EU Referendum

On June 23, the nation goes to the polls to vote on the EU Referendum. With the UK rail industry heavily affected by any decision on whether to remain in the EU, RailReview’s Editorial Board decided to present the facts to the industry through RAIL…

With the vote on EU membership looming, how will the way the nation votes affect the UK rail industry?

June 23 is a date many of us have lodged in our minds. Whatever your views on the EU Referendum, it’s a subject you can barely escape in the media at the moment… and for good reason. The outcome either way will have a huge impact on the future of the UK, and businesses in particular are clamouring to have their say before the British public decides its fate.

However, the issue is surrounded by confusion. And the information available from both the Vote Remain and Vote Leave sides often does not answer the most burning questions.

Professor Dieter Helm, an economist who specialises in fields such as utilities, infrastructure and regulation, recently wrote about what the country could look like on June 24 when the results are in.

If we vote to remain in the EU, he says: “We would know that the internal market remains open to us, and we would not have to renegotiate our trading arrangements - they would be the same as they were on June 22.

“All the directives that govern our trade, state aids, the internal energy market and competition policy, and contextualise our regulation of utilities, finance and the environment would be exactly the same. Not much of this is ideal, and some of it is at best very inefficient, but at least we would know where we stand.”

And his view on a Vote Leave outcome (aside from the potential for a Conservative party ‘civil war’) is: “Whereas it is pretty straightforward to predict what ‘remain’ would look like (the situation on June 22), Vote Leave cannot provide a blueprint for what ‘leave’ actually looks like.

“There are two reasons for this. The first is fundamental - Britain leaving the EU cannot be defined without including all the details about what the world would look like after so many other things change, many of which are outside its control. Change implies things will be different, but ‘different’ is not open to precise definition.

“That is why both sides’ arguments about the economic post-exit world are, at best, scenarios. Detailed modelling and statements about the ‘facts’ are not going to shed much light, for the very good reason that there are no facts on the leave side. There can’t be. They are all conjectures.”

This is a view shared by Rob Aird, a partner at law firm Ashurst. The firm recently