In the Guardian on Wednesday Colin Hines agreed with columnist Martin Kettle that Europe’s free-market dream is over – adding, “not before time”.
He notes the crumbling of support for open borders, “with its damaging financial flows, relocation of manufacturing and destabilisingly rapid migration from east to west”, proposing “a socially cohesive, green Europe that can provide its people with a sense of long-term security and control over their own national future”.
As a first step, Colin Hines advocates a co-operative EU in which social and environmental measures designed to improve domestic conditions would no longer be undermined by short-sighted neoliberal strategies.
Protective borders should be reintroduced in order to address the UK’s growing inequality, job insecurity and economic slowdown and pan-European problems like climate change and the trafficking of people, weapons and drugs.
