Tuesday 31 May 2016

Why Norway voted NO to the EU - and why it’s NEVER looked back

NORWEGIAN working conditions and its welfare state compare favourably to any EU country.
By MIMMI KVISVIK, NORWEGIAN UNION LEADER



Norway's Mimmi Kvisvik
Norway's Mimmi Kvisvik says the country is far better off out of the EU
Like Britain, Norway also has problems with social dumping linked to the free movement of labour within the Single Market. 
But outside the EU, Norway has a large number of tools at our disposal - not available to EU members - that can remedy our situation. 
Norwegians voted ‘no’ to the EU in a heated referendum in 1994 – and we are not regretting it. 
Quite the opposite. 
There has been a rock solid majority against EU membership for more than 10 years. 
According to the most recent poll, 72 per cent are opposed to Norwegian membership of the EU, with only 18.1 per cent supporting it and 9.9 per cent undecided.
Norway has experienced unprecedented economic growth since the ‘no’ vote in 1994. 
Annual growth in GDP has been significantly higher in Norway than the EU average. 
There has been a strong increase in foreign investments in Norway, more than doubling in the last 10 years alone.
For decades, Norway has enjoyed easy access to the EU market. 
Since 1994 through the European Free Trade Agreement (EEA) that makes Norway part of the Single Market. 
We believe Norway would be even better off by replacing the EEA agreement with a bilateral trade agreement with the EU. 
Norway voted not to join the EU in 2004
Norway voted not to join the EU in 2004
Norway’s monetary policy is decided BY Norway FOR Norway
Mimmi Kvisvik
The EEA agreement is still very much preferable to EU membership. The EEA agreement encompasses less than 10 percent of EU law making. (Source: EUR-lex and annual EFTA-reports) 
The EU is both a single market and a political and economic union. 
The EEA agreement includes Norway in the Single Market, but we are still independent from most of the European Union. In addition, and more importantly, Norway still has a sovereign right to refuse the incorporation of new EU legislation. 
Norway’s monetary policy is decided BY Norway FOR Norway. 
Outside the euro, Norway has used its economic policies to stimulate employment and growth. 
The unemployment rate is 4.8 per cent, one of the lowest in Europe. 
Norway is not affected by the continuing attempts of the EU to coordinate taxation, and we are free to decide the level of taxes and duties needed to finance our welfare state.
Norway's decision not to join the EU has not changed our internationalist perspective; on the contrary. We are a part of Europe, and the world. 
We cooperate with the EU on research and education like any member state. Opposition to EU membership is in the majority in all groups of voters. 
Women and young people are most negative to EU membership, and the labour movement has grown even more sceptical to the EU in the last 20 years.  
Mimmi Kvisvik is president of the Norwegian Union of Social Educators and Social Workers (FO)
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/673775/Norway-EU-referendum-positive-brexit-UK-vote-MImmi-Kvisvik
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Tim Congdon: Serious flaws in the Treasury's analysis of EU costs

25th May 2016

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Tim Congdon

 Serious flaws in the Treasury's analysis of EU costs

 Dear fellow member of UKIP (and others concerned about the UK's relationship with the EU),      

  As I said in my last UKIP e‐mail, I have written a long piece for Standpoint magazine demolishing Chancellor Osborne’s statement that the average UK household would be substantially worse off because of Brexit. That piece is due out tomorrow, when the next issue of Standpoint hits the newsstands, but I thought you might be interested in a video on the same subject. 

 The video shows that Osborne has engaged in the Goebbels tactic of “repeat Big Lies often enough and they will be believed”, except that in this case we have a Big Lie in the form of a Big Number. To justify his Big Number Osborne appeals to a team of Treasury economists, who have written his White Paper (Cm 9250). My discussion is on the contents and argument of Cm 9250.      

 The video may be a bit technical in places, but I am confident it is easier to follow than the extraordinarily obscure and abstruse Cm 9250. Osborne and the Treasury say that   
 ‐ EU membership increases the UK’s openness to the world, 
 ‐ the greater an economy’s openness the higher is its productivity (i.e., output per person), and
 ‐ living standards depend on productivity.      

 My main points are:     

 1. The growth of productivity in UK manufacturing in the decade after joining the then Common Market (i.e., the European Economic Community which became the EU in 1993) in 1973 was less than half that in the previous decade, 

 2. Crucial to the Treasury’s analysis is the claim that openness has increased enormously since the 1940s. I show that the Treasury’s measure of openness (i.e., the ratio of the volume of trade to the volume of national output) rises in all dynamic economies for reasons which have nothing to do with openness, in the sense of participation in international trade deals, such as the EU. The Treasury has made an analytical blunder. 

 3. The EU is to a significant extent a protectionist organization. Leaving it would enable to the UK to pursue unilateral free trade (like its former colonies, Hong Kong and Singapore). Contrary to the assumption in Cm 9250, the UK’s openness could increase after leaving the EU. On the Treasury’s own reasoning, that ought to be good for productivity and living standards. 

 4. The main text of Cm 9250 more or less ignores the contents of the annual White Paper (published since 1980) on European Union Finances, which documents the definite fiscal cost of EU membership, and indicates a cost per household running at over £500 a year. 

 5. Such notions as “benefit tourism” and “health tourism” are undoubtedly meaningful, because governments departments are known (from press reports) to have investigated their size. Benefit and health tourism are ignored entirely in Cm 9250. 

 6. Much EU regulation has an undoubted cost to the UK, while immigration reduces the pay of low‐ income workers. The costs of regulation, and the cost of lost employment and income of the UK‐born, are also ignored entirely in Cm 9250.    

 The Treasury analysis in Cm 9250 is dishonest and worthless, while Osborne is a bare‐faced liar. No other phrase makes any sense in the context. Happily, many other people – even many who want the UK to remain in the EU – have seen that the government’s conduct of its publicity campaign has been disgraceful. A backlash is emerging, not least from those who feel that demands that government departments support political propaganda are an abuse of power.    

 I hope you enjoy and value the video. The Powerpoint file I use is available for wider circulation, but please request it (for use in public meetings or whatever) only if you really need it. Fan e‐mail is nice, but on this occasion can you please not send me an e‐mail in reply unless essential?

 http://www.timcongdon4ukip.com/docs/SeriousFlawsInTheTreasurysAnalysisOfEUCosts20160525.pdf
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‘Can the promoters of Project Fear not see that Brexit would merely result in the UK becoming just like any other non-EU nation?’

Marketplace May 2016

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Tim Congdon

Two kinds of nation are found in the modern world—a minority (28) that belong to the European Union and a majority (more than 160) that do not. Most of the world’s roughly 190 nations have their own currencies. All have assets that constitute national wealth, and a great many have stock exchanges where the assets can be bought and sold.

Economists and others have put forward numerous theories to explain the valuation of both currencies and assets, where the word “assets” embraces houses, land, equities, bonds and so on. Currency markets behave crazily from time to time, but the most plausible view is that an exchange rate is just another price. Like every price it is set by supply and demand. If governments and central bankers create too much money relative to demand (as they did in Germany in 1923 and Zimbabwe in 2008, and as they are doing now in Venezuela), the value of money falls.

No theory proposes that the value of a currency depends on the nation’s loneliness, its geographical location or its abstention from this or that international organisation. Counter-examples are so obvious that they can be limited to one paragraph. Switzerland is a country of eight million people, little more than 1 per cent of the continent (defined mostly widely) in which it is situated. It does not belong to the EU and until 2002 it did not belong to the United Nations. The Swiss franc is about as lonely a currency as could be imagined. But it has appreciated against all the world’s other currencies, including the euro, in the last 50 years. Japan could claim to be Asia’s most peripheral nation, in the atlas sense. But, again, its currency has been impressively strong for much of the last four decades.

Further, not one school of macroeconomic thought has argued that assets within EU member states have systematically more expensive valuations than nations which are not EU member states. No evidence whatsoever has been presented that companies quoted on the stock markets of Germany and France are more highly rated (in terms of price/earnings ratios, market-value-to-book ratios and so on) than their equivalents on the stock markets of the US or Australia, or that any such superiority in valuation is attributable to their EU membership. Not a single published academic paper has attempted to claim that EU membership by itself improves the valuation criteria of corporate equity.

Yet the promoters of Project Fear and far too many headline writers have been busy in the last few weeks with silly alarmism. They say that the day after a vote for Brexit will see collapses in the value of the pound and the stock market. Can they not see that Brexit would merely result in the UK becoming just like any other non-EU nation? No facts or data show that EU membership affects the long-run valuation basis of the currencies, stock markets and assets in general of EU member states relative to the currencies, stock markets and assets of non-EU member states. The sky hasn’t fallen in because the US, Japan, Canada and others are not EU members; the sky will not fall in because the UK is not an EU member.

Remember that the UK has had a dress rehearsal for the day after Brexit. In the summer of 1992 its economy was suffering from a severe recession clearly due to its membership of the European exchange rate mechanism. A number of observers—including a weirdly-named “Liverpool Six” group of economists (of whom I was one)— said that the Exchange Rate Mechanism, with its fixed exchange rate between the pound and other European currencies, was responsible for too-high interest rates. The UK therefore needed to leave, so that monetary policy could again be geared to our own needs.

But the then Prime Minister, John Major, disagreed. According to his memoirs, “We had looked at the precipice and decided against jumping.” In the event, the UK did not jump over the precipice, or leap in the dark, or plunge into the abyss, or otherwise throw itself downwards into some great unknown. Instead, it was pushed. Overwhelming selling pressures in the foreign exchange markets forced the pound out of the ERM on “Black Wednesday”.

Except that it turned out not to be black at all. Although the pound did indeed fall in late 1992, interest rates came down and the economy recovered. The period to the May 1997 general election saw steady output growth with moderate inflation. Black Wednesday became Golden Wednesday. The pound’s value against other currencies was higher when Major lost the general election than when he and his Cabinet colleagues had behaved so idiotically on Black/ Golden Wednesday almost five years earlier. When politicians use words like “precipice” and “abyss” in matters of economic policy, they are waffling. Even more than usual, they don’t know what they are talking about.

http://www.timcongdon4ukip.com/docs/2016_Standpoint_May_Non_EU_EU_countries.pdf
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Patrick Minford calls for Osborne to RESIGN after Brexit vote amid ‘deceitful’ fearmongering

A LEADING economist today called for George Osborne to resign after the EU referendum following the Treasury’s “politically criminal” analysis of the impact of a Brexit vote.

By 

Image result for Patrick MinfordProfessor Patrick Minford, a former advisor to the Treasury, hit out after the Chancellor’s team today published their assessment of the short-term economic impact of leaving the EU.
The Cardiff University academic branded the 83-page document “intellectually deceitful and politically deceitful” with the Treasury having “gone into the gutter” with their “shock and horror” report.
Asked by Express.co.uk if leading economists could continue to have confidence in Mr Osborne beyond the EU referendum on June 23, Professor Minford said: “The big problem for the Chancellor if we vote for Brexit is that he will think it’s going to be a disaster.
“Therefore I don’t think one could have any confidence that he would handle it right.
“You have to have somebody in charge who actually believes in the situation and how it can be dealt with so I think there would have to be a change.”
In the Treasury document Mr Osborne has warned of a “self-inflicted blow to living standards and aspirations of the British people” that would result from quitting the EU.
Supporting his close political ally, Prime Minister David Cameron said a Brexit vote would spark a “DIY recession”.
The Treasury analysis of the short-term impact of withdrawal from the EU claims Britain would be plunged into a year-long economic downturn.
George Osborne
George Osborne claims quitting the EU could plunge Britain into a year-long recession
The civil servants’ report adds between 520,000 and 820,000 jobs would be lost, house prices would fall by between 10 per cent and 18 per cent, and public sector borrowing would rocket by between £24 billion and £39 billion.
It is also claimed GDP could plummet by as much as six per cent.



This is intellectually disgraceful, politically deceitful and totally irresponsible
Top economist Patrick Minford
But Professor Minford, a leading Brexit supporter, trashed the Treasury document as “completely irresponsible”.
Appearing at a Politeia event alongside Tory MPs John Redwood and Peter Lilley, the academic said the Treasury’s “whole methodology is pretty badly founded”.
Professor Minford said the Treasury’s short-term assessment of Brexit was always bound to be wrong because their previous long-term analysis of the impact of leaving the EU - on which the new document is based - was “deliberately deceitful”.
He also said the uncertainty of a Brexit vote, on which the Treasury have based much of their doom-laden forecast, would “quickly dissipate” once the EU referendum is decided.
Professor Minford also argued the Treasury themselves are causing the most uncertainty with their downcast assessments.
He said: “They’re going around saying the economy’s going to be crap after Brexit. Then they’ll have to run it after Brexit happens, which of course it may well do.”
He added after Brexit the current uncertainty caused by the EU referendum will be viewed as “a big fuss over something that’s pretty good.”

The economist said if Britain pursued a free trade agenda after Brexit prices could fall as much as 20 per cent.
Professor Minford also accused the Treasury of an “astonishing” and “crazy” assumption that Britain would keep all the same trade tariffs post-Brexit that are currently put on UK goods as an EU member.
Professor Minford said this “assumes you are a complete lunatic” as he branded the notion a bit of “Mickey Finn” slipped into the Treasury analysis to forecast a negative GDP result post-Brexit.
He said: “What the Treasury have done, in my opinion, is two intellectually criminal things.
“And also I think politically criminal, they have actually deceived the British people deliberately by making this entirely false assumption.”
He added: “This is intellectually disgraceful, politically deceitful and totally irresponsible by the ministry that is supposed to be running the British economy and will be responsible for it after this Brexit vote, which could go, as they know, either way.”
Professor Minford said his former employer had “gone into the gutter” with such a “cynical approach”.
Also arguing for a Brexit vote on June 23, Mr Redwood claimed Britons would be “better Europeans” by quitting the EU.
The former Cabinet minister said it was “becoming increasingly” difficult for the UK to be in an organisation driven by the euro single currency, a drive for political union and a desire to establish a borderless continent.
Mr Redwood said these are all things the Government is “trying to avoid being part of”, adding: “It would be a more honest relationship to be outside.
“To be friends, allies, traders with them but not be trying to slow down the crucial elements of the strategy of the EU.”

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/673032/EU-referendum-economist-Patrick-Minford-George-Osborne-Brexit-resign-Treasury-analysis
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JAPAN TIMES Brexit Headlines: 1 May - 31 May 2016

The Japan Times
Brexit Headlines





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Thursday 26 May 2016

MUST READ: Across Europe, distrust of mainstream political parties is on the rise

The far right is gaining support in some corners of Europe, but more marked is the rejection by voters of the political establishment

, and

Austrian Freedom party supporters wave flags in Vienna
Austrian far-right Freedom party supporters during the final election rally in Vienna in April.
Photograph: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters 
The narrow defeat – by just 0.6 percentage points – of the nationalist Freedom party’s Norbert Hofer in this week’s Austrian presidential elections has focused attention once more on the rise of far-right parties in Europe.

But despite what some headlines might claim, it is oversimplifying things to say the far right is suddenly on the march across an entire continent. In some countries, the hard right’s share of the vote in national elections has been stable or declined.

In others – particularly the nations of southern Europe, which, with memories of fascism and dictatorship still very much alive, have proved reluctant to flirt with rightwing extremism – it is the far left that is advancing.

Some rightwing populist parties are relatively new, but others have been a force to be reckoned with for many years now, sometimes – as in France – enjoying a large share of the vote but being unable, as yet, to break through nationally.

The concerns of many may be broadly the same: immigration, integration, jobs, incomes, the EU, political and business elites. The euro crisis, followed by Europe’s migrant crisis and the Paris and Brussels terror attacks have fuelled their rise.

But their ideological roots are very different: from anti-establishment to neo-fascist, nationalist to anti-austerity, authoritarian to populist, libertarian to Catholic ultra-conservative.

Germany’s AfD is not Hungary’s Fidesz. The Finns and the Danish People’s party loathe France’s Front National, and the Netherlands’ PVV is nothing like Poland’s Law and Justice, which bears no resemblance to Austria’s Freedom party. It may be misleading to bracket them all together in the same category.

What is undeniably happening, however, is that the continent’s traditional mainstream parties are in full retreat. Across Europe, the centre-left social democrats and centre-right Christian democrats who have dominated national politics for 60 years are in decline.

Following a collapse in support for its two centrist parties last December, Spain has been unable to form a government and will hold fresh elections next month. The three mainstream parties in the Netherlands are set to win 40% of the vote between them in elections next year – roughly what any one of them might have got previously.

Even in Germany, it seems highly likely that support for liberal and green parties and, above all, the populist, anti-immigrant AfD, could soon bring to an end an era of two-party political stability that has endured since the end of the second world war.

What is on the march across Europe may not be the far right, but distrust, disillusion, even full-scale rejection of the political establishment: in the first round of Austria’s presidential elections, the centre-right and centre-left parties barely polled 10% each.

Austria





Norbert Hofer of Austria’s Freedom party. 
Photograph: Filip Singer/EPA
Having toned down its inflammatory, sometimes racist rhetoric to focus on issues such as social welfare and spending power, the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic Freedom party has seen its share of the vote nearly double in recent years, but it remains lower than the 27% it scored in 1999.







Italy

 
Matteo Salvini, federal secretary of Lega Nord.
Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

While it has continued to fare well in regional elections, finishing first in Veneto in 2015 with a landslide 50% of the vote, support for the Lega Nord in national elections nearly halved between 2006 and 2013. Meanwhile, comedian Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment, anti-corruption and anti-euro Five Star Movement has entered with a flourish, winning 25% of the national vote in 2015.







France





Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National in France
Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National in France.
Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images


In national elections, support for Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, anti-euro Front National has swung between 11% in 2002 to 4% in 2007 and nearly 14% in 2012. In recent European (24%) and regional (27%) elections it has done far better, but France’s two-round electoral system means it has yet to make a decisive breakthrough. Le Pen is thought likely to reach the run-off in next year’s presidential elections but, like her father in 2002, be defeated.








Sweden

Jimmie Akesson, chairman of the Sweden Democrats. Photograph: Scanpix Sweden/Reuters

National support for the nationalist, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats has rocketed since 2006 and the party won 49 seats in the 2014 elections, giving it the balance of power in parliament. The refugee crisis has further increased its following, although its support has fallen since January polls suggested it might be Sweden’s biggest party. For the time being, other parliamentary groups refuse to cooperate with it.




Denmark

Danish People’s party leader Kristian Thulesen Dahl. Photograph: Scanpix Denmark/Reuters

Support for the anti-immigration, “more Denmark, less EU” Danish People’s party, which has 37 seats in parliament and is propping up a minority Liberal government, is helping to force a significant hardening of Denmark’s asylum and refugee policies. Its support has surged in the past five years, rising from 14% to 21% in last year’s general elections.




Finland

Timo Soini, chairman of the Finns party. Photograph: Vesa Moilanen/REX Shutterstock

Stealing votes from right and left, the Finns party led by Timo Soini is fiscally leftwing but has a socially conservative and nationalist platform; it supports the welfare state and marriage and strongly opposes immigration. Support has grown rapidly and it now has 38 seats in the Finnish parliament.




Spain

Leader of Spain’s leftwing Podemos, Pablo Iglesias. Photograph: Curto de la Torre/AFP/Getty Images

The new leftwing, anti-establishment and anti-austerity Podemos, born from the Indignados protests during the financial crisis, and the more right-leaning, anti-corruption Citizens party, born in 2006 as a regional party to counter Catalan separatism, both made a spectacular entry on to the national political scene last year, collecting 35% of the vote between them and stymying the mainstream parties’ hopes of forming a government.




Germany

Frauke Petry, head of the rightwing populist AFD. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Formed in 2013 by an economics professor to campaign against the euro and ongoing European harmonisation, Alternative für Deutschland scored 5% in the general elections of that year and, earlier this year, won representation in half of Germany’s state parliaments. Currently polling at around 15%, five points behind the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the party has focused increasingly on opposing immigration and recently adopted a motion saying Islam was not compatible with the German constitution.




Greece

Ilias Panagiotaros of Golden Dawn. Photograph: Pantelis Saitas/EPA

The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn has grown into the third-biggest force in Greek politics during the country’s economic crisis, but its electoral support has not increased since 2012. Electoral support for the Syriza movement – a coalition of radical left parties that came to power on a promise to fight EU austerity – has grown more than sevenfold to more than 35%.




Poland

Jarosław Kaczyński, Law and Justice party chairman. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty

Support for the rightwing Law and Justice party, standing for Catholic conservative morality and greater state intervention, has grown steadily since 2005, allowing it to win last year’s elections. Its subsequent reinterpretation of democracy has brought it into increasing conflict with the EU and many of its own citizens.





Hungary

Chairman of the radical Jobbik party Gábor Vona. Photograph: Balazs Mohai/EPA

Jobbik, Hungary’s third-strongest party, denies it is racist, but its ideology is so freighted with antisemitism, racism and homophobia that most far-right parties shun it. Its rapid growth, from 2% to 21% of the vote since 2006, has spurred the ruling national conservative Fidesz party to increasingly hardline policies – including the erection of a razorwire fence last year to exclude refugees.





Belgium

Gerolf Annemans of Vlaams Belang. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

Support for Vlaams Belang, the far-right, nationalist and populist Flemish-language party, has plummeted from 12% to 4% in national elections since 2007, although recent polls suggest it is rallying successfully under a new leader and may be approaching its former levels.




 

Netherlands

Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Dutch Party for Freedom. Photograph: Dirk Waem/AFP/Getty Images

Geert Wilders’ anti-EU, anti-Islam Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) saw its share of the vote surge in elections in 2010, but fall dramatically two years later. Recent polls, however, suggest that unless its flamboyant founder runs into another scandal, it may end up as the Netherlands’ largest party in elections next year, with up to 25% of the vote.



Note: All data is from the national elections 

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/25/across-europe-distrust-of-mainstream-political-parties-is-on-the-rise
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