Brexit: Part II, The Case for Leaving
Britain has long had a frigid relationship with Europe, going back centuries before Walter Hallstein, a former lieutenant in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, became the first Commission president of the European Economic Community (a predecessor to the EU) in 1958. Call someone from Britain a ‘European’ and she will squirm inside a little. Sure we are technically part of the continent called Europe, but in our hearts we have always considered ourselves something distinct from it. Our experience of European history has often been one of looking in through the window from the outside, watching as one regional power, and then the next gains the upper hand in the endless jockeying for territory and power. Of course, on occasion we have waded into that fray, with mixed success, but thanks to the good fortune of being surrounded by miles and miles of deep salt water, Britain has been largely shielded from the political shakeups, revolutions and general turmoil that have shaped the Continent over the years.
That general turmoil has meant shifting borders, land swaps, and occasionally the amalgamation of various nationalities into one political ‘union’ or superstate. The Holy Roman Empire, the Confederation of the Rhine, and the state of Yugoslavia all serve as useful examples. In general Britain stayed out of these and is not culturally accustomed to the idea of having to share sovereignty. These weren’t just military alliances mind you (which Britain gladly embraced) but political projects specifically designed to melt away national borders and bring a variety of different European nations under one roof, often led by one ambitious man. Neither Charlemagne, nor Gustavus Adolphus, nor Napoleon, nor even Hitler himself was ever able to set foot on our ‘green and pleasant land.’ This has given Britain the quiet time and space necessary to forge the unique culture, political institutions, and bonds of trust that make up a stable society. Geographical isolation has also given us the opportunity to be more outward looking — our chief successes have been in exporting the British language, common law, and education system all around the globe — albeit primarily through often not so innocuous empire building. We have close friends outside the European club. This narrative is not itself a direct reason to want to not be in the EU, but it provides important context for the arguments which will now follow, since a lot of them would not hold water if you thought of all European nations (including Britain) as one big happy family. As far as many Brits are concerned, the EU is just another in a long line of attempts to fashion a European superstate, and just another one we’d keenly like to stay out of.
Sovereignty, Law, and Judicial Jurisdiction
When the British government first asked its populace to go to the polls over the matter of Europe in 1975, the question was phrased: “Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?” The ‘European Community’ (such a cozy, friendly, and non-committal term), wouldn’t officially become the European Union for another 34 years. In 1975 its architects presented the Community as merely a free trading area among just nine, prosperous Western European nations¹. Read as such, there wasn’t much about it not to like: free trade meant a smoother flow of goods and services between nation states and an easing of barriers for workers looking to get a job in another country. You’d have to be a real hermit to say no to something like that. But of course although this was all the European Community was at the time, this wasn’t all it was intended to be by its founders. The problem — the big, big problem — was that something that was sold to Britain as merely an instrument of free trade slowly but surely metastasized into something very closely resembling a superstate.
In 1983, the European Community introduced the Common Fisheries Policy, which set quotas on how much fish eat nation could catch, even in their own territorial waters; in 1999 the Euro was introduced, replacing the currency of almost all member states; in 2004 came the European Arrest Warrant, whereby a member state, if requested by another member state, is required to arrest and transfer a criminal suspect to the issuing state. That last one is a shocking breach of national sovereignty when you stop and think about it — it’s like a 27-way reciprocal extradition agreement on steroids, except unlike a traditional extradition treaty it also applies to your own citizens. Nor is it at all a purely academic matter, as British citizen Andrew Symeou will tell you. In 2009, Greek authorities, after intimidating some witnesses, falsely accused Andrew, a student, of killing someone at a nightclub in Zakynthos. Andrew hadn’t even been in the nightclub at the time, yet because of the European Arrest Warrant he found himself summarily shipped off to a revolting Greek prison where he was left to rot for a year in ‘inhumane conditions’ before finally managing to clear his name and come home. Presumption of innocence and habeus corpus are treasured keystones of British common law tradition, dearly bought by our forefathers and passed down over generations. Yet in the EU they become worthless, or at least fall in value to that of the least free country in the group. That might have been fine when the EU comprised only 9 countries, and the most gangster nation among them was, like, Luxembourg, but it’s certainly not now that the EU is considering adding Turkey to its club, a country led by a bonafide despot who eats political freedom for breakfast.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of legislation spewing from Brussels and raining like a suffocating ash all over Europe. The EU has taken to regulating everything under the sun, and the British Parliament now spends much of its time just frantically copy-pasting these EU directives into national law, rather than coming up with laws themselves. It’s true that Britain has its own representatives (MEPs) in the European Parliament, but an important aspect of the EU constitution is that laws cannot originate from the Parliament — instead they must originate in the EU Commission, a body of appointed, i.e. not elected, bureaucrats, who write the laws that the Parliament can then just vote up or down on. Also, because of the size of the European Union today, even if every British MEP voted against a particular piece of legislation it could still easily pass if enough other countries ‘ganged up’ on us, at which point we are forced to implement a law that the country categorically does not want. Now of course, in any federal state, this happens all the time and is quite expected. It’s expected, for example, that the US Congress might pass a law that none of the Texan representatives agrees with, and yet still it must apply to Texas because they are part of the union. While Texans might grumble about it, none would seriously argue that such a move was tyrannical or oppressive (lol, actually they might but you get my drift) because, conceptually, the people of Texas think of themselves as Americans first, and part of the American democracy, wherein it’s expected that you don’t get your way on every piece of legislation.
On a technical level, the same thing is happening in the EU, but the problem is that hardly anyone in Europe (and even fewer in Britain) feels European. Instead they feel German, or French, or Danish, and so when a law gets imposed against their will, it doesn’t feel like losing in a democratic vote; it feels much closer to a foreign nation, or group of nations, imposing its will on you. A sense of nationhood must come ontologically prior to the political institutions that define a nation. EU planners understood this stubborn fact and so the only way to get their beloved superstate to work was to beguile people by selling it as a free trade agreement and then gradually layering the institutions on top. Like the delicious mille-feuilles cooked up in Parisian bakeries and now sold across the continent tariff-free, each layer of the EU is itself barely perceptible, but the sum of all of them put together is something indistinguishable from a federation or superstate. Yet to protest this obvious fact, or even to state it at all, is to invite jeers and accusations of sensationalism and fear-mongering.
Don’t Mention The War
When Brits speak of being bossed around by ‘the EU’, there is an unspoken understanding that what we really mean is being bossed around by Germany. Owing to its size (both in terms of population and physical land area), position in the continent, and economic might, Germany was always bound to dominate the European Union, and indeed it does so. It has the most MEPs and the European Central Bank is conveniently located in Frankfurt, German territory. In fact there are powerful arguments to say that the EU is little more than Germany’s third attempt to dominate Europe. Realizing that they have failed twice using tanks and bombs, they are now attempting to do it instead using regulations and interest rates.
The Greek economic crisis all but confirmed to any intelligent observer that the European Central Bank prioritizes German interests over everyone else’s. When the crisis hit, the one economic tool that might have mitigated Greek suffering would have been a devaluation of the euro, which could have inflated away their public debt and made their exports relatively cheap. But such a move was culturally off-putting to the thrifty Germans and, more significantly, would have hit the profit margins of German private banks, so it was never even considered. The EU forced an austerity program on Greece, despite the Greek people first voting for an explicitly anti-austerity party, Syriza, and then several months later rejecting the austerity-laden bailout plan offered by the EU in a nationwide referendum. Yanis Varoufakis, the then Greek finance minister, characterized the EU’s tactics as “fiscal waterboarding”, which sought to “turn [Greece] into a debt colony.” This was only a more overt case of what had happened covertly some years before: in 2011 the press revealed that the Irish government had sought approval from the German Bundestag for its budget plan before the plan was even seen by Irish politicians, which heightened suspicions that EU member states were mere rule-takers to Berlin. Better check with the Germans from now on that it’s OK to spend your own money.
For a country like Britain, which has built an entire national myth around our heroic, solitary stand against the Germans in the darkest hour of human history, having to take orders from them now, even if it is dressed up in a democratic light, is anathema to us. Perhaps the Brits are being petty and narrow-minded since these rules and regulations are for everyone’s fiscal well-being. Perhaps - but just imagine if the Japanese government today had a say in how much fish Americans were allowed to catch in Alaska and what kinds of fireworks Americans were allowed to buy at Walmart. Yea, exactly, that’s how we feel.
Immigration
Notwithstanding what many left-leaning politicians and journalists will say, in an embarrassing attempt to make their country seem more closely connected with the ‘cool’ USA, Britain has never been a ‘nation of immigrants.’ It’s of course true that going back centuries, various ethnic populations — the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans — have invaded and settled in the British Isles. But since the nation state we know today as Britain first emerged into being in the early modern era, the demographics of the country have been fairly stable. Britain has been hospitable to emigres fleeing terror and persecution, most notably taking in the Huguenots from France after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and establishing the Kindertransport for Jewish children seeking to escape the anti-Semitic violence of the Third Reich. The existence of the vast British Empire and later the Commonwealth has, too, attracted peoples from all over the world to our shores. However, as late as 1991, 91% of the population was native born British (for context, that’s Wyoming level homogeneity, except not even just whiteness — I mean specifically British. Even the Irish get their own separate category). As a general policy, large scale immigration has never been a stated objective of British governments, and the British people were not led to believe that membership in the European Union would change that.
At first, back when it was still the ‘European Community’, membership did not really change that — net migration from the EU to Britain was roughly flat right up until 2004. Approximately the same number of people moved to the UK from the rest of the EU as emigrated from the UK to other European nations, and it was a relatively small number of people (less than 100,000) moving in either direction. Such modest numbers were expected, since there was near parity in the standards of living between all EU member states. That all changed, however, in 2004, when the EU admitted seven former Eastern bloc countries into its fold. Having spent the better part of the last 75 years behind the Iron Curtain, economic prosperity in these societies was in short supply. Per capita GDP in Poland at the time, for example, was just $6,700, barely a sixth of that in Britain. It made perfect sense then, for entrepreneurial young Poles, Lithuanians and Latvians to take the golden ticket that the EU’s freedom of movement doctrine offered, and immigrate to the richer countries in the union to seek work. Predicting that this is what would happen, many rich Western European countries made sure to put together specific laws preventing unchecked mass migration of low-skilled labor into their borders. France, for example, put restrictions on what kind of job you could come do; Germany went even further and flatly said it would not admit any migrants from these new member states for seven years, i.e. until 2011. Such limitations would normally be a violation of the right to freedom of movement that is central to the EU’s Single Market framework, but exceptions were made in this case by the Commission in Brussels because of the exceptional circumstances of this enlargement of the EU area. Now crucially, Britain was one of the only wealthy countries to not impose these one-off restrictions — it’s economy at the time was booming and thus reckoned it could handle (and indeed benefit from) the extra supply of labor. Its leaders also vastly underestimated the sheer numbers of immigrants that would arrive, something that the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, would admit in 2013 was a “spectacular mistake.”
The eager Eastern Europeans began arriving in droves, settling all across Britain, and sending net EU migration up to a peak of just over 200,000 a year by 2014. With a population of 64 million, this worked out to migration rate of 3.1 per one thousand inhabitants. To put that into perspective, last year the net migration rate to the USA, a country 40 times the size of Britain, was about 2.8 per one thousand inhabitants. Recall that we are not even talking about total immigration to the UK here — only that from the EU. There are still almost that same number again moving to Britain from the rest of the world. What this arithmetic meant practically for the people of Britain was a downward pressure on wages, especially those of low-skilled or unskilled labor; a general strain on public services such as transportation and medical care as supply struggled to meet the new demand; and a startling transformation of neighbourhoods.
It’s easy enough to dismiss the last point as the groans of narrow-minded xenophobes and racists, and it’s absolutely true that there are genuine racists on the Brexit bandwagon. But to paint all 17.4 million Brexit voters as some giant, monolithic white power group seems a cheap cop-out to avoid confronting the real issue. (For one thing, how many black and brown people do you know from Poland? The immigrants we’re talking about here are white too, so even your racism charge, if you want to make it, needs to get a bit more nuanced). To live some place your whole life, know all of your neighbours, share a language and culture with everyone in your community and have it stay roughly the same for decades, only to see it morph into something wholly unrecognizable over the course of a few years is a powerful ordeal to go through. When immigration happens gradually over time and in a managed fashion, society can effectively integrate newcomers into its fold; but when immigration goes (literally) from zero to 200,000 virtually overnight, integration cannot meaningfully happen and social and ethnic divisions will naturally form. The fault in no way lies with immigrants themselves, for the most part resourceful, hard-working young men and women who bravely underwent the terribly arduous process of upending their lives at home and moving several hundred miles to a new one with a foreign language and foreign culture. One can only reserve admiration for them. Something quite different from admiration, however, has to be directed at the politicians and policy makers who were either too ignorant to know what was going on or too unsympathetic to care.
While immigration numbers have come down from that dizzying 2014 peak, the simple, stubborn fact remains that the EU’s freedom of movement directive is a foundational pillar of the union itself. As long as Britain remains a member, it must maintain an open door to the over half a billion (!) other citizens living within the EU. Just months before the EU referendum took place, David Cameron desperately tried to get a handle on the immigration issue, since he knew it would take center stage in the upcoming referendum campaign. In a frantic, King Canute like attempt beat back the waves, Cameron begged the EU to make exceptions for the UK by granting him some controls over how many migrants could arrive each year. His trip to Brussels, however, ended up a fool’s errand. Besides some token concessions around limiting the welfare benefits that could be paid to new migrants and allowing more leeway over deportation of criminals, the Commission basically sent Cameron home empty-handed. They simply were not going to compromise on what they saw as pretty much the whole point of the EU in the first place. As Nigel Farage memorably put it afterwards: “Cameron went to Brussels. He asked for nothing, and they didn’t even give him that.”
Economics
Perhaps you don’t care where our laws get made (so long as they are sensible ones), and it might not bother you that your local city center is turning into a Polish exclave (more pierogis!). Yet there is a final reason to want to leave the EU that even the most disinterested political observer would care about: money. Membership of the EU is not free, and it’s not even cheap. In 2018, the bill sent to Britain for its EU membership amounted to a staggering 20 billion pounds, a hardly insignificant figure even by government standards. That number is not the end of the story: thanks to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s successful negotiation of a rebate in 1985, we can immediately knock 4.5 billion off of that top line number; then, like any tax, you have to account for the fact that lots of that cash finds its way back to us in the form of government programmes and subsidies. However, according to the EU Commission’s own figures, even when you account for the rebate and the funds apportioned to the UK’s public and private sector, Britain still forks over a net 7.8 billion pounds per year to Brussels. As in, that is the amount we pay and never see back. As one of the richer countries in Europe, it’s perhaps just that Britain should pay an outsized amount for general upkeep, but for someone who is already ambivalent about why we’re still in this bizarre superstate club, the purpose of which no one can really explain, it must be irritating to discover that 1% of our national budget is shipped over to Brussels every year just so that Spain can pay for its bullfighting.
While budget contributions constitute the most direct and easily quantifiable financial impact of EU membership, they are not the only ones. The two cornerstones of the EU’s trade agreements are the Customs Union and the Single Market. The Customs Union is what guarantees ‘free trade’ amongst all member states, but also, importantly, requires all states to implement a common set of tariffs against countries outside of the union. If, like France, the majority of your trade is with countries within the EU, then that becomes a pretty attractive tradeoff: free trade with everyone you care about, and tariffs on countries you weren’t planning on having much business with anyway. The UK, however, is not in that position — the majority of our trade is now with countries outside the EU, and that proportion is increasing every year. We feel the brunt of those external tariffs and restrictions harder, therefore, and see less benefit from the unfettered internal market. Further, EU rules specifically prohibit Britain or any member state from striking new trade deals independently. Britain’s famous mercantile power has always come from drawing on our extensive global network of the Anglosphere, stretching from the USA to India to Australia on the far side of the world. With the advent of the digital economy, re-engaging with those countries is a massive financial opportunity, but instead we must sit awkwardly with our hands tied on the edge of Europe, watching everyone else inside frolic in the fun of cheap French wine and German sausages.
As if the golden handcuffs of the Customs Union weren’t burdensome enough, Britain then has the Single Market to deal with. The EU’s Single Market is what sets rules and regulations on all goods and services traded therein. Some of these regulations have made for great comedic material, like Commission Regulation 2257/94, which goes to excruciating detail to lay down standards for the sale of bananas — its clause which outlaws any banana with “abnormal curvature” earned it a place in meme history as the “bendy banana law.” Other Single Market regulations are less funny — state aid to help struggling domestic industries is generally disallowed so when, earlier this year, British Steel went into insolvency and 5000 workers lost their jobs (with another 20,000 jobs at risk along the supply chain) the British government legally could do nothing to help. Germany — err, sorry I mean the EU — says you can’t prop up failing domestic industries since it would be ‘anti-competitive.’ There is an argument to be made that the Conservative government wasn’t planning on bailing out those steel workers anyway, and indeed an argument that a government shouldn’t bail them out — after all they went bankrupt for a reason: the industry was kind of inefficient and other countries like China could produce steel faster and cheaper than us. Yet even so the point remains: the EU would not have allowed us to help save that industry had we wanted to, and surely the decision of whether to salvage a struggling industry is one that rightly ought to be made by the people of that country. Restricting the fiscal policy tools available to a national government is itself an omnipresent, invisible cost of membership that many on both the left and right of the political spectrum are uncomfortable with.
So there you have it — as Brexiteers will tell you, what they want is control over their laws, their borders, and their money. A nation which cannot be said to have full autonomy over these three things is not an independent nation at all, but a vassal, a province of something bigger and more powerful than itself. Brexit may very well be chaotic, painful and risky, but what many commentators don’t understand is that for Leave voters, it’s worth all of that because this is about saving the very soul of their national identity. Remaining in the EU doesn’t just mean accepting the status quo — it means staying on a slow-moving conveyor belt down a pathway to federalism, at the end of which the last remains of Britain as a nation will get swallowed whole by the European leviathan. As Michael Caine put it, “I’m in favor of Brexit, actually, because I’d rather be a poor master of my own fate, than a rich servant of someone else’s.”
[1] Britain, Ireland, West Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.
