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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 23^rd June.