I didn’t vote Leave but I find it interesting how many of those that, like me, voted Remain have become venomous, screeching, pitchfork shaking maniacs towards those that did vote Leave, often demanding “Give me one tangible benefit of Brexit”! Well, shouldn’t we, in a democracy, which the UK is last time I looked, be asking “give me one tangible benefit of being an EU member”.
It’s almost become a cult, with EU flags and ‘FBPE’ proudly adorning their social media profiles. Apart from the fact the EU doesn’t have a ‘flag’ because it isn’t a country or state, it’s purely a logo, using FBPE as a badge of honour is rather churlish.
Here’s my take on the EU, having had 5 years to do some research and give myself a talking to about the error of my ways. In my defence, I didn’t know enough about the implications of leaving or remaining in the EU and shouldn’t really have voted at all, but I did. I actually only personally know one other person who voted to remain and she’s a teacher!
A ratchet can be a handy tool. If you’ve ever had to tighten an inaccessible bolt you will know how satisfying and reassuring it is to feel the ratchet biting on the nut, driving it further in, securing it properly, letting you know that it’s safe.
In politics, however, a ratchet is not so much reassuring as alarming. Occasionally we see political processes which drive an agenda onwards, one click at a time, bolting it in securely to the point that it becomes almost impossible to undo. Ratchets are rare in most democratic systems. They may even be specifically precluded by stipulations such as “one Parliament cannot bind the hands of another,” but one of the criticisms of EU membership is that it is a living embodiment of a ratchet effect. And, like its mechanical equivalent, it is deceptive because none of the individual components might seem unduly threatening in itself.
Since the EU referendum in 2016, a frequent demand made of Leavers is, “Tell me one thing you dislike about the EU”, or “Name one piece of actual legislation you object to”. The problem with this approach is that there are so many fundamental errors in the design and implementation of the EU, and so many pieces of objectionable law-making, that the Leave voter doesn’t know where to start. If you comply with the demand and specify one, you are asked, “Is that it? All this chaos and uncertainty just because of EU Directive 2141/70?” The Leave vote is then mischaracterised as an act of vandalism that rips everything apart just because of a regulation about pilchard canning procedures. In any case, all governments will pass bad laws. All institutions will have examples of poor governance.
The truth is that there are many reasons for voting Leave, and several of these are interconnected across multiple domains. The EU itself is a complex web of dysfunctionality, and Leave voters find it hard to collapse this complexity down to one sound-bite. The demand itself is actually a bad faith argument, because your interlocutor almost certainly knows that the Leave vote is driven by a sense that an anti-democratic institution cannot be benign and will not survive. It resembles a conversation which goes like this: “So, you say you love reading! What is your favourite book?” Then, when you are dumbstruck by the inanity of this, the follow-up is: “Ah! Not much of a reader then!”
The proper response for any-one caught out by this rhetorical trap is to say, “I can’t give you one reason why I voted Leave because that would be absurd. I can only give you multiple.” For what it’s worth, here are ten. Each of these could stand on its own merits, but it is only when you step back and view the entire snarl-up that you realise that the many problems of the EU are not merely intertwined, but interlocked. It is the interlock of its component parts which gives the EU a ratchet-like effect on European politics.
1. Popper’s criterion: How can a bad government be removed?
Tony Benn famously stated that those in positions of economic, social, and political power should always be asked five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?” Benn repeated this many times at rallies, protests and marches. He commented to his friend and fellow campaigner John Nichols that his favourite question was the final one. “Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system” (his views are described in detail in an article by John Nichols in www.thenation.com, 14th March 2014).
Whatever view you take of Benn’s politics, there can be no denying the fundamental truth of this final statement. Indeed, this is a subject that has been the focus of political philosophy for generations. David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity explores the views of Karl Popper, who applies his general concept of ‘How can we detect and eliminate error?’ to political philosophy and boils it down to ‘How can we rid ourselves of bad government without violence?’ Political institutions should not make it hard to oppose rulers and policies non-violently. As Deutsch puts it: “Systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.”
The EU fails this essential criterion, because it is structured by international treaties which are almost irreversible, and it is designed in ways which make it unwieldy and inflexible. Powers have essentially been given up by elected governments, in favour of an unelected Commission and Secretariat. As ever, it was Benn who put his finger on this. In a speech during the original EEC Referendum in 1975, he remarked: “We live in a continent where increasingly powers have gone to a group of people who are not elected, cannot be removed, and do not have to listen to us.”
For many voters, a desire to leave was driven by considerations of sovereignty and control, but the problems which have emerged are technical matters of just-in-time supply chains, and customs arrangements at the Irish border. Prior to the referendum in 2016, people who expressed anxiety about the creeping supranationalism of the EU were told, “You can leave any time you want.” When they duly voted to leave (largely because of the same concerns), they were told, “You cannot leave, because the just-in-time supply chains for the Nissan factory in Sunderland will cease to function.”
Ironically, the hard-line Remainers have simply made things difficult for themselves in this as in so much. They have been so determined to establish that “we cannot leave” that they have made the Leavers’ point for them. If we can never leave, the EU fails Popper’s criterion and it becomes a bad institution. Is it really true that the UK can never become an independent country? If so, this is the most shocking revelation of all.
2. Primacy of EU Law.
The fact that the EU is “hard to leave” is worrying enough, but this is compounded by the fact that the EU has arrogated to itself a primacy in law, so that EU law essentially trumps national laws and customs.
The Treaty of Lisbon formalised (but didn’t start) this shift of primacy. The Treaty stated that, “in accordance with well-settled case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Treaties and the law adopted by the Union on the basis of the Treaties have primacy over the law of member states”. Unlike other international treaties, this means that the Treaty of Lisbon penetrates into domestic law and over-rides the decisions of domestic courts. As Martin Howe QC pointed out, this penetration is actually a characteristic of a federal state rather than an international treaty. The process started much earlier, not in the text of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 but with the way that Treaty was interpreted by the European Court of Justice (and in fact the judicial activism of the ECJ is a whole topic in its own right). Howe quotes European case-law (Costa v ENEL 1964): “The transfer by the States from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights.”
3. Legitimacy of the Constitutional arrangements.
Such a profound change in sovereignty ought to be built on a solid foundation of legitimacy, but needless to say this was never put to a popular vote in the UK. The primacy of UK law was basically given away by UK politicians without any attempt to seek a popular mandate for this change. (For a summary of the processes involved, see the long Twitter thread by @verumandverus on 27th February 2018).
In 46 years the UK electorate has been allowed 2 referenda on EEC/EU matters. Over that period the EU has changed substantially, not only in size and reach but in its stated goals and purposes. Despite this, there was no “people’s vote” in the UK for the Accession Treaty of 1979, the Accession Treaty of 1985, the Accession Treaty of 1994, the Accession Treaty of 2003, the Accession Treaty of 2005, the Accession Treaty of 2011, the Single European Act of 1986, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 (which ushered in the EU from the EC), the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997, the Treaty of Nice of 2001, or for the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. Bit by bit, these treaties and Acts ensured the steady intrusion of the EEC/EC/EU into more and more parts of everyday life, and with no attempt to seek a democratic mandate for doing so. In each case the incursion becomes irreversible, because any attempt to reform these foundational documents is dismissed out of hand by the EU Commission. International treaties cannot simply be waved away by Act of Parliament. It is hard to imagine that many countries in the world would have allowed such massive shifts in their constitutional and regulatory arrangements to take place without conspicuous popular consent, but that is indeed what has happened.
4. Democratic Deficit.
The lack of democratic legitimacy goes much further and deeper. The structures of the EU are themselves poor implementations of democracy, either because they are too unwieldy, or because they are designed to by-pass the democratic process.
The EU Commission is the only institution empowered to initiate legislation (www.europarl.europa.eu). The EU commissioners are proposed by national governments (one per state) but are not elected (and in fact are often politicians who have failed to be elected in their own countries). The EU Commission operates as something of a hybrid between a Civil Service and an Executive, and it manages the day-to-day business of the EU. Commissioners swear an oath pledging to respect the Treaties of the EU (which effectively mandates them to prioritise EU affairs over nation states). This latter point is critical, and it could be described as a problem of “emergence”, in that the EU Commissioners have a primary statutory duty to the EU and not to the nation states.
Almost uniquely in the world, the EU Parliament does not and cannot propose legislation. It can modify and amend, and it can reject, but it cannot initiate new acts of parliament. Yet, bizarrely, the EU Parliament is the only piece of the apparatus within EU structures which has a direct claim to democratic accountability.
We have become so accustomed to this that we are blinded to its shortcomings. Democracy is here turned on its head. The civil service ought to operate as a moderating influence ensuring continuity of good governance while elected governments come and go. In the EU this can never happen, by design, because there are no elected governments, there is no “coming and going”, there is just a permanent Commission and we have no direct role in putting it there or removing it.
It is actually instructive to look at this deficit, which is baked into the EU structure, when considering the response of Leavers and hard-line Remain to the Referendum result in 2016. On the one hand, longstanding frustrations and suspicions of illegitimacy, exacerbated by the failure to implement the Referendum result, and on the other hand nonchalance about overturning a democratic mandate and a bizarre belief that our superiors in Brussels know what they are doing, and the voters need to be kept well away.
The fact that the “Stop Brexit” brigade have triggered an electoral backlash is hardly surprising. As political philosopher John Tasioulas remarked, “For all the talk about new-fangled rights, it turns out that people give a very high priority to longstanding rights such as democracy and sovereignty.” (@JTasioulas, 12th May 2019.)
5. Democracy requires a demos.
There are even deeper problems than the undemocratic architecture of the EU governing bodies. At another level entirely, the problems of the EU relate to ideas of citizenship and belonging. Citizenship is not only about the politics of public authority, it is also about the social reality of peoplehood. As Thomas Fazi put it: “Democracy presupposes the existence of an underlying demos — a political community usually (though not exclusively) defined by a shared and relatively homogenous language, culture, history, normative system etc., the majority of whose members feel sufficiently connected to each other to voluntarily commit to a democratic discourse and to a related decision-making process.” (The European Union is an Antidemocratic Disgrace, jacobinmag.com, 23rd May 2019).
Many of the arguments surrounding independence, sovereignty, secession etc. around the world arise from disputes about the boundaries of the demos. Sadly, the EU has never been able to establish its own demos and seems fated never to be able to.
One of the bizarre consequences of EU membership is that it has allowed a sort of “gravity model” borrowed from economics to be applied to social policy and legal arrangements. We are constantly told that the citizens of the EU must have a lot in common with each other because our respective countries are neighbours. But this doesn’t follow at all. It may well be the case that individuals, and families, and indeed entire social groups within the UK, might have more in common with people in India or Canada than with Latvia or Bulgaria. This doesn’t just apply to the UK. A voter in Lisbon might feel more connected to a distant cousin in Rio de Janeiro than with a stranger in Estonia. The point is, there never has been and never will be a European demos, and one cannot be magically brought into existence by a directive from Brussels.
Be that as it may, Leave voters take the view that, whatever their connections to cousins around the world, there needs to be some form of local accountability for legislators and government machinery, along with a sense of shared values. The realisation that one’s message has been received and understood is a powerful reliever of frustration, grievance, and anxiety.
Localism and globalism co-exist. You might have a cousin in Sydney, and an employer based in Calcutta, but it is reasonable for you to want your law-makers to live and work nearby and to have some awareness of what is happening in your life.
6. Supranationalism vs intergovernmentalism.
This touches on one of the other errors in hard-line Remain thinking. When confronted with evidence that the Leave voter is quite happy about the existence of NATO, or the WHO, or the WTO (or indeed any other body anywhere in the world where two or more nation states cooperate), the response is, “Ah! You’re perfectly happy to be a member of X but yet you want to leave the EU! What incoherence and contradiction!”
This is a surprisingly common misconception. Intergovernmentalism is not the same as supranationalism. Governments must cooperate. Nation states must work together. The world requires integrated systems for trade and economic activity, as well as public health and environmental protection etc. None of this implies the need for a European super-state which is politically committed to ever-closer union. As far as the UK is concerned, intergovernmentalism will be weakened by continued EU membership, because the UK cannot act as a sovereign state when it is part of a larger entity.
7. The role of “Experts”.
In one of the most misquoted remarks of the EU referendum, Michael Gove told Faisal Islam that, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.” (Sky News, 3rd June 2016). Faisal Islam, who interrupted Gove, immediately mangled this to, “People have had enough of experts?” and this is the version that has stuck. (For example, “Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove”, Financial Times, 3rd June 2016). The role of experts has been much debated ever since, and to the exasperation of onlookers the term ‘expert’ has become a proxy for ‘the educated intelligent person’ in contrast to hoi polloi.
There has been much wrong with the ensuing conversation, not least that it has exposed various strands of snobbery, elitism, complacency, and even a certain anti-democratic impulse amongst the UK’s commentariat. Nevertheless, this is a useful debate for any society to have, and in this case the conclusions that Leave voters have drawn have not been advantageous to the so-called ‘experts’.
In the first place, the experts have usually been technocrats, who are qualified to answer particular questions about economics or trade, but they have been allowed to dominate a discussion about sovereignty and independence. The fundamental question of “what kind of country do I want to live in?” cannot really be adequately answered by an expert in tariff procedures on the Dover-Calais shipping route. In fact, the question is not addressed to an expert at all, but to the ordinary voter. This hasn’t stopped an army of experts from replying “I know best.” These experts have actually failed a basic test. They don’t know the difference between a technical question and a value judgment. The ability to fine-tune a technocratic detail is irrelevant in a conversation about fundamental democratic rights.
Secondly, not all experts are in agreement about these technical matters, but some experts are given less attention. For example, the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot has written extensively about the damaging effects of EU membership, but his voice has been drowned out. The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has been steadily negative about Brexit, and has been afforded great status and esteem, but his predecessor Mervyn King, who is positive about Brexit, has been disregarded (“UK should leave EU with no deal, says former Bank of England governor”, Guardian, 29th March 2019).
Some of the flavour of this discussion can be seen in the backlash to a cartoon in the New Yorker on 3rd January 2017. The cartoon depicts a passenger on an airline standing up an addressing his fellow passengers with the words: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Many saw this a thinly-veiled insult to Trump and an attack on populism. If so, it back-fired, because the ensuing arguments provided ample opportunity for voters to point out the many ways in which the technocratic elites have let them down. It turns out that people know a real expert when they see one, and they value that expertise. People respect their optician, their obstetrician, the woman who set up their WiFi and the man who fixed the brakes on their car (and they certainly respect their airline pilot). But those talking heads on the TV? Not so much.
In fact, the brazen impertinence of these self-styled experts has simply added to the frustration and anger. This has been the second failing of the expert class. “The inability of a certain type of political professional to perceive the difference between the developed technical knowledge associated with a skill, and the bare assertion of a class-based right to exercise power, is a defining problem of the age” (@TheAgeofShoddy, 9th December 2018).
Far from being ideology-free, experts have a bias, a status, a position in the world. Their social world helps shape their perspectives. They are surrounded by like-minded experts who shape their views. This socialization process provides a perspective on how society should work that is often divorced from the interests of others (Matthew Lesh, AustraliaDivided.com). Expertise in one domain is no guarantee of superior decision-making in an unrelated field (any-one who doubts this can read about Bertrand Russell’s views on World War II).
8. Lack of positive reasons to Remain.
The Remain world-view likes to think of itself as “evidence-based” but in fact in key areas it operates at an ideological evidence-free level. Very few positive reasons to remain are ever advanced. As described above, the main arguments for Remain appear to be Fear and Loathing. Firstly, the UK can never hope to survive as a tiny little country on its own (despite the inconvenient fact that hundreds of smaller countries are surviving just fine). Secondly, Leave voters are stupid. They are “low-information, uneducated, racist, fascist, even Nazis.” It is worth exploring each of these in turn.
Fear is not an unreasonable driver for international politics. The Precautionary Principle may actually be a sensible guide (“avoid ruination if at all possible”). But, as David Deutsch describes in The Beginning of Infinity: “There is a closed loop of ideas here: on the assumption that knowledge is not going to grow, the precautionary principle is true; and on the assumption that the precautionary principle is true, we cannot afford to allow knowledge to grow. Unless a society is expecting its future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.” This is essentially the hard-line Remain position; better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Optimism sounds like an airy-fairy basis to make radical constitutional change, but declinism and catastrophising are hardly more rational. There is a strong case that the technological advances of the 21st century will require nations to respond with speed of thought and action. Our future choices may indeed be better than our present ones.
In fact, pessimism may simply reflect a lack of imagination. “A mark of small minds is the assumption that what seems realistic to me now tracks the limits of the possible. History is full of transformations that seemed flatly impossible until they occurred, and the well-informed were often the most myopic about their possibility.” (Adrian Vermeule, 5th May 2019).
As for the disparagement of Leave voters, three years of continual belittlement has had the opposite effect from that intended. Strangely, people who voted in good faith, to choose one constitutional settlement over another, don’t like being called Nazis, and it makes them question whether there is anything at all that can be said in favour of EU membership. After all, if the EU is at heart a good and worthwhile institution, surely some-one would by now have come up with a coherent argument for remaining in it.
It is true that there are a small number of EU federalists in the UK; people who are supportive of the EU’s direction of travel and believe in “ever-closer Union”. This concept has never attracted much more than 10% in polls and is not likely to be an electoral winner for any UK party. This leads to a type of dishonesty amongst hard-line Remainers. What exactly do they want to remain part of? The idea of “Remain and Reform” is not a valid option, so the Remain case must be to support ever-closer union but it is rarely stated in these terms. This is an interesting counter-narrative to the charge that “People didn’t know what they were voting for.” Leave voters want to leave the EU, and they know this will be complex and messy, but Remain voters don’t know (or won’t say) what they want to remain part of.
Much of the criticism is back-to-front. Leave voters are called fascist (for wanting to respect democracy), empire-building (for wanting local accountability of politicians), and low-information (although they tend to be interested and informed about much of this debate). The charge of racism has been especially unwarranted. For wishing to arrive at a better constitutional settlement? Seriously? For many horrified onlookers, it has been this dishonesty that has hardened their resolve. Voters who only marginally voted Leave are now committed and zealous anti-EU hardliners.
9. Specific bad acts.
Contrary to what we are often told about the EU being a guarantor of peace and security in Europe, the EU has been a bad actor on the world stage. From its failure to act in Bosnia, and its mishandling of the migrant crisis, to its hurtful policies in the 3rd World, the EU has been negligent and malign rather than a force for good. Even the much-trumpeted Freedom of Movement has had disastrous consequences for the social fabric of Eastern European nations. The imbalances of the Eurozone create distortions between the economies of the North and South, and yet the Eurozone is a fundamental building block of the EU.
As for the endless stream of specific EU legislation covering more and more parts of life, there isn’t time and space here to describe the cumulative misadventure. People will have their own favourites. Just to give a flavour, I will give two long-standing and two recent examples of EU directives which have been unnecessarily damaging.
The European Arrest Warrant is a particularly pernicious piece of legislation. It allows unfair summary extradition to any EU country, with very few safeguards. It does not provide for the basic protection that a prima facie case be made in a domestic court before a UK resident is extradited (“It’s not just Eurosceptics who think the European arrest warrant is rotten”, Shami Chakrabati, Guardian, 10th November 2014).
The European Working Time Directive has been a controversial and heavy-handed top-down piece of legislation since it was introduced. Its basic goal was good (to prevent employers from enforcing employees to work long hours) but the implementation is extremely poor. In the NHS, it led to new shift patterns, disruption of rotas, adverse effects on training opportunities, and lowering of morale and job satisfaction (“UK Doctors’ views on the implementation of the European Working Time Directive as applied to medical practice”, BMJ open, 004390, 2013).
Since the EU referendum in 2016, the EU has continued to enact inappropriate and damaging legislation. GDPR became law in May 2018, and acts as a new privacy bill regulating online activity. It has had serious unintended consequences. One of its main provisions (Article 17) concerns the so-called “right to be forgotten”. This has allowed individuals to erase reference to their criminal activities on online databases. The compliance costs to small businesses have been so high that it has dampened growth in Europe’s digital economy (large corporations can cope because they have the resources — Microsoft has 1600 engineers working on GDPR compliance) (GDPR After One Year: Costs and Unintended Consequences, truthonthemarket.com, 31st May 2019).
The most recent is EU Copyright Directive 2019 (Articles 11 and 13). This was given its final approval in the EU Parliament in April 2019 (possibly mistakenly, as MEP’s then claimed that they didn’t know what they were voting for, ironically). The Directive is ambiguous and intrusive, giving news companies the right to charge for links to their articles, and the right to ban links altogether. It is a fundamental reworking of how copyright works on the Internet (see article by Cory Doctorow in www.eff.org March 19th 2019 for a detailed description).
Interestingly, very few EU nations actually wanted this change to copyright law, but as we have seen, the EU Commission proposes the law and the EU Parliament endorses it. In Sweden, for example, the legislation was opposed by the ruling government and by the opposition, and by the general public. But it is now EU law and the Swedes will have to live with it like everybody else. This illustrates why “emergence” is a genuine problem. It is not simply the case that each nation has to abide by a majority decision — rather, every nation has to live with a decision by the EU Commission which is a higher authority than the nation state.
10. Surreptitiousness.
Much is made of dishonest campaign slogans by Leave (“False claims on the side of a bus”) but we don’t hear so much about the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the EU project. From its inception, it was clear to the EU’s architects that erosion of national sovereignty would be deeply unpopular in most European states, and so the long slow process of obfuscation and secrecy was designed to hide the EU’s true purpose. Jean Claude Juncker, who is something of a comic-book villain in the British media, is an ideal representative of this tendency. Time after time he has made it explicit that “when it becomes serious, you have to know how to lie” (Gavin Hewitt, “The Real Jean-Claude Juncker, BBC, 15th July 2014).
Senior EU politicians have long understood that most European citizens have better things to do than fret over the complexities of constitutional change. The preferred modus operandi has always been a steady drip-drip of intrusion and infiltration rather than a headlong rush. Juncker summed it up best: “We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no-one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.” (Nick Timothy, Conservative Home, 8th March 2016).
There we have it in a nutshell. Not only the stealth, but the “interlock”. The secrecy, the misrepresentation of goals, the wilful ignoring of a democratic mandate, the illegitimacy of the constitutional changes, the self-appointed primacy, and the enactment of unhelpful directives; they are carefully interwoven until the day comes when “there is no turning back.” The idea that you can stay and change any of this is comically naive. Sometimes, when confounded by complexity, the boldest solution is the only workable one, and in this case voters decided to cut the knot. Remarkably, during the three-year national conversation about Brexit which has taken place, very few hard-line Remain voices have addressed the factors summarised above. And all the while the click click click of the EU ratchet has travelled smoothly onwards.
Life of a Strong Independent Woman 