Thinking About: The EU Referendum

It does seem to be THE topic of conversation at the moment – In or Out of Europe. Over the past 3-4 weeks, as voting date approaches (only 10 more days), I’ve been asking just about everyone I know what they plan to do and, more importantly, why. I’ve actually found myself surprised more than once. Sometimes in a good way when someone goes into a quite detailed economic and rights based justification for their decision to stay in the EU. Other times I’ve listened in varying degrees of dismay as otherwise intelligent people use frankly emotional arguments for leaving. OK I admit I’m biased here. I’m pro-Europe and see myself as a European even before I see myself as British (being half Irish probably helps with the perspective here I think). So it’s not really a huge leap of faith for me to stick an X in the box to remain in the EU.

From a completely unscientific poll my feeling is that it’s going to be a close call next Thursday – VERY close. I’d actually be surprised if the Yes vote was more than a few percentage points different from the No vote. My guts are telling me that it’s probably going to be 52% Out and 48% In. I think the turn out will be high by election standards but still the Out vote – in my opinion – will prevail. Why, you ask? Because I think that people are essentially stupid, can’t see much further than the ends of their noses, think purely of themselves and don’t understand how the world works. Oh, and the dominant debating point? Immigration. The Out voters think that pulling out of the EU will allow us to control our immigration to a greater extent. That might indeed be true (I don’t know because I haven’t really thought about it because I don’t consider it important) but ‘going it alone’ is a pretty drastic way of gaining that kind of ‘control’. Now Europe is by far our largest trading partner so how do I think leaving the EU will affect our trade. Here’s a clue: It won’t be the same and it won’t be better…… Of course we can trade with other countries and we do already. But setting up new trade deals will take time and effort. The increased uncertainty will force businesses to be more cautious (whilst we’re already in borderline recession) which will mean less investment, lay-offs and, probably businesses going to the wall. International companies will relocate to France and Spain to remain inside the EU. Whatever happens it’s unlikely to be good news.

The only compensation I can presently think of is the few seconds of joy I’m going to feel every time the inflation rate or unemployment rate goes up and I can say to some of my fellow workers “told you that would happen” or when a company moves out, or when our taxes go up to pay for things that would have been granted from central European funds. Or when EU employment law is withdrawn allowing employers increased rights to exploit people or when social security legislation is allowed to lapse and previous allowances are cut or removed all together. There will, naturally, be winners and losers in any deal with Europe. If or when we leave the quick, agile or rich will probably still make a tidy sum. Meanwhile the rest of us will get shafted whist being informed that it’s all worth it because we’ve got our sovereignty back. Unfortunately sovereignty doesn’t pay the bills and doesn’t put food on the table. Nationalism might very well have been a good idea at some point in history but that time has long gone. Trying to ‘go it alone’ will be swimming against the tide of political and economic history and if, as I believe we will, we go down that route it will go badly for us. I can only hope that I am pleasantly surprised on the 23rd June and we vote to stay in the EU. I guess that we’ll just need to wait and see.