How can the European Union cope with rising populism threatening the regulatory state?
 The growth of populism in Europe is said to come from right and left, as they make common cause against an establishment they dislike for different reasons.
Rightists, mostly older male taxpayers and their wives, that is, traditional family units, seek to be left alone by the state while the bulk of leftists are single women and the young, who see the state as surrogate husbands and parents that should provide for them.
This growth in populism is likely to reshape Europe and bring about changes in the supply and demand dynamics that will have a profound impact on international trade. The bureaucratic establishments, now allied with private conglomerates, rightist populism will only bring dark days if only because bureaucrats themselves rightly predict a bleak future for themselves in a new era of de-regulation.
Leftist populism, if successful, seems only capable of winning elections, because no one, however victorious they are at the polls, can provide state aid to all at the scale demanded and yet have the economy perform as well as it has done. In the end, the state will run out of other people's money to spend and so to hamstring productive elements with regulations and taxes that result in less production..
The experience of breakaway Britain, which voted to be free of the European Union, is likely to be an experience demanded elsewhere on the continent. Such demands will be bolstered by a review of the economic record of laissez-faire jurisdictions such as postwar Hong Kong, Germany and Japan.
This will spark demands from populist European small and mid-sized enterprises (SME) to engage the re-energised British private sector on a level playing field, free of restrictive regulations.
While such outcomes will be decried by bureaucrats who will warn of the loss of protections in such deregulated environments, ensuing commercial battles are likely to benefit industrial sectors as a whole, eliminating the inefficient the regulators protect. Yes, there will be sad stories to tell, but what will emerge is a faster more robust continent to the general benefit of world trade.
In the course of these developments, something akin to the masculinist cry to "Make Europe Great Again" will arise as the continent breaks away from the confines of the largely feminine re-distributive EU that prioritises caring and sharing and loathes competition and thoughts of victorious outcomes, in which there are winners and losers.
In short, rightists seek freedom to grow while leftists seek equality and security. Occasionally, they will combine in huge numbers and stage enormous riots such as the French gilet jaunes (yellow vests), who showed the gulf between France’s metropolitan elites and its people both right and left in the face of sudden and enormous petrol tax increases.
After an online petition in France attracted nearly a million signatures, mass demonstrations throughout France began, motivated by rising fuel prices and a high cost of living as a disproportionate burden of the government's tax reforms were falling on the working and middle classes.
The gilet jaunes movement spanned the political spectrum. According to one poll, few of those protesting had voted for the centre left President Emmanuel Macron, but for far-right or far-left candidates instead.
It's fair to say that most of the rioters were men seeking to be free of state burdens, just as 40 years of discrimination in women's favour has resulted in women representing increasing proportion of tax collectors and regulators.
This is seldom if ever discussed. Various expressions of such opinions have labelled "hate speech", which can result in severe penalties, which has put a chill on public debate, which increasingly has only one socially acceptable side.
In this atmosphere, in which one can be guilty merely by being accused, it is not surprising that the lovers of free speech, speak of "draining the swamp" of its non-productive bureaucratic regulatory apparatus. This has long been the cry of the supporters of President Donald Trump in the United States, and has now been taken up by their fellow native English speakers in the United Kingdom, which has given a Boris Johnson's Brexiteer business-friendly government, which has been given a handsome mandate. Now administrations on both sides of the Atlantic see much the same problem in much the same way. One can now expect to see similar trends to develop on the continent.
It is mistake to see this as a conflict between the bourgeois business interest and the working class, as Marxists are wont to do, because it would be truer to say that this is a battle between big business and big government on one side and normal tax payers and SMEs on the other. The Americans say it is a conflict between Wall Street and Main Street. And some even reminisce of the Ronald Reagan - Margaret Thatcher era when the White House and 10 Downing Street shared a deep accord brought an end to the Cold War.
Thus, in this cool war, or cultural war that has raged for 40 years, you will find big business, ironically enough, not on the side one expects it to be, but ironically on the side of ever more stringent environmental regulation. This has become a counterintuitive alliance between big business - with the exception of victimised industries such as coal mining - and the state-funded green lobbies because they both favour sky-high compliance costs that smaller companies cannot afford.
Nor can these smaller companies, being so close to insolvency as SMEs so often are, secure bank loans because banks quite reasonably consider them high risk and will only lend on disadvantageous terms. Thus these regulations put smaller players' corporate lives at risk and put their market share up for the taking by bigger companies. Thus, we see major ocean carriers uniting to urge the United Nations to stringently enforce eco-rules, or insist that banks only lend money to those carriers with decarbonisation programmes in place.
The biggest backers of environmental regulation are the moneyed elites, not the farmers, fishermen, herdsmen and miners who make their living from the land the sea. They view it has a resource to be exploited with due care, but not solely as a bucolic pastoral vision for the ages.
But the rumblings and grumblings in the back woods of British parliamentary life became so intense that Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, following his party's pledge established the legal basis with the European Union Referendum Act 2015. He headed the Britain Stronger in Europe side, which became the official group campaigning for the UK to remain in the EU.
The experience was much like the process that saw the election of Donald Trump in the United States. The media, academic bureaucratic complex were certain that the Remain side would win. Any suggestion to the contrary was met with howls of derision. Yet the Leave side drew the crowds. What drove, and what was actively driving the Remain side, was fear. Project Fear, it was called. The Bank of England the government treasury officials, now highly partisan for the Remain side, predicted the sky would fall if the public dared to vote leave. When they did vote Leave, by 52 per cent, the sky did not fall. In fact, after a few weeks the UK economy looked better than all but Germany's, and it was heading south.
Under the new ministry of Theresa May, who as a pro-Remain minister under Cameron, the new cabinet worked half-heartedly get out of the EU, against the will of a hostile Parliament, which under an odd piece of earlier Labour government legislation designed to fix another problem at an earlier time, now created one of its own. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act decreed that the government could no longer resign and call an election at will before its maximum five-year term, as indeed parliaments throughout the Commonwealth can. It was thought that the governing party had an unfair advantage. Thus only with a simple majority of the House of Commons could a government call an election.
But by this time the Remainers who held most of the seats preferred the weak-kneed government in place being unable to advance the Leave agenda to an election in which they feared many of their number would be swept away.
Eventually, an election was called with many a lawyerly manoeuvre to derail it, and the result was, as the Remainers feared, a pro-Leave government swept in and Remainers lost their seats.
The issue today is a hard Brexit or soft. Is there to be a trade deal or is the UK to deal with the EU on the basic rights all trading nations have with each other under World Trade Organisation's (WTO) rules. Whatever deal is struck or whether it is "no deal" Brexit, Britain is finally out January 1.
It is clear that Britain will have to be more competitive than before. While this may provide teething troubles, it seems likely that Britain will thrive. As such, it will spark similar action on the continent, which will shake itself loose of EU bureaucratic restrictions or shake itself loose of the European Union itself. |
