#Brexit - What has the EU ever done for us?

In the wake of the EU referendum, the UK has decided to divorce itself from the rest of Europe and I've been trying to make sense of the UK's choice. This outcome was never predicted, the bookies were still giving 4:1 against it after the polls had closed, so why did it happen? I think there are a lot of 'obvious' answers which may surface between now and October:

• David Cameron put too much emphasis on the EU being the 'bad guys' last year, increasing prejudice.
• The government got the strength of opinion on immigration wrong.
• Boris Johnson never thought he'd win, opposing Cameron was a ploy to get more screen-time than a back-bencher normally would. (I'm going to suspect this more if he vacillates further on invoking Article 50).

Yes, I agree that all these are likely causes of why it happened, but something's been nagging at me: The plethora of debates and articles have been using the same phrases, drawing the battle lines in the exact same places:

1. Immigration
2. The EU Contribution
3. Political Control
4. Impact on business

Is this all there was to it? I've put pen to paper because I'd like to add one more point which I'm not convinced was properly mooted before the axe fell: What is the full importance of our EU membership and therefore the true impact of leaving? In short: what are we about to lose? The debates seemed to meander in that direction momentarily, but were inexorably dragged back into those first four arguments. Let's face it, it's much more entertaining to see Nigel Farage dig himself into a hole on a topic such as immigration, than it is to watch two bureaucrats discuss the process of transcribing millions of documents between heterogeneous legal systems and frames of reference.

But given that campaigners on both sides have admitted that on the points they did debate, they over-egged their rhetoric (including immigration), and that the plan is very much different to that which everyone thought they were voting on, it begs one very serious question: Now that the country has woken up to the realities of a #Brexit, what does it really mean to be exiting the EU? Just what did the UK vote for? Even worse than the hyperbolic rhetoric, it now seems that the promises are starting to be broken within the first 24 hours: Immigration isn't going to be curtailed, the NHS won't benefit, the economy is indeed sliding, the world is turning away, Cameron is resigning, and it's looking ever-more likely that Scotland will throw in its lot with Europe, leaving the UK even weaker than before.

Would more screen-time for the bureaucrats demonstrating the mountain of work to do have given people a better informed opinion?  Well, given that "What is the EU?" was the number one search term on Google the day after the referendum, one might be inclined to think "yes".  

What exactly did people think about the possibility of being external to the EU? I think people were focusing  on the personal financial gains without consideration of what that money had been paying for.  This is what I want to explore; the intangible benefits which day-to-day Brits may not have had time to consider.

A lot of leavers pointed to China and America as being outwith the EU and 'doing fine', and used them as examples of why the country will be fine, oblivious to the fact that both covet our EU membership of the 'free-trade club'.  But I think they're missing one important point: They were never in the EU to begin with, we are. What was seldom tabled was that the path to being out is going to be a long and expensive one. When a country joins the EU, there's a signing of a document, lots of photos, and then a long steady process of harmonization (or absorption if you want to think negatively). Every single year that the UK has been part of the EU, we've been part of that process, albeit fighting the bits we don't like: Everyone knows about the wine-lakes, the butter mountains, the square bananas, the Cornish pasties not from cornwall, the Spanish fishing debacles, British "chocolate" not having enough chocolate in it and so on. These can be put down to teething problems, and cultural 'slippage', but over the intervening forty years, many of those have been fixed (or turned out to be urban myths). If you think about it, streamlining and harmonizing 28 countries with over 500 million people in just 40 years isn't all that bad.

If one is a leave-voter, EU standards and legislation would seem to be unwanted invaders which have insinuated themselves into UK law... The process of leaving could be viewed a bit like weeding the garden: One spends a long time figuring out which plants don't belong, and then spend money to buy plants to replace them, and then sit back and wait months or years for the new plants to grow and start to flower. Looking into neighbouring gardens, America and China have back yards just as weed-ridden as we do (gun-laws, single or two-party systems, lobbyists, human-rights issues etc), but those 'weeds' are considered to be part of the garden (like a wild garden, if you will), and the gardener 'weeds around' them.

How much of our garden has been voted to be weeded out, then? Well, the answer to that, like all things 'it depends'. The leaders of the leave campaign, being politicians, have always expressed dissatisfaction with the political hierarchy; they don't like being told what to do, and want complete control back. (As Lord Acton pointed out, "Power Corrupts..."). But unilaterally, politicians have advocated they want to stay in the 'good bits': the common market, freedom of travel, the exchange of information, the sharing of standards, and so on. Sadly, however, it may be too late to repair those bridges. The ballot form wasn't multiple choice: The UK chose between "Leave" or "Not leave". Absolutely everything that the UK does with the EU is going to have to be reviewed and either copied or replaced with UK-specific alternatives: As one person on twitter pointed out "we cut off the head to cure a toothache".  

One of the real problems seems to be that the EU takes UK money.  However people forget that the EU dispassionately looks back at the UK (the benefit of distance often gives objectivity), and then re-apportions a lot of it back to those that need it via subsidies. In effect, they just pick some flowers that aren't working and put them down in different places to improve the garden as a whole.  They only do this because the UK government itself is neglecting those areas.  Is there any guarantee that a UK government would suddenly take money post-brexit from the UK purse and give it directly to Cornwall, Newcastle or Glasgow the same way that the EU has? The increased per-capita spend on Scotland might suggest: yes, but the inner-city deprivation and abandonment of the rural areas in 70s pre-EU UK may suggest: No!  Not even the Labour party has been effective at wealth distribution as its leftist core would prefer. e.g. New Labour, Derek Hatton's Liverpool, or the 'fact-finding missions' of inner city Glasgow council in the 90s. The SNP and Lib Dems seem to have been much more effective at a local level in this regard, it seems.

Taken in a business-context, the UK has effectively outsourced its legislation, standardisation and international deals to the EU. Taken in a multi-country context, most of that work has been successful: As an example, little has been done on the Common Agricultural Policy in years.  We're now looking to bring all that back in-house, requiring it to be reviewed in a single-country context, and hoping that our oversight committees and working groups are as objective as the distant bureaucrats in Brussels.  

As with all contractor-relationships, bringing work that's been outsourced back in-house may not actually be cheaper, once overheads are factored in.  However, it can't be denied that the EU bureaucracy is expensive compared to a single-country. But since much of the work is 'done once and reused many times', on a European scale, the cost may balance out. Look at the number of UK.GOV web pages that just quote and link to an EU law, rather than spell out a UK-specific one.   Time will tell if the army of London-based civil servants who replace the EU's legal teams end up being cheaper, but I'm skeptical that the difference will be major in the grand scheme of things, and that they can compare UK areas with the same level of objectivity.

This outsourcing has been going on for over 40 years to the legal super-departments in Brussels, but married to a parallel set of teams in London to negotiate our harmonious 'wild garden' of intermixed laws where the weeds and plants work together locally and internationally... Perhaps a flagstone here or there is pushed out of place because a weed has popped up in an inconvenient place, but in general, it's easier to de-weed those as they happen.

If we're looking to de-weed the the whole garden, we have to look back over 40 years and (paraphrasing Monty Python) ask "What has the EU ever done for us?", in a scene which could be straight from a UKIP meeting.  Continuing the reference (and taking a little license with the meanings):

• Sanitation - Common limits on waste, radiation, particulates, pathogens, chemicals, recycling, heavy metals and so on with a gradual tightening agreed across the board mean that everyone must improve at the same rate, incurring the same costs and penalties, but reaping the same benefits.  There's no longer a need to bother with a mish-mash of german standards, British standards, Italian standards, and so on.  Countries can't argue about whether they are in breach because they interpret "safe limits" differently, Everyone is held to the same account by the same EN standards.
• The Roads - i.e. travel - Improved road safety holding car manufacturers to account, forcing common safety tests and ratings. Cheaper air travel, harmonized border agreements, the European International Health Card, cheaper travel insurance, Inter-railing.  While travelling, we benefit from capped EU roaming charges, now.
• Irrigation - i.e. farming - Farming subsidies help small UK farmers, while access to common animal and plant health certification and cheap trade deals help our farmers export more easily to our most accessible partners.  Small communities also get injections of European aid to fund small infrastructure projects, as well as being networked with trade partners to help boost local economies and improve trade links.
• Medicine - The European Medicines Agency gives commonality and helps UK pharmaceutical industries protect and sell their IP (as well as other companies), and the NHS to benefit from a wider source for them.  Patent enforcement is much easier with a common patent protection scheme, and products only need to adhere to one set of standards, saving time and money for businesses large and small. Companies can even apply for grants to help with research. Inter-country agreements between nationalised health services allows treatments and options which may be closed off otherwise.    As mentioned, we also benefit from the the European International Health Card, , lest we forget our cheap travel insurance which benefits from EU agreements on cost caps.
• Education - Universities and researchers get substantial grants from the EU. Students can go on ERASMUS programmes. With the UK government slowly reducing university funding, many students rely on these grants, scientists face the very real possibility that their funding will vanish, and UK scientific progress will stagnate.  Universities can be rated and collaborate on research projects with a common funding base, get common course accreditation etc.  Common accreditation allows UK vocationally-trained citizens to work anywhere in Europe without needing to re-qualify.  Researchers can collaborate in EU-funded projects, safely share data across borders thanks to common data laws.  The EU's creative media program also funds a lot of educational TV and films in the UK for children and adults alike.
• Health -  EU working directives and health and safety guidelines have vastly improved the working conditions in the UK.  When the UK was left to police itself, the picture was not so good.  Air quality is regulated by an outside entity now, so places like London can be held to account for their smog, and fined.
• Public Baths i.e. community projects - The EU support for deprived areas and infrastructure has directly benefited everywhere from food banks in Liverpool in the 1990s to services in Cornwall in the present day.  The EU can compare places far afield, and apportion cash where it's needed.
• Wine i.e. food - That much-mentioned common market grants us cheap and easy trade with excellent food producers without needing to conform to different international laws.   Once again, additive limits, food safety, consumption monitoring and guidelines  are all governed by a carefully considered set of single standards.  If a food has a regional specialisation, its name and identity are protected from substandard and cheaper copying. 
• Public order i.e. law - Membership of the EU grants us access to EUROPOL intelligence, security agreements, and information sharing which makes us safer. The EU (in theory) redistributes money from richer countries to less fortunate ones: This gradual balancing decreases disparities. High disparity creates desire and desperation to migrate legally as well as illegally.
• Peace - The EU improves dialog, every member state has MEPs.  It gets politicians from all over Europe to talk things out before they escalate, to share ideas and things which went wrong. So far, it's been remarkably successful at keeping the dialogs going.  Let's not forget the Euros as well as sport in general.   At least we still get to be in Eurovision.

 The decision on Thursday says that the UK thinks it can do all that and a lot more better by itself.  My personal opinion, having seen our politicians (link, link, link), I have my doubts. As can be seen there is a lot of non-obvious stuff which is going to require ripping out and replacing (or re-ratifying) to be completed in under 3 years.

I honestly don't think the average voter was ever given the full picture of the scale of the integration, a failing of both campaigns, but particularly the remain camp.    

So, soon we may be saying "Romani ite domum" to all those hard-working people from Rome and all the other EU citizens who've set up businesses in the UK, because they haven't got a UK passport, even though they may be paying UK taxes, and employing UK citizens.  Lives are going to be ruined, and a lot of money spent on lawyers to replicate all the work done in 40 years.  So, as we happily wave goodbye to EU integration, Boris and Nigel's "UK People's Liberation Front" might be heard to say:  

Apart from the sanitation, the roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health, public services, wine, public order, and peace, what has the EU ever done for us?

Disclaimer: This article is just my opinion, after many years dealing with the EU applying for grants, attending workshops, working with partners, visiting institutions, learning and applying global standards and of course, being an EU citizen, enjoying free travel and all the other good stuff.  There are opposing views, and they must be respected.