The Case for Europe (and Against Leaving): Part 1

[This has become much longer than I expected so I’ve decided to break this up into two posts. Probably two posts. . . . Hopefully just two posts . . . We’ll see. . . ]

The EU referendum election is coming up on 23rd June. I don’t think it comes as any great surprise to hear that I’ll be voting to stay in, but I thought it might be worth taking some time to explain exactly why I not only feel that we should stay in, but why I feel extremely passionately that this is the best thing for the UK.

There are two types of arguments I can see: the positive arguments for staying in Europe and the negative arguments against leaving. Within these are my ‘gut instincts’ and the more rational reasons based on data and precedent.

So why do I think we should stay in? At my most facile I will simply reply "because it’s the 21st century!". We are living in an increasingly globalised world, what happens overseas impacts us more than ever and frankly it seems crazy to me that we are seriously contemplating withdrawing from the EU. Retreating back behind the White Cliffs of Dover into our island fortress is, to my mind, a pathetic response to the modern world.

Why don’t I think we should leave? Because the British Empire is dead. The Leave campaign seems to be predicated upon the assumption that being part of Europe is all that is holding us back from a return to the glorious days of old when a quarter of the map was pink and the sun never set on the Empire (hyperbole, but only just). This seems to miss the fact that the world has moved on in so many ways.

The main reason, beyond these rose-tinted views of the past, for leaving seem to be the desire to curb immigration. Now, it’s important to recognise that immigration comes in two forms – economic migrants and asylum seekers. Regardless of what happens, we will still have a legal and moral duty to take in asylum seekers, such as those fleeing from Syria, so it’s hard to see how our response to the current refugee crisis will be affected by an ‘Out’ vote, however much people may wish it to be different.

As for economic migrants, well, the figures suggest that they are a net benefit to the British economy. Research by the UCL Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration back in 2014 found that EU migrants added almost £20bn to the economy since 2000. During the same period British people cost almost £617bn. Admittedly, there are very good reasons for this. Migrants are generally young, healthy and have few or no dependents. They don’t routinely use public services but they do pay taxes, in contrast to the native mixed-age population. There is still a question of the longer-term impact (i.e. once they stop being young) but if they have contributed to public services then benefiting from them when they get old only seems fair. And that’s if they do decide to stay. Figures on the number of immigrants leaving the UK are seemingly impossible to find but while some will chose to remain, it’s clear that many are returning home.

So, immigrants are not the bogeyman they’re made out to be. But what if your criticisms of Europe are more fundamental? What if you just don’t like foreigners from Brussels telling us what we have to do? You may have heard people say that most of our laws come from the EU and feel this is ridiculous. Well, I agree with you. It is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous because it is ridiculous: the figures are completely made up. When the House of Commons Library looked into the figures they found that around 15% of our laws come from Europe.

You may think that this is still too high but a lot of these relate to working and trading in the EU so it’s not surprising that they come from the EU. More fundamentally, they are laws that the UK helped to write and voted on. Part of the point of being in the EU is that we have a voice in the laws that it creates. We have MEPs who, unless they’re from UKIP, work to create legislation with their European colleagues.

As you’d expect, a lot of the legislation regards trade. But while the economic benefits are enormous, for most of us they’re rather abstract. Yet there are laws that we, as ‘normal’ people, care about. The EU banned animal testing on cosmetics and their ingredients in 2009, following the lead of the UK . It’s not hard to think that we had some influence on this legislation. "But we didn’t need the EU to do that", I hear you cry. Fair enough. But what about forcing airlines to stop misleading people in their adverts. Or the soon-to-be enacted legislation to end mobile phone roaming charges across the EU. And most of our environmental law is passed at a European level so if you care about our environment then it's worth knowing that no-one knows how effective the UK legislation will be in its absence.

So maybe you reluctantly agree that not all EU laws are bad, and that some may even be ok. But this is the same EU that banned bendy bananas and put in a load of rules so that charity cake sales would have to have the same level of hygiene as 5* restaurants. Except, it isn’t. That stuff is all, to put it bluntly, bollocks (read the links to see how). I was alerted by a friend to this amazing website which contains responses to all of the claims made about EU legislation dating back to the early ‘90s. Some are willful misunderstandings, such as The Guardian reporting that the definition of an ‘island’ had been changed when in fact it was just a working definition for an economic analysis. Others are blaming the EU for the mistakes of the British government, such as a redefinition of kilts as women’s wear by the UK Office of National Statistics. The best ones are made up wholesale, like the one about the EU banning firemen’s pole due to legislation that never existed and neither of the relevant pieces of European law had anything to say about firemen’s poles. These stories have been bandied about since the early 1990s (that's over 20 years!) and yet despite the continued presence of bendy bananas, church cake sales, firemen’s poles, traditional Irish funerals, British plants, and “Made in Britain” labels amongst many, many other hysterical claims, the stories just keep coming and the old ones won’t die.

Hopefully I’ve gone some way to convincing you that the EU has some benefits, or at least isn’t the incompetent waste of space and money you may have been led to believe. In my next post I’m going to try and explain why I think that leaving is a bad move and why the ‘plans’, such as they are, for extracting us from the EU fill me with abject terror.