Why I’ll be voting to stay in the comic, wasteful, inefficient mess known as the EU

Some of my best friends are eurosceptics. Smart, informed, thoughtful people, not particularly extreme in their politics, they have come to the conclusion – often with reluctance – that Britain would be better off going it alone.

Tory ministers have told me that despite previously having been in favour of staying i n, their experience i n government, wrestling with the restrictions placed on them by eU regulations, has led them to flip. We should leave the whole sclerotic, bureaucratic mess behind us.

I’m not certain they’re wrong. I suppose I’m a bit of a sceptic myself. The eU is a cosmic grotesquerie, isn’t it? A pastiche of what a world government might look like, as scripted by Sir Anthony Jay or Armando Ianucci. Colossally inefficient, massively wasteful, seemingly populated by pumpedup Luxemburgers and bolshy Belgians and strutting French bantams, it is a farce staged on a grand scale, at taxpayers’ expense. And what expense – a budget of 960 billion euros between 2014 and 2020.

efforts at many of the necessary reforms are fitful, and often frustrated by vested i nterests – thus, farm subsidies are expected to account for around 38 per cent of eU spending over the next five years, ludicrous when we need to shift resources towards growth and jobs.

In an ever more competitive global market, with emerging economies from the east and South snapping at our heels, we’re not doing ourselves any favours.

Island

We also hear eU leader after eU leader tell us that Britain can’t have what it wants, that our desire for a looser deal on issues such as benefits and immigration goes against the project’s basic principles, that we have to follow the crowd.

The goal of ‘ever- closer union’ is nonnegotiable, a motorway without exits. And, of course, coded into us is the fact that we’re an island, that we don’t get invaded by Nazis, we don’t surrender, we choose the right side from the off, and we win. We’ve repeatedly fought and died for the right to self- determination, and the eU tractor beam threatens that.

I’m not immune to any of these arguments. As it happens, I do believe in British exceptionalism. I think we have a distinctive voice, informed by our unique history, our political and civic evolution, our grasp of free markets and the limitations of the state, our belief in compassion and solidarity. Partly because of that history and its modern legacy, we are in a better position than most to use our influence for good.

But this is also why, when it comes to me and the pencil and the bit of paper in the polling booth, I will probably vote to stay in the eU. A key reason I supported No in last year’s Scottish independence referendum was my belief that the UK’s role at the top table has a way to run. In a world of Vladimir Putin’s aggressive adventurism, China’s stumbling, uncertain steps into modernity and the dark tragedy that is so much of today’s Arab world, I prefer the idea of a British voice among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. I think the values we share with our American friends and others, of individual freedoms and state accountability, are more effectively advanced together. I don’t see how us leaving the eU helps this – and nor do the Americans.

I look at the German miracle, that country’s late 20th century emergence from darkness into light, at the role our formalised european unity has played in this process, and feel grateful. ours was a continent tormented through centuries by bloodshed and insane extra-territorial ambitions – but not any more.

A YouGov survey found that German people support the UK staying in the eU by 58 per cent to 18 per cent, with more than half saying the Union’s leaders should negotiate to make an exit less likely.

This is not blind euromania, keeping the show on the road at all costs – after all, a majority of Germans would like to see Greece leaving the euro. We also have Angela merkel, the most impressive world leader of her era, promising to help David Cameron secure the changes he needs.

As with the advocates for Scottish independence, the eU’s harshest critics seem determined to dismiss all the achievements of the status quo and instead focus relentlessly on the problems.

I see the same kind of super- excited assertions flying about that so depressed me during last year’s referendum campaign. Look at Norway! or Switzerland!

The Tory meP and passionate outer Dan Hannan seems to be driven almost batty by europe. He wrote in the mail recently: ‘The General election has just finished, but the eU referendum campaign is already getting under way. The first settled which party would be in office; the second will settle whether elections in Britain matter. Will the United Kingdom be an independent nation… or will it be part of a country called europe?’

A country called europe. I really don’t think that’s what the Germans want, Dan. I don’t believe, having been frustrated in their less diplomatic strategies to win Lebensraum, they are now attempting to conquer us by stealth. I think they see a fellow major economy with a magnificent private sector and free-market values that can help them balance the eU against French and southern european statism. And I struggle to be against that, or to think it sensible to walk away from the potentialities of Anglo-Teutonic partnership.

‘The case against the eU is not nostalgic, fearful or petulant; it’s optimistic, modern and global,’ says Dan. I’m sure Tim montgomerie, another chum, would agree. Tim is a newspaper columnist who set up the Conservative Christian Fellowship, the CentreC for Social Justice, and the Good Right, a campaign to encourage the moral argument of the right-of-centre position. He is a fine human being, obsessed with improvingm the lot of the least well- off. I d don’t disagree with him about much.

And yet, chatting last week, I told him there was one thing likely to push me towards embracing the idea of an independent Scotland – the UK leaving the eU. Tim’s response was something like, ‘well, I’d rather england left the eU and Scotland went its own way than we stayed in so that Scotland sticks with us’.

Outlandish

Way to make a boy feel wanted. And the more I hear of this view, the more I think ‘Alex Salmond’. When I see Tim argue that Barack obama has no right to say he is ‘looking forward’ to Britain remaining in the eU, a little bit of me dies. Here we go again: rather than listen to our allies and take into account their reasons for feeling as they do, they are told to butt out.

As the debate goes on the outers will grow angrier, make outlandish claims and give short shrift to reasoned argument from the other side. Conservatives for Britain, a campaign for an out vote, has 50 Tory mP members, and claims it will get more than half the parliamentary party. Whether he wins or loses, this does not bode well for mr Cameron.

I hope the pro-eU campaign makes a better fist of it than did the Better Together outfit. There are a number of lessons to learn – be realistic, and at least as positive as you are negative. Argue that we are better off sticking with supranational institutions, as infuriating as they are, and continually working from within to make them that bit less imperfect.

Point out the consequences of walking away – a choice that will determine our future place in the world, that is predicated on bold and often contradictory guesses, and that is likely to see the loss of Scotland. There is no Utopian alternative – merely the option of being a less relevant, less consulted, nosy neighbour who no longer gets invited to the local parties.

Yes, the eU is a bit of a basket case, but the same can be said of the UN, Nato, the World Trade organisation, the International Criminal Court and the World Bank. Compromise, the taking into account of the opinions and habits of the other guy, is very often the price of solidarity. When it comes to the eU, for all its bad habits, it still feels to me like a price worth paying.