Priorities for my work in the EU

I write at the end of a busy first week. There's been little time to think so far, because the complexities of embarking on a complicated life in two countries, while trying to do the marking and other commitments of a university job, leave little chance for real politics. I've even gone rather quiet on Twitter which is a shame, as much is going on and I could have had a good go at the indignities of a nation and a Queen forced to host the offensive climate-change-denying "leader" of the nation that some people want us to become enslaved to (in order to get our country back).

One of the things I want to think about, in preparing to take up office in Brussels is to which of the many aspects of Green politics I want to pay most attention. I don't need to do all of it, because I am only one of a really substantial UK contingent of Green MEPs, so that's good. And anyway no one can do all of it.

Partly my focus will be determined by what committees and delegations I get assigned (I've put in my bids on that front, but I'm not going to tell you what they are till I know whether I got the ones I wanted!).

But in addition, I want to find a way of engaging with other things, but without diversifying too broadly. To keep my work focused and manage my time, let's make a list of priority areas of special interest. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on these. My first one is described below.

Animal welfare:
This interest relates to my work on the Vegan Studies Network at UEA, and my support for Compassion in World Farming (which I inherited from my Aunt). I'd like to do some work in connection with the horrors of intensive factory farming of animals, and live exports etc. Animal welfare, the economics and benefits of traditional small scale livestock practices, good farming and good food. The problems of intensive farming of crops, pesticides, weedkillers and the loss of biodiversity that goes with factory production. The problem of imports of food, including palm oil, to service the plant-oil requirements of vegetable diets. The problem of imports of soya for intensively farmed cattle. And so on.

So this focus, let's call it good food and good welfare, with the ethics of traditional mixed farming in mind. Whose land is it anyway?

This is one theme, though it need not necessarily be placed as number one priority in a hierarchy.
I will continue with some other ones later and summarise the list when I've finished. Need to stop now for a meeting!

First days in the new job: week 1

What have I been doing this week? Well I'm not officially in the job yet (it starts on 1st July) but that doesn't stop them holding lots of meetings in Brussels in the coming weeks leading up to our starting day.

And naturally, the European Parliament bureaucrats want lots of paperwork to make us official, so there's a process of registering (which I haven't done yet: it will require several hours of free time in Brussels and several pieces of paper that I didn't have with me on this visit, and possibly won't have for some time).

What we did do was meet up with the hugely impressive "Green Group" which is all the MEPs from the Green Parties from a range of EU countries. There was a great sense of positive progress, not least in the fact that we needed BIGGER ROOMS, and there wasn't enough space for everyone, because there are SO MANY of us. Not enough of us, naturally (why did we only win seven UK seats, you may well ask, when everyone should have been voting Green at this point?). But still, there are a lot of us, a lot more than there used to be. What's more, in the Green/EFA Group, the UK Greens comprise one tenth of the whole, or more than that if you include the four members of the EFA (SNP members and Plaid Cymru). But still, Germany and France have even larger contingents of Green MEPs than us.

I'm beginning to learn who's who and to discover all the wonderful people from other countries with whom we'll be needing to collaborate, working together in the committees to get our ambitious proposals and policy changes up and running in the next few weeks, months and years. Many of the other MEPs in the Group have been there before and are already experienced and influential in their roles, so the UK delegation is unusual in having six of our seven MEPs new to the role.

Wednesday's meeting was partly a celebration of the Party's huge success all across Europe in these elections, and partly an opportunity to get to know each other. There are also crucial decisions to be taken in working out how the Group positions itself in relation to other large groups in the Parliament, since we are now large enough to hold a "balance of power" position. No Group has an overall majority, so groups of the size of the Greens can offer support for things that are in line with our values and ideology (or decline support if there are things that we wish to oppose).

I've got a lot to learn: finding my way about in Brussels was a small and relatively simple bit of it, though since it was a Public Holiday on Thursday which was the day I was coming home, part of the metro was closed for repairs, and I had to take a rather infrequent "Sunday service" bus to Brussels Midi Station to catch the Eurostar coming home.

Finding my way about the Parliament Building will be much worse (I've only been to a few bits of it, and always with someone to take me to the right place). Getting my head round the work involved in finding and appointing staff for my offices (one office at home and one office in Brussels) is even more challenging. And then there is the urgent task of finding accommodation for the weeks we have to go to Strasbourg for sessions in the parliament there.
And probably I need to be booking travel tickets.
Tricky to do all this with no assistants in post yet, and while I still have a lot of things I have to do in my old job—most of which have been waiting for weeks, because there was no time for anything during the election campaign. And then there was the stuff at home, like the lawn that needed mowing. Finally I did that this weekend!

What to do next?

A friend wrote to me to ask what on earth we could do now, because never in our lives have we been faced with such grief and despair. The UK we thought we belonged to has done something absolutely terrifying and people are terrified and distressed. Once we come through the despair, what can we actually do to change the future to something we could hope for and feel was an achievement.

Here are my first thoughts in response:

The people I mix with are mostly absolutely devastated and there have been many tears. It’s clearly a disaster for the economy already, but my impression is that there is a long way to go before any politician is actually going to be willing to enact the decision in practice. I think that the electorate have begun to wake up to what was a big mistake, and that before long it will be okay for the leaders of all parties to say "actually we don’t want to vote this through in parliament".

We are only on day 2, and these things are pretty unclear as yet. But it appears that Boris Johnson is not in favour of leaving, and was just doing it all as a stunt. A third of the population didn’t vote because they didn’t realise it mattered. A quarter of the population thought it was okay to cast a protest vote to save the NHS from the Tories. If we ran it again tomorrow we’d get a remain vote. I’m not in favour of running it again because it was a silly idea to run it in the first place, but it seems clear that there would be some relief all round if the politicians decided that it was not a strong enough mandate or that it was based on misinformation.

What to do if not? Well it rather depends how successfully the Labour Party repeat their self-harming behaviour and destroy what credibility they have left. I suspect we need to create a new “pro EU party” running on a ticket about xenophilia and socialism and environmentalism and human rights . I don’t think the Green Party can rise to the challenge but I shall see how it does over the next few weeks and at its September conference. I plan to go to the Green Party Conference.

If we do leave we need to see what the advantages and disadvantages are of what is arranged. I think the tears may be overhasty. Almost all the scenarios for going forward are pretty good. It’s highly unlikely we’ll be closing our borders unless I’m much mistaken, or removing ourselves from Horizon 2020 research funding or from the workers protections. As regards the horrible racism that has surfaced in the campaign, we need to campaign for the end to austerity which is driving people to look for someone to blame. But this was so before, and the problem is of our own (UK policy) making, egged on by the nonsensical desire of the whole EU to self-immolate on the worship of austerity politics. Maybe it is right to blame some of that on the EU which has ruined Greece with the absurd ideology that imagines that you climb out of a recession by way of cuts. Terrible stuff.

I think that writing to our various MPs to ask them to reconsider, and to group together, across parties, to argue for rejecting the vote and questioning its legitimacy due to the falsities in the Leave campaign might be the best option now. All the main parties share an interest in achieving this? It would be a magnificent move if they could come together and agree this. 

What do you think?

Any nuclear dumps coming to your neighbourhood?

This article in the Guardian informs us of new legislation that's been rushed through parliament in the last hours before it closed for the election period. Now the Secretary of State for Energy will have power to decide where to have a nuclear dump. In your back yard, if he/she likes. And it's not for you to protest, nor your local authority planning authorities. Probably because neither you nor they want it.
Well, this is hardly less than inevitable, is it? I mean if you want nuclear power you want nuclear waste, or at least you have to have it. And if there's no where to put it you will be in trouble. And no one actually wants it anywhere in this country, not surprisingly.
There's only one solution, and that is to stop using nuclear power. And to achieve that we need a government with the will to invest in research into the best possible range of renewable power facilities, and with the will to override local planning opposition to get those in place, not to override local planning opposition to put in things that are really horrible and permanently polluting.
We've just had a government that is way out of touch on this, and has encouraged a stupid attitude towards wind and solar power as if they were a threat to the environment, when they are the least of all evils to have on your doorstep.
Let's not do that again!

Tax loopholes

At the end of March, a number of people wrote to me about the so-called "Mayfair Loophole". Or rather they wrote to the current MP in South Norfolk who is Richard Bacon (Conservative), and copied me in to see what my view was. This is what they wrote:

The Mayfair loophole gives special treatment to private equity bosses. They shouldn’t be allowed to dodge up to £700m of tax a year. It’s money which should be going to our NHS, education and public services.
Will you vote to close the Mayfair loophole - by voting for amendment 3 in today’s Finance Bill? It's being tabled by Caroline Lucas MP. If the vote happens, please explain to me how you voted.
I'm sending this email to the other MP candidates for this area, to find out how they'd vote if they had the chance.
Here’s the report into the loophole, for more information:https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/closing-the-mayfair-loophole-report

The Link provided there (to a section of the 38Degrees site) gives more information about the loophole and the proposed amendment due to be tabled by Caroline Lucas.

In the event the proposed amendment by Caroline Lucas was not debated, due to time limitations. So no solution has been endorsed as yet. But the Green Party has committed itself to closing this loophole, which currently loses the country an estimated £700 million a year in tax revenues. You can find the Green Party position explained here.

Richard Bacon gave his constituents the following reply:

I have been concerned about this issue for many years and have been campaigning on it together with my colleagues on the Public Accounts Committee for many years.  Indeed, it is largely because of our committee’s campaigning work that the whole question of “tax and who pays it” is now much higher up the political agenda, where I think it needs to be. Tax is not a simple issue.  Having said that, there is a growing public sense that the tax system is “not fair”; that is – to put it crudely – that it offers one set of rules for ‘the rich’ (including rich individuals and big multi-national corporations) and another set of rules for everyone else (including normal people and small businesses); and I believe there is some truth to this general public view, even if it needs to be qualified here and there. Public anger found its most visible expression after Starbucks, Google and Amazon all gave evidence to our committee some while ago, when people started to boycott Starbucks and buy their coffee elsewhere. You can watch our Public Accounts Committee hearing with Starbucks here. I was highly critical of the use of personal service companies by over 2,000 senior civil servants in order to minimise their tax liability.  Top civil servants were paying corporation tax at 20—26 per cent, rather than income tax at higher rates.  I discussed this matter on the BBC’s Newsnight programme in an interview that you can watch here. I quizzed HMRC’s Tax Assurance Commissioner Edward Troup earlier this week, when we discussed the status of people who live here permanently but are non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes, which you can watch here. The way in which the question of tax is sometimes presented in the media actually hinders rather than helps understanding.   For example, the very phrase ‘tax avoider’ can be deeply misleading.  If you go into a building society to invest in an ‘ISA’ – which is a tax-exempt savings account available to everyone – you are being a “tax avoider”.  That is to say, you are avoiding tax that you would otherwise pay.  There is nothing wrong with this.  Actually, the government wants you to be a tax avoider and has said so clearly.  Successive governments of all political parties have backed the idea that there should be tax-exempt savings accounts. Why?  Because all governments have reached the conclusion that our society needs people to save more – and that offering tax relief on the returns which people get from their savings is a good thing to do.  In the same way, if you take out a pension you are a tax avoider.  Why?  Because the government wants you to be a tax avoider – it wants you to have a pension and therefore offers substantial tax relief against the cost of taking out a pension. One person’s ‘tax avoiding’ is another person’s ‘sensible tax planning’. The phrase ‘tax avoider’ has become a ‘swear word’ which describes not only activity which is ‘normal and fair’ but which also describes activity which is ‘undesirable’. Years ago, it used to be widely understood that tax law broadly covered two kinds of activity: i) the avoiding of tax which you did not need to pay if you planned properly, which was perfectly legal – and, indeed, if you were the director of a company, your legal duty under company law to avoid; and, on the other hand, ii) the evading of tax, which is simply illegal and a criminal offence.  The distinction between these two activities – avoidance and evasion – used to be much clearer.  A very big ‘grey area’ has emerged in which taxpayers such as large companies ‘twist and turn’ to achieve outcomes which were certainly not intended by Parliament but which appears to be ‘legal’ and which would survive a legal challenge in the courts. This has happened for two related reasons. First, it is now much more common than 30 or 40 years ago for companies to become global, which means that they operate in many different tax jurisdictions.  Second, different governments around the world offer many tax reliefs for a wide range of different reasons.  This combination of i) worldwide economic activity and ii) huge numbers of tax reliefs provides almost limitless possibilities for creative accounting.  The obvious ways to eliminate these problems are i) to stop global trade and ii) to have the same tax everywhere in the world, but plainly neither solution is in the slightest realistic. The great enemy here is complexity.  The more complex the system, the easier it is for highly paid tax lawyers and tax accountants to dream up entirely new ways of achieving an outcome not intended by Parliament. Every attempt to create more rules to solve the problem actually makes the problem worse. The only way to make serious progress is to make the tax system much simpler and get rid of all tax reliefs, but the trouble is, of course, that for every person who would like to say ‘Get rid of the tax reliefs’, there are others who benefit from the tax reliefs. You will quickly see the point by imagining how you would feel if you had an ISA or a pension, and the government suddenly said ‘We are abolishing all the tax reliefs on ISAs and pensions’. I discussed these issues on BBC Radio 4's 'Today programme' which you can listen to here or here.  You can read more about my work in ensuring that our tax system applies to everybody equally on my website here, here and here.   Please do take the time to visit the links above and to listen to what I have said on this subject on behalf of my constituents and taxpayers generally.  I hope you will see that I have been active in defending the interests of the vast majority of people who pay their taxes on time and in full. Thank you again for taking the time to contact me. Yours sincerely 
 RICHARD BACON MP

Much of what Bacon says here is wise and clear in explaining in general terms what tax avoidance and tax dodging are. I am sure that Bacon cares about these things, and especially about ensuring that people don't muddle up tax avoidance that is deliberately encouraged (like ISA schemes), tax dodging that is exploiting unintended consequences of allowances designed for others, though still within the law, and illegal tax evasion. But for all that, it does not seem that Bacon has done anything to crack down on the illegal or unintended kind, or indeed has actually had any effect whatsoever.
Well, of course, we in the Green Party have not had any effect as yet, but then we are not in government yet, and are not the sitting MPs. We do have one sitting MP, and she has actually done something, by bringing the tabled amendment that was frustrated by the time rules.

So my answer to the question? Here is my response to those who wrote to me about it:

Dear ...... 

I’ve now seen the response that you’ve probably had from Mr Bacon, and I am impressed because his diagnosis of the problems and of the need for a solution seem to me very sound and wise. Nevertheless. I do wonder how much he can achieve, given his party’s record in this parliament. I find myself appalled at the blind eye that this government has been turning towards the loopholes and wriggle room built into the tax revenue system, and it seems suspicious that these practices serve to protect some of the wealthiest among Tory donors. 

Naturally I’m with Caroline Lucas in her attempt to address this. I would be really proud of the South Norfolk voters if they were willing to follow their wish for honesty and integrity, and elect an MP who’s prepared to stand up with Caroline Lucas on this and other matters. Let’s hope!

These things matter to me as a Green Party candidate because we need a society that works towards greater equality and a fairer distribution of resources. Tax avoidance schemes that favour the wealthy and lead to the wealthy paying a lower rate of tax than the poor are unjust and unfair, and prevent us from providing the public services that a civilised country needs, from health provision and care for the elderly to museums and libraries, schools, roads and railways.

Defending the NHS and reversing privatisation and marketisation in the NHS

Today I have answered hundreds of e-mails received over the last few days from constituents concerned about protecting the NHS and alarmed by the way in which it is being sold off to private companies, and contracts signed for supply of services from private care organisations. I paste in here my reply to these worries, explaining where I stand on these issues.

If I were elected, I would support the inclusion of a Bill in the first Queen’s Speech after the election that would reverse 25 years of marketisation in the National Health Service, abolish the purchaser-provider split, re-establish District Health Authorities and other public bodies and fully restore the NHS in England as an accountable public service. This Bill is known as the NHS Reinstatement Bill, and you can find the proposal here: http://www.nhsbill2015.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/NHS-Reinstatement-Bill-and-Notes.pdf 

I would support inclusion of a Bill such as the one described there, without delay, to halt all the privatisation and marketisation of all parts of our crucial public infrastructure, and especially the NHS; and to initiate the quickest possible reversal of all the private finance initiatives and other market driven schemes. This is exactly the kind of thing that I shall be supporting with all the efforts I can muster, should I be elected in 2015. 

Indeed, I am already campaigning as a private citizen to prevent further marketisation in the NHS. But without a seat in parliament, there is only so much one can do. So please, if you care about a public NHS, vote for me in the coming election and encourage others to do so. The Green Party stands a chance of carrying some weight in the new parliament, if everyone who believes in these things votes sincerely for what they believe in.

To be frank, I cannot myself see how anyone who cares about these things could do otherwise than to vote Green in most constituencies in England, since there is no “least bad alternative” among the main parties available to us here. All three of the main parties seem either to support privatisation and marketisation of our public institutions or to have been complicit in it during the last five years of coalition. Let’s not be deceived by the promises of “x number more nurses”. This is just a cover for cutting costs in all sorts of other ways. I see no grounds for entrusting those other parties with this most precious part of our welfare state. We need a party that is promising to end the cuts and reverse the austerity programme: to develop a country we can be proud of where everyone is cared for and we are not taking funds from the weak and the vulnerable to feed the greedy and powerful. That’s the Green Party through and through.

There is absolutely no reason to change to a cumbersome, costly and unkind insurance system instead. The free NHS, without questions asked and without means tests or contributions requirements is the crowning glory of our welfare state, and is an essential tool in ensuring that we have healthy able-bodied mentally healthy working people to produce the resources we need, and create the society we can be secure and happy in. It is a nonsense to suggest that we can’t afford to give this free to all. We can’t afford not to. Do we want dying drunkards or sick refugees bleeding on our streets while millionaires drive by in their Porsches bought from their Swiss Bank accounts? Not for me a country that could do that. I will fight to the death to prevent any such thing.

I expect that you’re also concerned about TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) which is being cooked up in the EU, and poses a major threat to this country if our health service is undergoing privatisation, and would be bought up by American health care providers, with the risk of major legal action against the UK if we ever took them back into public hands or enacted legislation to keep costs down. The Green Party (including myself) is totally opposed to the whole of TTIP of course, and if it goes through (over our dead bodies), will definitely fight with white knuckles to keep the NHS and all other public services fenced round with impenetrable ring fences! No other party is coming out against TTIP, though they are making every effort to bluff their way into your hearts as though they cared about the NHS and would protect it. If they are not against TTIP, and not keeping the NHS out of it, they are not protecting the NHS at all. I trust you will not be deceived by the lies of other politicians who don’t want you to know what they are selling to the USA.

What's to fear about TTIP

Several dozens of my prospective voters in the South Norfolk constituency have written to me to ask me for my commitments regarding TTIP, which is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, being debated in secret by EU officials.
I record here a generic version of my thoughts on this topic which I have been sending over the last few days to these voters:

I believe that TTIP is among the great threats that we face, and this one is from within our own EU—not some aggression from Russia or foreign terrorists. This is our own politicians, entrusted with the care of our interests, and they are betraying us in secret. The episode is symptomatic of the complete disregard for democracy, and for the interests of the country as a whole, or for the common good. It’s a deal that stands to benefit no one but the largest corporations and multinationals. Its effects on small businesses in the UK, on farmers and producers and on workers wages and rights will be devastating, and the government will lose more in falling income from import duties and greater costs due to falling wages/increased poverty at home than it stands to gain in trade.

This is not just about the NHS (though that is a worry anyway, with or without TTIP: we in the Green Party are in favour of keeping the NHS public and getting rid of existing PFI systems and privatisation schemes, but much of the evil has already been done and will take years to unpick)—but is about the whole structure of the modern neo-liberal consensus across parties and across Europe, which is generating ever greater inequalities between the haves and the have-nots. I know why the EU is working on the TTIP: because the austerity programme in Europe has ruined the EU's trade and prosperity from within and created a long and unprecedented period of depression, because all the markets are affected together by the coordinated austerity programme. The solution is not to sell out to the US (or anyone else) but to stop the programme of austerity that’s causing the problem, and look for an economic system that can cope with stability instead of growth and a long-term self-sufficiency that does not involve exploiting the labour force and the planet. Let’s face it: we have immense wealth in this country, or would have, if it were not siphoned off to tax havens for the millionaires, but it’s not being fairly or gainfully used to support the right investments in the right projects to benefit the working people or the planet. Thankfully Greece has started a move to resist the old consensus and ask the difficult questions.

Only the Green Party offers a coherent solution to this combination of issues. As was evident in the debate in Norwich, the other parties are all fudging it, because they are all (including Labour) committed to the TTIP (even UKIP have not come out against it but have been voting for it insofar as they vote at all in Europe, though Stuart Agnew seemed to be trying to erase that truth or make some virtue of it). Only the Green Party is explicitly *against TTIP*, and in favour of reforming Europe to be more democratic. The Green Party favours an in/out referendum on Europe. It favours ending the austerity economics that is causing the downturn in trade in Europe and worldwide. It favours investing in making Britain and Europe energy-self-sufficient and sustainable on a slow to zero growth basis for the future without fossil fuels, so that prosperity can return and wages can rise to a level at which no one must beg for loans and food parcels. This is a new look Europe and a new look Britain, fit for a planet which is overheating and becoming too unequal and unkind.

This is my Party, and my position, and if you vote for me I will not compromise these principles.