A Hatful of Rainbows Position on the EU Referendum

So far, the EU referendum debate has been ill-informed, hysterical and lacking in facts. I have decided that I ought to add some thoughts of my own. I intend them to be ill-informed, hysterical and lacking in facts.

Rather than go into the ins and outs (ho, ho), I will restrict myself to pointing out three things and making two observations. It is not so much argument as the background that you are unlikely to hear. I imagine that many of you will have made up your mind already, but I will do this anyway.

For a politics student/geek, the first point about the EU is that it was founded to stop people fighting. This is mentioned from time to time, but rarely in the right context. When the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago, angry UKippers were on the radio asking what the EU had done for defence against Russia or to prevent the collapse of Yugoslavia. This misses the point, The EU was not founded to stop war with Russia or to prevent civil war in the Balkans, it was designed to stop war in *western* Europe. It is worth a glance at any timeline of European history to remind yourself how much fighting there was in Western Europe in the seventy years before 1939 as opposed to the seventy years after 1945.

One of the ideas that has underpinned that extraordinary era of peace is that you can prevent war by preventing economic nationalistm . Put very simply, no country is going to destroy its neighbour’s coalfields if they need that coal to supply their own steel industry. Simple and yet also brilliant and if you now join in the laughter over thinking that war would break out in western Europe, then you partly have the EU to thank for that.

David Cameron is a politics student, of course. Sadly he decided to take this point and take it to an extreme. No David, war will not break out if the UK leaves the EU. I do think that a general implosion of the EU would lead to an unstable continent of barbed wire fences and populist right-wing governments, but a UK exit would not immediately lead to hostilities. Even more sadly, those arguing for a UK exit have been just as daft. The EU is not Nazi Germany. There is no plan to invade other countries or attempt genocide. It is deeply insulting to all those who died in the Second World War and those millions of victims of the Nazis to suggest that regulation of fishing is no different to a fascist regime.

The lack of understanding as to where the EU has come from also creeps in to other criticisms. On a newsgroup, someone asked me, ‘Could you defend the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)?’ Yes, absolutely – it is one of the most successful transnational policies ever devised. At the end of the Second world War, Europe faced famine. Before you sigh too much at the thought of continental Europeans being unable to feed themsevels, I include the UK in this. The winter of 1947 was particularly devastating and the snow that covered the UK’s fields was followed by an equally devastating thaw. This was the moment that the USA woke up and realised that it needed to come to Europe’s aid if societies were to be rebuilt. In the UK, the Labour government had to take emergency actions to ensure the food supply (and this was in a time of rationing – though also note that it was a time when UK governments thought that it was a bad thing when members of their population were faced with starvation). The CAP was the method of those who had lived through these times to stop them happening again.

Fast forward to the 1980s and the people who derided the EU for producing grain mountains, wine lakes and butter hills were missing the point. Europe had become self-sufficient in its food production and the situation had been so effectively turned around that surpluses were now normal. It was a remarkable achievement. At this point, it is worth noting that the EU suffers from something familiar to anyone who has dealt with large institutions or indeed some large companies. Having found something that worked, they kept with it, even after change was needed. This also leads to some anomalies – if you are farming sheep, it is subsidies all the way, if you are farming pigs, then there are none.

Strange as it may sound, at 39% of the EU’s budget, the CAP is actually smaller as a percentage of the EU budget than it used to be, but let us stop for a minute and give the EU due praise for its role in our living in times of abundance. You get the same criticism of fisheries policy ... that would be the same fisheries policy that has taken the population of North Sea cod from facing extinction to its highest levels in thirty years.

One of the reasons that the CAP has gone down as a proportion of the EU budget is because of the accession of the Eastern European countries. We should praise the country that led the EU in opening up to the east – we will come back to who that was later on. It is only a partial role, of course and we should be a little bit careful about praising cheap food. You probably know the dilemma facing many milk producers who find that supermarkets pay them at a level that does not sustain their operations (we then subsidise some farms through housing benefit, you might not realise). This is blamed on the EU, rather unfairly, when we used to have a Milk Marketing Board that set prices for milk but for Conservatives this was an aberration as it interfered with the market and Conservatives cannot cope with anything that interferes with the market. At least one major supermarket has tried to address this but it also needs consumers to change their habits. I am yet to see the consumer revolution demanding higher prices so that supermarkets can pay farmers more.

My point is that this is not all the fault of the EU. Could I defend the Euro? That would be a stretch! There is a logic to the idea of a single currency and we seem to have quickly forgotten the days when newspapers would be full of stories of how you could catch a ferry to France, buy a car and drive it back to the UK for less than the cost of the same car here. CDs were always said to be cheaper abroad too. If you took away different currencies, you would remove the artificial pricing that made UK consumers pay more for the same things than consumers in other countries. It is a logical extension of the Single Market. Which country pushed through the single market? We will come back to that question later on.

The trouble with the Euro as we have it now is that it was a political project rather than an economic one. Rules were bent to allow the bigger countries to behave how they wanted to (The Economist was complaining about this as early as 2002) and no-one could sensibly argue that Greece and Germany had harmonised economies unless they were making a political rather than an economic argument. If you go online at the moment you will find that Gordon Brown is abused and derided for having no economic judgement. Apart from the fact that the UK economy grew every quarter when he was Chancellor (an unprecedented record, I believe), I think that history will judge him much more kindly – Tony Blair and his inner circle wanted to join the Euro when it was launched, only Gordon Brown stopped this happening. We should be a bit more thankful than we are.

My other two points about context are that the UK has led the EU on two significant occasions. Listen to the Leave campaigners and you will gain the impression that the UK is at the mercy of foreign committees which we have no part in – this is nonsense. More to the point, it ignores the fact that the UK, without even trying properly, has led the EU at important points in its history. Imagine what we could do if we were only trying!

The UK does not try. Other countries send their best and brightest administrators to work in the EU, we only send people with a special interest. Other countries appoint top politicians to be their Commissioners, we send Chris Patten, Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock ... bright men in their own way I am sure, but at the end of their political careers rather than at the height of their engagement in politics.

As for decision-making, did you know that all EU countries change over to summertime on the same weekend? That is one of those small harmonisation measures that makes a lot of sense. All bar one country had decided on the weekend to harmonise the clock change but one country did it a week later. So, the obvious solution ... yes, that is right, that one country that did things differently insisted that everyone else changed to do things their way or they would sulk. Everyone then had to do what the sulky country wanted and that is the history of why we all change our clocks across Europe at the same time every March. You can guess who the sulky country was, can’t you? It was, of course, the UK, behaving like a stubborn, pig-headed bully with a sense of entitlement. Makes you proud to be British, eh?

Despite not trying, there have been two extraordinary achievements of the UK which have shaped the EU. The first came in the 1980s. The 1970s were a bruising time for the EU (yes, I know that it was not called the EU then, but I am trying to keep it simple). The oil crises had caused havoc across Europe (including the UK, of course) and early attempts to co-ordinate currencies had been a failure. The trouble was that the ‘common market’ really did not work as first envisaged. As an example, if France was not selling enough wine, they could simply reduce taxation on champagne and increase taxation on chianti. Oh no, they could claim, it is not designed to penalise any one producer, it is just a new tax on some wines. Of course, practically this is a trade barrier to foreign competition. One country had the idea to properly remove all the trade barriers across the EU. The wine example is a genuine one, by the way.

That country was the UK, of course, and the Single European Act of 1986 must rate as one of the Thatcher governments' greatest contributions to European development. Make no mistake, this was the free market agenda put on to a European stage. I said earlier that the logical extension of this was the single currency (that is the true way to remove trade barriers) so take a moment to ponder Margaret Thatcher as the Godmother of the Euro! However, back in 1986 this was just the idea of creating a truly single market where goods could be traded freely across national boundaries within Europe. It was quite a vision and it was the UK that pushed it forwards.

Indeed, if you complain about the free market nature of the EU in its current form, that is the UK’s influence. People complain that the UK steel industry cannot be helped due to ‘state aid’ laws in the EU ... those would be the state aid laws that the UK pushed through to try to stop interventionist governments in other countries bailing out their industries (there are enough loopholes though that the UK government could aid the steel industry if it wanted to ... if it wanted to is the key phrase).

The fact that the Single Market took six years to fully implement should give you an idea of the scale of the project. With the internet now it is perhaps harder to think of not being able to buy goods abroad (as I demonstrate when I order my socks from the Basque country) but there was once a time when you would have had to pay customs duties on anything that came from what is now the EU. This free trade area now covers 500 million people, unprecedented in human history.

Of course, making a level playing field for trade also means that everyone has to produce goods under the same conditions (so, for instance, no-one can use worse working conditions to make cheaper goods than you). This is the origin of the Social Chapter, something vigorously opposed by the same Conservatives who wanted the single market. John Major may be derided by current Conservatives but his opt-outs from things like the Social Chapter were an achievement for the party. The UK led the creation of the single market in Europe and it deserves some credit for this.

For many of us on the Left of politics, the ‘Social Europe’ of the late 1980s which was there to protect the consumer rather than promote the interests of business was its peak. Jeremy Coryn’s ‘Yes, but’ approach to the referendum is probably the most coherent argument on offer, not least because it does not involve World War Three or Hitler. That last comparison should be striking you as even more odd as you read on, did the Nazis negotiate opt-outs from their system?

The Single Market would have been an achievement on its own. However, the UK then became involved in a different debate. The Berlin wall had fallen at the end of 1989 and democracy was starting to sweep through Eastern Europe. I wrote a dissertation about this! There is room for a lot of argument as to what caused this but I would not credit either Ronald Reagan or David Hasselhof with as much influence as they were to claim. However, the EU was faced with the other part of Europe being interested in joining the European Club. There was precedent for this. Spain and Portugal emerged from dicatatorships in the 1970s and the way of securing their democracy was to join the EU. There are entry requirements regarding democratic instutiouns, the rule of law, freedom of speech and so on, which is why you cannot join as a dictatorship. Greece also overthrew its military rulers and joined the EU. Could the same principle be applied to the former communist countries?

You might be surprised to know that many people argued ‘no’. At the time, the big project for the EU was a single currency (to complete the single market, see above). There were plenty who argued that ‘deepening’ the EU was far more important than ‘widening’ the EU. The UK did argue for an alternative currency by the way – the ‘hard ecu’ which would exist alongside national currencies but would also be legal tender. It would have been the bitcoin of its day, I suppose. There is an alternative history to be written about how this might have worked.

Leadership came from the UK. It was a British initiative that pushed the widening agenda over the deepening agenda. It was British influence that led to a small expansion in 1995 (Finland and Austria were among the joiners – it has been a speedy expansion) and then the former communist countries of Eastern Europe in two blocks. Romania and Bulgaria joined later than the others as they had to fulfil conditions around their democratic transition. You will read a lot about how the EU is ‘the enemy of democracy’ when actually it has promoted and stabilised democracy in many of its applicant countries.

Of course, this expansion has been used by some people to scare voters in this referendum. Iain Duncan Smith talks about how ‘Albania is on the ballot paper’, which is both nonsense and a sad reflection of how Conservative Leavers are once again failing to see that expansion is one of the areas where Britain really has led Europe. I am sure that the overall strategy was to prevent deepending by widening, which has not quite worked (Latvia joined the Euro last year trivia fans) but at the same time we have pretty much created an ‘outer core’ of countries who are using the euro and who are not so integrated as the others. Montenegro is not part of the EU but has decided to abandon its own currency and use the euro anyway – reports of the euro’s demise are exaggerated, but I think that we still ought to be thanking Gordon Brown.

The ignorance in this referendum campaign is sad and amazing. Boris Johnson gets off his German-made ‘battlebus’ in Cornwall and waves a Cornish pastie to show his patriotism. Cornish pasties can only be made in Cornwall and so there is no danger of St Austell being flooded by cheap imitations from abroad ... err, so long as they remain protected by EU food rules. Of course, I am biased because in Wales we are in the middle of a £1.8bn (over £3bn with matchfunding added) EU aid programme. If you look carefully, you can see the EU flag everywhere. I was at Penllergare near Swansea recently for a guided walk in the woods. Who paid for the tea shop and toilets there? That would be the EU.

In Wales we do very well out of EU aid. I am not proud of that, it is just an indication that we are poor, but I also know that without it we would have some serious problems (or more serious problems). David Davies MP for Monmouth claims that if we left the EU then David Cameron ‘has pledged’ that this aid would continue. Given that Wales is already under-funded through the Barnett formula, the number of people who believe this is small.

None of this is to deny that the EU is a mess. The reasons for staying in have to include working to change the EU. The UK has pushed business interests for a long time and sadly it is another area where we have been successful. However, there would likely be a good audience for the idea of change and also it is a mood that is prevalent elsewhere too.

Have you heard conservative politicians saying that we have to leave the EU to avoid the US-EU trade deal ‘TTIP’? Those would be the same Conservative politicians who have promoted the trade deal as part of their worship of the free market. One interesting fact for you – opponents of the TTIP include Mr D. Trump and Ms H.Clinton. I suspect that there will be problems at the American end as much as a the EU end.

Sometimes in life you can have a strop and it all works out. The UK did this with changing the clocks. However, it is more usual that you have to work within your family, your relationships, your friendships, your workplace and so on with other people to achieve your ends. It is not easy and often you have to compromise and do not get your way. The EU is a long way from perfect and it needs to change. The closeness of this referendum may well show just how much change is needed. However, the best way to get a better deal for the UK is work with others to change the EU, not to have a strop.

We could throw our toys a long way from the pram and leave. If you are a wealthy individual or a former stockbroker like Mr Farage then it probably will not affect you very much. If you are not in that category then you are definitely going to be affected. The Leave campaigners say that the remain campaigners are ‘talking the UK down’. On the contrary, they are talking down the amount that the UK has achieved in the EU.