For the record, and to set my mind at rest that I have done something to persuade others of the best answer on a question of enormous importance to the UK’s place in the world, I am setting out some thoughts on why I voted as I did. They have nothing to do with fear and much to do with hope.
A rational review should weigh up alternatives. In practice we have been offered no clear alternatives. Instead, the campaign has been bitter and characterised by spin with responses coming in even before the original speeches have been made. Both sides have indulged in what the others call ‘Project Fear’. Remain has threatened economic meltdown, Brexit has conjured up an image of hordes of migrants swamping the country and created chimeras of European armies, a European superstate taking over Westminster, and the threat of Turkey joining the EU (What’s wrong with Turkey, I ask).
As to the future nature of the UK’s role in the world, Remain has been unable to offer anything significant beyond ‘more of the same’ while Brexit has offered … well, a pretty blank piece of paper with suggestions of trade partnerships similar to [insert name of country here – they have varied from week to week] and immigration systems like [insert name of another country here], none of which have stood up to close analysis.
Brexit’s big figure of £350m a week has lost all credibility and yet they persist with it. They probably like it because it sounds like a large amount when it is actually relatively minor compared with the sum total of government expenditure. They have offered to spend it many times over on the NHS or [insert your favourite project here]. Being slightly partial for a moment, it is hard to believe that Cornwall would get nearly as large a share of it from a Brexit government as it gets from the EU: a conclusion which seems to have escaped some of the residents of this county.
The debate is taking place in a poisonous and insecure environment. People throughout the world have lost trust in their political representatives and structures, and are still suffering the after-shocks of the financial crisis. Continuous growth has been replaced with economic stagnation except for a few who continue very visibly to flaunt their wealth. The relatively peaceful collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 has been followed by the financial crash and the very unpleasant meltdown of much of the Islamic world in the Arab Spring, the latter aided and abetted by the West’s interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and ineptitude about Syria.
People are frightened and insecure. ‘We don’t trust Westminster’ has been coupled with ‘We don’t like the EU’ as symbols of power-hungry people who ‘don’t understand my needs’.
The rise of the Far Right across Europe, of the anti-establishment figures like Trump. Sanders and our very own Boris Johnson is a symptom of this insecurity. Demagogues stride across the political landscape, like snake-oil salesmen hoovering up disgruntled individuals who believe that their simplistic or blinkered approaches can solve all the problems of the world. They distance themselves from existing structures by claiming not to be ‘establishment figures’ but, as President Obama has pithily observed, experience counts for much. You would not get your airplane serviced by someone who had not been trained and had experience.
Protectionism has long been the refuge of those who feel under stress. ‘Withdraw our horns and start again and we can re-build things in the way we want.’ The problem is that the world does not stop to allow you time to catch up.
It may be counter-intuitive but there is never a more important time to work together than when you feel out of control. Partnership in crisis is like a helping hand, never forgotten. Working together in two World Wars healed centuries of distrust between the UK and France in a way that negotiations could never have achieved.
Sovereignty is at the core of the Brexit argument; ‘We want our country back’ scream their posters as though it had been taken away by a malicious parent. It has not. Partnership involves willingly ceding control over some things for the greater good.
To take a small example, we agreed to share fishing quotas in the interest of protecting fish stocks and to avoid the costs and hassles of trying to police arbitrary lines drawn on a moving ocean. If our fishermen chose to sell our quotas to others then this is our fault, not something that has been taken away from us. If the quotas are out of balance with fish stocks then this is not necessarily a reason to reject the whole idea, it is a reason to discuss ways of bringing them in line with a new reality. Babies and bathwater come to mind.
This analogy highlights one of the silliest aspects of the debate about sovereignty. The historic concept of a country has changed. The idea of nation states was a C19 concept and involved arbitrary lines drawn on a map reflecting past power struggles and languages. The fact that most of the borders of the UK happen to be easy to define is a convenient exception.
Anyone who has crossed a European border between two Schengen countries knows how absurd borders are. The land looks the same on both sides, water still flows downhill, the birds and bees do not notice them, roads cross them at will, land ownership can be fluid. They are administrative necessaries not ‘castle walls against infection and the hand of war’.
We now live in a global world where a company can be headquartered in Panama, run from California and occasionally pay tax in Ireland. It may add to the feeling that others are controlling our destiny but we cannot undo it. Our response, if a response is needed, should be to work together with others who have similar concerns, closing tax loopholes as fast as the companies find them, banding together to prevent exploitation and finding common solutions. I seem to be advocating partnership again: let’s think if there is a group with whom we can work.
What matters is people not countries. Countries exist as a way of managing society, not the reverse. There is no objective rule that says that Westminster should be where all decisions about my life should be made. Some might better be made in our village, some at county level, some in somewhere like Brussels, some at the UN. It is pretty unedifying hearing the Brexit view that it should be Westminster or nothing. This just echoes the individual power-mad ambitions of our leaders.
‘Subsidiarity’ was the word used in the discussions leading up to the Maastricht treaty which, it is worth remarking, was willingly signed by an elected Tory Prime Minister not known for her love of sharing power with anyone, with the support of our elected parliament and which was not imposed by the EU.
Every country in Europe retains the right to remain as a sovereign state. Talk of a European super-state is rubbish. Not a single European that I have ever met would allow their country to be swallowed into such a state. Like me, they retain a sentimental attachment to the cultures of their homeland but are happy to compromise – now there is a difficult word – at the margin for the greater good.
Has that margin moved too far? Has the EU become too centralist? One can debate this just as one can debate whether Westminster is best placed to dictate where houses should be built in Falmouth. The edges of power ever shift to and fro. If we feel things are encroaching beyond what we can bear then we should talk about it, not throw our toys out of the pram and walk away. How childish that would be.
Some of our politicians complain at the very existence of a European justice system. They would wouldn’t they. It does the UK no harm to have their views challenged every now and again. We have no monopoly on morality as we once thought we did. Grow up and accept genuine objective criticism.
I am sure that there is much wrong with the EU and its structures. We all know of things that seem manifestly absurd, and there are even more urban myths, but what is true of the EU is as true of Westminster and, I am sure, of any government. We elect Westminster politicians and feel they are out of touch and take bad decisions just as we elect MEPs and feel they do the same. This is a symptom of the time, especially as we now have social media to allow us to share our, often narrowly focused, views so easily.
When the history of the EU comes to be written, I think we will credit is with a range of significant achievements to which we are too close to appreciate at present. Its ability to knit together some of the major and recovering economies of post WWII Europe was a triumph. This created a partnership which meant that we no longer had to play a constant game of Diplomacy, establishing spheres of influence and constructing ever more complex mutual support pacts, maintaining standing armies facing our nearest neighbours.
Early on, the EU included Greece in its ranks, a decision which made little geographical sense but rescued the country from the threat of years of political dictatorship or communism.
Its performance after 1989, helping guide the countries of Central Europe towards democratic processes and integrating them into a wider European community, could only have happened if Europe had the financial and cultural stability to cope. This cost Europe real money just as it cost Germany to re-integrate its two parts into one country. It has also helped to harmonise employment laws in civilised ways. The whole is infinitely greater than the parts and something of which we should be proud.
Brexit’s call to ‘re-capture sovereignty’ means little more than ‘power for me’. By ‘taking back control’ we can ‘make Britain great again’ (cf Trump’s claim for the USA). Actually, I don’t want Britain to be ‘great again’ in the sense they mean it. History has passed us by. We no longer have an empire; we no longer rule the world; we no longer have the right to tell everyone what is what and expect our view to prevail – one of our great failings in dealing with the EU. We are just one leading country and that is fine by me.
Yes, I would like to live in a financially successful and settled country but I see no reason to try and make ourselves top dog. And I am dead certain that cutting ourselves off from partnerships, and in particular the economic might of the EU, would bring nothing but despair and affectionate laughter from our friends about the insularity of the British constantly trying to recapture past glories.
Which leads me to the economic arguments for staying in the EU. In the C19 we were manufacturing giants, exporting around the world, especially to our empire. Today, we have all but lost or sold our mass-manufacturing capability and focus on specialist products. Ours is a service economy. Outside the dubious industry of arms manufacturing, our major industry is financial services. To sell services you need to be at the heart of a market not looking in from outside. No one beats a path to your door. To imagine that pulling up the drawbridge to Europe would allow us to prosper is cloud-cuckoo land.
We have the benefit of using the world’s modern lingua franca and are a natural stepping stone into the world’s second largest economy. If we leave the EU then the EU’s financial centre will slide to Frankfurt. Foreign-owned manufacturers will have no problems moving plants to the mainland of Europe where staff costs will be lower.
No trade agreements are going to replace existing relationships and, as we have seen, Brexit’s ‘Norway’ argument slides into nothingness when looked at in depth: payments to trade and no say in decision-making. Put that in your sovereignty pipe.
The last major argument for leaving is the problem of migration and the fear that the UK will not be able to cope with large influxes of people ready and willing to take jobs that British people do not seem able or willing to take; that our services will collapse in a heap and that welfare costs will spiral as a consequence. It is ironic that, like it or not, we need migration to staff so many of those public services not least our hospitals.
People are undoubtedly on the move, lots of them. It would have helped if we had not bombed their homes and tinkered with their existing government structures but such considerations are in the past and we have to deal with the reality of the present. We live in an over-populated planet and, the lure of political and economic stability of ‘the west’ is a considerable attraction to the dispossessed and insecure: another back-handed compliment to the success of the EU.
We are never consistent. We can cry at the image of a dead boy on a beach, drowned when his migrant boat sank and yet complain at the sight of adult ‘foreigners’ picking ‘our’ daffodils. We can join a campaign to prevent the deportation of a family who have lived in the UK illegally for years because we believe they are being victimised, and yet adopt a bunker mentality at the sight of thousands trekking across frozen wastes or braving under-sized boats, following in that family’s footsteps to the ‘prosperous’ west.
Migration takes many forms from free-movement for EU citizens most of whom would much rather live in their own countries if they could find productive work there; to genuine refugees escaping conflict such as those poor Syrians; to economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, escaping repressive regimes, ‘failed states’, failing agriculture under pressure from climate change, or religious persecution. All deserve our understanding.
To hear some politicians talking of the ‘influx’ of Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians from the EU as though the Vandals were at the door, is insulting and reflects an underlying elitist and racist view. They too are people. Many of us share their blood. They too have hopes and fears and are as European as we are. Why, some even revere St George as their patron saint. It is no more than fear of the ‘other’ identical to Trump’s view of Mexicans as drug-dealers and rapists (and probably Muslims, knowing the Donald’s grasp of facts).
There is no easy answer to migration: no easy measure of what level is realistic or ‘acceptable’. One thing is certain though: Cnut did not have the answer. We cannot hold back the tide by simply building ever-higher barriers and throwing the unwanted over the top. Those who argue for a cut in overseas aid are denying one of the few tools we have to correct injustices around the world and thus, eventually to un-fail those states or to create societies which are at ease with themselves in their home territories.
Brexit’s magic formulae for controlling immigration are as much insulting and unworkable nonsense as the suggestion of short-term permits unless someone was earning over £35k (well over double the average salary in Cornwall).
So where does this all lead me? I have found no merit in any of the arguments put up by the Brexit campaign. They offer me no coherent model for what our nation might look like in the future, and would almost certainly lead to the break-up of the partnership that we call the UK. All the public figures whose views I respect, and especially those who have no axe to grind or career to advance, agree that Remain is the answer. All the economic arguments point in the same direction. So both my head and my heart point in one direction.
The EU undoubtedly faces problems. Created in good times, it is struggling to deal with the twin shocks of the aftermath of the financial crash and migration but that is not a reason to walk away, it is a reason to work even more closely together to solve problems together. Our country too faces problems with a continued lack of trust in established structures, some generally unimpressive politicians and a population increasingly anxious about the future.
Two social memes have stood out amongst the plethora of postings about the referendum. The night club analogy describes the conversation in which protagonists stand around in a kebab shop asking whose idea it was to get out of the night club when they realise that it was a mistake to leave and they want to get back in. The second echoed Kennedy’s famous call in asking not what Europe can do for us but what we can do for Europe.
Both make their points neatly and concisely. The stupidity of stamping one’s foot and walking out into uncertainty only to realise the mistake afterwards, and the naïve and selfish expectation of getting out more than one puts in.
And then there is the obvious point made by so many: this is a referendum about the long-term nature of this country. It is about a vision of the future, not a simple election that can be reversed in five years’ time if ‘they’ make a hash of things. This is absolutely not the moment for a protest vote against the status quo, no matter how confused and insecure we feel.
To vote Remain is not, as Boris would have us believe, to show fear over hope, it is to show hope over fear. Hope that we can work within Europe and with our European partners to make the world a better place rather than pull up the drawbridge at fear of ‘Johnny foreigner’. Stuff talk of recapturing 'sovereignty'; it is humanity that matters.
