May you live in interesting times
This was no ordinary election. A blindingly obvious thing to say, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless.
We were asked an absolutely enormous, existential question by our government – and one that boiled down to just two answers, ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’. We were subject to campaigns from both sides which were defined by anger rather than reason, and in the end a little more than half of the country chose to leave. It was decisive, and we should respect that decision. Now is not the time to look backwards and pick over the mechanics of it all, but instead to look forwards and think about what happens next.
That said, two things that make the referendum different to other elections are worth bearing in mind as we think about the future.
The first is that it was an election based on proportional representation in a country that is defined by its first-past-the-post system. If you’re a Tory in Liverpool, or a Labour voter in Berkshire, your candidate is never going to be on the winning side. So why not put a cross in the box next to UKIP or the Greens instead? They will never get in, but at least it sends a message. Should we really be surprised if, in a referendum campaign dominated more by heat than light, they thought perhaps the same rules might apply here?
That’s why I don’t think those on the Remain side should be making the few people who say they now regret their ‘Leave’ vote the scapegoats for what has happened. If you want someone to blame for that, blame those in power who did not explain the terms of the referendum properly. And remember that there are nowhere near enough regretful Leave voters to have tipped the balance in the other direction, and that if we had voted 52-48 in favour of ‘Remain’ then an equal number of people would probably be thinking “what if?” and wondering if they should have voted Leave. It’s wrong to focus on that small group of people, and a distraction from what we need to be thinking about right now.
The second difference is even more important, because it points to what might happen next. We’re used to voting for political parties, single units defined (roughly) by a set of values turned into specific policies in a published manifesto. When that party gets into power, we know (again, roughly) what to expect from them and we have a set of promises to hold them to in future.
That’s not the case this time. The ‘Leave’ camp was not a coherent entity, and so no one single politician within it is going to feel bound to enact what another one committed to. They all have a different view of what a post-EU UK looks like. We’re already seeing that: Dan Hannan doesn’t think that we should put restrictions on immigration, which for others was the key issue of the debate; Nigel Farage doesn’t think that any money saved by leaving the EU should be spent on the NHS, which to some was a cornerstone of the Leave campaign.
This isn’t business as usual; this is pick‘n’mix politics, a kind of Darwinian policy-making in which only the most populist will survive. Every single element of our national life which was previously defined by our EU membership is potentially up for grabs. If we want certain things to survive into our brave new post-EU world, we’re going to have to fight for them.
As a Labour party member, trust me when I say that now is not the time to walk off the field of play. When we lost power in 2010, we spent six months navel-gazing while the Conservatives defined the terms of debate for the next five years: a focus on deficit reduction and public service cuts above all else. Then again, after the 2015 general election, we indulged in a lengthy and bitter leadership campaign while the sequence of events was put in place that led to last Thursday’s vote, and the Leave side started campaigning in earnest straight away.
We simply cannot afford to let the same thing happen now. We need to decide what it is about our country that we value most and make sure that those things are at the heart of this new process of national self-realisation.
People will have different views about what they should be. For my money, it’s workers’ rights, environmental protection and the fight against tax avoidance. All of those policy areas were defined by our EU membership. I don’t want to see vital protections for British workers and key pieces of climate change legislation redefined as “red tape” and abandoned. I don’t want to see my country turned into an offshore tax haven for the rest of Europe in a desperate attempt to stop businesses leaving for somewhere else.
That is our task now, and it is vital. Before last week, many people said that the question we should be asking was: “what kind of country do we want to be?”. That wasn’t a one-off; we need to be asking ourselves that question every day while the future of our nation and its relationship with the wider world is negotiated for us by a disparate set of politicians who never stood on a single platform and do not have a unified plan for the future.
So to everyone who cares about what happens next, I say this: I know that things seem uncertain, scary and potentially pretty bleak. They do to me too. But this is no time to sit back and leave the big decisions to somebody else. We’ve got work to do.
In defence of public service
Last Thursday afternoon, the MP Jo Cox was murdered on the streets of Yorkshire, while out and about in her constituency, meeting the people she represented and listening to their concerns.
The wider debate about Jo’s killer’s motive – the extent to which he was acting alone, or linked to a wider movement – will rage on, and will not be easily settled. But one deeply worrying thing about her death could be said with certainty almost immediately: she was killed because she was an MP.
Jo Cox was killed because she had chosen a life of public service, and was therefore seen as a legitimate target. That’s a horrible thought.
It’s a truism in the internet age to say that people have become desensitized to the consequences of their actions when those actions take place online. Remove the eye contact, the personal connection, from an interaction, and otherwise mild-mannered people can say the most offensive and extreme things behind the comfort of a pseudonym and an avatar. Public figures in particular are ‘fair game’, as if several thousand followers and Twitter’s blue tick of verification means you can’t be hurt by awful things being said to or about you.
But what if that isn’t the end of the process? What if that desensitization starts leaking back into real life and – to some people – those in the public eye carry the protection of that blue tick with them wherever they go? They deserve it (and ‘it’ can be so, so much worse than 140 characters of vile abuse) because they have put themselves in that position, or so the logic goes. What if online forums and comment sections aren’t the final resting place for awful thoughts that no one would dare give voice to in real life, but instead a breeding ground for those thoughts to become actions?
All of this matters because the contempt with which politicians are currently spoken of is breathtaking. They are viscerally hated by large sections of the public. And it seems to be getting worse.
What is so sad is that this chimes so little with my personal experience working with politicians. Almost without exception, every MP or MEP or councillor I have ever met – from all parties – has gone into public service for the right reasons. They have chosen a path that involves long hours, hard work, intense public scrutiny, and incredibly difficult moral choices when many of them could have done something less all-consuming for more money. They are trying to do the best they can, according to their own values, every day.
But we have lost sight of all of that. Elected politicians are seen as grasping, venal, self-interested megalomaniacs. Unelected civil servants are seen as unaccountable, manipulative pen-pushers stitching up a system that works for them and no one else.
Those attitudes matter. Not just because the people on the receiving end of that abuse are human beings, with real feelings. Not just because we cannot hope to recruit a new generation of MPs or civil servants if that is how the profession is perceived. But because little by little they chip away at the contract between the government and the governed, until those unspoken ties – the ones that say “we put our faith in you to look after us” – start one by one to disappear. And when they go, we are in real trouble.
I’m not naïve. I know that significant responsibility for the way things are rests with politicians themselves. Too often, MPs and others have said the short-term, expedient thing to get them over the line in a single election, without thinking about the cumulative impact that has on the collective consciousness.
Again, that goes for all of them – be it a Labour party narrative that suggests anyone who ever votes Tory is fundamentally evil; a Conservative election campaign built on the suggestion that anyone who finds themselves out of work is a “skiver”; or the SNP turning a blind eye to virtual and physical intimidation carried out in their name. If we are going to rescue politics and public service, then politicians themselves need to reintroduce into the public debate the values and the decency which so many of them embody in their day-to-day business.
The media also has a clear responsibility. One of the more heartbreaking things in the aftermath of Jo Cox’s death was hearing so many people say: “she sounded so wonderful; how come we never heard of her before?” Because journalists don’t write stories about MPs doing their jobs well until after they have retired or, too often, passed away.
Newspaper editors will tell ethics committees that they just give their readers what they want – that the demand is there for salacious gossip and they altruistically respond to it. But at the same time they are attracting advertisers by telling them that their newspaper is an organ of influence: that it has the power to shape debate, to change opinions and behaviour. The truth, as ever, is somewhere in between – which means that journalists and newspapers have a duty to give us a much better and fairer representation of public life than they currently do. They can’t just wait until something horrendous happens before they discover that some politicians were all right after all.
Finally, though, we as citizens need to look at our own role. If the newspaper editors are half-right, then we help to create the demand for stories that do down the role of government and public service as a whole. And those unpleasant, dog-whistle tactics we increasingly see at the tail end of political campaigns are a response to an existing public mood as much as they are an attempt to move that mood in a particular direction.
Democracy is a two-way street. We’re not passive; we are participants – and we have to participate in a civilised and respectful manner if we hope to elect politicians who will do the same with one another. That means taking the time to listen to those who try to tell us that situations are complex and that there may be no easy answer, instead of shouting them down. It means rising above the kind of petty ‘activism’ that sees MPs who voted against action in Syria labelled as “terrorist sympathisers” and those who voted for it sent photographs of dead babies.
We all – the politicians asking for our trust, the press which holds them to account, and the citizens who elect them – need to rise to the challenge that Jo Cox’s death presents to us as a democracy. And that challenge is so simple, so banal that it shouldn’t need to be repeated, and yet on days like this it feels like it has to be: we all need to start being nicer to one another.
It ain’t easy
In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a new Facebook trend. Every time I log in, another one of my friends is asking their social network the same question: “how do you think I should vote in the referendum?”
Depressingly, this is almost always followed by that friend saying that they feel completely let down by the people who are supposed to be giving them the guidance they need. “How can I trust any of them?” they ask.
I don’t blame anyone who feels like that. Too often, it seems the debate is being dominated by people just hurling abuse at one another, making a bold assertion which is then instantly denied by the other side. The message they seem to be sending is: “Look, this is easy. Just vote for us. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.”
But the question on the ballot paper is anything but easy. We insult people’s intelligence if we pretend that it is. You can’t just tell someone that they’re a moron for disagreeing with you and hope that that’s good enough to get them on board.
So, in the interests of trying to help out those friends of mine who are still unsure, and in an attempt to do so in a way that takes some of the heat out of things, below are my thoughts on a few key areas of the debate, and what you might want to think about if you are still undecided. It’s a slightly longer blog than usual, but I hope it’s helpful to at least a few people.
To be upfront and honest – this will not be an unbiased read. I am vehemently pro-Remain, and so I’m not going to sit on the fence. But I’ll try to explain it in a way that shows how I got to that position.
And I promise I won’t think you’re an idiot if by the end of it all you don’t agree with me.
The cost of membership
We pay to be a member of the EU. There is no getting away from that fact. It is a club with a fee. Larger and more prosperous countries like the UK pay more than smaller, less well-to-do ones.
It’s important to get that figure right, though. It is not – despite what you might have seen from the Leave campaign – £350m a week. That figure is simply incorrect, and it’s calculated by doing some pretty dubious maths.
The accurate figure is £8.5bn a year. The Leave campaign’s figure assumes a much higher amount of £18bn. That’s how much the UK would pay, if you didn’t factor other things in. For instance, we have an instant rebate of £5bn, taking it down to £13bn. And then the EU directly spends £4.5bn on the UK – investment in infrastructure, medical research, support for the poorest regions in the country – bringing it down to £8.5bn.
As a standalone figure, that sounds like a lot – and of course, when we’re talking about taxpayers’ money, it is. Any government should be making sure that a sum like that is well spent. But it is also worth thinking of it in context: every year, our government spends over £730bn in total. That makes our EU membership fee a little over 1% of total spending. Put another way, of the £11,500 that is spent per person per year in the UK, just £133 is spent on being a member of the EU.
Some people will still argue that’s too much – and you might agree – but it’s important we do it on the basis of proper figures, and that we put those figures in context. It is also worth considering, of course, that our relationship with the EU is not purely transactional, and that our £8.5bn arguably delivers a lot more for us, which is a little harder to directly quantify.
Trade and the economy
Respected estimates put the number of British jobs linked to our membership of the EU at three million. But it’s hard for people to know what that means. Which jobs? If we left, would they disappear overnight? And isn’t the UK one of the world’s largest economies anyway? Wouldn’t we cope on our own?
Firstly, it is worth saying that – as with all economic predictions – no one can really tell you the exact impact of leaving the EU. There are too many variables for precision.
But it is at least worth bearing in mind that pretty much every respected economic voice – the Treasury, the Bank of England, the IMF, the Institute for Fiscal Studies – think that the impact would be negative. And we are already seeing examples of the kind of economic trouble that we might face. Last weekend, a number of polls gave the Leave campaign a lead. On Monday morning, the pound fell 1.5 cents against the dollar. And in April and May of this year, investors took a total of £68bn in cash out of the UK – that’s the biggest withdrawal since the financial crisis. And that’s just what’s happening when people think we might leave.
Secondly, you need to define the timescale we are talking about. In the short term, absolutely everyone – including the Leave campaign – agrees that there would be a significant shock to the UK economy, and it would be a negative one. The disagreement is then over how long it would take to recover.
Brexiteers argue that the EU needs us more than we need them, and so it would be in their interests to arrange a new trade deal with the UK as soon as possible. To justify this, they point out that while £223bn of UK exports go to the EU every year, some £291bn of EU exports go to the UK. By that measure, we are more important to them than the other way around.
Again, though, context is everything. For the UK, that £223bn is nearly 50% of all our exports. For the EU, their £291bn is just over 10%. In that sense, we are much less important and in a much weaker negotiating position.
Of course, we can’t – and shouldn’t – deny that the UK is the fifth biggest economy in the world, and so will be able to strike reasonably good trade deals with other countries around the world in time. But we would be doing that as a standalone country of 65 million people, and not part of the world’s biggest trade bloc of 500 million. And it would take time: the EU-Canada trade deal currently on the table has taken seven years so far.
So in the long run we could get back to a position of strength, following the short-term economic shocks of Brexit. But, as John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead”. How long is acceptable for the UK to be suffering economically, and for people to be out of jobs or in low-paid ones? Five years? Seven? Ten? If you’re 20 now, then that’s the first decade of your working life hamstrung by trying to find a job in an underperforming economy. Is it worth doing that to ourselves – administering a self-inflicted shock so soon after the financial crisis?
Immigration
Last, but far from least, is perhaps the most emotive and divisive issue of the referendum: immigration.
To a large extent, people’s views on immigration in the EU debate will reflect their views on immigration as a whole. Fair enough, you might think. But it is still important to be clear about what exactly is on the table – and what isn’t.
Immigrants currently arrive in the UK from both EU and non-EU countries. In 2014, 168,000 people from outside the EU came to the UK. You might think that figure is too high, about right, or too low. But it has nothing to do with the referendum on our EU membership. The UK government has the power to restrict that number to zero if it wants to, whether we are in the EU or not.
Immigration from EU countries is different. Being part of the EU means signing up to the free movement of people (as well as of capital, services and goods) and that means allowing other EU citizens to come and work in our country. By the same token, UK citizens are free to go and work elsewhere. The figures suggest that this is generally balanced: there are about two million EU citizens living in the UK, and about two million UK citizens living in other EU countries. So you could see it as an equal exchange, if you want to look at things in that way.
Added to that is the fact that EU migrants are net contributors to the UK economy. They tend to be highly educated, of working age, and they pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits (in fact, just 0.2% of EU migrants claim out-of-work benefits without having contributed first). We are not part of the so-called ‘Schengen’ system (of passport free travel), and we cooperate closely – through Europol – with our EU partners to make sure that suspected terrorists and people with criminal convictions are not allowed to enter the UK.
And lastly, there is the fact that those countries which are in Europe but outside the EU – like Norway and Switzerland – have to accept the principle of free movement if they want access to the single market. So if we want to secure that good trade deal, we might not be able to close the borders anyway. And if we prioritise lowering immigration, then the price tag would come in the form of a much worse deal economically. That’s a key question for the Leave camp: which is most important to them, protecting the economy or reducing levels of immigration? Because it’s very hard to see how you could have both.
The fact is that for a lot of people such statistics won’t matter. Theirs is an emotional response. They don’t like that, over time, they have seen – or worry that they will see – the culture and traditions of their town, city or whole country changed by immigration. They don’t like that whenever they have tried to raise those concerns they feel they’ve been labelled a bigot or a racist and told they’re not allowed to think like that. It’s a vein of sentiment that Nigel Farage has very cleverly tapped into, telling people that he is the only one who understands those concerns and somehow – pretty disingenuously – saying that if we only left the EU these things would be better.
I think we need to have a national conversation about immigration. I think it needs to be of a level and a calibre considerably higher than anything that we’ve had so far, and certainly than we’re seeing in the referendum debate. In fact, I think if we’d had it a lot earlier then the polls probably wouldn’t be looking as close as they are now. But we simply do not have time to have and resolve that debate in the next 11 days.
Instead, I think it’s best for people to consider the multiple elements of the EU debate before they cast their vote:
- It does cost money to be in the EU. But that money is a fraction of what we spend as a nation, the tangible returns are good and the intangible benefits are enormous.
- It’s hard to say exactly what our economic future would look like outside the EU, but everyone says that it would be bad in the short term, and that “short term” could be seven years or more.
- Immigration is of course part of the debate. But only a part of it, and one that is intrinsically bound up with economics. There are as many Brits in the EU as there are EU citizens in the UK. And those that are here are contributing. Leaving the EU would not address the concerns that many people have about immigration, valid or otherwise.
After thinking about all of those things, I vote to Remain. I vote Remain for many more reasons, as I’ve written about before – because I want my country to be at the top table internationally; because 70 years of unbroken peace didn’t happen by accident; because I’m proud of a Union that makes our environment healthier and our working lives safer – but I don’t want to pretend that it’s an easy decision for anyone. It’s hard. The implications are massive. It deserves thinking about.
And it’s in that spirit that I hope, in some small way, for at least one person, all of the above helps them when they’re considering which box to cross on 23rd June.
the unfinished article 
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