Hold Your Nose but Stay In

Brexit revised

Hold your nose – but stay in.

By Anthony Robinson

(Notes for a pre-vote Q and A session on June 22 with students from Quintin Kynaston school, a London comprehensive where over 95% of pupils are either immigrants or children of immigrants)

Six months of campaigning culminated last night in a ding dong battle before a 6,000 strong invited audience at Wembley arena between Brexiteers, led by Boris Johnson, and Remainers headed by Sadiq Khan, Labour mayor of London and son of an immigrant Pakistani bus driver, and the feisty new leader of the Conservative party in Scotland, Ruth Davidson.

Boris Johnson ended his passionate appeal for voters to “seize back control” and make June 23 “Independence day for the UK.” Remainers called on the 46m strong potential electors to vote with their heads, for their jobs and their families.

The “in or out of Europe question” cuts across party lines and has embittered UK politics for decades.

When the UK joined in 1973 our economy was old fashioned and uncompetitive. The country, exhausted by years of war and under-investment, de- colonialisation, near civil war in Ireland and the cost of maintaining its military role as European lynchpin of Nato, looked to Europe for faster growth and political support.

Post-war Europe, including defeated Germany and Italy, by contrast received both Marshall aid and debt relief, and were able to concentrate on re-building and modernising their own war torn economies – with new autostrada in Italy and new factories everywhere. For three decades they showed more rapid economic growth than the UK. The UK joined in order to join in this more rapid growth – although many argue that the subsequent boost to UK economic performance owed more to the domestic reforms pushed through by Margaret Thatcher – curbing the trade unions, privatisation of state industries and actively wooing foreign investment.

What is not contested is that over the last decade the UK has outperformed the rest of the EU economically and attracted millions of EU immigrants in the process, especially builders and other skilled or semi skilled workers who make up for the UK’s lack of trained people.

When the Common Market was formed in 1956 it had only six members – Germany, France, Italy and the three Benelux countries. The Treaty of Rome was signed as the lingering Imperial pretensions of France and the UK were being shredded by Washington’s refusal to support the Anglo-French-Israeli occupation of the Suez Canal zone. A top US diplomat remarked “the UK has lost its Empire but has yet to find a new role.”

With the UK feeling poor and isolated Tory PM Harold MacMillan tried to join the Common Market – but was rebuffed by French President Charles de Gaulle, sweet revenge for the humiliation of France by Germany in 1940 and his exile in London. De Gaulle argued that the island nation would always choose the open sea rather than close co-operation with Europe.

De Gaulle understood that for the Brits co-operation with Europe was based on trade and markets – not emotional attachment to the dream of an “ever closer Union” or an eventual “United States of Europe.” Only when de Gaulle left power was PM Edward Heath able to gain entry into what was still the Common Market.

As the original Common Market of six morphed into the European Union with the treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon, signed as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, UK PM John Major secured a UK opt-out for two of the key features of this more federal and political Europe – the common Euro currency and the Schengen Treaty. The latter abolished passport controls within continental Europe and facilitated one of the key features of the expanded new Europe – the right to work and live in any EU country.

These new EU freedoms were planned before German unification and the wave of new entrants from Eastern Europe which dramatically changed the European political map. Membership rose quickly to 28 member states with huge disparities of income, very different histories and wide cultural and religious diversity.

Ironically France, Germany and Italy, so vocal and supportive in theory, restricted the influx of job-seekers from eastern Europe for several years after agreeing in principle while the UK, as usual, honoured its new obligations.

This is why so many Poles and other east Europeans came to the UK early on, with many of them taking UK citizenship and becoming proud and patriotic Brits. But the UK, with its Commonwealth and other connections also remained a magnet for non-EU immigrants, especially from the Indian sub-continent (as is France which has millions of Moslem Arab immigrants, mainly from Algeria and from former African colonies.)

The last few years however have seen a new wave of EU immigration into the UK – not from Eastern Europe but from Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Portugal. For them the Euro zone has been a disaster, especially for the young, with millions of unemployed. They are the victims of socialist ideology and trade union power, which protects those already in work, especially in bloated state sectors, and the one size fits all Euro monetary system. The Euro gives highly efficient Germany, with its tame unions and modern factories, a huge and un-needed competitive advantage. As a result Germany runs a huge, 9% of GDP, annual surplus on its foreign trade. This is matched by an equivalent deficit in the southern “Club Mediterranee” countries whose huge debts have been made unmanageable by low or negative growth. Italy’s GDP is over 10% smaller now than it was in 2007, before the global crisis.

Several hundred thousand of these EU job seekers from southern Europe have been flooding into the UK every year because the UK, with its own currency and a government seeking to control government spending and reduce the burden of debt, is not tied to the Euro and has retained its own currency and a more flexible system. This has led to the creation of over 2m jobs over the last few years – many of which have been taken by EU immigrants.

But the net result of all this EU and non-EU immigration is that wages are depressed and the competition for homes, hospitals, schools and everything else is acute. Some of the biggest opponents of what is seen as uncontrolled immigration are already established immigrants and lower paid indigenous UK workers- and voters, many of whom are deserting their traditional Labour loyalty in favour of UKIP and the Brexiteers.

Immigration is the most toxic issue in the debate – with UKIP in particular claiming that if we stay in the EU we will face further waves from countries such as Turkey, with 80m Moslem inhabitants and borders with Syria and the Middle East. If immigration were the sole issue there is little doubt that the Brexiteers would win hands down and the UK would leave the EU.

This is why PM David Cameron and the Remainers have tried to keep attention fixed on economic questions. They argue that leaving the EU would deprive UK companies of access to the 500m strong European single market and create deep uncertainty. This would deter investment, especially foreign investment. Jobs would be at risk. The pound would drop. Interest rates and mortgage rates would have to rise. Income tax would have to go up. Spending on the NHS and other social programmes would have to be cut – and so on.

The Remainers argue that the UK currently has the best of all possible worlds – access to the single market but an opt out from the Euro and Schengen. Brexiteers counter that being in the EU is like being shackled to a corpse -stagnant economies tied up by a crippling bureaucratic system harmful to a dynamic and entrepreneurial UK.

One of the key problems for Remainers is that even they concede that the EU is unnecessarily bureaucratic, economically sluggish and much in need of reform. There is no passionate desire to share the tarnished Europhile dream of ever- closer European unity, just a dogged insistence that exit would be a risky leap in the dark, accompanied by a hardly credible pledge to keep on trying to reform the EU from within.

But the Brexit camp is a very broad church with widely differing and contradictory views. For every liberal Brexiteer, just waiting for the chance to free up the UK to make mutually beneficial trade deals with the entire world, including the EU, there is a deeply conservative Britain-for-the- British voter. Many traditional voters do not like people speaking loudly in foreign languages on the bus and tend to resent foreigners if they are perceived to be ahead in the queue for jobs, and houses and places in schools and hospitals - or driving bigger and flashier cars.

But for six months this country, deeply divided and with many still not yet decided, has held a nationwide, civilised debate over its future. It is impossible to imagine such a debate taking place in any other EU member state, although unhappiness with the state of Europe is widespread and growing elsewhere in the EU too. By holding this referendum the Brits have demonstrated that Great Britain is still a sovereign state, despite EU membership.

As for me personally, I have changed my mind several times a day, as there are powerful arguments on both sides and no clear or risk-free way forward in either case. But tomorrow I think I will take the advice of former US President Lyndon Baines Johnson who, when asked why he kept a troublesome rival in his team replied “ better inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

We should remain engaged with our European partner-rivals and continue to take an active part in the decision making which affects our prosperity and security.

In my heart of hearts I think this unwieldly collection of 28 quacking ducks is deeply flawed and the Euro system is mad and probably un-reformable. But if we leave now I fear that the whole European structure would start to unravel – and we would be blamed. It’s a dangerous world out there – with a semi-gangster Russia watching every move from the margins, war in he much of the Middle East and a fragile global economy. This is not the time to rock the European boat.