The French President has just said "non" to a re-negotiation of Britain's settlement with Europe. Queue surprise and anguish from the media. Are we really surprised by this? As was mentioned many years ago in an (as ever) accurate episode of the original Yes Minister series the French are our 'mistrusted allies' and international organizations are 'games played for national benefit.' What then should we be looking for from our ancient faux-friends in Gaul?
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First off I need to get an important misconception out of the way - the pro, anti and unsure lobbies with regard to EU membership are actually talking about different things, and then therefore all conversation at present is meaningless.
The pro-EU argument is almost always couched in terms of economic impacts. Jobs lost, lack of access to the single market, lack of investment from areas outside Europe and so on. In the more serious articles there is then an attempt to show how these benefits outweigh the £10-12 billion a year cost of actually being in the EU in the first place.
The anti-EU argument is political and ethical - we are a sovereign nation and will remain so. I'm not sure whether it was intended as an insult but in a previous post I was described as a 'romantic nationalist' - a term I have since self-applied with gusto. While I can appreciate the economic impacts of European membership (or exit) these are ultimately a sliding scale which is not fully understood. That our courts are de facto no longer sovereign (despite the de jure claims), and that an entity other than our own elected Parliament can tax us is a situation which is not to be tolerated.
Unhelpfully however, this is not to argument you can factually resolve - just as the utilitarians struggle with the question of how many tubes of toothpaste is a naturally perky demeanor worth, a comparison of job creation vs sovereignty is not one that can be resolved by math alone.
Personally I'm all for common markets - in fact Britain had a larger network of free trade deals before it joined the Union than it has now. (We had to give up all our own trading rights to join the EU). The current deal between the US and EU that is being held up as a shining example of EU benefits only gets us more or less back to where the UK was before it joined the EU in the first place.
The economic objections raised by the likes of the TUC and, recently, Tokyo, would be mitigated by membership of a revamped EEA, and to the nay-sayers who worry that the cost of single market access is comparable to the full on cost of EU membership I say "fine." I'm happy to pay for the economic benefits, I'm not happy to pay for the ECHR to uphold the rights of rapists and murderers to have their living costs indirectly paid by me.
Britain's place in Europe has always been a bit odd. Religious, cultural and eventually historical loathing have lead us into war and conflict with just about every nation in Europe against just about every other nation in Europe. Our current attitude was almost certainly formed during the Long nineteenth century when Britain's global political and economic dominance allowed us to look to the rest of the world for our allies and trading partners, while keeping one boot firmly on the necks of any rising European powers (though admittedly one Frenchman proved to have a fairly boot-resistant neck). The cultural legacy of the world wars no doubt cemented that view, Britain does its own thing and regularly has to trot into Europe to sort things out. It's perhaps a pity our power and wealth stopped keeping up with our self-aggrandizement about a century ago.
This should be contrasted with the French and German views on the EU. Mr Hollande is directly quoted as saying he won't support anything that's not in the French national interest, while Germany has flourished with an artificially low exchange rate, and, increasingly, come to rule the EU nest thanks to its vast wealth and imperturbable constitutional courts (British equivalents take note). Britain needs to get over the view that we are doing everyone else a favor by playing along with the EU - we should be ruthlessly pursuing own our agenda, regardless of what that means to French farmers or Greek wine-merchants. If that means using the ultimatum of withdrawal to get what we want then fine.
While it doesn't really follow on cleanly, I'm just going to throw in a quick bit of maths (as ever). The costs to the UK last year of EU membership was £12billion (what we put in minus what we get back). According to Tokyo's recent lobbying we stand to lose "ten's of thousands" of jobs from a EU-exit. So... 99,999 jobs for £12 billion equals £120,001 per person. How about we just leave the EU and spend the money retraining anyone who lost their job?
And back to cricket...
Happy Trails,
/Z
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