 Good evening everyone. We would like to start and people can just join in as they come along. I would like to welcome you all on behalf of the Source Open Economics Forum, especially our two speakers who will be introduced to you by Christina in a minute. I would just very briefly want to take this opportunity to introduce you to who we are, meaning our society. In general we are concerned with a heterodox and pluralistic approach to economics. This means challenging orthodox thinking for example and we have been involved in two main campaigns throughout the UK. One is rethinking economics, which is basically a campaign striving for more pluralism in economics curriculum in universities. And the second is democratise economics, which aims at making economics more accessible to non-economists. We believe it is essential for democracy that also non-economists can get involved in the public discourse concerning economics topics. And yeah, that's basically all from me. I hope we have a good event and a good discussion afterwards. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the Open Economics Forum's event. I'm delighted to be hosting this talk today on the fundamental character of the EU and ultimately its desirability. We will be covering issues about these basic rules that govern the EU, who makes these rules up, who do the EU rules apply to and when, and in whose benefit do these fundamental rules change. We hope to cover a broad range of issues. Our two speakers have been asked to answer a series of questions, which I'll just repeat in just a moment. So what we are trying to ask is how do we interpret these different dilemmas between democracy and technocracy, which we see at the heart of Europe? And how do we interpret these violations that we see of various socio-economic rights also at the heart and at the fringes in particular? What is this Europe really like that in words says you can vote for whoever you like, but in practice tells those in power exactly what they have to do. So is this common currency compatible with democracy? Is this common currency compatible with any other policy program except austerity? So to help us navigate these broad, complex issues, we are truly delighted to have these two distinguished speakers with us. Martin Sanfu has been writing for The Financial Times since 2009, joining as the Newspapers Economics leader-writer. He currently writes the free lunch daily global briefing. His editorial responsibilities cover macro, the Euro crisis, financial regulatory reform. So all topics which are very important for our discussion today. His previous experience includes working and studying at top academic institutions, including Oxford, Harvard, Columbia and Pennsylvania's Wharton School. And he's worked as an advisor for governments and NGOs on economic resource, natural resource management. And he's the lead commentator on the EU crisis. We're delighted to have him with him. He's got a recent book called Europe's Orphan, The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt. So welcome Martin, thank you for being here. And we're also delighted to have John Hillary with us today. John Hillary is the Executive Director of War and Want, a large NGO based here in the UK. You might be aware of it. He's worked in global justice movement for the past 25 years and published widely on issues of globalization, trade policy and workers' rights. The recent report on the Transatlantic Trade, his recent report on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, also known as TTIP, has been published now in over 12 European languages and supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. You might remember John was last at SOAS actually to talk about the TTIP agreement in the autumn term. In 2013 John was appointed honorary professor of politics and international relations at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include The Poverty of Capitalism, Economic Meltdown and The Struggle for What Comes Next, published by Pluto Press. And a second title includes Free Trade and Transnational Labour. Recent publications, again very close to the global broad issues that we're going to be covering today. So big thank you to both of the speakers for being here to help us go through these issues. So the three sort of orientating questions that we wanted to focus on for today's topic were is the EU suffering from a democratic deficit? And the most important one, are democratic concessions a necessary component of economic integration? And to bring it back home, to bring it back to domestic policy concerns of the current moment, how does this reflect on the concerns raised in the UK referendum debate? So each speaker will take up to 20 minutes to go over their views, present their points of view and then we will have plenty of time to open it up to the floor for questions and answers and a discussion. So without further ado we're going to start with John Hillary and move on to Martin afterwards. So thank you. Is it too loud? Yeah. Has it gone? Yep. Has it worked? Has it gone? Yes. I've lost the hearing in my left ear so I'm not entirely sure that you can hear me well. So I'm going to stand up because that way at least I'll be able to present my voice. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's great to be back at SOAS. I did my master's degree at SOAS in a previous century looking at Chinese politics and economics. So I've always had a very nice feeling towards being back whether here or at Russell Square. And I should just say the only reason I was made an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham is that they have this honorary professorship which is part of the university's ongoing scheme usually to attract very high profile diplomats and sort of captains of industry. And there is a marxist group in the University of Nottingham who have fed up with always being people from the right so they asked me to be an honorary professor to get somebody to balance out this imbalance and that's really where it comes from rather than anything else. I'm really pleased to be able to speak on the issue of the European Union and I want to just start by saying why war and want has been involved in this why we're interested at all in talking about the European Union at this time. We're an organisation which does focus on the root causes of injustice and inequality so we do tackle political issues as a matter of course but there's no particular reason you might think that we want to get involved with the European Union in a referendum debate and indeed I should start by saying we're not running a campaign to promote people either to come in or to vote to fill out. Our real point in engaging in this debate was to deepen people's understanding of what on earth the European Union is. I think we're probably in a room where you've got more understanding than most people will have but 99.9% of British people have never ever had any direct experience of the institutions of the EU and so it's really a debate which is taking place at a very shallow or more intuitive level about whether you like the idea of being European and I should say from the absolute outset I do like the idea of being European rather than being English or British. I'm totally aware of the horrific history of Europe in the world 500 years of colonial plunder of every other country on the globe simply in order to ensure that Europe has a nicer standard of living than anybody else but even with that despite everything I do still prefer to see myself as European. We're not being asked in this referendum whether we want to be European or not. You might think we are because a lot of people when you hear oh it's really nice to do things together, we like to do things with our European neighbours that's not what you're being asked, you're not being asked whether Britain can be towed out into the Atlantic and partflips to Iceland or something like that you're being asked whether you want to be subject to the institutions of the European Union and that's a much more particular question which I want to talk to and in a way it's a question which pits your heart against your head. If you want to vote because you have a warm fuzzy feeling about being European you should vote in but what we're trying to do is say there are some specific reasons much more hard headed reasons why you need to look carefully at the institutions of the European Union and what they mean both in terms of these questions which Christina read out on Democracy and also in terms of the political and economic and social programme of the European Union and this is a particular desire to reeducate the left the left in this country has laboured under a bit of a misapprehension or perhaps an older view of what the European Union is and we put something on our website, a much longer explanation of this we put it up on the 1st of January this year to mark the anniversary of Britain having joined the EEC as it then was the European Economic Community or the Common Markets in the 1st of January 1973 which means I at least maybe not terribly many other people in this room but I was born in Britain which was not a member of the European Union which is perhaps why they feel so scared because it was okay anyway, history, for people on the left they still look back I think to the way that the European Union was portrayed in the 1980s and I want to start one decade back for that because in 1975 as you may know the UK did have its last referendum on whether or not we would be members of the European Union as it still was then the EEC and the left in this country by and large said we do not believe in this capitalist club that was the way in which it was described at the time it is a club which has been set up by capital for capital and so all of the trade unions in this country said we want to vote out the Labour Party had a special session of its conference just two months before the June 1975 referendum and by a margin of two to one the Labour Party said we want to vote out the current, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson he was forced to allow his cabinet members to campaign on both sides of the debate in exactly the same way as Cameron does now so it is a little bit rich when you hear some of the Labour shadow cabinet accusing Cameron of not showing leadership you just have to look back to 1975 and exactly the same thing happened and I think it is completely right that there should be that freedom but in the 1970s the left was basically in favour of going out and the right was in favour of going in and in the 1975 referendum the right one said ok we will confirm Britain's place in the European Union fast forward to 1988 and the left was in the crisis of thatcherism a whole decade of this massive onslaught of extreme right policies destroying the power of the trade unions in this country and at that moment Jacques Delors came over to Britain to address the TUC the trade union congress at its 1988 congress and this is quite a seminal moment in the history of left or centre left views of the European Union and Jacques Delors at that time was promoting EU, European Economic and Monetary Union in the run up to the Maastricht Treaty which of course was his great legacy and the way in which he did this was to say yes we recognise that Economic and Monetary Union is very much a programme in favour of capital it has been asked for, it is delivering for capital what it wants to see in the European Union to whip free movers of capital and deregulation of the capital controls and other boundaries which still exist but he said at the same time we have a vision of a social union to go alongside this capitalist Europe and he sold that very strongly and the trade unions in this country absolutely bought into it they said look we are being slaughtered by thatcherism we look across the channel and in fact the European Union does look a kinder, more gentle, more socially acceptable more socially progressive place and from that moment on the left or the centre left certainly in this country has been much more pro-European and it's why now you'll find very little open dissent from the left in relation to this current referendum but that was then and in the time since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty immediately after yes you did get some positive progressive directives coming out of the European Union on maternity and paternity pay on rights for part-time workers on rights for agency workers on rights for temporary workers on the environmental side as well you'll see from the Green Party's current political manifestos and things it was very good for beaches water and our beaches got better, things like that but since then the European Union has radically changed and certainly since 2000 when the Lisbon Agenda came in and since 2009 when the Lisbon Treaty came in it's completely reversed that consideration of the European social model which held the idea of a customs union a free trade zone alongside the European social model now the European social model is completely dead everybody recognises that from Brussels all the way across the whole of the European Union and in its place we have this hard-nosed drive towards competitiveness and competitiveness that's rather hard to say in English is the buzzword which has really led the European Union since the year 2000 and before that and it is in fact I think there that you can begin to see the technocratic element within it because it's as if the politics of the European Union has been sucked out of it and instead this professionalised technocratic solution to the problems Europe has been put in its place and you can see that in various different forms when Peter Mandelson who was the European trade commissioner sent over there from Britain was in charge from 2006 he introduced the concept of global Europe so instead of social Europe which was the thing which the left all bought into you had global Europe global Europe said we want to have a hard-nosed there were a hard-nosed approach to furthering the interests of capital across the world and in Europe itself across the world through all of the trade treaties the raw materials initiatives all of the investment agreements which pushed open new markets for European capital and tried to remove any of the restrictions on its operations and internally within Europe at the same time this agenda which is now called the Better Regulation agenda this idea that you want to minimise the burden on business the burden on capital in its operations within Europe just as you do outside Europe and the focus is squarely on what is good for business and what happens to the environment or to social standards comes a very very very low support of the second for us at War and Want as Christina says we're particularly looking at the transatlantic trade and investment partnership TTIP which is another logical conclusion of exactly this same programme we've left lots of bits of material badges, stickers, anything you like to take with you I'm not taking them back to my office so do take as many as you can carry with you I won't go too much into TTIP but TTIP is exactly this same programme of deregulation in favour of capital it's not like an old style trade treaty which was about reducing tariffs at the border between bananas, steel or coffee or computers it's about reaching behind the border and re-engineering our economic and our social space in favour of capital and that is where the European Union is so when we were describing the European Union in this piece we put up on our website we sort of wanted to pay homage to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood so we call it the good, the bad and the ugly the good was the introduction of some of the more progressive directives in this post-mastery era the bad was the turn towards global Europe and this very dramatic technocratic pro-capitalist extreme agenda the ugly bit goes to the heart of this discussion and that is the huge democratic deficit right at the heart of the European Union and I don't think people can really quite gauge this unless they've had direct experience of it the institutions of the European Union have a particular valence a particular force that our civil service and other institutions here do not have the European Commission which we might equate to our civil service here the European Commission has its own independent right of initiative it is the body which can initiate new legislative powers new directives, new regulations and then pass that through to the other bodies to approve usually just to rubber stand because the European Parliament for example doesn't have the opportunity to open up and to criticize a lot of these things it just gets a yes, no vote and it gets a lot more detailed and other things like that but I think it was last year that people really became aware of the limits to democracy by being within the European Union and that was because the crisis in Greece and the Greek people said quite clearly we believe in an alternative to this politics of permanent austerity coming out of the European Commission out of the European Central Bank and the other elected both of them unaccountable and it was the way in which I think it wasn't just the response but the way in which the Central European Institutions responded that sent shivers down the spines of most people across the Union when Jean-Claude Juncker the President of the European Commission was asked about the situation in Greece he said you mustn't confuse there can be quote-unquote there can be no democratic choice against the European Treaties the Lisbon Treaty this is not him anymore, this is now me the Lisbon Treaty had said that you no longer have the right as sovereign states of the European Union to challenge the central talents of that treaty that's what it made clear and that's basically the binding situation and interestingly I think it's not just the European Commission in this respect, it's also the President of the European Parliament the one elected body within the European Union who said exactly the same thing Martin Schulz German Social Democrats when he was asked about the Greek situation he specifically said the people of Greece need to remove the series of government we need to impose in its place a technocratic administration to administer the demands of the central European institutions until a new and more mulliant and more susceptible government can be put in place and you then see the same thing rolled out in the five president's report which you may have read from last year Schulz, the only elected one Junker from the Commission from the ECB Turk as the Euro Summit Tusker as the Euro Summit Heads and Gislebong, who I can never really pronounce anyway but Head of the Euro Group which is the least transparent group of all of them and I think this is where I've been when I was looking at the background to this debate coming out of Habermas' book of the Lure of Technocracy it's very interesting how there's a view of this from within the German situation I don't know how many Germans we have in the room I feel I can be a little bit rude about Germans because my mother's family came from Germany so I'm not being totally nasty about it but it is fascinating how the view from Germany of Europe is a very particular view which the Germans don't recognize how German it sounds to everybody else and how brutal it sounds being in Greece at the time of these debates last year and seeing the level of antipathy towards the German response to the Greek people was extraordinary armed guards around the German embassy to protect it because of the violence that the people of Greece felt the German people were doing to them Habermas I think is completely correct in pointing out that there is a crisis of legitimacy of the absolute heart I think that is absolutely unmistakable whether you're on the left or the right the European Union institutions are facing their greatest crisis of legitimacy at the moment I don't think he is correct in saying that somehow we can transcend this through a super European identity which boosts democracy by raising the status of the European Parliament without the European Council and everything is going to be okay I think he still sees the European Union through the prism of international relations which I think is completely wrong whether it's in terms of the internal or the external program of the European Union you can only understand it through the prism of political economy that this is transnational capital uniting with capitalist outside in order to try to reprogram the European project with their benefits and to their ends and you won't be able to counter that by however many new institutions you put up in its place at all and the creation of a United States of Europe is actually just going straight back to the technocratic or in the German the autoliberal approach whereby you don't need to have politics anymore you don't believe in any class struggle or any negative clash of interests because suddenly it's all going to be there internally austerity Europe externally fortress Europe and unfortunately this is where it links to the UK referendum because of course here very sadly the only way in which we're debating this is how we can have more open markets and more closed borders so when Cameron goes over into the rest of Europe and succeeds in securing his so-called compromise with the other member states of Europe all he's doing is feeding in to a pre-existing desire for more and more open markets getting rid of any of the regulations and standards and the rules which we believe are really important and instead raising the borders to anybody trying to come in from the outside very passionately whatever whatever the result of the referendum we must be insisting from within on the inalienable right of refugees to find asylum within Europe and the absolute responsibility of our countries to provide that asylum so I just want to finish by maybe raising one more hopeful asylum because at the same time as all of these crises have rolled across the European Union over the past two through four years there has been building a desire among certain groups in the left to create an alternative and I was lucky enough to be in January in Paris at the launch of the Plan B initiative and then in Madrid last month and the follow-up summit of that where various different groups from across Europe and mainly not in the UK but predominantly France, Germany, Spain and Italy have come together to say and Greece have come together to say we believe we must have a future as Europeans within Europe so not tracing our steps into some sort of proto-nationalist past we want to be European but we want to resist and revolt against the European treaties now the way they've put that allows quite a raw spectrum of opinion of exactly what you mean there and in fact Paris and Madrid the main focus was on the Euro in that sense of saying we will no longer be prepared to sacrifice our lives and our futures for an anti-democratic currency like the Euro or in fact any other currency within the UK of course we've been pushed into a more fundamental debate about the European Union itself and membership of it and we don't have to worry about the Euro itself but what's interesting there is this much more positive vision of working together from below a true meaning of internationalism between peoples between societies to conceive of a new type of Europe where we would be able to recover some sense of the European social model and the leadership in terms of international issues such as climate change or whatever you like to have and break with the current technocratic anti-democratic program that otherwise we're being subjected to and for more on what whatever the result of this referendum we will continue to take part in that program because we do believe in forging these very closely with others across Europe and fighting for a better future within Europe even if not within the institutions of the EU thank you thank you John for a very illuminating talk covering the historical transformation of Europe that was very interesting to hear about the previous referendum so many decades ago and I'm really talking about this open markets close borders tactics so very interesting contribution let's move on to Martin Sandbury now for our second part of the talk thank you very much the questions that we're debating tonight cover a number of different concepts we're talking both about globalization or international economic integration and technocracy we are talking about institutions whether democratic or not and outcomes the policies they choose those are not all the same things and what I'd like to do to begin with I think is to maybe clarify some of these concepts because it's very easy I think to be led astray if we think they all mean the same thing if you forgive me for starting in a somewhat abstract way I find very useful as a starting point Danny Roderick's globalization trilemma which I'm sure many of you know about but I will just go through it very quickly Danny Roderick is an economist at Harvard who's at the same time very much a neoclassical economist and a bit of a hero of the anti-globalization movement partly because he says that you can be a mainstream neoclassical economist and see big problems with globalization including democratic problems he's posited a trilemma three things that you can't have or three of at the same time the three things being economic globalization economic integration across borders that's the one thing the second thing is the nation state or national sovereignty national self-determination and the third thing is democracy as understood as some sort of mass involvement and mass politics popular influence on what the political choices are so Roderick says you can have globalization and the nation state but the nation state won't be democratic because it will just follow internationally set rules you can have globalization and democracy but only if you have an international super state that democratically then decides things at an international level so no nation state or you can have a classical democratic nation state but then you have to give up on economic globalization and that's putting it quite starkly he really says you can't have all of these things to their fullest extent at the same time I find that as I said a very useful conceptual starting point I don't quite agree and I will tell you why but it's a powerful way of thinking about things and I think it clarifies our thinking whether or not we agree with the analysis now notice first of all it's globalization it's not technocracy so I want to pause first to talk about the relationship between globalization and technocracy is there one and is there necessarily one and I tend to think that no, technocracy although it seems to be correlated with economic globalization and at the same time technocratic rules seem to come with economic integration across borders EU directives or trade rules like the trade agreements that John was talking about but there's no necessary link there even if things that happen at the same time don't necessarily depend on one another and I'd like just to remind you that neutral technocracy technocratic rules actually are with respect to what outcomes they favor remember or hunk back to mid-century European social democracy for a lot of people this was the golden age the sort of social democratic states most of Europe had in the 1950s 60s early 70s that was a very technocratic sort of state I grew up in Norway in the 80s under this I've been thinking about the Soviet Union that was probably the most technocratic regime man has ever known it was not democratic and of course the EU is technocratic the United States is very technocratic anyone who's lived in the US will just laugh at this notion that it's the home of the free and so on and I will just put it to you that even a country that isolated itself economically to the extent that it wanted to be a modern economy at all it would still be quite highly technocratic because modern economies are complex and the way they work is by a number of standards a number of rules that make people coordinate that you can mention any kind of trivial example the acceptable amount of voltage in your electricity sockets the width of railways I happened to have a three year old so I'm sort of interested in the regulations governing the security safety standards of bicycle seats for toddlers these things are technocratic that doesn't mean that they're either bad in themselves that depends on what those technocratic rules are depends on the content and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're undemocratic either that depends on how they were generated right and are they anchored in a process that citizens feel they have some sort of control over it's not undemocratic that it's illegal to produce certain substandard type of toddler bike seats okay so technocracy will be with us what we have to do is to make sure that it's democratically anchored in a great economically now there are special challenges when this happens across borders we'll know that discuss that but I just want to leave that as a point for now so let's go back to globalization specifically you can't have globalization and then both of national sovereignty, national self-determination and democracy in that self-determination I think that's overly complicated it's not obvious to me that even dictatorships that are full on globalizers that there are things they can do that democracies can't do or alternatively if globalization binds it's not clear that a democracy is bound anymore than a non-democratic nation state the conflict if there is one is really between global economic activity and setting rules at the national level regardless of whether those rules are set democratically or not if you could it's a strange thought experiment but if you imagined an authoritarian or dictatorial state being a member of the EU I think they would feel as hemmed in as democracies do maybe imagine Turkey under its current government if it really was an EU member it's already hemmed in by a lot of EU rules because it's an accustomed EU member it can't set its own tariffs but how democratic or authoritarian Turkey is becoming I don't think changes that now there is of course a sort of definitional conflict between national self-determination and globalization if globalization means allowing goods or services made in other countries into your own country and vice versa if it means allowing workers from other countries into your own country or if it means allowing capital flows from other countries into your own country then of course by definition there are some things you nationally cannot do namely lock those things out so there is a definitional conflict if you want economic activity across borders then you can't at a national level stop that economic activity across borders but that doesn't really get us very far that doesn't get us into a deep inherent conflict between cross-border economic activity and national self-determination from now on I'll just talk about national democracy because of what I said right before that it's democracy at the national level that matters dictatorship doesn't really get you out of this but there are a number of other ways in which there's not so much of a conflict so yes definitionally if you have international capital flows or international worker movements or international trading goods and services by definition you don't nationally block those but you still have a national choice in the extent to which you have these things do you want trading goods and services but not free movement of workers do you want the opposite do you want capital but not goods do you want capital but not workers do you want workers but not capital and how much of these things do you want these are these are spectra of choices it's not binary it's not economic globalization and no globalization and where you end up on that spectrum is a political choice and the EU has been gradual choices to go towards more integration and more common rules but that doesn't mean those weren't choices and it doesn't mean that the choice isn't available to step back from that the fact that we are facing a referendum in the UK on whether to remain a member of the EU I think rather proves that there's no democratic obstacle to reversing globalization that's there it's even codified at the treaty article 50 which you've heard about and ultimately both the law and power remains at the national level the country can leave when it wants to and even if it breaks the treaties you can withdraw from treaties that's legal and even if it's not what can anyone else do well they can maybe not want to trade with you but you can't require others to do without their collaboration so again there's a lot of choice there now are these choices more or less democratic because they are more economically integrated in other words do we get less democratic than more economically integrated we are well I don't think that either self-government is really about it's about the degree to which you control your environment and your destiny what self-government is and I'm using the word self-government because I want to make the point that this is true at the level of states but it's also true at the level of individuals your own self-government is about the sort of control you have and freedom you have in your environment economically and politically and this is why we don't say that there's a problem of self-government that you live in a state that's right the fact that we live in a state where laws are voted on in a certain way and then you have to follow them whether or not you agree with them that's not anti-democratic that's democracy if the process is right so the fact that you don't decide everything yourself is obviously not a sign of the lack of democracy or lack of self-government at the level of individuals at the level of regions within a country in the international community of course there can be a lack of democracy but the fact of deciding things together does not mean a lack of democracy and the fact is that most of what the European Union does is to decide things together so the whole premise of the European Union is that we European nation states can decide that it's better for us all if we have common rules and you may agree or disagree with that but certainly it's within the scope of national democracy to exercise that democracy by trying to sit down and make common rules with others that is the European project okay so to the extent that that is what's happening I don't think that there's a democratic deficit now that's not always what's happening but in large part everything that's decided in the EU has been approved by national governments which are all democratically elected have strong democratic mandates it's true that actual laws formally have to be proposed by the commission and they are but they will often be proposed at the request of national governments that's the European council they will never become law unless they're approved by the European council by very large majorities not unanimity anymore Margaret Thatcher helped get rid of that moving to what's called qualified majority for a large majority and the reason was in order to make it easier to have common rules and it has to be approved by the European parliament which has gained a lot more power after the NIS treaty it's true that again they don't initiate things but they kind of request things and in practice they do put things in I think the most telling example is the EU ban on excessive bankers bonuses so there's now an EU law against paying bankers more than twice with some details more than twice their salary as a bonus that came from the European parliament the Greens in particular who have a good team in the economic affairs area it was part of what they said we want this in order to approve other things capital markers regulations maybe it was accounted for some obscure regulation the government ministers the governments in the European council wanted to get the package through the European parliament said well you'll only get it through they also accept this George Osborne was very much set against it everybody else, every other country was for it they voted it through it all went through it is the law of the land more or less the Bank of England and the UK is trying to get around it this is not undemocratic it's also probably a good policy but as I said whether or not it's a good policy is different from whether it was democratically decided it was something that had to go against the desire of the UK government of the day as part of a system to which successive UK governments have agreed to and successive governments of all the member states have agreed to that we should try to have rules in common on a large number of things again that might be a bad idea but that in itself has been a democratic choice and again of course when you decide to have common rules you won't always get the rule you want but you will get a rule that can get through this sort of system and that means it must demand a majority among organs that aren't democratically elected national governments and the European Parliament now there aren't quite clearly problems it's not quite as idyllic as I have set it out to be that is my overall view that this idea of a democratic deficit is a bit of a misunderstanding of course things don't get decided by national governments but that kind of goes with the territory of trying to have common rules okay but things could be better so I want to end by talking about some of the ways in which there are let's call them democratic imperfections one is that national politicians who are presumably who do have democratic mandates I suppose everyone will agree with that it's very much in their interest to blame either the bureaucracy the Brussels bureaucracy or the courts the European courts not to mention the European Court of Human Rights which is not part of the EU for obvious reasons of politics but we should just be aware that they protest a little bit too much there's a lot more influence national governments have or could have there's a lot more influence national parliaments have or could have next time you hear parliamentarians here complain about undue influence from Brussels ask yourselves how often the British Parliament was the British government to account either before or after a European council meeting for how it bargains with other governments so some of this is just presentational things are presented as being less democratic than they are but there are real democratic imperfections like any bureaucracy the European Commission is always eager to do more it's always eager to do more at the European level the principle of subsidiarity which is a principle that things should be done at the lowest possible level is not as it should be but of course you don't see national governments using the European Court of Justice to try to stop that so again some of the blame here is on not using the sort of institutions that are available there's something else that's specific I think about doing things across borders which is that for the same reason that it's hard to get things through you need everyone's agreement or most people's agreement it's also hard to undo things and that is a real difference from a national government where a new government can undo what a previous government has done because things depend on so many more players in the European Union it's much harder to undo previous bad laws for example there are certainly things that could be improved there you could make laws with sunset clauses you could say this expires after 10 years unless it's voted back in perhaps with amendments depending on what elected representatives in 10 years want but again this is something that national governments have had the ability to do and they've chosen not to you can have a sort of spring cleaning and try to remove too much technocracy but of course that is deregulation you can't both complain about technocracy and about deregulation at the same time better regulation is presumably what we want and we will disagree on what the best regulation is but that's also part of democracy that we'll have to work that out in a political process now finally we get to that P the political process I agree with John that to a large extent to an excessive extent politics has been taken out of things probably not as much as you think John I agree in principle if not in degree let's take this example of the Euro now the Euro has ended up looking a bit like a trap remember that it was sold to citizens of Europe on the basis of a number of promises to the German electorate in particular the promise was we will not have to pay money bail out other countries if they get into trouble there was a legal clause in there that I don't really think made it illegal but there was certainly a political promise some of the other countries were promised a sort of charity with Germany that they hadn't had under the previous system of national exchange rates where what you found was that the independence you probably supposedly had was the independence the freedom to do exactly what the Bundesbank did within 15 minutes of a decision in Frankfurt so there was a promise that by having a common central bank everyone would actually be equal in these monetary policy decisions of course what's happened is that citizens of the Eurozone have been told that once you have the Euro the only way to make it work is to violate all of those promises the core countries the credit countries have to bail the others out and those that are bailed out have to accept dictates on their policy that is what's played out in the crisis that that's an actual description of what's happened in the crisis and it's also the intellectual vision of where the Euro has to go intellectual and political I should say John I think mentioned the five presidents report a sort of official roadmap which says for the Euro to really work we also need a fiscal union we need regular budgetary transfers and we need a centralization of some policy choices partly in order to justify partly in order to secure how that money is used so it's quite true that the direction of travel is towards less national autonomy and because these are democracies that means less national democracy I don't think that is a necessary consequence of having a single currency I think rather that it's the consequence of an entirely avoidable unnecessary but bad choice that was made early in the crisis which was a choice to force swear the write downs and restructuring of debts the debts of states such as Greece and the debts of private banks such as the Irish banks the choice back in 2010 that all debts have to be honored in full set up a sort of political economy within the Eurozone that pitted creditors against debtors and mapped national nation states onto those categories so you suddenly had a conflict between the creditor states and the debtor states now there is no sovereignty for debtors that cannot service their debt in a system that doesn't allow for debts to be written down or restructured that's not a fact about the Euro that's not a fact about economic globalization and it's not a fact about capitalism because problems with debts and problems between creditors and debtors have been with us much much longer than capitalism has the earliest writings are tallies of debt and I'm not a religious person but I've been deeply impressed by how all the great religions have very strict rules about debt and you can build it up what interest rates you can charge and the requirement to forgive debt at regular intervals all the great religions have this and that tells me that problems of debt and the sort of social havoc it can cause a debt bubble can cause is something that's been with us for thousands of years and we've learnt about it and unlearned it and had to rediscover it again and again at a very high price and the same thing has just happened but that has nothing to do with globalization that happens within countries too the problem is that the leaders of the eurozone chose they force war the option of restructuring debts and that set up this dependence of debtors on creditors and that gave power to the creditors and a lot of the things that have been imposed flow simply from that now you may ask well why why do people impose those policies why is it what many of you will call neoliberal policies structural reforms a certain vision of what the economy should look like that certainly people on the left don't like well I think it's because a lot of people believe that these are the right policies and they abuse their power to impose them but the people who do this are democratically elected so the problem we have here if you look across the eurozone across the EU it's parties who have tended to believe this that have won elections so I think democracy there's much more democracy available than is being used to the extent that democracy is being used it's unfortunately often the democratic battle is often won why people believe in bad and sometimes unjust policies now I don't have a good solution to that problem except going out there and campaigning more for better policies but what I do believe is that undoing economic integration the euro the EU and putting back up national boundaries is not going to help thank you very much ok thank you very much Martin for an interesting overview of your perspective on the euro crisis and the European Union certainly the theoretical frameworks are very useful these broad frameworks are trying to look at concepts to go into the meanings of concepts and I hope one of the things that you both of you raised is these common rules how do common rules get formed what is this deciding together process and I guess this jump of how was this political economy of debtors versus creditors set up in this system of common rules and deciding together so thank you both very much for your contributions I'm I'm going to open up to the floor to hear your questions speakers comments, short comments we can take a round a round of three or four questions give it back to the speakers and then continue continue on this basis so do we have any burning questions on the floor what is the sort of say you have in mind sorry are you British just to kind of make it concrete so what's the sort of say you have in the British government that you don't have in the EU well so obviously I can vote I do have any direct say in what happens directly in the EU just because I can do it through the British government isn't quite the same saying I have a direct say do you vote in the last European election yes I'm going to take a round if that's okay are there any more questions around just the two do you have any questions do you think there's a it seems to be one very technicality the great local kind of deficit the watch input from the European Parliament for example do you think there's what ways do you think we can improve that local kind of deficit in the European space sector okay I have a question to John you said that better regulation agenda in the EU is about deregulation prohibitions but as far as I know this is better regulation agenda is actually the opposite taking actually positive view and that's why they have these assessments that need to date into account for all kinds of impacts that deregulations have they will have to know on what basis okay let's give it to the speakers maybe to John first and then Mark yes full start but just on the first thing well you obviously have some say in that you elect someone to the European Parliament and they are a lot more powerful than people think and you can try and hold them to account as much as you would hold your Westminster MP to account I don't know what you do if your Westminster MP isn't the one you voted for or if they do something you don't like these are problems in any kind of democracy right now I accept the distance is much further of course of course it is but I don't see how you get around that if you think it's good for Europeans to try to have some common rules now you may not think that in which case sure you might better just decide everything locally rather than in some sort of horse trading compromise between national politicians with the input from the commission that will try to broker something that they think can go through they will push as much as they can for what they want that's politics but I don't see how you get around that it's a good idea to have common rules if you have common rules then others will have a say too and your say will be proportionally if you like way less but you can't say that that is less democratic you can say it's the wrong way to go to make common rules with others we should all have separate rules and you have to take the consequences of that I wouldn't be I think it makes sense to have a lot of common rules but if you think if you want common rules I'm not sure how in a bigger a larger governed space well yeah the distances will be longer we should do everything we can to minimize that distance but a space of 500 people is harder to govern than a space of 50 million on the ESM the European stability mechanism that's the that's the sort of fund through which Eurozone states have bailed out Greece and Ireland and Portugal and Cyprus I think it was wrong to bail them out to begin with because what that does is to create this credited debtor relationship between nation states which is harmful politically toxic it's been poison so I don't think we should have had it in the first place well once you have it well naturally it is a tool for enforcing the conditions of the creditors so yeah no in that sense it's not very democratic but again that has to do with how a debtor a debtor can reduce sovereignty that's a bad thing can I come back on this as well I mean to go to the first thing I do disagree with Marceline's perspective this question of an automatic comparison between our voting for parties here and our voting in the European space and I have this absolutely bitter experience of beating my head for 20 years against the European Union's trade policy and finding exactly this problem when we vote people back to Westminster we each vote in our constituencies so our vote in Wandsworth we all vote in Richmond somebody else will vote in the Harrogate we vote that out but we're voting for the same parties on the list and that means if together we all vote for these parties they will then form the government that's not the same in either the European Council where we get one vote for one vote even if we have the best UK government actually that's not used to UK because we'll never get a pretty good vote but let's say the Greek people for Syriza and everyone goes yes or indeed the Spanish for the left bloc and the French vote for the party the Gouche we can all dream even then you find that they don't have the power to stand up to the other one so we at this enfranchise at that level within the European Parliament it's much much worse and we've done this literally for the last year trying to push people on the t-tip resolution which was before the European Parliament in July of last year and we caught huge pressure we managed to get them to shift their position so we had the full the fullest impact in terms of our democratic accountability environment MEPs but the German social democrats and the Italians had already done a deal to form their own grand coalition with the Conservatives and the Liberals so they said we don't care about your views and they managed to swish all of it through and we have absolutely no say whatsoever and this is I think about more than just a distinction of distance this is about a structural inability to control which is different from here yes here we have 650 MPs from all different parts of the country the Tories are about to make it 600 so that they can get rid of two of the other ones and then they're part of the same system that's the difference I think for the Finnish or the Latvian or the Maltese representative they are all from different parties we have no participation impact so that's a bit of a difference there the ESM, interestingly I think there it was precisely this which was being discussed within the context of the Plan B debates in Madrid and Paris and here I think it's really important to remember it's not just really about the international relations between credit to states and debt to states the bailouts that went to Greece went straight out again 90% went straight back to the German banks and the French banks so it's not actually Germany bailing out Greece it's the people of Europe bailing out the banks again in exactly the same way again which happened with Ireland and with Ireland you had an absolutely hard choice to have a government which was considering forcing the bond holders to take a haircut as they say so actually you're putting a bit of pain on those who are just speculating and making more and more money out of the accumulation of capital and it was the Troika which came in and said no way, who is the Troika? the IMF, unelected, unaccountable the European Central Bank unelected, unaccountable the European Commission unelected, unaccountable and that is a recipe for complete anti-epocratic nightmare and that's what Irish people had to do so the Irish people get told you will bear the brunt of this pain of it's all going to go on you through permanent austerity and all of the bankers can continue by yachts and fillers in the Bahamas until they can't get ahead until the better just come back on better regulations agenda which we actually know through the fact that it was the Labour Party which originally coined the concept of better regulation here and they set up a better regulation executive within the cabinet office which is the sort of gatekeeper of all legislation going through and whenever you have legislation which looked as if it was going to introduce new rules based off because they said better regulation is about reducing the burden and that's exactly the same language which is being used by the European Commission and particularly this new way of saying that for every one euro of additional burden of regulation on business if you introduce a rule which would be worth one euro of regulation you have to have two taken away so this constant reducing of the burden and that seems to me to be a complete reversal of what was there before within the European Union where it was genuinely saying let's look around for a levelling up now what we've been told absolutely explicitly by our government is it's not about raising standards in order to be competitive you have to reduce the burden of business and that's what we've seen certainly through the global Europe agenda of the trade treaties but now absolutely explicitly through TTIP they're saying yeah it would be possible if you started with different logic to have a positive outcome of this if we were negotiating TTIP with our brothers and sisters from the U.S.A we would start by saying ramp up all of the standards and the regulations and exactly as Martin said on globalization we would say well we want to do it in a different way we're not saying North Korea is a great model for anybody to follow but we are saying that we can determine the terms and conditions under which we trade and invest and the technocratic revolution is not about technical choices it's about the rule of that deregulation the transformation so that the political discussion about whether you should or shouldn't have these terms and conditions on capital gets swept away and just the tiny example of that whenever we talk to the promoters the proponents of TTIP they say well look we're talking about technical revolution in the European Union if you have a washing machine the flex which connects it to the electricity has to be one meter long in the USA it's a yard long which is that different and they're saying we want to have this trade agreement to iron out that difference you say knock yourselves out you don't need to have that big trade treaty just cut it in two nobody cares it's not the point what they're actually talking about is GMOs big discussions about whether or not we should have GMOs in Europe 70% of all processed food in the USA in their supermarkets contains GM agreements and people in Europe don't want it but that's technocracy because the US is saying under free trade you don't get to choose hormones in beef and all US beef is produced using growth hormones they're bound in Europe because they're casting the chain the US say no no no under science based rules technocracy you don't get to choose get with the program we eat it, you eat it and there's massive examples like that so I think that's technocracy is where you move from the washing machine flex to the key issues of how we will control trade so that it is produced Polania Polanian Polanian Polanian you embed it within our social more reason you don't let it sort of float off into its own free floating world capital thank you yes of course and back to any more comments and questions I think you too often conflate a lack of democracy with outcomes you don't like not always but sometimes I'll start with one of the points you make where we agree the most I think which is the Irish case it's quite true Ireland was forced to bail out its banks after it had voluntarily done so for a while but it was starting to change and it was told it shouldn't do that interestingly the IMF is the hero of this story because the IMF was trying to say no no this has to be written down but kind of let itself be overruled by the others the villain is the ECB and here I agree there is a real problem of democracy in how the European Central Bank has acted because time and time again in the Eurozone crisis the European Central Bank has said you have to do this or that it's not beyond the mandate they've been given which is a democratically given mandate but into decisions about fiscal redistribution structural reforms and in particular this question of whether you should bail out the banks and the threat because think about this so in Ireland in 2010 it was sort of golden shackles if you want to bail out you need to accept these conditions but why did they accept to bail out up until the sort of last day the Irish government said well we don't want it and we don't need it because we don't need to borrow any money for it was something like 6 months or 10 months and I remember at the time writing leaders for the FT saying they shouldn't write down the debt in the banks it wasn't obvious at the time but it's become clear later that what happened was that the European Central Bank said you do this or we'll cut off all funding to your banks we'll kill your banking system the same threat and in Portugal a couple of months later it happened in Cyprus although with the opposite sign in Cyprus they said unless you write down the credit is in your banks we will kill your banking system so in that it was undemocratic but it was the right policy in my view and of course in Greece last year it was very much that Greece could there's been a lot of pain but they could have said well we're just going to default the much more difficult thing would be that it seemed like the European Central Bank might then just kill the whole banking system and would actually sort of kill the economy so I agree that the ECB has vastly abused its powers it's got better but that is a big problem of course it did happen because the countries let themselves get into those debt relationships but preagre, that's undemocratic but you're on the example so the labour MEPs and TTIP I'm sorry you just didn't have the numbers right the German social democrats are less democratic than the UK Labour Party we don't have any access to them you don't but Germans do we're working with them all the time but us then but it's not undemocratic that UK activists or even the UK Labour Party can't decide the European policy if you think there should be a European policy it is a constriction about democracy let's put it in a sorry to interrupt you at this point perhaps the question is about whether we are as free and equal against these rules and in making these rules as we would like to think because I think that's one of the things that I can distinguish is whether all social groups have equal power in creating the rules and for example a small activist group has the same representation in creating the common rules that we all decide together as for example the massive lobbyists and I think this has been one of the issues that has been at the centre of the some of this how EU policy is actually created and perhaps there's this sense of what accessibility do different social groups have to those kind of rule making processes in the EU so I'm just perhaps teasing out something there about this issue is it okay if we go back to the floor to see if there's any more comments and questions so we have two back English question about the transparency in the council there's 28 members at the moment and as John pointed out the UK only has one water over there but because a lot of the Australian done is done behind closed doors and not shown in the minutes we were suggesting what or how did they vote there's a problem of showing accountability to the national executives representing their peoples in the council could that actually, if that would be changed somehow would it help? Do you have any more comments ideas or questions for our speakers? Yes Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Great It's a big one Can I go backwards through the question? Of course, as you like Because on that one I think it's a really good point George Galway used to be my job he was the director of War and Month back in the day and it was quite funny because he was on the daily politics show on BBC just after that event having an absolute ding with the BBC report where they kept on saying everybody left when you started speaking and he said, I'm not here to discuss ridiculous little things I haven't here to discuss the EU referendum so we had a real fight and I was on immediately afterwards it was really terribly terrible How do we fix it? The people who are looking from the perspective of wanting to stay in certainly most people most people from the left most people from all sides are saying there is something fundamentally wrong in the European Union and then the question is do you believe it is reformable do you believe you can fix the institutions and that's the big question which we are asking to people because you get a lot of people from a more liberal green left side who will say we've got to be in it to fix it and it sounds lovely but if you actually have the hard experience of trying to shift those institutions you will know that actually there is a solid block at the centre of Europe which is under reformable that's interesting because more and more people are seeing that about the euro certainly the plan B stuff is saying the euro is under reformable it's structurally committed towards the supremacy of the Germany for the detriment of the European Union so we need to have a shift back to some form of the exchange mechanism from before or some sort of virtual thing where you have parallel currencies or back to national currencies, whatever it may be but they're all saying you have to have a rupture with the institutions to create the space for something positive and I think that's the debate really if you believe that the institutions are reformable then I think that's a very compelling reason but if you think that they're just genuinely not because the treaties of the European Union as set out preclude that option then you've got a different response the UKIP starts fascinating on TT UKIP love TT they love the fact that it's anti labour it's anti the environment it's against public safety they love everything in it they just hate the fact that it's Brussels not Westminster I won't go on too much about TT because you've raised everyone you've raised everybody transparency to go back in the reverse order for things would it be it would certainly help I remember when they were having the debates on the WTO World Trade Organization about 10 years ago and it was then the new Labour Government and they would say to us this is very sort of heart to heart meeting we've really been pushing absolutely hard for all the things you've been saying in council and then we get all these reports from all of the other countries saying you can't go on and get exactly the opposite they're absolutely lying through their teeth and of course the great thing about these untransparent bodies is that they can just submerge everything we have a nice very very luckily we have access to some of the cables inter-government so we can see the positions being taken by governments not to mention the FG's fine Brussels Bureau excellent FG Brussels Bureau without which I'm sure that there'll be less transparency in the European Union Varoufakis is pushing for transparency it's the thing that the basis of his DN 25 democracy in Europe movement by 2025 it's the lowest possible thing you can push for it won't really I think make any difference but it's a nice thing but I don't think it's really good can I just insert my thoughts on this particular question because I agree more transparency would be great I'm skeptical that it would be workable if you did make public these discussions the real discussions would happen elsewhere people will find a way around it that's not a reason not to do it I just want to note that UK cabinet meetings are not public right you can't go to the government website and see the streaming of the cabinet meeting yeah is that undemocratic you can see the argument for keeping the conversation private I don't know that it's undemocratic I think it'd be a good thing with more transparency I work for a newspaper we'd love it but it's not yeah absolutely I'm just saying this isn't any different at the Westminster level or the Brussels level if anything it's more transparent Brussels precisely because you have so many opposing interests it's not a team of collective responsibility I don't care whether Ian Duncan has made the greedies with David Cameron who doesn't agree with Michael Goh I don't care it makes no difference to me but you get one thing out of the Conservative government who you voted for but in most cases haven't before some of it is out you can see what it is so there is a W.S. line there I can hold every single one of them around the table and in the EU council that's the problem I can only I have absolutely no democratic route to the Latvian government that's my problem and it does go back to your question around the Scottish Nationalists for example and I think it's exactly the same sort of principle if the Scottish Nationalists were to hold you know to stand candidates in all of the seats all the way across Britain and the north of Ireland then it would be a different situation they just sort of run in Scotland and therefore they are to an extent exposed in that way so I do see that it's the same sort of problem whereas if you're looking within Hollywood and the election on the 5th of May for the Scottish Parliament then it's a slightly different issue but again you can then within your constituency and indeed within a fairly big bulk of Britain you can vote in that way but I think that the tensions are exactly the same tensions and that's what was reclaimed as a Scottish referendum and maybe it is, I mean that's one of the other things that Apolanyu really did say that the more you get this integration within bigger and bigger spaces the further away it is from people and so there is a sort of physical thing in that respect and it is a real physical thing we do take demos to Brussels and you know we have people going and protesting in Brussels but it's a great deal easier to take people to the Tory conference in Manchester like last year than to get everybody shlucking over to Brussels and I suppose it's the same thing as if you're in Indiana and you've raised a little militia to try and fight the federal government to step off to Washington DC just on the Scotland comparison, I think this is a good point I think it's partly made worse by the UK electoral system with PR they would probably have a bit more say because some coalition would have to be formed and so on but the problem if you look at Scotland the question is do you expect that consistently in the next run there will be very diverging preferences among most Scots and most English on what the common rules should be to such an extent consistently and diverging enough that it's better not to have common rules at all in which case the obvious solution is independence if you don't think that and that's kind of parallel in the European case you need to decide well how important is it for us to have common rules at all the detail levels we have now there should be more subsidiarity but on the whole do you want a commonly governed space or not if you think that's a good thing then you make it as democratic as you can but you can't really overcome the distance and you certainly can't say that because one country's one political movement in one country can't tip the outcome that that's a democratic problem that means everyone has to unite on the activism level too what has to be done for the vote to go in there are two very different kinds of conservatism you said you were a conservative there are two very different kinds I think every conservative party in the world struggles with this there's a sort of conservatism of tradition and how one used to govern oneself and there's a conservatism largely economic individual freedom including economic freedoms the trade in conservatism if you like with the tradition conservatism every conservative party struggles with that tension so I guess you need to know which one you think is more important but to the extent that like many conservatives you do believe in a lot of economic integration with other countries a lot of trade it seems to me that you would want to democracies about maximizing the influence you can have on the conditions under which that trade happens the Norway option certainly is not that that's accepting all the rules without any say some sort of free trade arrangement you could probably have more national autonomy but you would also cover less trade if it's both T-Tip and bilateral trade treaties have there is an undemocratic element which is the state investor dispute I think national courts are much better but that's something one can negotiate I just reread it was circulating inside the FT the leader article that the Financial Times wrote in 1975 about the referendum that the FT was for staying inside the same now what was interesting was just how much of that full length all the way down the page leader article could run it pretty much exactly maybe remove the replace the Soviet Union with a reference to Putin but there was one thing that was included then that I haven't seen in the debate now and that was the idea that the UK has a contribution to make it's not only self-interest it's also a sense of the common interest of Europe to which any great nation and indeed any small nation may have a contribution to make that question hasn't been raised in this debate does the UK nobody could claim that now with a serious does the UK well given the history it's hard but as individual citizens I think everyone needs to ask themselves well is there a responsibility for the UK here too it's usually the other way around I think people feel that it would be the greatest gift that the British people of Europe is to leave the European that's not what you can do for Europe but what Europe can do for you yep I think Boris Johnson has a lot in common with Donald Trump not just the hair Boris Johnson is a lot smarter than Donald Trump he's a lot more knowledgeable he is of course a US citizen bred in Brussels you know he's a citizen of the world but what he has in common with with Donald Trump I think is a nonchalance to put it mildly with the truth in the service of his own positioning it's very clearly established that he's admitted himself that Boris Johnson used his telegraph career to write outrageous stories about Brussels this is funny story about how he once arrived late to a press briefing and said so what's going on and how is it bad for Britain he's he's spattered a lot of false claims okay so I wouldn't take anything he says particularly seriously and I also think that you know he probably wants to have a profile a profile role in the no campaign leave campaign but probably once then as he is sort of sad to negotiate another way of staying in so no I wouldn't believe the claim about 3 million jobs because I wouldn't believe any of his claims but I also wouldn't believe any claim about 3 million jobs either way I mean Nick has made similar points on the other side we just don't know it could be a bit short term probably not so good long term nobody knows generally I tend to think that it's bad for economics to divide things up and erect barriers rather than the opposite so my take is it's probably bad economically but it's a political question okay thanks very much I just wanted to just draw something out which has been talked about by both of you and by people on the floor which is the common starting point seems to be this general what is the EU what could the EU be what did we actually see in practice since the EU crisis crisis management started being unfolding and I think we both there is a common agreement that the crisis management because the situation is definitely deteriorated has been done in an undemocratic way or has been done in ways which isn't going to be which leaves much to be desired and we've already talked about the ECB's mandate being overstepped through pressure direct or indirect on national governments to accept bailout mechanisms using the threat of the financial system being deprived of liquidity, the banking system being deprived of liquidity we've talked about how the stopgap measures which then end up being permanently instituted as the ESM being derived from the wrong decision to bail out the banks via the state so give money to the governments so the governments can pay their creditors which at the time were the big private European banks so this was a wrong decision from which then we can see all of these undemocratic problems playing out on the EU level so I think the thing that I want to draw out is why did that wrong decision happen in the sense that we have seen numerous times let me give you an example when the debt restructuring program for Greece was being decided between 2011 and 2012 which was when the notorious referendum proposal fell through and a technocratic government was put in place so here we have this divide between technocratic bureaucrats in Brussels and domestic civil servants versus technocratic governments being put in place I'll admitedly or by what many people thought was the creditors themselves in order to carry forward these agreements at that point we had banking sector interest the IAF actually helping to break the deadlock of those policy makers about what that agreement should be so how do we understand these negotiating powers coming to secure a new deal for the second bailout for Greece the let's say the bankers union very much helped to provide the blueprint for that debt restructuring would be how do we understand the deadlock arising at the European political level being helped and assisted by financial interest directly so I have this question how is this to be understood and how is it to be understood this we've been talking a lot about technocracy the benefits of technocracy when we're talking about you know leading up to the technocrats to decide the length of the cable but we have had a series of examples in the last years of technocratic governments being put in place and a lot of political instability in Greece in the space of six years and in the last case the political will of that government being very harshly resisted by the European authorities so in what frame can we understand sovereignty, popular mandates, the ECB's power to you know when we're talking about again in the context of the referendum under what conditions will England be voting in the UK be voting in Greece voted their referendum with the banks closed and capital controls that had been enforced by the ECB cutting liquidity so what are the frames of democracy under what conditions are we free to choose our futures if the banks are closed and there's no money in the ATM so just to open it out and to kind of draw out these issues again from the discussion I don't know if you would like to comment on this or if we have more issues any points from the floor I can say a few words because you were someone in the audience for so early asked about whether there's sort of free and equal influence among various groups in society I think this is related the answer is clearly no and that's a flaw in national democracies too electoral democracy doesn't mean equal influence by all citizens unfortunately maybe one question to ask is about the Papandreo story so what happened was that Papandreo sprung it as a bit of a surprise on both other European countries and I think his own government if I remember right that he would have a referendum on the second bailout that had a debt restructuring in early November 2011 and he was sort of called in school masterly by Merkel and Sarkozy who yelled at him and said you can't do this and so on but I think it's important to ask the question this was still the elected prime minister of Greece there's no question that he had the authority legally to call her a referendum he chose not to why did he choose not to, well there's obviously pressure from the outside a big part of it was that it seems like he was stabbed in the back by Benizelos where I guess was a finance minister at the time he wanted the top job himself there was a lot of internal pressure but ultimately he chose to withdraw it and he lost his parliamentary support and the new government was voted in or supported with a majority in parliament the scandal in Italy around the same time where Bologgoni was squeezed out again it was outside pressure but he lost his parliamentary support so these were terrible pressures against democracy but still it was national politics that kind of called the day it was that the horse trading that happens between politicians at the national level whoever the power brokers are who are necessarily the same as the elected people in elected office decided to side with the preference of the larger European countries why was that well two questions why did they do that and why did the larger European powers pressure for just that and I think the role of banks is very important I think what we have is democratically elected governments very often following the interest of banks it's quite true and let me offer a heretical thought there's a reason why national governments so often act in the interest of their banks it's because national banking systems political elites are very much intertwined at the national level most banks in Europe are nationally headquartered banks they have long standing relationships these are people who know each other banks are sometimes formally sometimes informally seen as some extension of national policy credit policy it's very powerful to be able to channel funding the direction you want and you see it at the most egregious level in places like Ireland and Spain where you have these huge property bubbles that benefited both banks and the parties in power while it lasted the heretical thought I want to offer then is that the movement towards greater integration of banking regulation in Europe at the pan-European level Eurozone and most of the EU which is both technocratic it's supranational is actually going to have the effect or at least it's our best hope for breaking that nexus at the national level between national political elites and national banking elites because it will stop governments from favouring their own banks and it will also stop the banks from favouring their own governments that's part of the purpose so here's an example I would like to suggest we'll see how it plays out where more European technocracy will actually improve national democracy can I give exactly the opposite position please do because I think that it's not just at the national level obviously for many sort of neoclassical economists they want to sort of remove that national level linkage but they don't necessarily see the transnational capitalist class working with exactly the same level of interconnectedness I think that's where it's not that technocracy isn't political it's that it has the appearance of not being political so what technocracy does is it opposes a particular solution as if it is the only solution that you could possibly hold which would be economically sustainable legitimate establishment and I think that that's part of the issue it was interesting in the plan B discussions everybody was saying you need to reestablish national central banks in the way in which they were originally conceived i.e. being institutions which are political so brought back under political control not with the semblance of independence and instead that they are responsible for managing national debt so that becomes a way in which you do and it could well be in the more extreme ways like Ecuador for example they have an extra EU example went through exactly that went through a debt audit wrote down its debt straight back again Argentina with a slightly different model a very very short period of pain and straight back again which obviously from the outside everybody was screaming to Greece to say default go through the pain and come out again but there were obviously different political and historical things there to go back to the bigger question under what conditions are we voting here in a way Britain is voting in a position of incredible privilege in our referendum in comparison to Greece all of the aspects we're not going to a situation where we go to the bank we're not being told you have 40 euros a week or whatever it may be you can take out and we also have absolutely no conception here of the reality of the refugee presence that there is in the rest of Europe even I was in Frankfurt the week before last and even on the platforms of Frankfurt Station you've got a huge physical presence of people who come out of the war zones but Britain is incredibly cocooned from the rest of Europe in that respect so I think we're voting in a position of great privilege and I hope that by continuing the debate we begin to see some of the more profound choices that actually are coming in in the European conflict okay that's a nice close how are there any final comments or questions any burning desires or questions for the speakers there's one to define this country defined the UK on EU conflicting laws and which obviously can be expressed in the field does this not perform to protect individuals especially when the EU can place checks and balances upon the UK and hold the state land for any confirmation or injustices does this not also show the historical context of unlocksed social contract between the individual and the state they avoid the states say parliament can still enact laws which can actually improve or fix the UK's position with the EU because ultimately they still hold sovereignty through the ECA membership in this sense would not seem to be a problem and can be done through express repeal of the constitutional statute they have also protected people in the past as well there's cases like that in the UK I think even the European Union which was on the outset may just affect corporations and not bring individuals so in a sense I still believe that being in the EU is actually protecting individuals more so than corporations and by leaving it it's going to bring a movement on people as opposed to corporations how would you guys look at that? let me just say one thing better I think one of the things we've tried to say from the war on is if you were thinking if people suggest that by leaving the European Union things are going to get better that's the main because we have the most rabidly neoliberal government and indeed country of all the European country so I don't think anybody needs to feel that there's a great choice of offer here you're either in the European Union it's going to hell in a hand car in the UK it's going to hell in a hand car and it's just a question of whether you feel you've got any control over it which is really a big thing so I think that on that basis nobody should be under any false illusion but I do think that there is there is a a necessary handing over of sovereignty as part of the UK's membership because with the Treaty of Lisbon and all of the previous treaties more and more powers are indeed ceded to Brussels so the work which I do on the trade and investment policy Britain no longer has a trade and investment policy Britain's relations with the rest of the world are no longer a matter for our government it's all rooted through Brussels so I think you'll find that more and more of those things which traditionally have seen pretty obscure, pretty distant they might deal with some of the profits of a big multinational corporation but people haven't seen and really have seen our issues are now being made much more real because it's precisely cases like these investment courts where US corporations if TTIP goes through will be able to sue the UK government for introducing rules to try and stop people smoking we don't have any control over that that's something which has gone through Brussels the comment of all of this is this, I had a private meeting with the European Commission on Trade in her office in Brussels and I said to her you know everybody's against you the whole of Europe's against you you have this consultation you have 150,000 people responding to your consultation over 97% so they didn't like what you're doing what legitimacy do you have and she said I'm going to take my mandate from the European people and that is the commission that is it, that is the power we've given to them and yes, there are secondary checks and balances it goes through the European Parliament and the European Parliament has taken it or leave it both, they're not allowed to get involved in any of the negotiations but the power that we've given is a massive transfer of sovereignty so I don't think we can escape that it's then just a question of whether you feel that you can get enough back and whether indeed you consider it to be worth giving up your sovereignty on a very legal level I think you're quite right on sovereignty Parliament could abolish the European Community Act today you can legally leave treaties and of course there is a provision in the EU treaty for leaving so legally speaking sovereignty is in Parliament in a narrow political sense I agree with you, of course a lot of decisions aren't made there, they're made in the Commission in the European Council, in the European Parliament and with all kinds of political processes, formal and informal including your law being with the Commission that's all part of politics and because these are common rules they happen at a common level so in that sense in that narrow political sense there is less national sovereignty but I think what matters most is this notion of sovereignty as governing yourself self-government surely that's what both the legal and political notions are for in the end, it's to have influence over the world around you and the lives we live and it's often the case that by binding ourselves to certain rules we enhance our self-government I mean that's the when technocracy is done well that's how it works, it gives predictability it means that everyone knows what to expect, it means that you know that you won't get a you won't be electrocuted by a washing machine an example, right and that's because of technocratic rules that have been put in place you don't actually have to be an electrician to check whether it's safe technical rules well but you know, technical rules are governed by technocracy that's what technocracy means I do agree with you that technocracy is political of course it's political because it affects real power relations but sometimes binding ourselves to rules but sometimes binding ourselves can enhance our self-government when we enter agreements with one another when we make commitments for the long term when we make promises we enable ourselves to do things together that we couldn't otherwise do and of course national democracy in some ways restricts what we can individually do that's what laws are but it enhances our control over our life together so the real question is in the world as it is today does the UK have more of that real influence on how things go by being a member of the European Union or not, that's what the question has to be and I think at at a more general level do you have more self-government by making rules together with others to me the answer seems overwhelmingly yes well does the EU as it's actually constituted really existing European integration as it were does it carry out that possibility in a satisfactory way not the best possible way of course it needs to be improved I don't think the sort of reforms the government called for were necessarily good ones but they illustrate one thing which is how much influence the UK actually does have the government decided to spend on getting concessions supposedly in these four domains those were not huge but they took a lot to get it was a huge hassle for everybody else who has a eurozone crisis and a migration crisis and Ukraine on their hands it was totally unnecessary but he got it and if you look back and you actually look at what happens rather than what's reported in most of the press the UK's had a lot of influence that's gone but the single market was to a large extent Margaret Thatcher's achievement so you might not agree with how that influence was used but that's a different question from whether there's a loss of real sovereignty real self-government I think there's a lot of more enhanced self-government by working together and well whether the governments over the years have used that influence in a wise way to judge but don't blame the structures for that let's give a round of applause to our speakers thank you very much I think we achieved the primary aim which was to educate ourselves and to educate all of us here on these issues and to have the time to really sit and go into these both very practical real political issues but these broader theoretical and philosophical notions and the content of the notions that get thrown around every day so thank you very much for coming thank you again very much our speakers for being here into the Open Economic Forum for hosting the event and a small shout out for the next event of Open Economics Forum is in two weeks on changing UK or challenging current UK policies it's co-organised with the Economics Department at SOAS and the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy it will be taking place in this room so if you look onto the Open Economics Forum site you'll see notification of it so please take some documents that we have which are from both of our speakers representing some good descriptions of some of the problems we've been talking about today and thank you again to the speakers for coming and to you for being here as well thank you very much thank you very much for coming it's been fantastic yeah it's been a real privilege I wouldn't expect you to say so unequivocally that it doesn't get better by going by legal from your earlier remarks I wasn't sure where you stood on that