The real EU issue is always sovereignty
Widdecombe
DO YOU want Britain to make its own laws? Do you want Britain to control British borders? Do you want Britain ruled by a democratically elected government? If your answer to any of those three questions is yes, then vote Leave tomorrow.
It is no good trying to decide on economic arguments alone because there is simply no united view as to what will happen if we stay in or if we come out. Even former chancellors of the exchequer are divided with Lamont and Lawson saying out and Clarke in. As for business, Sir Richard Branson says Remain, Sir James Dyson says Leave. And thus it is with academics, politicians, small business, large business and financial practitioners – they cannot agree.
So we need to take a long-term view because what we are discussing here is the very future of Britain. Will we be free or governed by 27 other countries?
For it is a certainty that if David Cameron could get no significant concessions from the others under the threat of Brexit we can kiss goodbye to having any influence if we meekly vote to stay in.
The Remain side often claim that we control 87 per cent of our own laws but that is mere sophistry. A law may not be a product of an EU directive but it must still be compatible with EU law, which is supreme. I spent seven years as a minister in, variously, Social Security, Pensions, Employment, Prisons and Immigration and in every department I spent an inordinate amount of time resisting EU intervention or making sure whatever we proposed was not likely to suffer challenge under EU law.
That is just one of many statistics along with trade statistics and those of votes in the Council of Ministers which can be made to look vastly more favourable than they are in reality.
For example it is often claimed that we are nearly always on the winning side in votes in Europe but that ignores the fact that we are rarely voting for what we actually want. Instead we are voting for the best deal we can get – after months of horse-trading – to avoid getting something much worse. Unless you have been directly involved in these crazy processes it is easy to be bamboozled by statistics.
As for imports and exports, the picture changes depending on whether you are looking at percentages, value, goods or services or both. However consider this telling comment, published not by Brexit but by the Government’s own Office for National Statistics: “Strong economic growth in many developing economies outside the EU has resulted in non EU economies growing in importance to UK trade with the proportion accounted for by the EU falling consistently since 1999.”
The same document points out that there is a trade deficit with the EU which has “widened noticeably” since 1999. In short the economic case for staying in falls well short of proven so look at the big principles instead: sovereignty, border control, democracy.
Not even the most rabid Remainer can argue that we will have more of each of those if we leave.