Battle is joined. In the coming weeks the bemused UK public will mull over the pros and cons of the UK’s EU membership, and then give their view in a fateful referendum in June. As US ambassador-poet James Russell Lowell put it in the C19:
Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ‘twixt that darkness and that light
I recall unhappily the previous UK referendum on EU membership back in 1975 when I was still a callow student. I feebly did not know what to think, and so did not vote.
Maybe my views have not changed much. The UK’s EU membership has advantages and disadvantages. One strategic advantage is that it offers a coherent view on managing Europe’s many fissiparous tendencies. The fact that the transition from Soviet imperialism to something like normal life has taken place in central Europe following the end of the Cold War can be listed as an EU credit. Yes, some of it might have happened anyway with a very different sort of EU or even no EU in its current form. But I have no doubt that the tedious disciplines of EU membership processes have helped those countries adapt and focus on tough reform packages, and helped scale back the scope for explicit Moscow meddling.
As I see it the core disadvantage has been an explicit erosion in the quality of UK democracy. Far too many issues with legislative ramifications are now sorted out untransparently in Brussels. It’s next to impossible to find out what UK policy even is on issues where EU Qualified Majority Voting holds sway. Once a QMV decision looms, it suits every government involved to keep quiet about what it really wants and doesn’t want in the hope of squeezing out some advantage in the haggling.
Eroding democracy and associated outsourcing of key legal decisions to the European Court of Justice affects everything for the worse. We end up with sloppiness in thinking and a wider dumbing-down of basic effort: if something ‘more or less acceptable’ is going to emerge, why try hard to influence the outcome?
Back in the 1980s, the FCO ECDs (European Community Departments Internal and External) were the career place to be for bright young diplomats. The smartest brains and drafters worked there, grinding out brilliant two-page summaries of the most complex issues to brief Ministers. Over time that disappeared. As the EU’s competences expanded, the lead role of the FCO ebbed away in favour of Cabinet Office-led Whitehall coordination. By the time I left the FCO in 2007 the UK Ambassador to the EU was quietly bewailing the fact that no-one who was any good wanted to do EU work any more: it was seen as something almost embarrassing and bland.
Things were not helped by the bafflingly stupid Labour Government decision to abandon the UK’s European Fast Stream civil service option, thereby helping reduce the numbers of credible UK candidates for senior EU positions – in 2011 William Hague wisely brought it back.
But all this is part of a wider phenomenon. The hard fact is that most British people just don’t care about the EU or even know anything at all about it. Most British children go through their whole education up and beyond degree level without spending a single hour learning about the way the EU works and the UK’s role in it. That includes those who do A-Level Politics. This suits the political classes who can dip in and out of EU issues to make trite self-serving points on a completely opportunistic basis, knowing that they too scarcely need to know much detail as no-one else knows anything at all.
Take the EU Budget. It’s agreed in principle every seven years. Spending over each seven-year cycle is not uniform. So in any one year the UK’s contribution into the EU pot may be going up (Boo – bad!) but within a tightly controlled overall ceiling (Hurrah – good!). It’s next to impossible to explain the workings of this in ways mere voters can quickly grasp. I’ve done my best, but who wants to read this stuff?
In this depressingly messy situation comes the new UK referendum. PM David Cameron is trying to persuade us that his ‘settlement’ makes all the difference.
Here are the key documents. They are almost impenetrable, not least in how far if at all they are ‘binding’, legally or otherwise. But it’s fair to say that while it was not possible to do anything more without changing the key treaties, these ‘reforms’ add up to very little when you look at them in detail. No doubt they’ll be quickly forgotten as the Brexit debate unfolds, in favour of wider clashing noises:
Steady as she goes! No, it’s time for a change!
Too risky to leave! No, it’s too risky to stay!
To be continued.
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Thank you for pretty much confirming my position of haven’t a bloody clue what to vote, but one thing that struck a chord was “I’ve done my best, but who wants to read this stuff?”
and “Here are the key documents. They are almost impenetrable,”
Of course I want to ask -why are these documents or formulae or whatever they are-so impenetrable?
‘Complexity’ is not really a answer – because complexity is all around us and many people choose to engage in it. Some even do it for fun. The impenetrability, is of course manufactured, and it is the question-why do we live in an ‘impenetrable’ fog of uncertainty. That in itself seems unsatisfactory.
Sorry for being simplistic but it is a bit like being married and not being at all sure that its has any benefit any more. It can go on (the marriage) but there is a sense of eventual resolution of the uncertainty, by some kind of crisis.
I also remember many many years ago taking delivery of an EU file , passed to me in my role as a member of a local community council. It was something like six thousand pages consisting of budgetary arrangements relating to certain designated regions that qualified for financial aid. i made the decision to try to get through the innumerable financial statements and realised eventually that it was mostly about the monstrously huge budget allocation on the cost of maintaining the associated administration. Eventually I got to position of doing some kind of calculation of the remaining pot that the area would be able to compete for. It was, needless to say, a negligible proportion of the whole but what I remember , was pointing it out to people who were apparently in positions of some authority, who had never questioned or delved into any of the detail.
Impenetrable indeed.
The complexity point is interesting. In the EU there is no 'common sense' in the literal meaning of the term and so no real common trust. That's because there is no common political/cultural language.
Everything therefore has to be spelled out in microscopic detail so that all sides know what they have or have not agreed. That leads to 'complexity' and the jungle of process as if for its own sake that we now see. This in turn creates amazing transaction costs and waste in simple documentation of the sort you describe.
Unsustainable? Probably, whatever happens in this UK referendum…
I firmly believe the Eu is dead. You guys are going through a version of the famous "parrot sketch" done by your countrymen. The Eu is the shopkeeper and everyone else is Cleese.