Poll after poll shows that, after the economy, the subject British voters are most exercised about is immigration. Thankfully Gordon Brown kept us out of the Euro, and so HMG can still pull the economic levers of interest rates, tax and QE without asking Brussels first. But what about border controls?
On 25th April 2005 a Treaty of Accession was signed by EU countries at the Neumuenster Abbey in Luxembourg. It provided that Bulgaria and Romania would join the EU on 1 January 2007. By 2005 New Labour was beginning to realise that its earlier prediction of 20,000 Polish and other East European migrants was way short of the reality (in fact ONS figures show that more than 600,000 were working here in 2012). Alarmed by the prospect of the 2007-accession countries' nationals coming to Britain in large numbers, the Blair government, along with seven other countries, secured an opt-out whereby the right to work would be deferred until 1 January 2014. It seemed a long way off at the time, but in fact it's now next year.
Now obviously if you have 600,000 extra people in your country, that is going to mean extra economic activity: it is idle to pretend there are no advantages at all to immigration. On the other hand, the extra pool of willing labour means that employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages, thus increasing inequality as the middle-class forge ahead. It also makes it harder for those at the bottom end of society - including a disproportionate percentage of black and asian Britons - to find work . There are consequences for the environment, in terms of housing demand and strain on public services; but I have rehearsed these points many times on this blog.
No, the point of writing this is a larger one about politics generally. If I were a person unhappy at the possibility of several hundred thousand people coming to Britain to compete with me for housing, jobs or services (and if I were a British black or asian person I would be mightily unhappy), how would I express my feelings politically? Unfortunately the issue of who comes to Britain, whether they can work here and what benefits they claim, has like many others been exported to Brussels. We are in the bizarre situation that the issue which concerns voters more than almost any other is no longer something domestic politicians can actually do something about.
Renegotiating treaties, the only option short of outright withdrawal from the EU, is likely to be fractious, divisive and time-consuming. It is very easy to give these powers away, but very very difficult to reclaim them.
If you think we are badly off, spare a thought for the poor Southern European citizen. If you wanted to see interest rates lowered, or a touch of QE to bail out your banks, which political party can offer these things? None of them. Because your country no longer has the power to do any of them. The powers have been given away.
If you wanted a reflationary budget to borrow your way back into growth, no political party could offer that option. That's because countries in receipt of Eurozone largesse have to get their budgets passed by Brussels.
These countries are powerless to pull the levers of their economies because they gave most of the powers to the ECB, either when they joined the Eurozone or when they got into trouble. As a result there is mass unemployment and rioting in the streets.
It's hard to imagine anything more corrosive to the democratic process than the creeping irrelevance which this erosion of power from national governments (and thus their citizens) entails. The damage this powerlessness does to politics, slow and insidious, is playing out across Europe in a big way.
