Brexit: Should we stay? Or should we go?
On June 23, Britain goes to the polls to vote in a referendum that has divided political parties, split the media, confused the electorate, raised the ire of Barack Obama and even made the President of the European Commission admit the EU is a meddler. With misinformation the only information on offer, Richard Holt asks: does anyone really know what’s going on?
The European Union creates millions of jobs, brings countless billions of pounds kerchinging into the country and provides cross-border cooperation that stops terrorists from unleashing mayhem on the streets of Britain. The EU also costs a fortune, prevents us from making our own laws and leaves the door wide open to every nutcase who wants to come over here and plot bombing campaigns from the comfort of his council flat.
This is what we are being told. If you think we should stay in the EU, you are an idiot. If you think we should leave the EU, you are also an idiot. But we are not an idiot, at least not a total one. And whenever anyone treats us as though we were, it is important to remind them of this. Most adult humans are fully aware that the vast majority of information being flung at us about the referendum occupies a spot on the truthometer somewhere between barely believable and blatant bullsh*t.
So the correct choice on 23 June 2016, for anyone who has even the vaguest grasp of that unfashionable notion of right and wrong, would be to tell both the Leave and Remain campaigns to pack up their muck wagons and wheel themselves to a far-off place where they can shout at each other until the capillaries in their faces burst.
But unfortunately we do not have the option of both sides losing. We shall be forced to watch one group triumphantly congratulating us on making the right choice for Britain – one they have guided us towards without a moment’s thought for their own career advancement – while the losing side cackles gleefully at the impending doom that we have voted upon our stupid selves.
So it is a simple choice. You are either Out or In, Leave or Remain. For those of you who decide that it is a matter of sufficient importance to drag yourselves off to the voting booth, you need to come to a decision, but how do you know which way to jump?
You could try consulting Vote Leave, the campaign group engaged in a little People’s Front of Judea battle against rival exit campaign LEAVE.EU to be the one that really hates the European Union more than anyone else. The Vote Leave website is dominated by a ticker showing a staggeringly vast and ever-increasing amount of money. It currently stands at over half a trillion pounds – that’s how much we have already flung with flagrant abandon in the direction of the EU. We are wasting £350m a week, it tells us, on unelected politicians and pointless bureaucracy – money that we could better spend on important things like the NHS.
(Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire)
But hold on, is that money really being wasted? Britain Stronger in Europe, the leading Remain group, tells us in big letters that for every £1 we put into Europe, we get “almost £10 back”. So in fact we are taking the EU to the cleaners, effectively putting our money on a 10-1 horse every week and winning? Amazing! Well, not quite, because in slightly smaller letters it qualifies the statement by saying that we get the money back ‘through increased trade, investment, jobs, growth and low prices’.
And that’s where it all gets a bit complicated. The Remain campaigners make much of the claim that three million jobs are ‘linked’ to Britain’s membership of the EU. David Cameron has gone as far as saying that these jobs are ‘dependent’ on Britain’s membership. This figure is based on a Treasury calculation of the proportion of Britain’s economic output that is made up of exports to the EU. This is then converted to the equivalent proportion of the UK workforce.
To make that jobs claim valid it would mean that everyone in the EU that has ever bought goods or services from Britain is going to wake up after a Leave vote and decide that they no longer want to buy anything from us ever again.
If Britain leaves the EU, people won’t stop wanting things that we make. Any more than they will want to stop selling us all the things we buy from them. Yes, trade tariffs will need renegotiating, but people are not going to immediately change their shopping behaviour based on a political decision. Just as nobody will stop watching Hollywood films because they feel a bit queasy at the thought of a US presidency involving Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
But getting down into the actual details is difficult. Trade negotiations are boring, and the campaigners know that as soon as they use the word ‘tariff’, people will suddenly start contemplating life’s really important questions, like whether a python can eat a pit bull.
(Getty)
So the campaigners fight for ways to capture our interest. Mr Cameron has told us that we should stay in the EU because “the prospect of linking arms with Nigel Farage and George Galloway and taking a leap into the dark is the wrong step for our country”. This is clever. Pick two people that most of us would not enjoy waking up next to, and introduce that disturbing image to our minds. Let’s not get bogged down in all this boring stuff about the economy, just imagine yourself as the meat in a Farage/Galloway love-sandwich and vote to stay.
Putting things in patronisingly simple terms is not just the preserve of the Remain campaign. Boris Johnson, using his clown’s hat of a hairstyle to mask the frantic political calculation beneath, claims a vote for Leave would be like a prison escape, saying: “This is like the jailer has accidentally left the door of the jail open and people can see the sunlit land beyond.” Again, forget any of the dreary details, we need to break out quick before Germany knocks on the cell door and tells us it is looking for a new girlfriend.
Of course both sides of the campaign are also very keen to give us ‘the facts’. It just happens they are two sets of facts that cannot occupy the same plane of existence. The Government has spent millions of pounds leafleting the entire country, laying out its own version of the facts. The Leave campaign has condemned the leaflets as shameless propaganda. My dictionary defines propaganda as ‘information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause’.
The leaflets put great emphasis on EU membership resulting in cheap flights and the imminent abolition of mobile phone roaming charges, but those perks are also down to something called market forces – as anyone with the faintest understanding of business could tell you. So propaganda sounds like a pretty fair observation. But the Leave campaign is lobbing stones from within the conservatory – in its own bit of leafleting the facts were considered so incontrovertible that it wasn’t worth mentioning, other than in the small print at the back, that the leaflet came from Vote Leave.
So to avoid being propagandised, you could listen to people not trying to win our vote. There are various organisations out there, such as The UK in a Changing Europe and Full Fact, claiming to offer impartial advice. And guess what? None of it is exciting. If we leave, things could get a bit more difficult, but they could also get a bit better. One thing that nobody denies is that we do hand over vast amounts of money to the EU, and the case that we get anything approaching value for it is very shaky indeed.
(Alamy)
So when making a decision we can’t avoid a bit of emotion. And none more so when making our decision on matters of security and immigration. Leaving the EU won’t mean shutting the doors and never letting anyone else in. Nor will it mean we are prevented from travelling and working and studying abroad. It is in everyone’s interests to make new deals to allow it to keep happening. And we should be able to make our own decisions on how much of it we allow.
But the very fact that security keeps coming up as one of the important issues is significant. Because if we really believe that European countries will stop cooperating with us on security matters then we need to slap ourselves hard around the face. Imagine a scenario where a former EU comrade says: “Sorry, we were going to tell you about the terrorists heading your way, but because you no longer wanted to be in our gang, we thought we’d just let them blow you all up.” If that even seems like a remote possibility, then it really is time to stop supping on the EU Kool-Aid.
Because terrorism is just the bloody end of the one big factor that the Remain campaign has in its favour: fear.
Nobody really believes that leaving the EU will make our economy crumble. Nor that we get value for money by paying 751 MEPs and countless hangers-on a handsome wage to sit around discussing the Implementation of the European Progress Microfinance Facility.
But we are scared. No country has left the EU before, so we don’t know what will happen. And if our main reason for staying is that we are worried about what happens if we leave, then there we have the answer.
(Main & featured image: Gap Insight)
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