Britannia Radio

TELEGRAPH      2.2.09
Wildcat oil strikes: Europeans are finally waking up to the demise of 
democracy
Angry people across the EU are discovering the fine print in all the 
treaties signed by their leaders, says Janet Daley.

Janet Daley

The peoples of Europe have finally discovered what they signed up to. 
I do mean "peoples" (plural) because however much political elites 
may deceive themselves, the populations of the member states of the 
EU are culturally, historically and economically separate and 
distinct. And a significant proportion of them are getting very, very 
angry.

What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother 
supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real 
meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of 
those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU 
obsessives: it is now illegal - illegal - for the government of an EU 
country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It 
would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field 
has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for 
EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.

Meanwhile, demonstrators in Paris and the recalcitrant electorate in 
Germany are waking up to the consequences of what two generations of 
European ideologues have thrust upon them: the burden not just of 
their own economic problems but also the obligation to accept the 
consequences of their neighbours' debts and failures. Each country is 
true to its own history in the way it expresses its rage: in France, 
they take to the streets and throw things at the police, in Germany 
they threaten the stability of the coalition government, and here, we 
revive the tradition of wildcat strikes.

But the response from the EU political class is the same to all of 
these varied manifestations of resistance. Those who protest are 
being smeared with accusations of foolhardy protectionism or racist 
nationalism when they are not (not yet, anyway) guilty of either. It 
is not purblind nationalism, let alone racism, to resent the 
importation of cheap labour en masse when its conditions of 
employment (transport and accommodation provided, as seems to be the 
case at Lindsey) allow it to compete unfairly with indigenous 
workers. The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen 
as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of 
the social cohesion of existing communities which, incidentally, is 
something about which the Tories say they are much exercised. So can 
the protesters expect their support?

The US had a rule during its great period of immigration in the early 
years of the last century, that no one could enter the country with a 
pre-arranged job. This was designed precisely to prevent the 
unfairness and disruptive effect of the wholesale import of cheap 
labour. An individual travelling to seek work, prepared to take his 
chances in fair competition with local workers is one thing: the 
organised recruitment of people from the poorest regions of the 
poorest countries in Europe in order to reduce employers' wage costs 
in the more prosperous ones, is something else altogether.

Nor is it "protectionism" to argue that competition for employment 
should take place within a context of social responsibility and 
respect for the fabric of communities. Genuine protectionism is 
setting up barriers to free trade: this is what Barack Obama is doing 
when he forbids the importation of foreign materials such as British 
steel, and urges his countrymen to restrict their purchases of goods 
not manufactured in the US ("Buy America!") I eagerly await the 
condemnation of his proposal for US economic isolationism from all 
those European leaders who were so anxious to see him elected.

Free trade in goods, as opposed to unlimited open borders for 
transient labour, is absolutely essential to the recovery of the 
global economy (and for that matter, to the relief of poverty in the 
developing world). I agree with those who fear that the US under 
President Obama may be about to do what it did under Franklin 
Roosevelt, whose protectionism and hard-nosed refusal to make 
concessions to international needs condemned the world to a 
depression (followed by a war). But what the British strikers are 
demanding is not the same at all, and if their complaints are 
caricatured or defamed, the price in social disorder could be 
hideous. It is not an exaggeration to say that this could be the 
moment of justifiable anger that neo-fascist agitators have been 
waiting to exploit.

The protesters are simply demanding what they thought - what all free 
people have been taught to think since the 18th-century enlightenment 
- was their birthright. That is to say, for the basic principle of 
modern democracy: the understanding between the state and its people 
that the proper function of a government is to represent the 
interests of those who elected it. And to be fair to both presidents, 
Obama and Roosevelt, this assumption is so deeply grounded in the 
American psyche that it is almost inconceivable for any US 
administration not to abide by it quite literally.
In the grand abstract terms of the enlightenment, the legitimacy of 
government derives from the consent of the governed, and therefore no 
government should have the right to hand over its authority to some 
external body which is not democratically accountable to its own 
people. So when the framers of the EU arranged for the nations of 
Europe to do exactly that, they were repudiating the two centuries 
old political struggle for the rights and liberties of ordinary 
citizens, of government "of the people, by the people and for the 
people". It has always been my view that this was a quite conscious 
decision by the EU founders who, in the wake of two world wars, came 
to believe that the infamous national crimes of the 20th century 
could be traced directly to the democratic revolutions of the 18th 
century, and that the only long-term solution to this was to replace 
democracy with oligarchy.

But there it is. And here we are, with a generation of European 
political leaders who almost all accept the terms in which their 
predecessors gave away the most important principle of that great 
democratic pact between a free people and its government. While times 
were good and there was enough prosperity to keep everybody 
distracted and happy, the loss went almost unnoticed except by a few 
persistent and despairing critics. Well, not any more. The American 
government may be committing itself to a policy that is economically 
unsound and even irresponsible, but its insistence on maintaining the 
compact with its own voters - on putting their concerns first - will 
at least ensure that democracy will survive there. I am not at all 
sure that will be true in Europe.