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Category Archives: Europe

This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Europe, Racism

≈ Comments Off on This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

Tags

Europe, Project Implicit, Racism

By Tom Stafford, Lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Sheffield

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A European map of implicit racial bias. Author provided.

This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas.

Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.

To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.

Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.

Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.

In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.

No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.

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A screeshot from the online IAT test. IAT, Project Implict

Implicit bias

Overall, we have scores for 144,038 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.

Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.

Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.

The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.

North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.

Open questions

When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.

The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.

The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.

This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.

This article was updated on July 18 2017 to correct the number of white Europeans whose scores were used in the study. The number was 144,038, not 288,076 as previously stated.

Source: https://theconversation.com/this-map-shows-what-white-europeans-associate-with-race-and-it-makes-for-uncomfortable-reading-76661

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Jeremy Corbyn speech to the Party of European Socialists Council in Prague

03 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Brexit, Europe

≈ Comments Off on Jeremy Corbyn speech to the Party of European Socialists Council in Prague

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Europe, Jeremy Corbyn, Party of European Socialists Council, Populist right

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Jeremy Corbyn, in a speech to the Party of European Socialists Council in Prague today, said:

Colleagues and comrades, I want to thank you for inviting me here today, and for the reception we have received from our hosts in this magnificent city.

It is fitting we are in Prague to discuss the challenges ahead for democracy in Europe.

This is a city which has been at the heart of the history of our continent and the convulsions of the past century – of war, revolution and the struggle for democracy and social justice.

We are in a city that also suffered the scourge of Nazi occupation and the horror of its genocidal crimes.

Today I will also be visiting the Terezin memorial which commemorates the victims of Nazi political and racial persecution in the Czech Republic, a permanent testimony to the threat posed by far right politics, anti-semitism and racist scapegoating.

On behalf of the British Labour party I will be paying tribute and remembering those who died, whose suffering is a reminder of the scars left by the far right, not just on this country or this continent, but on the whole world.

Today, we live in a different time with different pressures and opportunities.

But it is clear, across Europe and beyond there has been an alarming acceleration in the rise of the populist right.

Whether it be UKIP in Britain, Donald Trump in the United States, Jobbik in Hungary or Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France.

Politics has been shaken across the world and, as socialists and progressives,  we know very well why the populist right is gaining ground. But we are finding it increasingly hard to get our message heard and it is up to us to offer the political leadership needed for a real alternative.

We know the gap between rich and poor is widening. We know living standards are stagnating or falling and insecurity is growing. We know that many people feel left behind by the forces unleashed by globalization – powerless in the face of deregulated corporate power.

Often the populist right do identify the right problems but their solutions are the toxic dead ends of the past, seeking to divert it with rhetoric designed to divide and blame.

They are political parasites, feeding on people’s concerns and worsening conditions, blaming the most vulnerable for society’s ills instead of offering a way to take back real control of our lives from powerful elites who serve their own interests.

But unless progressive parties and movements break with that failed economic and political establishment it is the siren voices of the populist far right that will fill the gap

It can be difficult to convince the long-term unemployed that the reason there is no work is not that immigrants are stealing their jobs but the result of the economic programme of the right that has failed to deliver sustainable growth, security and rising living standards for all.

Or It can be hard to make clear that our public services are being run down because of years of austerity and predatory privatisation, rather than overspending and government waste, but it is vital that we do.

We cannot abandon our socialist principles because we are told this is the only way to win power. That is nonsense.

The reason we are losing ground to the right today is because the message of what socialism is and what it can achieve in people’s daily lives has been steadily diluted.

Many people no longer understand what we stand for.

Too often in recent years the left in Europe has been seen as apologists for a broken system rather than the answer to how to deliver radical social and economic reform for the 21st century.

Too often the left has been seen as the accomplice to reckless, unfettered capitalism rather than a challenge to it.

Too often the left has been seen as standing up for the privileged few rather than for the many we exist to represent and defend.

If we are only seen as protectors of the status quo how can we expect people to turn to us when they can see that status quo has failed?

We must stand for real change, and a break with the failed elite politics and economics of the past.

If we do, I have every confidence that the principles of solidarity, internationalism and socialism that we stand for can be at the heart of European politics in the 21st century.

That’s why it is vital that our rhetoric cannot be used to legitimise the scapegoating of refugees or migrant workers.

When we talk about refugees we need to talk about them as human beings, not as numbers, or as a burden, but instead as children, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters.

And when we face the challenge of migration we need to work together to halt the exploitation of migrant labour to undercut pay and conditions in a race to the bottom across Europe. We cannot allow the parties of the right to sow divisions and fan the flames of fear.

When it comes to Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union we in the Labour party respect that decision, and we want to work together with Socialist and progressive parties across Europe to find the best possible solution that benefits both Britain and the EU in the Brexit negotiations.

Labour is calling on the British Government to guarantee the rights of all EU Citizens before Article 50 negotiations begin, and not to use them as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

Labour is pushing for Brexit negotiations to be carried out in a transparent manner, in a spirit that aims to find a deal that works for all across our the continent.

That is why I am inviting leaders from socialist and progressive parties and movements across Europe to a special conference in London in February.

I believe our movement has the new ideas to take on and beat the populist right.. But we must harvest those ideas and that energy, allow a space within our parties for new ideas to be heard and build a movement with a democratic culture at its very heart.

It is when people lose faith in the power of politics to improve people’s lives that the space opens up for the far right to scapegoat and blame. Our task is harder, to restore people’s confidence that we have both the vision and an understanding of the lives of those we represent to change them for the better.

As we head towards 2017 many people are worried about the direction that Europe is taking. Well now is time for us to turn the tide. To put the interests of working people front and centre stage and  to fight for our values, of social justice, solidarity, equality and internationalism.

If we do that together, and break with the failed politics of the past, I am confident we can overcome the challenge from the populist right.

Source: http://press.labour.org.uk/post/153983095494/jeremy-corbyn-speech-to-the-party-of-european

Passporting peril: How can the UK make banking safer post-Brexit?

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Banking, Brexit, Europe, Finance

≈ Comments Off on Passporting peril: How can the UK make banking safer post-Brexit?

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Banking, Brexit, European Economic Area, European Union, Finance, Passporting, The Turner Review

By Jos Gallacher

The City will lobby to keep the financial services passport

2016-02_City_of_London-800x450 We are going to hear a lot about passporting in the next few years.

The City will make preserving the financial services passport a key aim of its post referendum lobbying. It is less clear who will make the opposite case that the passport creates unnecessary risks to the economy.

The question of whether passporting will form part of Britain’s future relationship with Europe is rising on the political agenda. To answer it we need to know firstly what passporting is, secondly why the City is in favour, next why passporting is risky and finally how real the risks are.

If a bank or other financial business wants to operate in the UK then it has two options:

Firstly it can establish a UK subsidiary licenced and supervised by the Bank of England and other UK regulators. It will need to meet UK capital requirements and liquidity rules. In the event of difficulty the UK authorities would agree the steps to take.

The alternative is passporting. A firm licenced and supervised in an EU or EEA state can open a branch in the UK under the passporting arrangements.

The branch would not have its own capital. It would remain the responsibility of its home state to ensure that it operated safely and to guarantee that in the event of a collapse the deposits would be protected.

UK regulators would have limited rights of supervision and if there were concerns they could only raise them with the home country regulator.

London’s financial firms strongly support passporting. It allows UK banks to conduct business without the need to create subsidiaries. They can deal with one regulator rather than several and instead of allocating capital to each subsidiary, capital requirements can be met at the European level.

The consultants BCG recently calculated that European banks would need an additional £30 – 40 billion in capital to continue to operate in Britain without passporting. Banks have a substantial incentive to retain the passport.

There is a tension in banking between holding more capital, which makes banks safer, and reducing capital which makes banks more “profitable”. Banks’ preferred metric for profitability is return on equity (ROE) which is the net profit divided by (equity) capital. A bank with the same profit but more capital would show a lower ROE.

In 2009 the most urgent political issue was how to reform the financial sector so that it could perform its role without endangering the economy as a whole. The Financial Services Authority produced a major report on what needed to be done following the crisis. The Turner Review called for reform of the EU rules:

These current arrangements, combining branch passporting rights, home country supervision, and purely national deposit insurance, are not a sound basis for the future regulation and supervision of European cross-border retail banks.

The report offered a menu of reforms for discussion some meaning “more Europe” others “less Europe”, but expected a mix of stronger national powers and more EU coordination. It expressed a preference for:

The reinforcement of host country supervisory powers over liquidity, and the right of host country supervisors to demand subsidiarisation and to impose adequate capital requirements and restrictions on local business activity.

The Turner Review’s recommendations for more Europe have not been implemented; in particular its proposal for a European deposit protection scheme has been rejected in the European Council. Passporting remains essentially unreformed.

The risks of passporting would matter less if European banks were stable and well capitalised. The results of the ‘stress tests’ released by the European Banking Authority on Friday show that they are not.

The stress tests fingered Italy’s Monte Paschi di Sienna as Europe’s most problematic bank. The world’s oldest operating bank has already been bailed out twice. In recent months the rescue of Italian banks has been the focus of a stand-off between Matteo Renzi’s government and the European Commission.

The Italian government wants to use public funds to recapitalise Monte Paschi and other troubled banks. The European Commission has been blocking the rescue citing state-aid rules and insisting that bond holders take a loss.

This is a problem for Italy as its banks have been allowed to sell bonds to their customers as if they were savings products.

Banks in Ireland, Germany and Britain have also been identified as vulnerable by the stress tests. The tests themselves have been criticised. They did not give pass or fail marks and covered only the largest institutions.

Greek, Cypriot and Portuguese banks were too small to be included. Yet their banks face chronic weaknesses. Over 40 per cent of the loans on the books of banks in Greece and Cyprus are classed as non-performing.

If Britain was staying in the EU, we would be calling for the reform of passporting along the lines of the Turner Review.

Once we leave, the British government will not have a say in banking regulation in the European Economic Area. We will be faced with a binary choice; either passporting as advocated by the City or protecting the customers of overseas banks by requiring them to create subsidiaries subject to UK regulation.

Whatever the difficulties of immigration, the free movement of people, unlike the free movement of capital, does not risk crashing the economy.

Jos Gallacher represents Labour International on the National Policy Forum of the Labour Party.

Source: http://leftfootforward.org/2016/08/passporting-peril-how-can-the-uk-make-banking-safer-post-brexit/

Labour demand action after Brexit crash

25 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Barnsley, Economics, Europe, John McDonnell, Labour Party, Referendum

≈ Comments Off on Labour demand action after Brexit crash

Tags

Brexit, Economy, Emergency budget, European Union, John McDonnell, Referendum

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Labour has called for “immediate and urgent action” in order to stabilise the economy following the referendum result, saying the choice to Leave was a rejection of the Conservatives’ economic policy.

The party says the victory for Out was the result of widespread dissatisfaction with growing levels of inequality.

John McDonnell has demanded the Tories ditch the budget surplus targets, which he says have damaged growth. He added that they must also undertake a priority investment programme in order to stimulate the economy.

He has also warned Labour MPs will oppose any attempt to enact further austerity in an emergency Budget.

The party will also undertake an assessment of the extent to which pension funds are damaged, as these rely heavily on stock markets.

McDonnell said “The government must now take steps to stabilize the economy, and to protect jobs, pensions, and wages.

“Labour will not allow any instability to be paid for by the working people of this country. There is no justification or mandate whatsoever for an emergency austerity budget. We need a clear programme of action to protect our economy.”

The pound plummeted to its lowest levels against the dollar in 30 years this morning as well as billions being wiped off the the FTSE 100.  Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, was forced to intervene in order to stabilise the economy, promising they would provide £250 billion of additional funds as a result of the vote.

Source: http://labourlist.org/2016/06/john-mcdonnell-referendum-result-was-a-rejection-of-tory-austerity/

Brown and Kinnock electrify Scottish voters by shredding the case for Brexit

14 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Europe, European Union

≈ Comments Off on Brown and Kinnock electrify Scottish voters by shredding the case for Brexit

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Brexit, European Union, Gordon Brown, Neil Kinnock

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By Ronnie McGowan

In the splendour of Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall two of Labour’s big beasts orchestrated a strong case for remaining in the European Union, allied with a powerful onslaught on the Brexit argument.

It was an impassioned high octane performance from Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown at the Rally to Remain. Opening with a few well aimed swipes at the psychodrama being played out by David Cameron and Boris “Trump”, we heard Kinnock – the former adversary of Militant Tendency – set out the case for remaining in the European Union. Gone was the over-elaborate oratory of a younger Kinnock. Instead the audience of 150 heard how the EU offered a cohesion that would secure the political and economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom. Creating the world’s largest market the EU had gained protections for consumers, workers and the environment. Kinnock argued that a market place of 500 million had supported 4.2 million jobs in the UK along with employment rights that had a direct positive effect on everyone’s lives; leaving the EU and joining the World Trade Organisation posed huge risks with a lasting price to pay, including increased prices of consumer goods.

Kinnock was scathing about the fairy-tale mirage of the Brexit case in which he accused Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Nigel Farage of having never previously supported public service investment, workers’ rights and he claimed they would squeeze, slice and strangle the NHS in the face of further austerity. “By their deeds shall you know them”, summed up how Kinnock felt about the superficial quartet.

In dismissing the Brexit campaigns’ focus on immigration Kinnock said those coming into the country were young, fit and here to work, and contributed £2.5bn in taxes. The controversial immigration control based on the Australian points system, proposed by Brexit supporters would double immigration, he said. An ageing population requires an increase in tax revenues and immigration is part of the solution to this increasingly relevant scenario.

Striding across the stage Gordon Brown is a revelation in comparison to his television image. He is relaxed and funny, with a delivery spiced up with good anecdotes, particularly the one about Mrs Thatcher and her pronunciation of Cowdenbeath. All of this adds power to the message Brown is putting across which is that globalisation has changed everything. From the movement of capital, services and communications he states that co-operation is imperative. Neither pollution nor terrorism recognises borders and it is only through co-operation that these world-wide concerns can be addressed. In the case of terrorism and in the context of the Middle East, Brown was adamant that this should be seen through EU policy as the United States was too far away, the UK could not achieve much on its own and NATO offered only a military perspective.

On the question of tax havens, only the EU working together could deal with this problem and the Brexit campaign offered no answers. The former prime minister reiterated those principles of the European Community, democracy, human rights and the rule of law all underpinning the safety net and insurance policy offered by our neighbours along with the European Convention of Human Rights which the UK helped to form.

Brown used the event, organised by Labour Movement for Europe – Scotland, to reel off a list of areas requiring co-operation which included climate change, poverty, inequality, refugee camps and echoing Neil Kinnock stressed that the EU takes measures where Conservatives fail.

Dialogue, discussion and debate had replaced conflict in Europe with interdependence working for the common good, as Brown made reference to President Kennedy’s inaugural speech. Neil Kinnock received a warm reception; on hearing the kind words directed at him he quipped, “I thought I was dead”, but this veteran Welsh dragon roared, generating some real fire power with two weeks to go until polling day.

Ronnie McGowan is a Labour supporter and a former teacher.

Source: http://labourlist.org/2016/06/scottish-voters-hear-brown-and-kinnock-shred-the-case-for-brexit/

Will we be better in or out in regards to TTIP?”

13 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Europe, European Union, Referendum, Trade Agreement, TTIP

≈ Comments Off on Will we be better in or out in regards to TTIP?”

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European Union, Full Fact, Referendum, TTIP

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Full Fact readers

TTIP (pronounced “tee-tip”) stands for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an agreement the European Union has been negotiating with the United States since 2013.

Whatever you think is best with regards to TTIP, the UK would be a part of the deal if the UK votes to stay in the EU. In this scenario the deal, and any changes in EU legislation that result from it, will apply to the UK.

If the UK leaves the EU then we will not be part of the deal, but the government might also try to negotiate its own deal with the USA covering similar ground.

There has been no final text published yet, so it’s impossible to be certain about the end result of TTIP.

Giving American businesses more access to EU markets

TTIP aims to make it easier for European businesses to trade and invest in America and vice versa. This will be done partly by reducing or removing import taxes called tariffs, and aligning standards and regulations.

American businesses would also get guarantees of access to the EU market in the same way as European companies, including being able to bid for more public contracts.

The EU has tried to allay concerns about the NHS

Campaigners have voiced a number of concerns about TTIP, among them that it will risk the forced privatisation of the NHS.

The European Commission has assured governments that health services will remain under their control and provided examples of wording designed to ensure this. The EU Trade Commissioner has written to the UK government several times confirming this.

As there is no final text to consider yet, it’s difficult to be certain about the end result and the legal issues are complex. It comes down to trusting the European Commission to negotiate on our behalf.

The UK will be part of TTIP if we stay in the EU

If the UK voted to stay in the EU and the TTIP agreement goes through, then it would certainly apply to us.

The negotiators want to agree TTIP in 2016 before a new administration takes office in the USA, but no fixed date has so far been set.

The next round of negotiations is due to begin in July.

If TTIP were concluded and the UK left the EU after this, then we would not remain part of the agreement. Under these circumstances the UK and US would need to negotiate separately if both countries wanted to put a trade deal in place.

If we stay in the EU, the UK government would be able to block TTIP if it wanted

Both the European Commission and the government agree that it is likely that individual member states will have to ratify the final TTIP deal.

In theory this means that British ministers could veto the TTIP deal if they felt the UK’s interests weren’t being served. MPs would also be able to delay the deal if they disagreed.

Every other EU country would need to support the deal as well, something which is currently in question.

One poll published in April this year suggested that one in three Germans think that TTIP is a bad thing, compared to 17% who think it’s a good thing. The French president has said that his government would not support TTIP in its current form.

Leaving the EU doesn’t mean the UK would be totally unaffected by TTIP

If the UK voted to leave the EU then we would not be bound by the TTIP agreement. But it might still have some impact on the UK.

Whether it does or not would depend on the type of deal the UK negotiated with the EU.

EU laws covering public procurement and state aid still cover countries in the European Economic Area (EEA), like Norway. If TTIP meant that the EU changed some of its regulations in these areas then the changes would apply in the EEA too.

If we left the single market entirely rather than trying to join the EEA, TTIP wouldn’t have even that indirect impact.

There could be a TTIP-like deal between the UK and the US

The UK may choose to negotiate its own trade deal with the United States anyway, as it is an important market. In 2014 it was our single top export partner, buying 17% in British goods and services.

The EU is our largest export partner when considered as a whole. In the same year it received 45% of UK exports. In comparison our top export partner within the EU, Germany, received 8% of UK exports in 2014.

Both the US President and his Trade Representative have cast doubt on whether a deal with the UK would be an immediate priority for the US in the short term if we were to leave the EU. However, this will depend on the US administration at the time of any potential EU exit.

Source: https://fullfact.org/europe/ask-full-fact-ttip-or-out/

EU immigration has no negative impact on British wages, jobs or public services, research finds

17 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Europe, European Union, Immigration, Migration, Referendum

≈ Comments Off on EU immigration has no negative impact on British wages, jobs or public services, research finds

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Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), Education, Europe, European Union, Health, Housing, Immigration, Jobs, London School of Economics, LSE, Migration, Taxes

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Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK

New analysis by the Centre for Economic Performance

A reduction in immigration from the European Union (EU) following a vote for Brexit would not lead to any improvement in living standards for those born in the UK. Cuts in EU immigration would not offset the big fall in UK living standards caused by the reduction in trade and investment that would result from Brexit.

These are among the conclusions of new research by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics. The fifth in a series of #CEPBrexit reports – co-authored by Professor Jonathan Wadsworth, a former member of the Home Office’s Migration Advisory Colmmittee – analyses the impact of EU immigration on the UK, an issue that lies at the heart of the referendum campaign.

The researchers highlight the empirical evidence showing conclusively that EU immigration has not had significantly adverse effects on average employment, wages, inequality or public services at the local level for people born in the UK. Falls in average real wages of UK-born workers are more closely associated with the biggest economic crash for more than 80 years.

Ending free movement of labour would damage the national economy. First, it would curtail the country’s full access to the Single Market. Second, it would lower GDP per person since EU immigrants have higher employment rates than the UK-born and therefore help to reduce the budget deficit. And third, there is evidence that lower immigration harms national productivity.

brexit05The new CEP report shows that:

  • Between 1995 and 2015, the number of immigrants from other EU countries living in the UK more than tripled from 0.9 million to 3.3 million. In the year to September 2015, EU net immigration to the UK was 172,000, only just below the figure of 191,000 for non-EU immigrants.
  • The big increase in EU immigration occurred after the ‘A8’ East European countries joined in 2004. In 2015, about a third of EU immigrants lived in London, compared with only 11% of the UK-born. 29% of EU immigrants were Polish.
  • EU immigrants are more educated, younger, more likely to be in work and less likely to claim benefits than the UK-born. About 44% have some form of higher education compared with only 23% of the UK-born.
  • Many people are concerned that immigration reduces the pay and job chances of the UK-born since this means more competition for jobs. But immigrants also consume goods and services and this increased demand helps to create more employment opportunities. So we need empirical evidence to settle the issue of whether the economic impact of immigration is bad or good for people born in the UK.
  • Our new evidence shows that the areas of the UK with large increases in EU immigration did not suffer greater falls in the jobs and pay of UK-born workers. The big falls in wages after 2008 are due to the global financial crisis and a weak economic recovery, not to immigration.
  • There is also little effect of EU immigration on inequality through reducing the pay and jobs of less skilled UK workers. Changes in wages and joblessness for less skilled UK-born workers show little correlation with changes in EU immigration.
  • EU immigrants pay more in taxes than they use public services and therefore they help to reduce the budget deficit. Immigrants do not have a negative effect on local services such as education, health or social housing; nor do they have any effect on social instability as indicated by crime rates.
  • The refugee crisis is unrelated to our EU membership. Refugees admitted to Germany have no right to live in the UK. The UK is not in the Schengen passport-free travel agreement so there are border checks on all migrants.

Jonathan Wadsworth commented: “The bottom line, which may surprise many people, is that EU immigration has not harmed the pay, jobs or public services enjoyed by Britons. In fact, for the most part it has likely made us better off. So far from EU immigration being a ‘necessary evil’ that we pay to get access to the greater trade and foreign investment generated by the EU Single Market, immigration is at worse neutral and at best, another economic benefit.”

John Van Reenen highlighted: “The immigration impact hinges on the post-Brexit trade deal – if we go for a deal like Norway or Switzerland, immigrant numbers won’t change much, as free movement of labour is part of the package. But if we go for a looser trading arrangement we lose out much more from falls in trade and foreign investment”

Swati Dhingra said “Although some people value a diverse society with other Europeans, many other people do not. For this latter group, cutting back EU migration may bring cultural benefits, but Brexit would bring a financial cost.”

CEP BREXIT Analysis
Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK
Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano, John Van Reenen and Jonathan Wadsworth
May 2016
Paper No’ CEPBREXIT05:
Read Abstract | Full Paper (pdf) | Technical Paper (pdf)

Source: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/press1.asp?index=5053

First they came for the vacuum cleaners: will it be kettles next?

13 Friday May 2016

Posted by Kingstone Labour in Barnsley, Europe, European Commission, Referendum

≈ Comments Off on First they came for the vacuum cleaners: will it be kettles next?

Tags

Domestic Appliances, Electrical, Europe, European Union, Full Fact, Kettles, Referendum, Vacuum Cleaners

swan-1.7l-3kw-british-union-jack-jug-fast-boil-kettle-sk24010ngb-[2]-1491-p

“EU is now considering measures to ban most powerful hairdryers, lawn mowers and electric kettles, it was revealed” – Daily Mail , 30 August 2014

“Brussels plans to ban British kettles, toasters and hairdryers after the European Union referendum” – Daily Express , 12 May 2016

A number of retailers reportedly sold out of high-powered vacuum cleaners ahead of an introduction of an EU law preventing hoovers of 1,600 watts or more being manufactured in, or imported to the UK.

The EU is currently in the process of determining which types of product to prioritise for environmental improvements. Hairdryers, lawn mowers, and electric kettles are three categories out of 29 that could face restrictions, and the EU aims to choose about 20 as priorities.

We don’t yet know if the EU will enact any regulations affecting these products, never mind what they’d look like, although its preliminary investigations on some items provide us with clues.

29 product types up for consideration

Today’s vacuum cleaner regulation was part of the European Commissions ‘Ecodesign’ scheme , which is aimed at improving the environmental performance of products sold across the EU. The Commission is currently in the process of developing a new ‘working plan’ for the scheme, which it aims to implement in 2015-17.

As part of the development of this plan, it’s commissioned researchers to narrow the options to about 20 ‘priority product groups’. Once they’ve been identified, each type of product and the potential for regulation will be investigated further.

There are 29 product groups in total. Some of them are common household appliances, such as kettles, others are not, like escalators. Not all of them are particularly recognisable to the average person. They are :

Hair and hand dryers (blowers for personal care); electric kettles; gym and athletics articles; garden houses; humidifiers and dehumidifiers; imaging equipment; in-house networking equipment; lawn and riding mowers; mobile phones (smartphones); swimming pool heaters; anti-legionellae filters; aquarium equipment; base station subsystem; domestic kitchen appliances; elevators, escalators and moving walkways; energy-using equipment in means of transportation; reefers (refrigerated containers); garden houses; greenhouses; handheld power tools; hot food presentation and storage equipment; wireless chargers; inverters and static converters; patio heaters; sound amplifiers; tertiary hot beverage equipment; video projectors; water, steam and sand cleaning appliances.

Regulation isn’t just about limits to wattage

Not all of the potential requirements would involve limits to the power consumed in the home.

For instance, the researchers have said another option in the case of electric kettles would be to require them to be more durable so that they last longer on average, and fewer need to be manufactured.

And for hairdryers , the researchers point to a scheme by a German company which has been able to achieve a certain ratio of power consumption against the rate at which it dries hair. If adopted as a law, that would mean hairdryers would be allowed to have high wattage as long as there was a corresponding improvement in performance.

Neither of these options are actively suggested by researchers, or by the Commission, but they do serve to highlight that regulations on design don’t have to take the form of bans on power consumption.

Source: https://fullfact.org/europe/first-they-came-vacuum-cleaners-will-it-be-kettles-next/

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