I received the following correspondence from a constituent who makes some interesting points, and as the matter is highly topical I thought I'd post it in full on here...

Hello Richard,

There’s a controversy about company mergers that seems to be getting out-of-hand. Here’s a view that might help.

According to both Marxist and Capitalist interpretations, it doesn’t matter whether businesses operating from a country are owned by local shareholders or by those who live somewhere else. From both points-of-view, the concept of ‘national champions’ and of protecting ‘national firms’ from their shareholders selling out to those from other countries, is of much less relevance than how they operate in relation to their employees, suppliers and customers.

‘National Champions’ and protection from bidders (including so-called locusts) is a right-wing idea that seeks to reinforce the control of the workers, and to preserve market hegemonies and national hierarchies. It is a paradigm opposed to the objectives of both the EU and Socialism. Such nationalism is consistent with the pronouncements of Le Pen, Nick Griffin and their well-known and hated antecedents.

Moreover, replacing national institutions with pan-European ones has helped to make our EU the most successful peace process the world has ever known.

Giving access to bigger product markets has enabled poorer and small States to catch-up with their richer neighbours, who’ve been rewarded by new and growing markets on their doorsteps. Sharing their national currencies with the big economies has enabled small countries to gain from the lower borrowing and trading costs that arise from more liquid markets. Graduated opening of service markets and eroding discrimination in culture, trade, sport, music and transport has encouraged the ever closer union of peoples and ideas, without more Euro-bureaucracy. These are wonderful achievements in a continent otherwise well known for its history of extreme prejudice and violence.

We need to enable more pan-European institutions including pan-European companies and Trades Unions. We certainly don’t need more protectionism standing in the path of greater solidarity.

Allowing company mergers across borders – and where appropriate, encouraging them - enables firms to acquire, and share with their workers, knowledge and relationships that pushes them both along steeper learning curves. So those European peoples are gaining economies of both scale and knowledge within a huge market that even giant firms cannot dominate. Our country has been a major beneficiary of inward take-overs and mergers and all States need more of the same, not less.

The way our country gains from acquisitions is that complacency and narrow vision is challenged by outside investors, and who plainly value the potential of our firms more highly. The experience is that inward investors invest in generating higher productivity and value for all of the stakeholders. I share Gordon Brown’s vision that some European countries are limiting the opportunities for Europe by espousing their right-wing approach of protectionism.

By protecting so-called ‘national champions’, governments simply reinforce inefficiency and domestic exploitation. It’s no surprise that Italy and France (for example) have such low participation in paid work and have high social exclusions that spillover into angry protests and violence. British national experience is that cross-border take-overs bring dynamism, investment and access to markets that create better-paid jobs.

Intervention by EU institutions has helped in other fields. Football clubs now promote new forms of international understanding because the EU ruled that players could be transferred across boundaries without restriction. That intervention has invigorated British football, and is helping to erode national prejudices everywhere.

Does it matter if other countries pursue nationalist causes that injure their own economic health? Well, yes it does very much. Because we rely upon our neighbours’ prosperity for our trade, we need them to afford to buy from us. And, as we found in the 1930s, economic fascism is an infectious creed that tears us all down.

What the EU needs to do is encourage even more pan-European institutions and especially non-government ones such as firms. Developing trans-nationals through mergers, and allowing financial markets to become pan-European, are an essential part of bringing people together in peace and prosperity. Ownership of large companies is already more often accrued by pension funds and other forms of common ownership, than smaller ones.

I very much hope that the Socialist Group in the European Parliament will use all deliberate means to enable our ‘Economic Europe’ to triumph over ‘Economic Patriotism’.

With kind regards,

Andrew Dundas