Two British analysts answer Naftemporiki’s question: Should Britain leave the EU?
By Vassilis Kostoulas
[email protected]
@VasKostoulas
Britain should not leave the EU – it should lead the EU
By Edward Douglas
Senior Policy and Projects Officer, ResPublica
The most likely outcome on 23 June – Britain’s first vote on its EU membership since 1975 – is a vote for the status quo. Most polls show voters want to stay in – the Remain camp has a healthy lead. So although the prospects for the European project look bleak if Britain chose to leave, this is a significant opportunity for the EU to move from a narrative of near permanent crisis to one of economic and social renewal. It can only do this if we start to think about Britain’s role post-referendum in a renewed and revitalised political settlement for Europe.
Domestically, the debate has been dominated by arguments about the economic and security risks of leaving or staying. This makes sense – fear wins votes, hence the comfortable lead for Remain. And the economic risk of Brexit is, after all, very real – 44 per cent of the UK’s exports are to the rest of the EU. Hopes of an export-led rebalancing of the British economy would be dashed by reducing cooperation with the rest of the continent, the result of which would be an estimated net cost of £2,660 to each household.
But this focus means that we have no vision for Britain’s role in Europe post-23 June. The vote comes at a crucial time, with an unprecedented set of challenges in front of us. A weakening Eurozone, the humanitarian disaster of the migration crisis, the security challenge we face from Islamic State, and the rising tide of political populism across the continent.
Britain has the second largest economy in the EU (and will be the largest by 2050), and the largest defence resources and diplomatic network. So instead of rehearsing the relative costs and benefits of Britain’s EU membership, we instead need to look at what an active, engaged Britain pushing on economic and security reform in Europe could achieve for all member states. How can this be realised?
Greater prosperity across Europe can only be secured through trade, and free trade deals such as TTIP are crucial in boosting our export performance. That’s why TTIP is forecast to be worth up to £100 billion to the European economy – so Britain should push for negotiations to be completed more quickly.
But we need to better compensate those working in sectors that suffer as a result of greater economic cooperation, whether Romanian farmers or British steel workers. That means using some of the financial gains from greater trade to fund pan-European training initiatives. Giving people the means to move into high growth areas of the economy will help quell the rising tide of nationalist sentiment that feeds on the costs of globalisation.
But securing mass prosperity across Europe requires bolder thinking beyond trade deals. We can do this through tackling financial crime and tax avoidance; and by giving all citizens the means to share the benefits of the next wave of technological innovation. Both must be addressed at the European level but Britain has unique capabilities to lead in these areas.
Finally, the EU needs to take a leading role in stabilising failing states in North Africa and the Middle East to address the twin challenges of the migration crisis and the rising terrorist threat over the long-term. But Europe’s inertia as a regional security actor is preventing this. The fundamental problem remains the lack of a core group of states committed to furthering European security and defence. Britain’s defence budget is double that of Germany, and our international development spending is the highest in the EU. And with its unparalleled diplomatic network, Britain should push for an EU diplomatic framework to support nation-building and reconstruction in North Africa and the Middle East.
So when we ask why Britain should stay in the EU, we need to think positively about the role Britain can play in helping Europe as a whole meet the major economic and security challenges all member states face now and in the decades to come.
Why Britain joined the EU and why we should now leave it
By Alan Sked
Emeritus Professor of International History, LSE
The Brexit debate is not primarily about economics. Despite the myth, we did not enter the EEC for economic reasons. When Harold Macmillan submitted out first application in 1961 our annual growth rate was almost 6%. In 1973, when we joined the EEC, it was a record 7.4%. Today George Osborne would die for such figures.
Growth in Europe in any case has been spurred not by the EEC/EU, according to the latest research, but by the supply-side reforms of individual statesmen in a variety of countries, reforms that were then copied across the continent. The relevant names are Ludwig Erhard in West Germany, Jacques Rueff in France, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany. EU policies when they eventually expanded beyond the CAP and CFP (both deleterious to the UK economy), included the Snake, the ERM and the euro—all failures and detrimental to the European economy as a whole. Since the 1980s the growth rate of the EU has gone down by 1% every decade. Share of world GDP is in free fall. Today, the Eurozone is again on the brink of a fatal implosion over the Greek bailout and the whole of the EU is in a migration crisis exacerbated by its now absolute dependence on neo-fascist Turkey. The UK outside the Eurozone, whose GDP only this month recovered its 2008 level, has experienced twice the growth and half the unemployment there. So we have gained nothing economically by being in the EU.
The EU is clearly a political project. The mantra of the Remain camp is ‘to trade with Europe you have to be part of it’. But this is bizarre. Nobody says ‘to trade with China you have to be part of it’. That would be very scary. They don’t even say ‘to trade with the USA, you have to be part of it.’ Nobody suggests accepting the US constitution or the dollar as part of the price to trade with America. Yet, to continue to trade with Europe we are told we must accept EU laws, policies and institutions including its Parliament, Commission, Supreme Court, diplomatic service, flag, anthem and passport! This is the true price of EU membership and the Single Market—the loss of our political independence. So the referendum is primarily about Britain becoming a normal, self-governing democracy again with a British government alone in charge of formulating our policies and directly accountable to the British people in its execution of them, just as is the case in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, India and the vast majority of the world’s democracies.
This gives us the opportunity to redirect our trade to the rest of the globe where we have a trading surplus; to import cheaper food and goods from outside Europe where the EU external tariff will no longer apply; to spend our annual EU contribution of £8-10 billion on the NHS, the poor and disabled, farmers and universities and to control immigration into the UK. We are not some supine, failed state. In the past we regularly saved European democracy by our example. We can do so again—in fact, that is what the EU is really worried about.
