The Case for Europe (and Against Leaving): Part 3
[Click here for part 1 and here for part 2]
Things are hotting up in the run-up to the referendum as the official campaigns have been chosen by the Electoral Commission. Britain Stronger in Europe is organising the ‘Stay’ campaign while Vote Leave have been designated the official ‘Leave’ campaign. Vote Leave has written a ‘Case’ for leaving. It’s a 36-page PDF document that paints a picture of a bright and rosy future if only we’d do the sensible thing and leave the sinking ship that is the EU.
The first thing to note is how, well, rubbish the case is. They give several figures but no citations so there is no way to check their veracity or even their source. They could be spot on, or they could be pulled from thin air. Without knowing where they got their figures from it’s impossible to tell. For example, they quote the following statistic,
72 – times the UK has attempted to block motions before the council, with no success
(p29)
This figure may be correct but I have no idea where it comes from. Without a source we have no context. What were these blocks on? Why were they unsuccessful? Are these all the motions we’ve tried to block and all were unsuccessful or were most of the motions we’ve tried to block successful but we were unsuccessful on these occasions? How long a time period does this figure cover? Is it the last session or the entire lifetime of the Council? How does this figure compare to other countries? I can’t answer any of these questions because I have no idea where the figure comes from. I found a document (PDF) that has been claimed to be the source but while it says the UK has been “defeated on over 70 occasions” the ‘72’ figure is never given so I’m still at a loss to its actual source or context.
To be honest, I had a hard time working out what Vote Leave’s arguments were: everything is so vague and generalised. In essence their argument seems to be that the EU is bureaucratic, slow and doesn’t let the UK get its own way. Bureaucracy and slowness is not unique to the EU, it’s present in any large organisation public or private and it would be naïve to think that the EU could some how be immune to this. Yes, bureaucracy is a pain but it is necessary as anyone who has been involved in an audit will know.
As to not getting our own way, well, ignoring that this is the argument of a 5 year old, we are one of 28 countries and they all have their own interests which sometimes coincide with the interests of others and sometimes don’t. Why should we expect to get our way all the time? And what would it mean to get things our way anyway? We have MEPs from across the political spectrum, from UKIP to the Green Party. Some of those MEPs are so anti-Europe that they refuse to vote on even the most seemingly uncontroversial bills so is it any wonder that we might not always ‘get our way’?
One claim that Vote Leave makes regards the amount we spend on EU membership. Indeed, the home page contains a counter that increases by £601 every second, showing how much we have paid to the EU since we joined in 1973. How accurate are these figures? Well, according to Full Fact they are fairly accurate. As long as you recognise that these are gross figures. We are scheduled to pay £350 million each week for our membership of the EU. But gross figures are not the full story. What we should really be interested in are our net contributions. And this is where it gets interesting. We get a rebate of about £100 million each week. This is applied instantly so we actually only pay just under £250 million. Still a massive amount but £100 million is a not an insignificant reduction. Then we get direct funding for things like farmers subsidies and impoverished areas which reduces our direct payment to £161 million a week, a net amount of less than half the gross. Then there are, of course, indirect payments and other benefits that amount to a return of almost £10 for every £1 we put in. That’s a rate of return that I think most of us would be incredibly happy with.
But let’s assume that Vote Leave’s rather vague proposals have swayed you to vote ‘leave’. What then? Well, they have a vision. A dream, if you will. A dream where,
We negotiate a new UK-EU deal based on free trade and friendly cooperation. We end the supremacy of EU law.
(p3)
We regain legal control of things like trade, tax, economic regulation, energy and food bills, migration, crime, and civil liberties.
(p30)
It all sounds so easy. We’ll just make a new deal with the EU. After all, we’re friends. Except . . .
Really? We’ve just told the EU that we think it’s shit and they don’t have our best interests at heart and yet we expect them to play nice and not try and negotiate as good a deal for themselves as possible? We are already complaining they don’t have our best interests at heart yet somehow expect them to magically respect those interests now we’re no longer part of the same club? What planet are these people living on?
Germany’s Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has already stated that negotiations will be tough. Meanwhile,
The problem is that we need negotiations to go smoothly because we only have two years to complete them. Article 50:3 states,
Klaus Regling, head of the European Stability Mechanism, said that the leave campaign’s ambition to secure full access to the single market without accepting free movement of people and budget contributions “has never happened in Europe”.
The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.In other words, if we don’t get the negotiations finished within two years, we either need to get a unanimously voted extension (highly unlikely) or, it seems, just accept whatever terms the EU offers us.
“But two years is a long time”, you cry. And this is where, at last, I get to Greenland. Greenland was a member of the EEC (as the EU was then called) until 1985 when it voted to leave. It is a large country with a small population. In 1985 it had a population of around 53,000, which is a bit less than the population of Weymouth. Yet despite its tiny population and a single interest – fish – it took them three years to negotiate their exit. In 1985. The world has moved on rather since then and the UK has a much bigger and more complicated economy. To think that we can negotiate an exit in two years is verging on insanity. Former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell believes it could take up to a decade, if we’re given that long.
Not everyone agrees with Sir O’Donnell’s claims. Some think that the best way round the two-year exit period is to just not say we’re leaving until we’re ready and have informal negotiations in the meantime. Do we really think the EU will look favourably upon that sort of move? And even if they did, do we really want to extend the length of time where there’s economic uncertainty? The Economist writes,
The immediate effects of a Brexit vote are likely to be bad. Prolonged uncertainty over Britain’s new relationship with the EU will discourage investment, especially foreign direct investment, of which Britain is the biggest net recipient in the EU.The longer negotiations take, the worse things will be economically. Whether those negotiations are formal or informal, the whole world will know they are going on and will hesitate to invest in the UK while things are so uncertain. The pound has recently fallen to a seven year low against the dollar as a consequence of the uncertainly and will only continue to decline the longer this uncertainty reigns.
As to the sort of deal that we will be able to strike with the EU, well, there are options but none of them are good. One of the popular options is to follow the Norwegian model where there is access to the EU common market but without the ‘interference’ of Brussels. There are, however, a couple of problems with this option. The first is that we will still have to implement all the EU laws relating to the common market but we will have no say in what those laws are.
As a Norwegian minister once put it,
There’s also the problem that in order to join the European Free Trade Assocation (EFTA) we would have to have our membership approved by its current members. The EFTA currently consists of four European states: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, the combined populations of which total 13.8 million. The UK has a population of 64.1 million and a massive economic clout in comparison. Do we really think that the EFTA will welcome us with open arms? Why would they? What benefit is there for them?
“if you want to run Europe, you must be in Europe. If you want to be run by Europe, feel free to join Norway.”
Other options are equally unpromising. The simple fact is that we are a relatively large and prosperous country and losing us will be harmful to the EU symbolically as well as practically. There is a fear that we will be the snowflake that sets of the avalanche that ends the EU project, so it is in the EU’s best interest to make our departure as painful as possible to put anyone else off,
The simple fact of the matter is that, however optimistic the Vote Leave campaign may be, an exit is going to be painful for everyone concerned. It will have potentially lasting impacts on the UK, and EU, economies that may take decades to recover from. And for what? We get an incredibly good deal for our membership. We get to write the laws and if we don’t have as much influence as we would like in that then maybe we should stop voting for people who hate the very idea of the EU and work to undermine it from within rather than blaming it all on "them" and threatening to walk away.
With populist rightwing Eurosceptic parties threatening mainstream politics in both countries, the domestic incentives would prevent concessions to Britain as politicians would need to show their electorates that leaving the EU comes with a heavy price.
What I find most telling is that many of those who are on the Committee of the Vote Leave campaign encouraged Scotland to stay a part of the UK during their referendum a couple of years ago. Michael Gove claimed that Scottish independence would embolden Putin (yeah, I don’t understand either), while Ian Duncan Smith said that a leave vote would be “devastating”. Boris rambled about how the UK was an “identity” that gave us a cache overseas, while in a startling lack of awareness, my very own MP Dr Liam Fox bemoaned the fact that the campaign for Scottish independence was enabling xenophobia to “come to the fore”.
All these people extolled the virtues of being part of a union of countries but, given their current stance, I suspect what they really extol are the virtues of being the dominant member of that union and this is why they do not like the EU. We are not the dominant member. We are a member. We have some influence, some power but unlike the days of the Empire where it was "our way or the highway", we are finding that it’s not always fun not being in charge.
One of the lessons you learn as you grow up is that you can’t always get your own way. You have to concede and compromise on occasion. It’s not as fun but it is more sustainable and makes for better relationships. Isn’t it time the UK grew up?
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