David Cameron's cowering reliance on the City was exposed for the world to see this morning when he refused to sign the City up to a Financial Transaction Tax.
David Cameron’s cowering reliance on the City was exposed for the world to see this morning when he vetoed a treaty change to save the eurozone because of his unsurprising unwillingness to bring the City to heel with a progressive, redistributive Financial Transaction Tax.
Watch Cameron’s remarks early this morning, in which he claimed ”what is on offer isn’t in the one per cent’s Britain’s interests”, here. His refusal to sign up to a full treaty was described as “unacceptable” by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling Cameron’s alternative proposal a “rotten” compromise.
Cameron’s siding with the one per cent, with the fat cats who, lest we forget, got us into this mess, should come as no surprise. As we reported earlier this year, Tory dependence on the City doubled from when Cameron became Tory leader to when he became prime minister, the amount of money the Tories received from City money more than quadrupling.
More recently, the GMB revealed 37 Tory donors with a combined fortune of more than £10 billion – linked to finance, hedge funds, private equity, property and other City activities – donated 60 per cent of the Tories’ funding in the last quarter.
As GMB general secretary Paul Kenny said:
“Never in the history of political party funding have so few bought so much political influence for so little. The Tory Party is increasingly being funded by the asset strippers and predators…
“They are the same old nasty Tories now in the pockets of the predatory elite. This is why they have yet to lift a finger against the bankers who caused the recession in 2007… The Tory party is the political wing of the rich and the elite – the 1%.”
Is it any wonder then that Cameron refused to sign up to the deal, refused point blank to even countenance any scaling back of the City’s power? Who runs the government? Who’s pulling the strings? Whose money influences Tory policy? Even if he wanted to do the right thing, the gun to his head from the Tories’ biggest donors meant he couldn’t.
On the wider political point, if Cameron believes he has sated the Eurosceptics with this ‘non!’, he can think again. He appears as in hoc to them – and after all, it is only with their support he became Tory leader (see here and here for the details) – as the City. And, just like a predator who scents blood, they will demand more, and more, and more, more renegotiation, more withdrawal, more grandstanding which their increasingly weak leader will be powerless to resist.
As the Telegraph’s Ben Brogan wrote in his Morning Briefing:
“Mr Leigh [arch-Eurosceptic Edward Leigh] and his friends are unlikely to waste time clapping Dave on the back. They will demand more, no doubt a comprehensive renegotiation of British relations with the EU.
“How will Mr Cameron manage those forces? He is meeting a group of his backbenchers at Chequers tonight, but he won’t be able to ward off the demands for a referendum before his statement to Parliament on Monday.”
And as for the deputy prime minister, if it’s true he approved Cameron’s veto, many Liberal Democrats, and moreover most Europhiles may be asking themselves this morning:
‘What is the point of Nick Clegg?’
See also:
• How bankers’ bonuses are contributing to the new credit crunch – Cormac Hollingsworth, December 6th 2011
• Osborne starts to panic about the chance of a Robin Hood Tax – Owen Tudor, November 9th 2011
• On the Financial Transaction Tax, why is Osborne on the side of the one per cent? – Shamik Das, November 2nd 2011
• Farage should check his own funds before accusing others of being in it for the money – Alex Hern, October 24th 2011
• Tory dependence on City money should come as no surprise – Shamik Das, February 9th 2011
116 Responses to “Cameron didn’t sign EU deal because it’s not in the interests of the one per cent”
Pete
Great stuff. I’m very glad that someone has written this, it is something that needed to be said.
There are a couple of things I’d like to add. I think that a big problem is that Britain has allowed the financial sector to get far too big at the expense of other industries.
Several factors combined to create the bloating of the financial sector and the shrinking of the rest of the British economy:
1. Globalization, free trade policy and failure to include stronger labor accords into international trade agreements. This meant that skill-based jobs quickly flooded out to the third world where corporations can get cheap labor and exploit their workers with impunity.
2. The legacy of the Thatcher years. The Thatcher government deliberately dismantled much of the mining, manufacturing and other skill-based industries, particularly in the north of the country. The consequence has been a concentration of business and growth in London and the surrounding areas to the detriment of elsewhere. Cities like Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool and even Sunderland used to be great global cities of industry. That was completely wiped away by the Thatcher years.
3. Failure to improve labor law and advance the labor movement. Whereas Germany acted to keep its manufacturing base and create a partially worker-controlled model of production, Britain did the opposite. Conservative governments kept up a system of confrontation with the unions and the skill-based sectors they represent. This was largely a cynical political tactic to increase the power of the southern, rural base of their support. It was also hypocritical since the Tories attacked Labour’s attempts to help these industries, yet did very similar things to help the farmers — because agriculture supports the Tories and people in mining and manufacturing tend not to.
4. Most importantly, capital has been siphoned out of the productive sectors of the economy because a legislative framework has been put in place that produces this result. The British public and media haven’t woken up to the fact that financial services are like trucking — they are an intermediary good that sets the conditions for actual goods and services to be produced. The Conservative Party in the 1980s tore down financial regulation and in consequence huge amounts of money went into the financial sector. This was combined with the decline of manufacturing so that many people couldn’t raise their standard of living without going into debt. This led to a number of self-fulfilling prophecies. The aforementioned decline of the labor movement and effects of globalization have meant that people are hardly able to negotiate wages any longer — and therefore fell into extreme debt. Again, it leads to the gross inequality that Britain now experiences. Similarly, the Thatcher government started to roll back state intervention in the housing market so people were taking out mortgages (in some cases when they didn’t really have the income to do so). So again, more money goes into the banks and financial institutions and more return can be made on exotic trading and speculation.
The financial services sector has now basically made Britain in a system of economic apartheid. People who work in these and related industries can have access to superior services and hugely superior standard of living. They know this and they want to keep it this way. Rebuilding the rest of the country, rebuilding infrastructure and striving to become a global leader in the industries of the future such as green technology will require huge amounts of public investment which will mean the need for both more revenue and a radical alteration of laws governing the financial system and labor law. This is exactly what the Tories and the people they represent don’t want. And the Labour Party has completely abandoned any commitment to discussing, let alone offering, these types of policies. I would argue that this is because under Blair they became just as, if not more, subject to the influence of Murdoch, the City and the interests of global capital.
The consequences of this on the global scale is that the global public now lives at the mercy of the twists and turns of the unwieldy global financial system. Sarkozy and Merkel want to address this to a very limited extent whereas Cameron wants to keep the status quo. Very transparent to see his motivation when you actually look below the surface. If we want to really solve these problems we need to have a genuine, effective, democratic European left rise from the ashes to challenge the concentration of power in reactionary, unelected entities and make the west genuinely productive once again.
wolfstar_de
Cameron didn’t sign EU deal because it’s not in the interests of the 1%: http://t.co/c8ouElel writes @ShamikDas #EU #FTT
Patrick White
Cameron didn’t sign EU deal because it’s not in the interests of the one per cent http://t.co/535ZQ0AM via @ebuzzing
Rowland Paul Hill
RT@occupybritain Cameron didn’t sign EU deal because it’s not in the interests of the 1% http://t.co/xyXqOaWI #WhyWeOccupy #WeAreThe99%
Rowland Paul Hill
Cameron didn’t sign EU deal because it’s not in the interests of the one per cent http://t.co/ctu3yoJw via @shamikdas #olsx