EXPLODING THE MYTH OF SOCIAL EUROPE

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: may 2013 :: RMTnews 22 C yprus has become the latest member of the Eurozone to be engulfed in the growing debt crisis as the Troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank demand bank closures and mass privatisation. The Cypriot government agreed to the measures in March in return for a €10 billion bail- out deal, making it the fifth country—after Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain—to receive money from the EU-IMF in return for strict neo-liberal economic structural adjustment. Cypriot banks were all closed and movement of capital off the island was suspended in contravention of EU treaties which demand the free movement of capital, labour, goods and services. The bail-out was widely seen as EU institutions placing the burden of the crisis from the banks onto working people. The country’s left wing AKEL party said that the deal constituted “a clear theft of the Cypriot people's labour and toil and at the same time is a fatal blow to the Cypriot economy, something which will cause unemployment to rise to new levels”. It said that the EU was exploiting the state of the Cypriot economy to undermine the sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus and impose itself politically on the country. While Thatcher may have passed on, Thatcherism is alive and giving public services a good kicking across the European Union. The cult of monetarist economics is enshrined in all the EU treaties which parties of all political persuasions rubberstamped after they were written by big business groups like the European Roundtable of Industrialists on behalf of the European commission. A major part of this cult believes that cutting budget deficits and imposing harsh austerity is the priority and mass unemployment and economic decline is a ‘price worth paying’. Unemployment in the euro zone is at a record 12 per cent, and the zone’s economy is shrinking. But the EU sticks with endless austerity. This means wage cuts and dismantling public services before handing them to the private sector that created the economic mess in the first place. The fact that it doesn’t work is irrelevant to the EU austerity cult. In fact, even the International Monetary Fund admits that spending cuts in deeply depressed economies actually accelerates economic decline. It is clear that Greece, Spain, Cyprus and the rest need investment not more austerity and savage cuts to essential public services but, locked in the Eurozone, the only option left is exactly that. What’s more the EU sees this as the perfect opportunity to speed up the privatisation drive. Earlier this year European transport commissioner Siim Kallas unveiled proposals for a fourth rail package designed to further breakup of national rail networks and hand the entire industry over to the private sector. The commission is seeking a full separation between the companies that own railway infrastructure and those that operate train services as has been imposed in Britain by the Tories using EU directives. The EU has been promoting this blatantly business-friendly structure for rail for decades with various waves of legislation such as EU directive 91/440. This model of forcing competition into rail has created the basket case we suffer in Britain today and now they want to roll it out across Europe in the interests of profits for private monopolies. And you don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to work out that the chaos of rail privatisation that has ripped through Britain will now sweep across the continent courtesy of the bosses and bankers that run the EU. This process of firing off diktats demanding mass privatisation with no public mandate whatsoever is not confined to the transport sector. Across the EU health care, education and every other public services face the same EU business model of privatisation. So what about Social Europe? For years many in the labour movement claimed that ‘Europe’ was going to deliver everything from full employment, decent public services to even improved weather but none of this has happened. The general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, Bernadette Ségol, has said that present EU policies have failed. Addressing the theme of the future of social europe, she recently pointed out that “policies that are being implemented are attacking industrial relations system, are putting pressure on wages, are weakening public services and weakening social protection. “These are the core aspects of the social model,” confirming the view of many that the old model is now dead if it was ever alive at all. EXPLODING THE MYTH OF SOCIAL RMT general secretary Bob Crow outlines how the myth of the European Union’s much-vaunted ‘social model’ has been exposed CYPRUS FACES PERMANENT EU AUSTERITY