EU - Deputy Prime Minister Clegg (left) v UKIP Leader Farage (right)
At last, thanks to the challenge laid down by Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg on LBC the other week for UKIP Leader Nigel Farage to enter into a public debate on whether or not the UK should stay in the EU, we can begin to discuss some of the facts. I look forward to the second debate to take place soon on BBC2.
I am an enthusiastic European, but I'll say this about the EU: it is riddled with faults,
top-heavy bureaucracy, money-wasting procedures, and a set of accounts that
have not been signed off by auditors for years.
UKIP's solution is to leave it. The pro-Europeans' solution is to stay in and
do something about the faults.
Both solutions are fraught with difficulties.
There is a balance to be made, and pro-Europeans like myself
say that the benefits of membership outweigh the dis-benefits. Perhaps that
judgement is subjective, and the only way to be objective is to be presented
with facts. Which is why I'm glad these debates are taking place.
The next problem, when presented with “facts”, is resisting
the temptation to say that facts we don’t want to hear are either lies or
fear-mongering.
Putting millions of jobs
at risk can either be a fact, or fear-mongering, or both. If you don’t like
the statement you can say that the leaders of businesses like Siemens, Ford,
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hitachi etc. are lying when they say they are investing
in Britain because we are in the EU.
Stating that 480
million people have the right to enter Britain is a fact, but since it is
somewhat irrelevant, it is also fear-mongering. If a French politician was to say, “70 million British people have the right
to enter France” he would be factually correct, but what would be the point
of him saying it?
Anti-Europeans ask what's so special about the The European Arrest Warrant. It is favoured by senior police
officers because pre-EAW the average time to execute a successful extradition
was one year; under EAWs the average time is under 50 days.
Then they say we have criminals walking the streets because of failures in
deportation proceedings. Deportation failures are often caused by rulings handed down by the European Court of Human Rights. This
has nothing to do with the EU, and if we left the EU we would still be bound by
the ECHR until or unless we legislated our way out compliance with any of those
Court rulings.
UKIP are not against immigration, but are in favour of
controlled immigration. I don’t have any quarrel with that. Under the free
movement of jobs and people in the EU, it is clearly not possible to control migrants
from EU countries. If that causes a problem, then it should be reviewed.
Like it or not, the kind of world we live in now makes
membership of a powerful group more useful than being a little man on your own.
The EU is arguably big on bureaucracy and small on Democracy. I do feel that democracy is on life-support but then in my view we
never have had democracy before or after membership of the EU. Coming out of
the EU is not going to make us any more democratic until or unless politicians
bite the voting system bullet.
The one thing to be said about the European Elections is
that they won’t be based on “first past the post”. The (predicted) big win by
UKIP next month is largely thanks to the use of a system of proportional
representation. Come the General Election, both Clegg and Farage will be
victims of a voting system that takes little account of their true support.
The hectoring practice of the EU to get the right answer to any referendum on a treaty change is a weapon in the armoury of those who want to withdraw. The practice of calling a referendum and then calling
another one until the right answer is achieved is a huge puzzle to me. Firstly,
if a government is prepared to call a second one because they didn’t like the
answer, then that government is at fault. But then again, how does the right
answer come about? How or why do people vote one way in the first referendum,
and another way in a second referendum? Which of the two is democratic? They
both involved people voting.
At UK General Elections about half the people bother to
vote, and in European Elections the figure is more like one third. It’s a
disgrace. Voting should be a compulsory element of being a member of civilized
society. Education of children is compulsory, paying our taxes is compulsory;
why not voting? Ballot papers should have a “None of the above” or “Abstention”
box.
By the way, I have no objection in principle to a
(democratic) United States of Europe.
