A lobbyist’s thoughts on Brexit

A few broad-brush thoughts, that are perhaps both too long and incomplete. Hopefully they’re of interest nonetheless.

The view from here

Transatlantic perspectives

Born in London, I spent 10 years of my childhood in the USA. I am in contact with relatives in Russia, Switzerland, France, the UK, Sweden, Germany, and the USA. I have lived and/or worked for extended periods in the UK, USA, Austria, Germany, and Belgium. I have worked for American and European clients, American, European, and arguably African, employers, and the American government. I am married to a Pole, and can speak Polish. I spend a lot of time in Poland for family reasons. Our four daughters all have Polish, French, and UK citizenships, and two have US citizenship too (I have French, British, and US citizenships). In the last three years I have worked for a South African-owned, Polish-based e-commerce company (Allegro). Outside Brussels, I have concentrated on politics and policy in Central and Eastern Europe, notably including Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania in that time. I feel European and American, and believe that the transatlantic relationship is the most important geopolitical relationship in the world, regardless of the rise of China.

The lobbyist and government

Although I started working life as an IT systems implementation consultant in London, I have lived in Brussels for 15 years, working with the governments of every single Member State at some point or other, either via their Brussels representations, or directly in the national capitals, or both. The only EU countries I have not visited are Greece, Malta, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, and Finland. I have had countless conversations with civil servants, diplomats, parliamentarians, and ministers at all levels of government and from every EU country. My job is not just to persuade these people of the importance of the interest that I represent, but also to listen to them and translate their reality into something that my employer can understand. Over the years, these contacts have shaped my understanding of the Europe we live in and the UK’s place in it.

Vested interests

It has been suggested to me by some that as a lobbyist whose job depends on the EU, my view of the value of the European Union is distorted by a financial interest in its success. While my opinions are of course as subjective as anyone else’s, I am firmly convinced that the job prospects of lobbyists across Europe would not suffer at all from the disappearance of the EU, or from Brexit specifically. On the contrary, the added complexity of fragmented regulatory regimes would undoubtedly increase the demand for the services of lobbyists. My wife does work for the European Commission as an economist, but her expertise and experience would make it quite easy for her to find employment elsewhere. My children are educated for ‘free’ at a European School, but they could just as well be educated for free in a Belgian school or in the state school system of any other country. In other words, I have no personal vested interest in the continued existence of the EU or in UK membership.

The UK seen from across the water(s)

Pragmatism & common sense vs obstructionism

Many of the people I talk to regard the UK as a bastion of pragmatism and common sense. They see Britain as a Member State that is willing to invest political capital in resisting ideological or aspirational, but ultimately impractical or unenforceable, policy proposals. The other side of this coin, of course, is that many also see the UK as obstructionist, or as a country that has a consistent policy of slowing or stopping the European project. Neither of these views dominates the other completely; the balance fluctuates over time and varies from country to country.

The City

There is a strong identification of the interests of the City of London with those of the UK government. Whereas the Germans are often accused of defending their manufacturing base, and the French of supporting their trades unions, and the Poles and Spanish of protecting their access to EU funds, the UK is associated very strongly with financial services in European minds.

The Special Relationship

While many people I talk to understand the history of empire and the concept of the Commonwealth, this aspect of UK foreign policy doesn’t figure as prominently in European minds as the Special Relationship. Many think of the UK as, at best, a country that aspires to be like the USA, and at worst, as an agent of Washington. UK economic policy is often described as ‘neo-liberal’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, or just plain ‘American’. The UK is strongly associated with the political Right – this was the case even during the Blair years.

Ireland

The Republic has been remarkably successful at carving out a role for itself in the community of EU states, independent of its historical ties with the UK. Ireland is believed to be sufficiently different from the UK that it is treated as credible and independent. Irish people I talk to are confident of their country’s place in Europe apart from the UK, even if everyone knows that the Republic’s economy has a level of dependency on the UK comparable to that of Austria’s to Germany, for example. Ireland is viewed, like Luxembourg, and to a lesser extent the Netherlands, as a country dependent on its corporate tax regime for inward investment, and as too close to Silicon Valley interests as a result.

Media

The UK media are believed to be heavily influenced by Rupert Murdoch. They are also regarded as euroskeptic. I share the latter view, and am dismayed at the lack of quality reporting on EU issues. My UK-based friends are subjected to journalism of a quite astonishingly low level of sophistication when it comes to EU business. UK media will frequently put stories into a ‘pro-EU’ vs ‘anti-EU’ context, even when the reality of the issue at hand is Left vs Right or North vs South. Bent banana-style stories are published without questioning their accuracy or relevance, in order to feed the pervading sense of frustration with the EU. At the same time, some of the ‘real’ problems with the EU are not treated in sufficient depth, if at all. More on that below.

Warts & all

The (ir)relevance of policies

I often see British friends debate whether the Working Time Directive, or the regulatory framework for financial services, or any number of other specific EU rules or policies, are reasons to stay in or leave the EU. In my work, I spend inordinate amounts of time fighting against policies, or details of policies, that would damage my employer’s interests. A great example is the new Data Protection Regulation, which I regard as likely to do significant damage to the European economy. But my personal view is that the decision to Leave or Remain should not be based on these, because they can and do change over time, just as the analogous UK laws change depending on the colour of the government. Furthermore, I think they are of far less importance than more structural policies enshrined in the Treaties, like freedom of movement, or the EU’s institutional set-up, or the Euro and the body of law and the institutional structure that supports it.

Overregulation

EU overregulation is a truism in the UK. But context is important. The reality is that we live in an age of unprecedented regulation, on a global scale. If the EU wasn’t regulating certain things, you can bet that the UK would be. And this is where you could actually argue that the EU reduces the overall regulatory burden for business, by ensuring that national rules are as consistent as possible, and by preventing Member States from regulating fully independently of each other. In that sense, the EU is actually an organization that reduces the need for lobbyists.

The EU budget

The EU budget, by any objective comparative measure, is miniscule. It’s about 1% of GDP, which is a tiny fraction of the percentage of GDP that Member States spend. The European Commission, although it is not the only EU institution, is the biggest and best funded. By way of example, it employs some 25,000 officials, which is not far off half of the US Department of Commerce – not to mention perhaps 10-15% of the size of the US Department of Homeland Security. It’s considerably smaller than the 33,000 employed by Leeds City Council. I think the Commission could be smaller and more efficient, but that’s probably the case for most governments. For this small amount of money, we support a strategically important agricultural sector (not the way I would do it, but nevertheless it’s cheap), decent-sized research programmes, hugely valuable programmes like Erasmus, and a myriad of other useful things, in addition to a constellation of useless ones.

Corruption, waste, inefficiency

Is there corruption in the EU machinery? Undoubtedly. You’d be hard-pressed to find any organization with a multi-billion euro budget that didn’t attract some people intent on gaming the system to make a fast buck. On the other hand, the stats show that the overwhelming majority of the fraud that takes place is at national level, where the Member State governments should be doing a better job of policing. I also think it’s only fair to point out that there is a fundamentally irreconcilable tension between the political imperative of stamping out corruption in the budget (by exerting rigourous control over all spending) and the political imperative of making EU funding faster and less bureaucratic (by reducing the control over spending). It’s a balance that the EU can never and will never get right, because there is no objectively correct middle point. I should stress that although in my work I have knowledge of a number of examples of officials inviting bribes to fix problems, these have all been at national, and not at EU level. The EU system is pretty clean.

Is there waste and inefficiency in the EU machinery? Yup. I have seen enough pen-pushing Commission officials who are sitting out their days waiting for the clock to strike 5 pm, enough officials stay employed who ought to have been fired for gross misconduct or because they’re useless, enough money thrown at initiatives that have no impact, to be firmly convinced of that. My biggest waste bugbear is the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions – two EU institutions that have hundreds of staff, big buildings, and decent-sized budgets, but effectively zero power. I can’t think of a stupider idea. If there is a need for these institutions to provide input into legislation, then their opinions should count for something. But as a lobbyist of 15 years’ experience, I have never yet seen an opinion from one of these bodies that had any influence on a legislative outcome. Which makes them a complete waste of money in my book. Is that something that can’t be fixed, or that is inherently worse in Brussels than any national administration? No. It’s the nature of modern bureaucracies.

Accountability & the democratic deficit vs sovereignty

The EU institutions are often criticized for being too distant from the citizen, and therefore not sufficiently accountable. There is plenty of truth in this. But in reality, this is simply the opposite side of the coin from national sovereignty. The more democratic legitimacy the EU system has, the less national systems will have. In the end, we are all governed by a given set of rules. Some of those are made at global level, some at European level, some at national level, some at sub-national regional level (e.g. Scotland), and some at local level. If you give one part of that system more power, you are taking power away from another part of the system. Democratic accountability is the necessary adjunct of political power. The more democratic accountability (and power) the EU gets, the less other levels of government can have. The truth is that the current system is carefully set up by the real masters of the European Union: the Member State governments, who have ceded just enough executive power, and just enough democratic control, to the EU institutions to be able to reap the benefits of certain efficiencies, and to be able to retain a level of control and national sovereignty that they are comfortable with. And by the way, an essential element of the value that national governments get from the EU is the existence of a convenient scapegoat for unpopular measures.

Personal bugbears

During my years in Brussels, I have seen plenty of bad legislation. I think EU environmental rules are too detailed and bureaucratic, or not enough. For example, I have serious doubts about the emissions trading system and the ‘price’ of carbon. I think the regulatory framework for chemicals is excessively burdensome, and that the benefits are unproven. I think we have the strictest consumer protection laws in the world, and that this unnecessarily affects the competitiveness of our B2C industries. I think the same of our new privacy rules, which I regard as obsolete before they have even been adopted. Do you think we really need those cookie consent banners on our web sites? So many of our rules allow for petty protectionism, and punish European companies that want to go global instead of staying local. I’m losing count of the bullets we’ve shot into our feet. All this is material for great Daily Mail headlines. But it’s pretty down-in-the-weeds stuff, and constitutes only a small part of the picture.

Popular soundbites

‘The EU needs the UK more than the UK needs the EU’

The EU certainly needs the UK. I don’t know a single industry lobbyist who believes that his or her employer’s interests are best served by Brexit. This is because the UK brings an important dose of pragmatism and common sense to EU decision making. That loss would be keenly felt. However, the UK undoubtedly gets great value from the EU – more on that in Brexit and the big picture below. I don’t think this is the kind of balance that is measurable.

‘The EU/NATO is the guarantor of our security’

This really is pretty simple. NATO is clearly the guarantor of our military security. That means we have a guarantee that American, Italian, and French warplanes, ships, and soldiers will come to the UK’s defense if we are attacked by Russia or China. This protection also now extends more and more to cyber-warfare. But for every other kind of security except that provided by the intelligence services, we rely mostly on the EU. This is where David Cameron is putting a lot of focus in his referendum campaign. We benefit from EU-level cooperation in areas like police cooperation, extraditions, border control (not enough, of course!), sanctions, many aspects of anti-terrorism coordination, training and exchanges between our law enforcement agencies, etc etc etc. So it’s not that one provides all our security and the other doesn’t.

‘The UK is fundamentally different from the Continent, and closer to the English-speaking world’

The UK is composed of islands. But so are Cyprus and Malta, and actually Gibraltar is on the mainland. We have a rail link with France and it’s quicker, easier, and cheaper to get to Brussels from London, than to Edinburgh. We speak English. But so do Malta and Ireland. ‘We’ have Common Law and ‘they’ have Napoleonic law. I’m not a lawyer but I think that distinction, while significant, is simplistic and ignores a wide and developing body of European law that is neither fully one nor the other.

In fact, UK history is deeply European. Even the British Empire was European, in the sense that there were also planet-spanning French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Russian, Italian, and perhaps even Belgian empires. We do most of our trade with Europe, we go to Europe for most of our holidays, we learn almost exclusively European languages in our schools, we tell our kids the same fairy tales as other Europeans, we enjoy European-style public health and education, we play largely the same sports as other Europeans… the list goes on. Sure, we are close to the English-speaking world. There’s a connection between Brits and Aussies drinking beer in a pub while watching cricket that just isn’t shared with the vast majority of Europeans, but try getting a Brit to care about the issue of Aboriginal rights, or an Aussie about the refugee camp at Calais.

‘The EU has kept peace in Europe for 60 years’

Yes and no. National governments have kept peace in Europe for 60 years by avoiding serious conflict and declarations of war. The question is why. The EU and its predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Communities, and the European Economic Community, have provided primarily economic incentives to keep peace, by ensuring that there is ever-increasing economic value in keeping the system going – not least through enlargement. There is another powerful reason that the EU has contributed to national governments keeping peace in Europe – see Intergovernmental intimacy below.

Alternative scenarios

What will and won’t change

It is very unlikely that the UK would suddenly develop a fundamentally confrontational diplomatic relationship with any EU country as a result of Brexit. We’d probably all largely stay friends, and we’d likely remain in NATO. It’s likely that we’d be able to travel to Europe as freely as we could travel to other parts of the world, but that might well be considerably less freely than today. The EU negotiates deals for visa-free travel en bloc, so Brexit would probably mean we’d need visas to get to more countries than today. It would also mean an end to the freedom of movement we have in the EU today, unless we were able to negotiate a deal on that – a deal that would not be so different from the deal we have today, and would include both the costs and benefits associated with reciprocal free movement. We’d certainly still export to and import from the EU, but that would become more expensive outside the customs union. Unless, again, we negotiated a free trade deal or membership of the customs union on terms largely similar to those we have today (yup – the Single Market rules, straight bananas, etc!). We would certainly be free to stop complying with lots of rules that we don’t like. But then we’d find there was a cost to that too, in terms of access to the EU market. In other words, all of the ‘freedom’ we would gain by breaking the chains of Brussels rules would be matched by costs – the loss of privileges and convenience that we take for granted. Michael Howard is right when he says that the Germans would still want to sell us their cars and the French would still want to sell us their wine. Just like we’d like to sell the Germans and the French our own goods and services. It’s just not clear that the terms of a new settlement would be more advantageous than the one we currently have. I have no doubt that after an initial period of downturn due to uncertainty in the market about investing in the UK post-Brexit, things would return to ‘normal’. I’m just not convinced that it’s a ‘normal’ we would think is better than the ‘normal’ we know today.

Another Norway

Norwegians call their country a “fax democracy”, because they are forced to comply with Single Market rules (straight bananas again!) in order to have access to the Single Market, but have no say in the making of those rules. The rules are ‘faxed’ to Oslo, and they have to comply. Sure, they have a customized deal whereby certain things are excluded (like fisheries), and they have the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing they are oil and gas-rich and have a moon-sized nest egg to keep them comfortable for the next 100 years. But ‘independence’ from Brussels seems to be more a matter of principle than of real pragmatism. And as we know, Britons are nothing if not pragmatic.

Focus on the Commonwealth

We could re-focus our foreign and economic policies on the Commonwealth. There’s potentially enormous value in this, not least because of the mind-blowing potential size of the Commonwealth as a market. On the other hand, we already have pretty good economic and political relations with the Commonwealth. In order to make those better, we’d need to develop the Commonwealth’s institutions. Of course, the Commonwealth includes countries with which we have far worse relations than we do with any EU country. We’d have far greater challenges in terms of developing common systems and institutions, notably with regard to human rights, corruption, and protectionism. It should be pretty obvious that it would take many years of extremely challenging work, to say the least, before we could imagine the Commonwealth replacing the kind of arrangement we have with the EU today in terms of the benefits. And let’s not forget that such benefits come with costs, as we have found with the EU.

FTAs

The Single Market, at its core, is just a hyper-regulated free trade agreement. It is possible to imagine agreeing FTAs with the EU and many other countries – FTAs that would be less regulated, and give us slightly lower quality access to those markets than what we enjoy in terms of quality of access to the EU market today. On the other hand, the EU negotiates FTAs for us today, so we’d have to go and do that bilaterally with all our major trade partners. Not only is it unclear that they would all have an interest in doing this (the US has said it probably wouldn’t), but it would require a massive investment in trade negotiation resources – we’d need literally dozens of teams negotiating FTAs at the same time to have any hope of completing a decent number of them by the D-Day on which we lost the access to those same markets that we have thanks to our EU membership.

A coherent, holistic vision

All of the above scenarios deserve to be looked at in more detail to assess if they are feasible. My main concern is that the Out camp doesn’t really seem capable today of offering a detailed vision of the UK’s place in the world, geo-politically or economically, in a post-Brexit future. Does it involve FTAs? With which countries? Negotiated by whom, in what time frame? Does it involve closer ties with the Commonwealth? What kind of ties? With what kinds of institutions and agreements underpinning them? Based on what fundamental principles? And closest to home, what kind of relationship would we have with the EU? Presumably, we’d need to negotiate some kind of partnership that was pretty close. What would that get us, broadly speaking, in terms of benefits? And what would be the costs we’d expect to have to face in order to enjoy those benefits? I haven’t heard anything that comes close to an answer to such questions.

Brexit and the big picture

The Brexit debate takes place in isolation from a broader context that is often ignored, misunderstood, or simply unknown to many of us.

Intergovernmental intimacy

If we put the costs of EU membership aside for the moment, in my opinion one of the biggest, and least understood, reasons why there has been an absence of war between EU countries is the intimate contact with other governments that the EU provides, at all levels. From the European Council (heads of state and PMs) right down through the ministerial, ambassadorial, and working group levels, government officials meet daily in Brussels. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of officials have established friendships with their foreign counterparts, have listened while they explained their views on a given European policy choice to be made, and have felt listened to when they themselves have spoken. Two generations of officials have gone through secondments to Brussels or other capitals, and have been obliged to sit around a table and find compromises in the interests of a tactical (legislative) purpose underpinned by the strategic assumption that we are all better off if we work together than if we dig in and stick to our proverbial (or other) guns. It’s essentially a system that has successfully shown generations of our leaders an alternative to the Great Power-dominated realpolitik and cyclical warfare of past centuries. It’s the reason that David Cameron has warmed to the EU since he became PM and the reason why anti-Europeanism has never been the policy of the governing party in the UK and never been supported by the UK’s civil service. Brexit would largely sever those links unless some replacement were found, and inevitably result in divergence, rather than convergence, or parallelism, in the world views of the UK government machinery and its continental counterparts. In my mind, that is one of the single greatest risks of Brexit.

The importance of English

The EU runs on the English language. This is hugely significant. Any expert on language will tell you that the language in which you communicate with others has an impact on the communication. It is said in academic circles (and my wife confirms it in my case) that bilingual people have different personalities when they speak different languages. What does this mean for the EU? It means that it’s using our language when it talks to itself, and that its internal conversation is therefore happening much ore on our terms than on German or French terms. The French have clearly identified this as a strategic threat and have for years ordered their diplomats to speak only French in meetings in Brussels, in order to oblige other countries’ officials to either listen to translation, or learn French. English native speaker translators and interpreters are the ones most listened to in the meetings rooms of Brussels, and the ones whose proof-reading, grammatical nuances, and drafting most often make it into EU law and policy. We English speakers have a huge advantage that we just can’t see. By leaving the Irish and the Maltese as the only English-speakers in an EU of 27, we’d be inviting the return of French as a dominant working language in Brussels.

Brits in the EU institutions

The House of Lords has identified the presence of British officials in the EU institutions as a high priority, and is deeply concerned about the low numbers we have. This is because of a steep decline in applications – largely because careers in the Commission or Parliament are seen as distinctly un-sexy in the current media climate in the UK. Anecdotally, I am told that there are 8 Brits under 40 in the European Commission. I can’t confirm that this is the case, but I can confirm that I can’t remember the last time I met such a beast, whereas I can for virtually every other EU nationality. Furthermore, the UK government (specifically, Michael Gove) has stopped seconding teachers to the European Schools, which means that children of British eurocrats are being educated by more and more locally hired, non-inspected, and often non-native speaker teaching staff. We’re under-represented and it seems likely to get worse unless there is a major policy shift in London.

Europe in crisis

When I arrived in Brussels 15 years ago, the EU was getting ready to launch the Euro and welcome 10 new Member States. I, an EU citizen, married my wonderful Polish wife, a non-EU citizen. In a few short months, it’s conceivable that it’s only my French citizenship that will keep that situation from being reversed. Today, the EU is dealing with the most severe migration crisis it has ever faced. Its institutions and leaders are not covering themselves in glory, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole system is at risk from this situation. The same is true, independently, of the economic crisis. Grexit could cause the end of the Euro, and bring down the whole system. Meanwhile, Mr. Putin is profiting from weakness and uncertainty in our foreign policy to strengthen his position in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Middle East. We face civil war in a huge neighbouring country, a serious risk of similar conflict in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (NATO members), civil war just a few minutes’ boat ride from the EU (Syria & Cyprus), chronic instability in Palestine, an oil crisis affecting our main strategic allies in Arabia, precarious young governments in Egypt and Tunisia, and anarchy in Libya. In national politics, we are experiencing the rise of nationalist governments in Poland, Hungary, and Greece, extreme right parties in Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden, the extreme Left in the UK, and populist protest parties in Italy and Spain. I can’t remember a time when mainstream, centrist politics was more threatened in Europe than today. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous time for Europe. And at this time of unprecedented threats to the existence of a stable order, what are EU leaders and the people of the UK debating? The best way to stabilize Syria and reduce the flow of refugees? How to get Crimea back for Ukraine or protect NATO allies from what they see as Russian interference? Banking sector reform and the rules underpinning the Euro? No. The finer details of a fig-leaf Brexit deal that doesn’t address the real challenges we face at all.

EU Reform

As should be clear from various things I have written above, the EU is in need of reform. All governments are in constant need of reform, but serious EU reform could have a massive positive impact. We need nimbler regulatory authorities, more transparent legislative processes (notably in the Council, less so in the Parliament or the Commission), less waste on pointless programmes, employment policies that allow the institutions to clear out dead wood and get better access to private sector expertise via secondments, a digital-first philosophy to underpin our policies, and any number of other changes. One of David Cameron’s calculations was that launching discussions on a package of UK opt-outs with other EU governments would stimulate a groundswell of reform proposals from other governments, perhaps resulting in treaty change. It’s a great idea, but as explained above, appallingly bad timing.

Dis-united Kingdom (What of Scotland?)

I think it’s pretty clear that public opinion on EU membership is considerably more positive in Scotland than in England. With an SNP government in Holyrood committed to calling another independence referendum as soon as it has a good excuse, it seems virtually certain that Brexit would be closely followed by just such a referendum, and I feel that the result, at minimum, would be more divisive than last time, and indeed quite likely to go the other way and see the breakup of the UK. For many pro-independence Scots, Brexit is not unattractive (even if they still have an incentive to vote Remain in order to build the case for a strong Scottish pro-EU sentiment). But for those who want the United Kingdom to continue to exist as a state and not just a family of charming posh people, Brexit is probably a bad idea.

Brexit as a prelude to Bremain

Michael Howard and other senior Out figures have publicly surmised that a vote for Brexit could serve as a signal to ‘Brussels’ that we want a better deal than what David Cameron has been able to negotiate, and could force ‘them’ back to the table, leading to a second vote when ‘we’ could vote to ‘Bremain’ after all. This strikes me as fantastically improbable. The EU is in an existential crisis. It has no bandwidth to be negotiating a special deal with the UK. It’s highly improbable that there would be the necessary unanimity to get such a deal, given the UK’s reputation in some quarters as an obstructionist party pooper. It would only take a veto from a small country like Malta or Luxembourg to scupper the entire deal. That seems like an awfully big risk to take if you have doubts about whether Out is the right option.

Human rights and European values

It’s important to remember that a good portion of what Euroskeptics object to is nothing to do with the EU at all, but the Council of Europe and its European Charter and Court of Human Rights (e.g. judgments from Strasbourg preventing the deportation of radical Muslim imams). Brexit would still leave ECHR-objectors unsatisfied, and might need to be followed by Brexit II – a withdrawal from the Council of Europe. After all, the Council of Europe and the ECHR are arguably much more idealistic and ideological expressions of European-ness than the EU, with its utilitarian, functional, and detailed (pragmatic?) approach to unity. Assuming the UK went through with Brexit, there would be important questions to answer about the validity of a massive body of English, Scottish, and other UK law that is based on the European (EU and ECHR) legal order. I suppose the lawyers among my readers might disagree, but it seems to me that you’d have to develop home-grown jurisprudence over many years that would need to have some fundamental values and rights as basic points of reference. These exist outside the EU, but the development of a coherent approach wouldn’t be a trivial undertaking.

Oh, and Cameron’s ‘deal’

Ever-closer union

It’s somewhat unhelpful shorthand, isn’t it? Not a great piece of text on which to base the EU treaties, given that it could be taken to imply the aim of full union – i.e. a single European state. I think it is broad enough to encompass the reality that there will always be things that crop up that we can cooperate on, and indeed it arguably implies that full union is unachievable, since it can get ‘ever’-closer. I think it’s legitimate to object to this and push for a better formulation (how about just ‘closer union’?). But I am not sure that it’s worth what David Cameron says it is.

Immigration, social benefits & free movement

The complicated arrangement that Cameron secured in relation to immigration is a classic EU fudge. It’s neither completely meaningless, nor particularly meaningful. The UK will be able to slow down immigration of EU Member State nationals as a result, at least for a few years. And the signal that it sends is powerful. But in reality, Brits’ ability to move freely around the EU is predicated on Europeans’ ability to move freely in the UK. And the deal doesn’t really address the current problem, which has very little to do with EU citizens and much more to do with Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and others. The deal ignores the fact that the migration crisis is a symptom and not the underlying disease. We can close our borders to people if we like, but ultimately, if they keep leaving their countries in large enough numbers, things are going to go wrong in our neighbouring countries and we simply aren’t immune from that. Allowing us to block immigration is not a solution to the civil war in Syria, and will not stop pressure on the Channel Tunnel or the trucks on cross-Channel ferries. Again, it feels odd to me that we should be obsessively worrying about immigration from a narrowly local perspective, when it’s our own foreign policy that encouraged the civil war in the first place. Worse, that worrying is then expressed as opposition to the EU, which is probably the organization with the best chance of fixing the underlying cause.

Parliamentary control over EU legislation

This is not a bad idea. It potentially amplifies the control that Member States have over the EU, and adds some accountability to the EU legislative institutions. It has a cost, in that EU legislation can be slowed down, but that’s likely to happen only if the legislation is particularly high profile and controversial. Parliaments already have certain scrutiny and intervention powers under the Lisbon Treaty, and Westminster hasn’t used them.

Reimbursement of Eurozone bailouts

It’s interesting that the deal doesn’t include any element relating to ‘The Rebate’, which has been a major subject of discussion for decades. Instead, Cameron’s got a promise that any money we lend to bail our EU partners out will be reimbursed. This guy knows how to make friends. I can’t say I find this particularly inspiring or significant.

It’s really not about the deal. The deal might convince a small part of the electorate that is on the fence, but in my opinion, there are much bigger issues at stake here.

Conclusions

I can’t vote in the referendum, because I will have lived outside the UK for a few weeks more than the 15-year limit imposed by Her Majesty’s Government. But I wish I could. And if I could,

I wouldn’t vote Remain because of specific laws I like, nor Leave because of laws I don’t like.

I wouldn’t vote Leave because of corruption, waste, or a lack of accountability, and I wouldn’t vote Remain because I think the EU is fine the way it is.

I wouldn’t vote Remain because David Cameron says our national security is dependent on it, and I wouldn’t vote Leave because I see a brighter future for a UK focused on the English-speaking world.

And Cameron’s deal wouldn’t change my mind either way.

I would vote Remain – because the EU is the most effective means to keep us at peace with our neighbours and to help them stay at peace with each other, and because I can’t divine a coherent value proposition for Brexit or a coherent vision of how a post-imperial UK would navigate the stormy waters of geo-politics cast adrift from the EU. I’d vote Remain as a Frenchman and an American with my countries’ interests in keeping the UK in at heart. I’d vote Remain as a Briton who prefers the UK to remain united. My daughters will remain EU citizens (as Poles and Frenchwomen) regardless of the result, but I’d prefer them to grow up believing that the UK, France, and Poland belong together, rather than believing that they ought or need to choose between citizenships or allegiances, or, God forbid, between parts of their family.