Many years ago at a London cocktail party – it was just after Douglas Hurd and Francis Maude had signed the 1992 Maastricht Treaty – I explained to Hurd that the British political establishment had not understood what the EU meant by the “single market” – and the mass migrations which would ensue from the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty which he had signed. I said that the personal responsibility for capital in a competitive market (capitalism), free trade and the free movement of goods, services and above all investment across borders all made the mass movement of peoples unnecessary – and indeed wasteful. Hurd replied “I had not thought of it like that” and in that he certainly personified the confusion of the entire British political class in their dealings with the European Union.
That confusion continues today as David Cameron writes in the German equivalent of the Sun newspaper “Like Germany, Britain believes in the principle of free movement of workers.” But those British politicians who signed European treaties did not mean to accept that principle – not least since they talked unceasingly of free trade not free movement as “Europe’s” main advantage.
It was, I explained to Hurd, far more efficient for capital to migrate to find and train peoples in the poorer countries and for higher value added goods and services to be sent from developed nations in return for basic commodities and agricultural products from the underdeveloped. The capital inflows benefit the poorest economies and later in their development industrial production is established and exported back. The same applied within Europe where the mass movement of people between states was culturally alienating for the host countries and their immigrants and democratically and economically destructive of the people-exporting states who lose their most valuable resource – their young. While third world countries could not always be relied upon to sustain a rule of law for foreign investors this was not true within Europe.
Neither the Foreign Office nor the Treasury it seems had grasped that “the European project” had little truck with the anglo saxon concept of free trade and market economics, the exchange of goods and mobility of capital (all of which make mass migration unnecessary) because the Euro-state wanted mass migrations and saw the “single market” as the best route to a single country.
The deliberate and ruthless pursuit of this policy is personified by the former EU Commissioner and now head of the Global Forum on Migration and Development Sir Peter Sutherland: “We still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and that’s precisely what the European Union should be doing its best to undermine.”
For the Euro-elite had planned a single state with centralised political control which would mean millions migrating to find work – including non Europeans fleeing poorer economies destroyed by the EU dumping of agricultural and fish products, currency manipulation (an undervalued Euro) and industrial protectionism.
Obviously there is more to the present migrations than that – given US and UK policy in the Middle East – but the fundamental problem underlies the present chaos. There were already 14m internal migrants in the EU and the EU’s Schengen Agreement allowed a non EU migrant setting foot on a Greek island to be de facto if not de jure already in Berlin!
Mass migrations are totally unnecessary – but they are an inevitable consequence of the loss of capitalist free markets, which have been compromised by big business lobbying of supranational powers like the EU, the subsidy of failure through State induced inflation and debt promotion and EU member States’ protection of their financial systems – even as they trumpet a “single market”.
Nearly 60 years after the founding of the European Common Market there are still restrictions on capital movement in the EU and forced mass migration between member States make labour cheaper and profits greater. The large corporations thus feel relieved of the need to invest in higher value labour and production. The country with the worst productivity growth – the UK – is also the biggest recipient of foreign labour (6 million over the last 12 years).
The neutering of nation states and their democratic parliaments (in favour of supranational corporatism) has removed the power of protest at the local and national level where it could have been most effective. The fundamental distortions, economic inequalities and social failures can therefore be politically more easily sustained.
Trade and investment thrive on differences – including inequalities in standards and costs of living. Where such differences exist it is enterprise which spots both the problem and invests to provide the solution. It is not the existence of capital and cash – big multinational corporations have been awash with both for many years during the deepest of recessions. No – it is the flexibility and ideas and enterprise of the entrepreneur, the small company, the enterprising communities, the historic regions and men of ideas whose very originality means that they need to attract new capital, not be dependent on the corporate hoarders of historic capital – or the dangers and rigidities of bank debt.
As the hordes (made unemployed by the bureaucratic rigidity of a centralised Europe and the dead hand of the Euro) move across borders in Europe and millions more move from the undeveloped world, the poorer countries are denuded of their highly skilled workers and made dependent on the rich States and their rapacious corporate powers. The rich countries are burdened for generations with millions of economic refugees who conquer their host countries by demographic growth, alien cultures and religions. That reverse colonisation is far more powerful than any European imperialism of the 19th century – and made easier in democracies by the power of large immigrant minorities to wield the “swing vote” against the majority. When the ethnic minority is large enough even private sector production favours them through the “ethnic marketing” of products.
Only free markets based on dispersed ownership of capital and free trade in investment, goods and services permit nations to flourish without the need to exchange populations – and permit peoples to prosper without losing their nations, languages and cultures. Douglas Hurd did not understand that in 1992 and we witness the consequences today.
