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Denis MacShane

Denis MacShane was a Labour MP (1994-2012) and served as UK minister of Europe. He writes regularly on European politics and Brexit.

Denis MacShane

The woman Roosevelt relied on to put America back to work

Denis MacShane 14th July 2020

Roosevelt is invoked more than ever amid talk of a ‘new deal’ for today’s crisis. Rather fewer, however, recall the woman at the heart of his programme.

What The EU Really Thinks About Brexit

Denis MacShane 22nd November 2018

A major problem in the Brexit debate since June 2016 is how 95 percent of reporting and discussion in the UK media has been about internal Westminster politics. Occasionally space is found for a brief interview with a minister or politician from an EU-27 government but only on condition that they speak perfect English. Pro-Brexit Conservative MPs […]

Why Such Disparity Between Unemployment Rates In Europe?

Denis MacShane 27th July 2018

Eurostat has just published its latest unemployment figures. For the EU and Eurozone. Overall, they show continuing progress though youth unemployment remains seriously high. But the statistics do not explain why some countries have much higher rates of joblessness than others with Greece posting nearly ten times the rate of unemployment as the Czech Republic […]

Reforming Freedom Of Movement To Support Workers And Reduce Immigration

Denis MacShane 11th June 2018

We now have a glimpse into the hard Tory vision of how a fully Brexited Britain will treat Europeans who want to work here. All during the 20th century after 1945, Britain had to import workers to do the jobs the sturdy white Englishman didn’t want to do. 200,000 Polish ex-soldiers after 1945 were sent […]

European Works Councils – Another Brexit Victim

Denis MacShane 5th January 2017

European Works Councils (EWCs) are a living, functioning embodiment of Social Europe and the core EU concept that workers should have rights and, in exchange for accepting cross-border market liberalisation, including movement of workers between different labour markets, employees of Europe-wide firms must be consulted and informed. A little known advantage of being in the […]

UK Labour Difficulties Are Those of 1930s, 1950s, 1980s

Denis MacShane 21st July 2016

I was asked by a German friend to explain what is happening inside the British Labour Party. This is what I sent him. In 2011 I organised a conference in northern England bringing together top Labour historians and senior MPs from the 1980s like David Owen and Gerald Kaufman. It was called “Labour 1931, 1951, […]

The New ‘Pop-Nat’ Authoritarianism

Denis MacShane 27th May 2016

The drift to illiberal Pop-Nat – populist nationalist – politics in Europe continues. Across the Atlantic Donald Trump exemplifies Pop-Nat politics. There is no sign that the grip of Orban-Kaczynski style politics is weakening.  They represent the soft EU version of Putin-Erdogan political control. Elections are held. A market economy exists. People can travel and publish. But […]

Millions Of Labour And TUC Votes Need To Be Won To Defeat Brexit

Denis MacShane 7th April 2016

The paradox of the EU referendum campaign is that all of Mr Cameron’s political foes want him to win and many of his political comrades want him to lose and hand over to an isolationist Prime Minister. So far the campaign has been a civil war in the Conservative Party rather like the legendary Irish […]

Why Post-mortems On Labour’s 2015 Defeat Are Pointless

Denis MacShane 12th February 2016

Has any historian of democratic left parties that form governments examined the phenomenon of how long they have to stay in opposition before they once again return to power? Labour is currently indulging in a ritual of seeking to answer the question why it lost the 2015 election with different elements of the party from […]

How Should Labour Handle The Brexit Referendum?

Denis MacShane 19th June 2015

As the Commons begins to discuss the Brexit plebiscite how should Labour handle the referendum?  By far the most important intervention was not a speech in the EU referendum bill debate but the warning from a troika of pro-European union leaders – Frances O’Grady of the TUC, Dave Prentis of Unison and Sir Paul Kenny of the […]

Believe In Europe But Prepare For Brexit

Denis MacShane 23rd March 2015

The people of Britain are poised for one of the biggest decisions in our history. In 2017, while the rest of Europe celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Treaty in Rome, I believe Britain will leave the European Union unless there is a major change of direction in British politics. The most important change in […]

Manuel Valls – Le Ferdinand Foch De Nos Jours?

Denis MacShane 17th July 2014

In 1914, as he was leading his men at the Battle of the Marne General Foch, the best of all the French fighting generals told his chiefs in Paris: ‘My centre is giving way. My right is retreating. The situation is excellent. I am attacking.’ And indeed in one of the greatest manoeuvres ever seen […]

Why The Left Must Address Inequality And Poverty

Denis MacShane 28th April 2014

Gently, slowly one can sense the terms of intellectual trade changing. The long era of individual accumulation with the massive transfer of power from the wage-earning collective to the capital funds and bankers that have caused so much damage is coming to an end. More and more the intellectual argument is shifting ground. The Nobel […]

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


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Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


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Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


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