Britain could cope outside the EU, declares May the reluctant remainer

Home Secretary says ‘the sky will not fall in’ if we leave but that on balance Britain should vote to stay

BRITAIN “could cope” outside the EU and is “big enough and strong enough to be a success story in or out of the EU”, Theresa May has said.

The Home Secretary used her first major speech of the referendum campaign to make clear that she did not think that “the sky will fall in if we vote to leave”, in a speech that positioned her as a “reluctant remainer”.

It was seen in Westminster as an attempt to counteract the Project Fear tactics of Chancellor George Osborne and David Cameron, the Prime Minister. It could also be an attempt by Mrs May to appeal to the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative membership which will select a successor to Mr Cameron within the next four years.

Mrs May told a small invited audience in Westminster: “I do not want to stand here and insult people’s intelligence by claiming that everything about the EU is perfect, that membership of the EU is wholly good, nor do I believe those that say the sky will fall in if we vote to leave.

“The reality is that there are costs and benefits of our membership and, looking to the years and decades ahead, there are risks and opportunities too. The issues the country has to weigh up before this referendum are complex. But on balance… I believe the case to remain a member of the European Union is strong.”

In her 40-minute, carefully argued speech, Mrs May said Britain would be safer as part of the EU. She dismissed the argument that the EU “does not make us more secure because it does not allow us to control our border” as “not true”. Outside the EU there would be no access to the European Arrest Warrant, which has been used to extradite more than 5,000 people to the Continent in the past five years, and it would be harder to share criminal records and biometric data.

But she accepted that the price of being in the EU was an inability to control immigration from within the EU, stressing that “nobody should think” that Brexit is the “single bullet that is suddenly going to solve all our immigration problems”. She said: “Free movement rules mean it is harder to control the volume of European immigration... but they do not mean we cannot control the border.”

Mrs May questioned a forecast from the Office of National Statistics that staying in the EU will mean that three million EU migrants might move to the UK by 2020. She said it was time to question the principle of “ever wider expansion” by allowing Serbia, Albania and Turkey – “countries with poor populations and serious problems with organised crime, corruption and even terrorism” – to join the EU.