On Thursday, at the Oxford Union, I debated the motion ‘this House would re-join the EU’.
What, so soon?
We gave our membership over 40 years before we decided to leave. We’ve not even been out of it 4 years yet. Those 4 years that have been dominated the economic impacts of war in Europe and a pandemic. We should give ourselves rather more ‘ordinary times’ in which to judge.
The premise in the motion ‘re-join’ implied that we would be going back to the way we were. We wouldn’t. The EU has changed dramatically; it’s engine, the Franco / German alliance, has collapsed; Schengen is in disarray; and the block is struggling to address the rise of the far-right.
Neither could we expect the same membership terms – Mr’s Thatcher’s rebate, and John Major’s opt-outs -including a treaty obligation to join the Euro.
The favoured statistic of the joiners is that, in years to come, our economy will be 4 to 6 % smaller than if we hadn’t left. The genesis of that statistic however, is the same Treasury forecast which predicted an immediate recession in 2016 following the referendum, with unemployment rising by 10,000 per month. In fact it fell by almost that much and we ended the year as the best performing developed economy.
Forecasting is always bedevilled by incomplete data and questionable assumptions. Typical of its sort, we’ve just had a new analysis from a prestigious business school. It begins by saying that we have seen only modest gains from our accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But that membership hasn’t even started yet -that’s not till 15th December. The report goes on to note a catastrophic decline in aspects of export performance. The problem is that the boffins failed to spot that the export reporting codes have changed and they’ve simply missed the data.
That we have significant economic problems is not in dispute. Nevertheless, we are doing comparatively well: in the last quarter for which statistics are to be had, our GDP growth was twice that of the EU, (though EU growth is not a high bar).
Our future prosperity depends not being in or out of the EU, but rather on how hard we work, our risk appetite, the business-friendly nature of our tax and regulatory regime. In an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be agile and flexible.
That agility is bound to be enhanced by our ability to make decisions quickly in our own best interest rather than reliance on mechanisms that require a qualified majority negotiated between 27 member states.
In the EU Council of Ministers, we so often didn’t push our objections to a vote because we could see we hadn’t a chance. On the 72 occasions when we did force a vote – we lost every time.
We were increasingly governed by people we didn’t elect and couldn’t remove.
In this respect Brexit has already delivered: we are no longer required to implement damaging arrangements to which we were opposed.
The proposer blamed the Conservative Party for taking us out of the EU. When I pointed out that it was the people who made that choice, my opponent, Rachel Johnson, responded that it was the fault of the Conservatives for granting the people a referendum: proof that the contempt for democracy by the liberal elite, is unabated.