Worthwhile read if open minded or undecided... It was sent to me a couple of days ago - I already voted and found some of this very persuasive unlike much of the misinformation coming from both sides of the campaign.
Regards,
Tony
Chris Emerson·Wednesday, June 8, 2016
You knew this was coming at some point! Its too late for some people (many have voted by post already, including me) but I urge you to read through this if you havent decided yet.
Warning: Very long post ahead... Im sure your attention spans can cope with it though
First - I should say that late last year I didnt really know too much about the EU, the vote or the implications, and was considering voting to leave based on the EUs treatment of Greece last summer. I did the reading and the research and very much changed my mind on the matter. To say that we arent being given the right information by the campaigns is one thing (both are guilty of lies, though in my opinion the Leave camp are far worse at this, whereas the Remain camp has the effects broadly right but tend to exaggerate them), but to say that the information isnt out there to find for yourself if you do the reading is nonsense in my opinion.
Democracy
This is one of the big points I see raised by people in the Leave camp. They claim the EU is undemocratic, and we dont get a say in what happens, and this is why we have to get rid of it (often I have found that these are the same people who have defended the existence of an unelected House Of Lords in the UK, but thats beside the point).
Heres a useful diagram showing the power structure in the EU: see attached image
https://scontent.fma...506&oe=58026AD0
EU Power Structure
The European Council sets the general direction of the EU. It is made up of the 28 heads of state of the member countries, each of which is elected democratically by their own nation.
The European Commission is the section most people seem to have trouble with. They propose laws and budgets, all of which must be voted on by democratically elected bodies down the line. In this respect, they are a lot like the civil service in the UK, some of which draw up legislation based on directions from MPs to then be voted on by Parliament. They are also appointed by the members of other (elected) bodies, just as those same civil servants are in the UK.
The European Parliament are directly elected by citizens in European elections. They vote on all the EU law and budgets that come from the Commission, so nothing gets through without being scrutinised by a democratically elected body.
The Council Of Ministers also helps scrutinise and vote on laws. This is made up of government ministers from each member nation, who are obviously also elected.
You dont get a say in every single person at every point in this chain of course, because that would be ridiculous. Its worth pointing out that you also did not get a say in 649 of the MPs, any of the Lords, any of the civil service who help draft new laws here, or indeed the Presidents of the US and China or the CEO of Google, all of whom have more impact on your life than the European Commission or Council. Everyone in this EU power structure however is either elected democratically, or appointed by someone who was, so its pretty much as democratic as the UKs system.
Could it be better? Probably. Would it be worth the additional bureaucracy to do so? Probably not.
Sovereignty
In terms of how much say the EU as a whole have over our laws in the UK, this parliamentary report (
http://researchbrief....parliament.uk/...) claims that its between 6.8% and 14.1% - though this includes laws that even just mention the EU anywhere, not necessarily laws implemented as a direct result of the EU, so the real figure is in fact lower.
In the UK data suggest that from 1997 to 2009 6.8% of primary legislation (Statutes) and 14.1% of secondary legislation (Statutory Instruments) had a role in implementing EU obligations, although the degree of involvement varied from passing reference to explicit implementation.
This (at least to me) is really not a whole lot of interference from the EU at all, especially given the trade this legislation enables. This figure in itself is pretty irrelevant though - the question is how it would change if we were outside the EU.
On the assumption that wed be wanting to trade with the EU from outside it (Ill address that assumption further down), we would need to strike up some kind of trade agreement with the EU. This would likely involve accepting most EU law being handed to us to implement, as is the case with Norway, and to some extent Switzerland (again, more detail later).
Its all well and good declaring that We voted to be in a common market, not for all the regulations (as I have heard many, many people do), but this misses the point that its the regulations that create the common market in the first place. You need to set the same standards in different countries in order to be able to trade to the same standards - thats the whole point! Therefore, in order to continue to trade freely with the EU, we would have to accept those regulations being handed to us. We could of course set our own, different regulations, but that would require every manufacturer in the country to manufacture products to 2 different standards. Doesnt sound very sensible does it?
Immigration
This is a big one for some people, so its good to see what we have now and what we would likely have if we left the EU.
Firstly, its important to note that EU freedom of movement accounts for just less than half of our net migration (
http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/sta...).
EU Immigrants in this country come here to work and are net contributors (
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...).
Contrary to what many would like you to believe, our public services are under strain due to under-funding and cuts imposed by this government, not immigrants (
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...).
Regarding the NHS specifically, the BMA have said
Without immigrants many NHS services would struggle to provide effective care
The idea that our jobs are being taken by immigrants is a complete fallacy too - this is the Lump of Labour fallacy (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_...). When population increases, demand for services and goods and therefore jobs also increases. This is obvious really.
Our culture and identity as a nation has been shaped over hundreds of years by immigrants, and the history of this nation is one of immigration throughout the ages anyway - you are probably descended from a French immigrant or Viking, and I think were better off as a nation for it.
Borders
The Leave campaign like to suggest that we would get control of our borders by leaving the EU. The only problem with this is... we already have control of our borders. This government have cut border staff which may have contributed to recent higher net migration, but if youve been abroad recently then you know full well you need a passport, and to pass through border controls, in order to get in to the country. We have an opt-out of the Schengen agreement (along with Ireland).
Leaving the EU would probably not change this situation, and may in fact require us to join Schengen - losing the control we do have of our borders - as part of any trade agreement. This is what Norway has to do, and Switzerland. If we did have any border control though, itd be in the UK - our membership of the EU currently means we have an agreement with France to station border controls over there, hence the migrant camp being in Calais and not Kent. If we left the EU, this would likely move to Kent.
Regardless of any of this anyway, people seem to forget that we have a land border with the EU in Ireland, which would be very difficult to control or police, save for putting up a wall between Ireland and Northern Ireland - and Im sure you can guess how well thatll go down. You simply wont be able to stop determined EU citizens (and its just the EU citizens we are talking about here) crossing that border into the UK.
Human Rights & Workers Rights
Its important to remember that the EU is essentially the worlds most successful peace project. One of the requirements for joining is the acceptance of the European Convention on Human Rights (drawn up by the Council Of Europe in 1950). This is a whole other subject in itself, and a vote to leave the EU would not result in the abolition of the Human Rights Act (our own implementation of the ECHR), but its one of the best things about the EU.
Anyone critical of the Human Rights Act or ECHR should really clarify which of the rights they are happy to give up before criticising further.
This, incidentally, is one of the reasons that Turkey is a long way off joining the EU, much as though the Leave campaign would have you believe they will be a member soon.
More information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copen...
The EU has also given us many important rights in the workplace, to ensure that trade that happens within the EU (and to some extent outside it) is conducted without the exploitation of workers - a very good thing. Things like paid holiday, maternity pay, minimum wage and the working time directive have come from the EU.
The Leave campaign are trying to convince businesses to back them by selling the idea that they would roll back some of these rights, sacrificing your rights as an employee for profit.
If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.
- Priti Patel
Note that the economic and job availability benefits she claims are unsubstantiated, and my opinion is that they would be outweighed by the negative economic effects leaving the EU would have (more on that later), but this does betray their intent to roll back your rights. They have not clarified which of the rights they would roll back. Do you want to lose your right to paid holiday, maternity leave or be forced to work as many hours as your employer wants? This is what the Leave campaign are offering.
Money
It is often claimed by the Leave campaign that we pay £350m a week into the EU. This is already nonsense, and the campaign have been told by official bodies to stop lying (
https://www.statisti...thority.gov.uk/...) - it hasnt stopped them though.
Facts on our EU membership fee here:
https://fullfact.org/europe/our-eu-...
We pay a membership fee to the EU relative to the size of our economy, and we get a lot of it back - in fact the EU is a very good redistribution system, spending money in poorer areas of the UK where our own government (on recent evidence) would neglect. Germany pay by far the highest contribution to the EU, followed by France and Italy, with the UK in 4th. Some countries do better out of the EU than us in terms of net spending.
According to the tax breakdown the government published last year
(
https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...), 0.6p out of every pound taken in tax goes towards EU membership - and that doesnt include what we get in return. Thats pretty much nothing in the scale of things.
Regardless of what you think of a membership fee though, the crux of this point is that (going by the deal that Norway have and many Leave campaigners are keen on emulating) we would still have to pay into the EU should we leave, but we wouldnt get any money spent on us in return. Who knows how much that would be - putting any amount on it would just be guesswork - but the membership fee would not just simply disappear or be available to spend on anything else.
Its also interesting to note that the Leave campaign have promised spending of 10x the amount they say we would save (assuming the fee was gone altogether) on other things. Their numbers just do not add up.
Trade
Voting to leave the EU would require us to set up new trade deals - not just with the EU itself, but with many other places that the EU itself has trade deals with that we make use of. After triggering the Article 50 notification of our intention to leave (something which Cameron has said he would do immediately if the vote was to Leave), we would have 2 years in order to negotiate new deals before wed no longer be able to make use of the existing ones.
I dont think its particularly controversial to state that wed definitely want another deal with the EU - they are the worlds largest economy, and account for 44% of our current exports.
Noone can say for definite what kind of deal we would end up with, but we can make pretty educated guesses based on the kinds of deals other non-EU countries in Europe have, and based on some reasoning about what the EU would be forced to do for us.
Firstly, the UK - as a major stakeholder in the EU and an early member - enjoys a number of opt-outs and benefits that most other countries dont get, and far more of these than any other member. For example:
We arent part of the Schengen agreement which almost every other country (including Norway and Switzerland) are, which allows freedom of movement around the EU without a passport
We get a rebate on our membership costs that is applied immediately (its taken directly off the money we pay in) negotiated by Thatcher in the 80s, so pay less in than we should
We have an opt-out of the Euro itself
We have automatic exemption from ever-closer union if this happens, negotiated by David Cameron only last year. As much as he was mocked for his negotiations, this is actually pretty big given this is a concern for a lot of people.
A few more lesser known ones too, see link below
Not forgetting our automatic entry into the Eurovision final of course
More information here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-o...
Switzerland and Norway are commonly cited as models that we could follow for an EU trade deal after leaving.
Switzerland negotiate trade with the EU on a case by case basis, and in return they have to implement different aspects of EU laws or treaties. As a result, they are required to accept free movement of citizens, for example, and have since become part of the Schengen area. Some of the agreements with Switzerland are mutually linked - if one of them is cancelled by either side, they all collapse. There are over 100 separate agreements between Switzerland and the EU covering many aspects of trade, a lot of bureaucracy! The Swiss previously voted not to join the EEA by just 0.3% in a previous referendum.
In 2014, they held a referendum and voted to limit the free movement of foreign citizens to them. This is in breach of one of the linked agreements mentioned above, and if not resolved (Switzerland have not yet implemented it), will lead to the collapse of quite a lot of the trade agreements with the EU.
Finally, the EU has said it is concerned with the way the Swiss agreement system is working in general, and so would be unlikely to want to implement anything similar with the UK.
Norway has a different agreement in that it can trade freely with the EU, but it accepts all relevant EU law and must implement it without having any say in it. It also has had to accept the free movement of people, join the Schengen area and must pay into the EU, yet it has no say in any of the legislation or deals created by it. According to Norway's Foreign Affairs, from 1994 to 2010 Norway acquired 70% of EU directives and 17% of EU regulations.
One more thing to consider with both Norway and Switzerland is that each country has built up their trade agreements over many decades - they grew alongside the EU as it grew. Neither country has had to negotiate their entire relationship in 2 years after a sudden ending of current agreements, so the idea that we could simply replicate either of these in such a short space is pretty wishful thinking, however optimistic you are about how well trade deals will go!
The cost of living in both these countries is also very high - is this related? Im not sure.
More information on Norway and Switzerland here:
https://fullfact.org/europe/norway-...
Back to the UKs situation. If we vote to leave, the idea that we would have any clout in negotiations is fantasy. We have a reasonable economy compared to other EU nations, but not compared to the EU as a whole. Our economy would also likely be weakened by a vote to leave - evidence in just the past few days shows that billions of pounds is leaving our economy just on the thought of leaving the EU. The UK has an unusually high reliance on financial services supporting our economy, many of whom are only based here (in the City of London) as a result of our EU membership. If you take that away (many of these companies have said they would leave the UK and base themselves elsewhere if we left), and then take away about half of our manufacturing exports too (see below), our economy would be very quickly, and seriously, crippled. This does not put us in a good place for negotiations.
The EU accounts for 44% of the UKs exports (and that doesnt include exports to other places using negotiated EU treaties), but the UK only accounts for 8% of EU exports - ie, we need them a lot more than they need us!
Thinking about what the EU would want out of any deal - they would be interested in quashing the hopes of independence movements in other nations which could cause the collapse of the EU. They had no problems making an example out of Greece last year when they tried to stand up to them, and Im sure they would have no trouble making an example out of us to show any other countries that might want to leave just what it would entail. This is simple self-preservation from the EU.
The UK would be on the receiving end of the deal. Unless we want half our economy wiped away, we would basically have to accept whatever deal we were given. This could (and probably would) include free movement of people/Schengen integration, and acceptance of EU laws, treaties into the UK anyway, and no say in any of them. We are a strong partner in the EU and they dont want us to leave, but they would absolutely have the upper hand in all future negotiations, and we would not get the special treatment we currently have as a member - the incentive to give us that would be gone.
Whatever people claim about the strength of the UK economy - just remember that this is in the context of 43 years membership of the EU, and the benefits it has brought the country. This does not apply when we leave.
TTIP
TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) is a huge concern, and another reason I was considering voting to leave late last year. Its a large trade deal being negotiated between the EU and the US, in secret (we arent supposed to know whats in it - but its content has recently been leaked), and it has a number of concerning elements. It prioritises the needs of business over everything else, and is symptomatic of the worlds shift to neo-liberal ideals and policies starting with Thatcher and Reagan, which pretty much declares businesses to have more rights than people - but I digress.
TTIP would allow businesses to sue national governments if they passed any law which was detrimental to their profits, it would open up public services (such as the NHS) to American companies (privatising them in the process), it would adopt American food standards rather than those already in place in the EU. It would also force the US to loosen their banking regulations (which was the cause of the 2007 crisis, if you can remember back that far), invade the privacy of citizens by snooping on their online activity. The EU admitted that its implementation would likely cause job losses as jobs moved to the US.
There are 2 things to note here. Since its leak, many are considering the deal pretty much dead. France are threatening to veto the whole deal, and many states and parties are calling for the exclusion of public services from the deal, which is the major concern for most people. Secondly, its likely that wed be affected just as much by the deal whether we are in or out the EU, assuming it is passed. This referendum is not about how good or bad the EU is, but whether wed be better off inside or outside of it.
We are in Europe geographically - that much we cant escape. 21 miles of shallow water between us and the mainland doesnt make us immune to goings-on in the continent, or immune to its effects.
Climate Change
Whether you agree its happening or not is irrelevant here - facts continue to be facts regardless of whether you believe in them. Climate change is happening, and the world will be in a whole load of trouble if much more is not done soon. Our government have been busy rolling back green programs and renewables subsidies, as well as giving tax breaks to oil companies, as though we arent all going to have to suffer the consequences of this recklessness at some point.
The EU is our best chance of having a collective movement to help stop the effects of climate change, and have a chance of doing something about it. The clout of the worlds largest economy can help force the hand of other world powers to do something about it too. This may not be high on your priority list of issues to think about with the EU, but the consequences will affect you regardless so its well worth thinking about.
Tax Avoidance
The EU have made lots of good moves recently to try and tackle tax avoidance, yet our own government have consistently voted against EU measures to try and tackle this. If this is of concern to you (and frankly, it should be), then consider how much worse itll be under this government if we left the EU. Businesses would have more rights than people, (more) tax deals would be done in secret, and your tax money would be paying for the profits of big corporations while they distract you and make you angry with nonsense stories about benefits claimants that pale in comparison.
If you are concerned about the criminal misappropriation of public money in this way, the EU has a far better record on it than our own government do (or in fact the 3 or 4 previous governments)
United Kingdom
Polling in Scotland shows that the vast majority of Scots would vote to stay in the EU. A vote to leave would be enough for Nicola Sturgeon to call for another independence referendum, and she would be justified in doing so. They would easily vote to leave this time around - public opinion has swayed, and they do not want to be dragged out of the EU with us.
In addition, the Northern Ireland peace treaty leans on both the UK and Ireland being members of the EU, and a vote to leave would create more tensions there that would shatter the peace deal, or create a pathway for a similar call for independence there. I dont have any polling data for Northern Ireland on EU opinion, but its a risk.
In short, leaving the EU could well lead to the break-up of the UK.
Leaving
You must remember that the question in ALL of this discussion is not about whether the EU is good or bad, but whether we are better off out (especially under this Tory government who are determined to take away your rights, damage the climate and economy and promote the UK as a tax haven) or in, whatever its ills.
The Leave campaign has not come up with a single plan for leaving, not a single suggestion as to what a post-Brexit situation would look like, let alone anything even credible. Its a huge mystery and unknown, but the available evidence strongly suggests that it wouldnt be a good one. We know what being in the EU is like - weve had 43 years of it - so suggestions from the Leave camp that remaining would also be an unknown is nothing more than an attempt to legitimise their own cluelessness in my opinion.
Summary
This is probably the most important decision anyone is likely to make in their lives. Its very important to get it right.
In my opinion, its very clear that the benefits of staying in the EU outweigh the costs. The EU undoubtedly has its problems, but it doesnt follow that wed be better off outside it rather than staying in. If we stay in, we at least have a chance of reforming it. If we leave, we lose that chance, yet will still very likely have to abide by the legislation, costs and free movement anyway - all of the (supposed) downsides, but with no say in anything.
If you want to run Europe, you must be in Europe. If you want to be run by Europe, feel free to join Norway in the European Economic Area
- Nikolai Astrup, previous Europe spokesman for the Norwegian Conservative Party
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I love the place and I love the people but my word they are retarded.... Did you know eurodisney was offered to Cornwall and they said no 
Over!
