Friday, 14 October 2016
First, I object strongly to the insinuation that the Brexit vote should be linked in any way to support for Donald Trump or Rodrigo Duterte.
Second, I profoundly disagree with Azmi’s analysis that the UK voted to leave the European Union on the basis of half-truths, nationalist fear-mongering and outright lies. By suggesting this, Azmi is uncritically repeating the fable which is being perpetuated by the disappointed Remain camp, and I am surprised that a law lecturer should do so.
The 17.2 million people who voted to leave the EU participated in the largest democratic vote on any single issue in the history of the UK. They may have done so simply because they recognised that the EU is a failing, moribund, fundamentally undemocratic and corrupt institution whose own independent Court of Auditors has declined since 2007 to sign off its accounts as accurate and truthful.
They may have done so because the UK economy, the fifth largest in the world, has a long history as a leading and highly successful island trading nation going back over 300 years, and wanted to express confidence in its future growth with global, rather than solely European, trading partners.
UK imports are far more important to the rest of the EU than our exports. With subdued domestic demand, Germany and the EU depend on trade-induced moderate growth including close trading relations with Britain. Nine EU countries send at least 5% of their total exports to the UK. In Germany, whose economy is highly export-dependent, that percentage is about 7.5% of total exports. In 2015, Germany’s trade surplus with the UK alone was a staggering €51bil, about one-fifth of Germany’s entire trade surplus. If anything, these figures understate Germany’s economic dependence on Britain.
In 2015, around 36% of Germany’s total exports went to the Eurozone. However, under the so-called TARGET2 payments systems operated by the European Central Bank, Germany’s balance of payments surplus with the Eurozone is financed not by the transfer of foreign currency reserves, gold or other near-liquid assets to Germany but by an open-ended overdraft facility granted by the Bundesbank.
Under this peculiar system, the exporter is paid but not by the importing country but Germany’s central bank, i.e. the German public at large, which never receives payment from the importing country but a mere credit note from its central bank.
As of July 2016, the Bundesbank’s TARGET2 balance stood at over €660bil. That sum is the total debt owed by other Eurozone central banks to the Bundesbank, which is unlikely ever to be repaid. The Bundesbank, in other words, has become another “bad bank” financing the current account deficits of other Eurozone members.
Germany’s trade surplus with the Eurozone therefore is little more than a massive “accounting trick”. If German Eurozone exports were paid for in the same way as her other exports, Germany would be a much richer country. That Germany is moderately prosperous at all is owed in large measure to her “real” non-Eurozone trade surplus.
Germany and, by analogy, other export-driven Eurozone economies depend on trade with the UK as a key trade partner outside the dysfunctional Eurozone much more than is commonly realised. This is unlikely to be far from the German/EU negotiators’ minds when the UK triggers Article 50 and we get down to proper bargaining rather than posturing.
The Leave voters may have done so because they recognised that this was a single opportunity not being given to any other people in Europe to take back control of their destiny.
I do not accept that it is nationalist fear-mongering for a state to want to exercise control over its own borders, nor is it racist. The law which governs a people should derive from a nation’s sovereignty and the consent of its citizens, not be imposed from outside, particularly by an institution that has a different political purpose, does not share or respect its culture or values, has a different legal system, and has no true accountability.
Why should that be acceptable to Malaysia, or any other sovereign state, any more than Great Britain? That is not the basis upon which the UK entered Europe in 1973, nor did any government since that time enjoy a democratic mandate through the electoral process to integrate the UK into the EU politically.
I further disagree with Azmi’s contention that EU monies help British communities in the form of subsidies. We are a substantial nett contributor to the EU Budget, which has been spiralling out of control for many years despite attempts by the UK to have it curbed. That nett contribution will now be spent by the UK’s Treasury, not at the behest of Brussels.
Azmi’s article founders on the rather pretentious attitude that people whose values he does not share (reasonably or objectively or otherwise) should not be permitted to vote. He says that people need to understand the real issues and choices before them. I suggest that it is entirely patronising and wrong to believe that the 17.2 million people in the UK who voted to leave the European Union can simply be written off as either racist or stupid, misguided or fooled. Rather, perhaps Azmi himself has been fooled by the UK establishment view which, having lost, is now attempting to rewrite history to offer an explanation for a vote it still does not understand and cannot come to terms with.
ANDREW GOODMAN LLB MBA PhD
Professor of Conflict Management and Dispute Resolution Studies
Rushmore University
http://www.thestar.com.my/opinion/letters/2016/10/14/uk-vote-on-brexit-based-on-peoples-need-for-sovereignty/
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Why people support the unsupportable
Wednesday, 12 October 2016BY AZMI SHAROM
SHOULD people be given the vote? Are people too stupid to be entrusted with selecting their leaders and the future of their respective nations?
Looking around the world, it would seem that there is a strong reason to believe so. Based on half-truths, nationalist fear-mongering and outright lies, the British chose to leave the European Union.
The Americans have a vile, misogynistic, racist, infantile bully as a potential president. The people of the Philippines are apparently supportive of a president whose crime-fighting policy amounts to little more than murder.
All these countries have a democratic system of government. At various stages naturally, with some more mature than others, but at the end of the day, in all four nations, people vote. So the question is, are the people too dumb to do so?
That would be an easy answer, would it not? Blame the situation of these countries on the unwashed and uneducated masses.
But then it would also be an answer based on despair for it ultimately says that people are hopeless without looking for any deeper reasoning behind this state of affairs.
Firstly, I do not think that education is important for people to be able to see right from wrong. There are many very highly educated people who are corrupt and devoid of any ethics.
I have heard people with doctorates spout the most disgustingly vicious and unkind ideas. Just as I have heard taxi drivers and domestic helpers say things of tremendous wisdom, humanism and intelligence.
Education does not make you an intelligent or a good person. Just a person with qualifications.
What is it, then? How can people support the unsupportable?
Well, I think that there is a disconnect between a large number of people and governance. A sense of being detached, somehow, from the running of the country. As though their lives do not matter to the great and powerful. This being the case, then, it does not matter what they do, or who they vote for.
This disconnect is linked to poverty, because poverty leads to a sense of being left out of the development of the nation. Many supporters of Trump, for example, are working class people who feel insecure about their future.
And if we look at the Brexit vote, England can be divided into two; London and the rest of the country.
A common thread with regard to leaving Europe is that for many, they simply can’t see what effect it has on them and that only the rich (like those who live and work in London) care about remaining in Europe.
This sense of disconnect from the grander scheme of things means that people like Trump and the Brexit politicians with their simple messages become attractive; a way to get at the status quo that does not seem to care for them.
Closer to home, a person earning minimum wage probably thinks that no matter who is in power, they will still be earning minimum wage.
So what if a person takes millions and millions of ringgit in corrupt money, what effect will it have on their daily life?
And is it any surprise that Duterte, with his “man of the people” rhetoric, can strike a chord in a nation with a 25% poverty rate?
Of course, as understandable as these reasons are to explain why some people vote the way they do, it still does not make the reasons correct. Trump’s economic policy is meant to help the normal American; yet his past shows that his business uses cheap foreign labour.
And European money helps communities all over Britain in the form of subsidies and the like; money which can’t easily be replaced by the British government on its own.
And surely a non-corrupt government would mean more funds to be used in sustainable development plans, and not the occasional handouts. Something which ought to help all of us.
There will always be idiots in any country. The racists will be drawn to the language of Trump, Brexit and the Red Shirts.
But I doubt that these are the majority of people.
People need to know that they matter and they also need to understand the real issues and choices before them, not just simplistic political sloganeering. This is the challenge for the future.
- Azmi Sharom (azmi.sharom@gmail.com) is a law teacher. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
