et la spéculation être vaincue si la Banque centrale européenne même dans ses statuts actuels assouplit ses interventions, si le Fonds européen de stabilité financière se transforme en banque pour venir en soutien des pays les plus vulnérables, si la banque européenne d’investissement engage une politique de grands travaux et si le budget européen dispose des ressources nouvelles en mettant en place la taxe sur les transactions financières et en lançant les euro-obligations.

On Friday I called on Ed Miliband to wake up to the European crisis and promote a socialist alternative with, amongst others, French Presidential candidate François Hollande:

If Labour wants to gain any credibility on Europe, and any kind of stable economy to inherit in 2015, Miliband and Balls need to stop shouting from the sidelines about how the Tories are shouting from the sidelines…..

Instead, they should be catching the last flight out to Brussels tonight to work through the weekend with the Party of European Socialists, and whoever they can drag in (Francois Hollande would be a good start) on a joint anti-Merkel statement ready for Monday’s meltdown signs.   

This statement should be unequivocal in its short-term support for a Eurobond backed by all members, riding roughshod over Germany’s (historically) understandable but now irrelevant fears of inflation. 

The statement should also be unequivocal in its support for a revision of the Lisbon Treaty – not to move it further towards the disastrous neoliberal entrenchment Merkel’s domestic political needs demand of her, but further away from it.

Miliband did nothing of course (and his spokesperson Emily Thornberry was simply hopeless on Radio 5 this evening) but Francois Hollande has at least spoken out:

Nous ne pouvons pas attendre. Je propose un pacte de responsabilité, de gouvernance et de croissance. Aujourd’hui, pour lutter contre la crise de l’euro, ce n’est pas l’annonce d’une machinerie qui convaincra les marchés et les citoyens.

La confiance peut revenir rapidement et la spéculation être vaincue si la Banque centrale européenne même dans ses statuts actuels assouplit ses interventions, si le Fonds européen de stabilité financière se transforme en banque pour venir en soutien des pays les plus vulnérables, si la banque européenne d’investissement engage une politique de grands travaux et si le budget européen dispose des ressources nouvelles en mettant en place la taxe sur les transactions financières et en lançant les euro-obligations.

The prospect of immediate meltdown has receded slightly during the weekend, but the threat of the Merkel-driven Treaty of Austerity, designed to temporarily satisfy ultimately insatiable markets by impoverishing millions of Europeans (and by proxy much of the rest of the world), has grown even greater.

Francois Hollande, at least, understands what’s happening, and how serious it is. 

Ed Miliband must wake up, smell le café, and follow Hollande’s lead.

Cameron’s been talking about the need for Commonwealth countries to promote human rights. 

Inevitably, he’s asked about Sri Lanka’s record. Cameron tells us sagely that we need a

proper, independent exercise to look into the whole issue of what happened, and whether there were war crimes, and who is responsible.

And that would be something more independent than the 214 page UN Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka, published in March 2011? 

Of course the Sri Lankan government doesn’t like the report, but they wouldn’t would they?  Not when the report says thing like this (p. ii/iii):

The Government shelled on a large scale in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, even after indicating that it would cease the use of heavy weapons. It shelled the United Nations hub, food distribution lines and near the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ships that were coming to pick up the wounded and their relatives from the beaches. It shelled in spite of its knowledge of the impact, provided by its own intelligence systems and through notification by the United Nations, the ICRC and others. Most civilian casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by Government shelling.

The Government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, some of them were hit repeatedly, despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government. The Government also systematically deprived people in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid, in the form of food and medical supplies, particularly surgical supplies, adding to their suffering. To this end, it purposely underestimated the number of civilians who remained in the conflict zone. Tens of thousands lost their lives from January to May 2009, many of whom died anonymously in the carnage of the final few days.

The Government subjected victims and survivours of the conflict to further deprivation and suffering after they left the conflict zone. Screening for suspected LTTE took place without any transparency or external scrutiny. Some of those who were separated were summarily executed, and some of the women may have been raped. Others disappeared, as recounted by their wives and relatives during the LLRC hearings. All IDPs were detained in closed camps. Massive overcrowding led to terrible conditions, breaching the basic social and economic rights of the detainees, and many lives were lost unnecessarily. Some persons in the camps were interrogated and subjected to torture. Suspected LTTE cadres were removed to other facilities, with no contact with the outside world, under conditions that made them vulnerable of further abuses.

That is not to say that the Tamil Tigers did not also carry out war crimes, but the case against the government could not really be clearer.

An ‘independent investigation’ is not needed.  What is needed is leadership from people like Cameron.

Of course Sri Lanka is not an oil-producer.

(See also Channel 4′s ‘Killing Fields’ documentary.)