What I did on my holidays
One of the hardest tasks faced by the ‘Remain’ campaign in the forthcoming European referendum is trying to communicate all those ways in which our membership of the EU makes things better and easier, but which have been part of our daily lives for such a long time that we risk taking them for granted.
I’m going to give this a go – in the manner of a primary school student coming back after a break – by telling you about what I got up to on my holidays.
Last week, my wife and I went to Scotland for a wonderful, relaxing Easter break. My Facebook friends can attest to the smugness of the photos that followed. What is less hard to spot or quantify is how much of our holiday was affected by the UK’s EU membership. Sounds a bit tenuous? Stay with me.
Let’s start with the fact that we are both British citizens working in Belgium. That alone is to do with our EU membership – as UK citizens, we have the right to work in any of the other 27 Member States.
We are then free to travel around the European Union on holiday, needing nothing more than our passports and tickets. It’s easy to forget that things aren’t always that simple. Travel somewhere outside the EU and you’ll often have to apply (and pay) for a visa several weeks in advance.
Then there’s the fact that, for the week that we were on holiday, both of us continued to get paid by our respective employers. You probably also get paid leave, and would expect to be entitled to it as part of your job’s terms and conditions. But you might not know that the right to that paid leave stems from the EU: it’s the Working Time Directive that guarantees 20 days of paid holiday a year, and that made millions of British workers’ lives better when it was introduced in 1993.
For our holiday, my wife and I were originally going to fly to Edinburgh. After all, the flights were pretty reasonably priced – no doubt in part thanks to the EU having put an end to the days where only certain airlines were allowed to fly to certain countries, meaning they could charge whatever they wanted.
In the end, our flights were cancelled, so we switched to travelling by train. We were entitled to a full refund of the cancelled flight. Again, this isn’t in UK law – it’s in an EU Regulation which guarantees compensation and assistance to people whose flights are cancelled or delayed for a long period of time.
We stayed in Edinburgh for two nights, before going up to the Highlands, where we stayed in the breathtakingly beautiful Glen Affric just west of Loch Ness. It’s hard to think of a better place to get away from everything – stunning, remote, untouched wilderness. And the reason that it’s untouched is because it is a ‘Special Protection Area’, as designated by – yep, you guessed it – the EU. Glen Affric looks as beautiful as it does because the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive say it has to.
None of this may seem like much on its own, and most of it would pass you by if you didn’t know to look for it.
But now try to imagine a Europe in which my wife and I found it much harder to work overseas in the first place; where if we wanted to take off a week of holiday we had to do it without being paid; where we had to fork out money and time to get a visa to go to a neighbouring country; where we lost a load more money on an expensive flight which was then cancelled with no prospect of a refund; and where when we finally got to our beautiful rural retreat the whole thing had been so overdeveloped that all that lovely wildlife had long since departed.
That may all sound quite apocalyptic, but it’s EU membership that guarantees all of those things. In a country that’s been a member since 1975, there are many of us who have never known a life outside the EU. But just because that membership is sometimes invisible to us, don’t think that it isn’t there – making life a little better, and a little easier, in thousands of imperceptible ways.
Land, air and sea – we’re better off in the EU
I was blessed to grow up in Shropshire. I may not always have thought it was a blessing – when you’re a teenager and what you want most in the world is access to all the temptations a giant city has to offer, then a rural idyll tucked along the Welsh border is not necessarily your first choice But now, every time I go back to visit my parents there, I think again what a wonderful place it is. If you’ve never been, picture the opening scenes of Lord of the Rings. It’s that beautiful. I am completely smitten.
Nearby are the striking mountains of Snowdonia, where I went on adventurous school trips and where my wife and I went walking last year, and across the county border in Staffordshire is the vast expanse of Cannock Chase, where I broke my arm when I was six (although I don’t hold that against the park).
I mention these places because they are all, rightly, protected for us and for future generations. But that protection doesn’t come from national law – it comes from the EU’s Nature Directives, bold and far-reaching legislation aimed at protecting our vital wildlife. Before those European laws were introduced, the UK was losing 15% of its protected sites every year. That figure is now down to just below 1%. And if you think that a Tory government outside the EU would still protect the countryside in this way, then it’s worth remembering that George Osborne described these protections as “placing ridiculous costs on British businesses” (a claim his own government discovered to be unfounded).
Some of the most beautiful, quintessentially British areas of the countryside – Snowdonia, Cannock Chase, Dartmoor and many more – therefore owe their status to our membership of the EU.
And it’s not just on land that we have reason to be grateful for being part of the Union. The air we breathe is going to get cleaner too. This isn’t just a nice-sounding thing to have. Every year, over 23,000 people die sooner than they should have done because of unacceptably high levels of nitrous oxide in the air. That’s appalling – and unsurprisingly, the nitrous oxide itself doesn’t really care whether the air it’s polluting is over the territory of the UK, or France, or anywhere else.
If we want cleaner air, then we need to act together – and the EU has introduced new legislation requiring just that. Labour MEPs like my boss, Anneliese Dodds, and Seb Dance are campaigning to make sure these new laws are now properly enforced.
The quality of air isn’t only important for us. As the RSPB has pointed out, there is categorical evidence that endangered species of birds, singled out for protection by the EU, are faring much, much better than they would be if those laws were not in place. It is undeniable that EU laws, while they can no doubt be improved and better enforced, are working to protect wildlife.
Lastly, British beaches and seas are in a better state because the UK is a member of the EU. The EU has introduced something called the Bathing Water Directive. OK, it sounds like a typically dull Brussels initiative. But it has resulted in 99% of all bathing waters around the UK coast meeting minimum standards for water quality. That’s up from a frankly hideous 27% in 1990. I was eight in 1990, and spent a significant part of my summer holidays swimming in the Channel. I shudder to think about quite what I might have been swimming alongside.
With this level of European level protection – and with a Conservative administration at home whose days of hugging huskies and promising to be the ‘greenest government ever’ are well behind them – it’s little wonder that environmental charities like the RSPB and Friends of the Earth, and respected publications like Nature magazine, are all queuing up to argue that we should stay in the European Union.
So however you are about to spend your Easter holidays – be it climbing mountains, walking through green pastures, braving a first dip in the sea, or just breathing in air that you hope isn’t going to shorten your life in any way – it will be a more pleasant experience because we are a member of the EU.
the unfinished article 
Recent Comments