European Union

Farmers’ protests sweep Europe

Farmers’ protests have subsided somewhat in France, following government concessions, but continue in many countries across Europe. They were sparked by new European Union rules which require a certain proportion of fallow land, crop rotations, and reduced fertiliser use. The EU is now stepping back. German farmers object to the phasing out of tax breaks on agricultural diesel; Netherlands farmers, to rules curbing nitrogen oxide and ammonia emissions. In Greece, fuel tax is a target; in Bulgaria, food imports from Ukraine. The French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste ( Révolutionnaires ) reports...

A workers' response to Brexit

March to Rejoin the EU, Saturday 23 September, central London, from 12 noon. Left bloc meets at 12, corner of Curzon Street and Park Lane. More here and here Brexit has meant and will mean: • An end to the free movement which enabled millions of workers from other European countries to join the British workforce not, like other migrant workers these days, with a visa status dependent on employers’ goodwill, but as workmates with equal rights. Freedom of movement also enabled large numbers of British-origin workers and students to travel the other way with equal rights. In other words, Brexit...

Nick Wright, Qatar and "mal-information"

The so-called Qatargate scandal, involving corruption and influence-buying by Qatar and Morocco in the European Parliament has led to the arrest of several MEPs, an NGO secretary general and a union bureaucrat on charges of corruption, money-laundering and “participation in a criminal organisation”. The Morning Star has carried two lengthy reports by Communist Party of Britain member Nick Wright (who, being based in Italy, seems to be the paper’s de facto Europe correspondent), going into often fascinating detail about the inner workings of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the group to...

Protocol patch-up

On 27 February, Rishi Sunak announced that the EU had agreed a wide range of easings to “overlay” the Northern Ireland Protocol attached to the 2019-20 UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. The Protocol allows Northern Ireland both to be in the EU Single Market (and thus have no “hard” border with the South) and to be in the UK. Since the Tories plan to depart widely from EU regulations — Sunak still seems intent on that — the Protocol requires some border checks between Britain and Northern Ireland. The new agreement minimises those. The ultra-Brexiter Tories have backed Sunak’s deal. The DUP, the main...

Tories seek way out of Brexit snarl-up

The Tories are in turmoil, as rumours emerge that a “deal” on the Northern Ireland Protocol is close to being agreed between the UK Government and the EU. The main lines of any deal have been known for weeks. They are likely to involve a system of “red lanes” and “green lanes” at Northern Ireland ports, which would reduce checks on cargo bound only for Northern Ireland, with risks of non-compliance mitigated by the sharing of data and by penalties for breaches of the rules. One Brexiteer and DUP bugbear, however, is the continuing jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over Northern...

Tom Nairn, 1932-2023

I met Tom Nairn, who has died at the age of 90, only once, when I was 17 or 18 and he came to speak at a meeting at my university. I remember wondering how someone even more shy, awkward, and dishevelled than I was could have become such a high-profile influence on the 1960s left. Nairn wrote not awkwardly but exuberantly, floridly, splendidly. The literary-only character of his activity was typical of the New Left Review ( NLR ) editorial group of which he was part. Perry Anderson, its leading figure, had taken over the Review in 1962, at age 24 - he can scarcely have been shy - and though...

Letter: Focus on rejoin and free movement

Mohan Sen’s article ( Solidarity 654 ) ends by stating: “The labour movement should demand the UK rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union immediately, and launch a serious discussion about reversing Brexit”. It is wrong to propose demands for Single Market (SM) and Customs Union (CU) membership. We should focus straightforwardly on the demand to rejoin and transform the EU, and short of that, to restore and extend named, specific working-class rights we have lost or are in the process of losing — chief among them, free movement. Workers’ Liberty summarised its stance on Brexit as “Remain...

Political ripples from the war

On 17 June Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev discussed world politics with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. Tokayev repeated his refusal to recognise the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine, formally recognised by Russia two days before the invasion on Ukraine on 24 February. In January Russian troops had helped Tokayev snuff out a crisis in Kazakhstan. But Kazakhstan has a long border with Russia and a large ethnic Russian minority in its northern areas. Russian MPs then threatened Kazakhstan. Konstantin Zatulin said,...

Morning Star’s Nick Wright praises Wagenknecht

In the Morning Star of 18 November, former Straight Left ultra-Stalinist Nick Wright, now rehabilitated into the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and a regular contributor to the paper, had a lengthy article headed “The truth about immigration waits at the Polish border” While rightly condemning Poland and the EU over the plight of the people at the border, Wright glosses over Lukashenko’s cynical manipulation of desperate migrants in his efforts to destabilise the EU (while his master Putin gloats from the sidelines), and reports of Belarusian troops forcibly turning back migrants attempting...

EU migrants face hostile environment

Hundreds of thousands of EU migrants face losing their access to benefits, healthcare, livelihood, and even their right to remain where they now consider home, as UK “settled status” applications comes to an end on 30 June. The “settled status” process itself it a betrayal of the promises made in the run up to the EU referendum, when migrants were repeatedly assured their status in the UK would be safe in the event of Brexit. Most applications have been approved, but many have been given insecure “pre-settled status”, some have been rejected outright, and unknown numbers have not applied. The...

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