EU Referendum

N.B. I initially published this post on tumblr BEFORE the referendum on 7th June 2016

I hate the referendum. I’m sick of talking about it, sick of hearing about it, and certainly didn’t want to write about it until I realised I could use it to bastardise the Hokey Cokey:

You mark your ballot paper in.

Your ballot paper out.

In, out, in, out,

You shake it all about.

You evoke your right to vote and u-turn around,

That’s what it’s all about.

Woooaaahh the Referendum.

Woooaaahh the Referendum.

Woooaaahh the Referendum.

Stats bent, facts stretched, ra ra ra.

Unfortunately this invasive political phenomena is also a perfect example of the polarization of current affairs – something that’s pretty integral to this series – so let’s get serious.

Last time I started with numbers, but that doesn’t fly so well here. Unlike immigration, there isn’t a core set of 2-3 statistics to come back to when things get tough; the EU affects a whole slew of stuff from trade, to travel, to border control, to currency, and everything in between. If I tried to box them all up into separate packages and strip them back to basics, we’d be here forever.

Instead I’ve started by fishing two things out of the kitchen bin: the government’s sixteen-page Remain leaflet, and a four-page leaflet by Vote Leave, who have been named by the Electoral Commission as the official Brexit campaign. These should, in theory, give me the bare bones of each campaign’s message.

I won’t go into reams of detail about the “facts” laid out by either – the info is out there if you want to subject yourself to it – but I’ll highlight the parts that stood out to me.

I’ll start with Remain.

Their leaflet makes three main points: there are economic benefits of EU membership (Single Market trading and so on), we already have a ‘special status’ in the EU (we’re not subjected to all of the same rules as the other countries) and, contrary to popular belief, we do have control over our borders.

The actual statistics the leaflet presents are, generally-speaking, factually correct*, but it does sometimes avoid giving other statistics that don’t reinforce its argument and you end up with different numbers depending on how things are measured (for more detail see the asterisked link).

So as with most aspects of this debate, all three of Remain’s core arguments are disputable – all yes, but.

It also doesn’t take a genius to see why the campaign has been dubbed Project Fear: the emotive language evoked throughout is striking.

To take one example of many, look at the section on economic benefit:

‘The EU is by far the UK’s biggest trading partner… remaining inside the EU guarantees our full access to its Single Market… leaving creates uncertainty and risk’.

The UK government’s PR department put their heads together and the best they could come up with was ‘uncertainty and risk’?

We might lose full access to the Single Market. Companies might leave the UK and jobs might be lost. The price of household goods might rise and we mightbe several thousand pounds worse off per household. Then again, it might be absolutely fine. It might even be better – who knows? Not this leaflet.

This is where the Remain campaign falls apart – for me at least. The EU can’t weigh in on exactly what will happen to us if we leave unless we actually do it, so a lot of arguments against leaving begin on solid ground and then trail off into speculation.

And now, to Leave.

Their key arguments are: greater control over our borders, laws, and trading (so we can decide things as a country without being overruled or forced to compromise) and the amount of money the EU costs us (which would be better spent elsewhere, on the NHS or education for example). Not unreasonable or illogical when taken at face-value.

However, there’s a great deal of scepticism about the latter in particular. The Leave campaign’s mascot – the £350 million they say the EU costs us per week – has had a lot of the stuffing knocked out of it.

According to Paul Johnson, Director at the Institute of Fiscal Studies the ‘actual figure’ we send per week is about £275 million because we get a rebate (don’t ask me why because I have no idea), and goes on to say that our net contribution – that’s the amount we end up paying once the money that trickles back to us had been deducted – is about £150 million**.

Still nothing to sniff at but certainly not £350 million either.

I doubt Boris Johnson pulled the figure out from under his hair, so £350mil probably is roughly the initial amount we sent to the EU every week. Yes, we don’t have a lot of control over exactly where that money goes, but it’s safe to assume that a great deal of it finds its way back into our economy.

So the figure isn’t technically a lie but it is deliberately misleading. Remain is guilty of the same thing of course, but not having any of its statistics painted on the side of a bus saves it from the same degree of criticism.

The selective representation doesn’t end here. Under the subheading ‘Immigration will continue to be out of control’ is a picture of Middle-Eastern-looking migrants crawling under a barbed-wire fence and the sentence ‘Nearly 2 million people came to the UK from the EU over the last 10 years.’

I mean, never mind that the vast majority of those won’t have entered the country under a fence and that a considerable number are probably making valuable contributions to the country today – though maybe I’m a hypocrite for speculating.

But wait, it gets better. Brought to you by the people who dubbed their opposition Project Fear:

‘Imagine what it will be like in future decades when new, poorer countries join.’

Oh boy.

But I can understand people wanting to leave for this reason. We are frightened by terrorism – legitimately so – and we’re perhaps more frightened by our powerlessness in the face of it. Nothing we can do will make it go away, so let’s shut ourselves away in a panic room and see if it leaves by itself.

I know people who want to vote leave and – while I might not agree with much of their politics generally – the majority of them aren’t stupid. There must be some social and economic benefits of leaving (or at least there must be an indication that Remain’s scaremongering will prove unfounded).

Unfortunately for them, the Leave campaign seems to prefer using thinly-veiled racism and questionable statistics in its promotional material, so my back-to-basics approach didn’t give me much of an idea what these benefits might be.

Maybe you’re thinking at this point that I’m pretty anti-Leave for someone who’s claiming to be on the fence, so I want to emphasise something here:

The EU isn’t just a single board of benevolent, worldly-wise individuals sitting around a table; it has (from what I understand) 4-5 main bodies that all influence the decision-making processes in various ways***. We can say one of two things about this:

A) that the more layers there are to filter through, the more democratic the process. No one is running around unchecked and the vast slew of interests and perspectives brought to the table(s) ensure that the outcome is as fair as it can be

or that:

B) out of all the bodies, only one (the European Parliament) is directly elected by being voted on, and the rest of the process is almost completely removed from everyday voters. How do you go about changing a system like that – one that’s purposely designed to ensure nothing can get through it without being diluted a million times over – from the inside?

Powerful countries are built on selfishness and the changes we, the UK, might want to make for our own good probably won’t be shared by anyone else, which means we’re unlikely to see any change at all.

Cameron’s “deal” is Exhibit A: the uselessness of it is one of the few things many people from both sides agree on.

I’ve never been more tempted to spoil my ballot – or just show up at all – but what would be the point in that?

At the end of the day I know which I’m voting, but I’m sure as hell not going to like it.

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*According to https://fullfact.org/europe/, though I didn’t look into where they got their information because if start fact-checking the fact-check, where should you stop?

**Speaking in the BBC documentary Britain and Europe: For Richer or Poorer?about 5-6 mins in. Available on BBC iPlayer as of posting.

***For a breakdown of how it all works, visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23488006. There’s a flow chart and everything.

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For more info on either side of the debate (from someone besides the two campaigns), head to the fullfact.org website cited above, where there are various fact-check articles on the debate.

Though I’m generally suspicious of anything from a media outlet and don’t like to use it as an actual source, The Guardian has an interesting (and reasonably neutral) comparison of the statistics interpreted by each side here:  http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2016/jun/03/brexit-how-can-the-same-statistics-be-read-so-differently?CMP=fb_gu