Ok. I've come to this party late. I will say from the off that I have only a passing interest in politics. I read around subjects that interest me, but in general, as I have no actual say, I don't get very invested. Of course, the EU referendum is one of those occasions when my voice carries a tiny amount of weight and, as such, I am trying to make a well informed decision.
First, it's great that you want to make an informed decision
. Second, because the vote is expected to be close and is much more important than even any general election vote, your voice will carry a lot more weight than you might think.
A well informed decision you say? Pretty difficult when the campaigns put out have been so incredibly negative that they have regressed into scare mongering from both sides.
The campaign hasn't been very good at all to be honest. There are some places out there where you can find more informed and reliable information though. The EU referendum reality check that the BBC has made is good, for example.
1. Trade Agreements.
If we leave the EU, we will have to negotiate new trade agreements. The Remain campaign suggests this will be difficult, the Brexiteers suggest otherwise. In 2014, the UK exported £230 Billion in goods to the EU. We imported £289 Billion. Surely it would be more important for the EU to organise a trade deal that is of benefit to both, considering we are net importers of goods? Or am I being incredibly naive?
And if we leave, will we not be able to negotiate our own deals with other markets such as India and Australia? Areas which we trade with, yet the EU has been slow to negotiate with...
It is very difficult to negotiate trade deals. For Leave campaigners to suggest that countries would be queuing up to negotiate with the UK in the event of a Brexit is misleading to say the least.
To take the two countries you've given as examples, they are both on the record as saying that they want us to stay in the EU, and that despite being Commonwealth countries, they would not treat the UK as a special case in the event of a Brexit. The Commonwealth has moved on since the end of the British Empire and they want to do the best deals for them not the best deals for Britain. That means negotiating with the largest trading blocs, which would not be an isolated UK.
There is also the question of TTIP. The Americans are prioritising this deal with the EU, so in the event of a Brexit, the UK is going to lose out through not being a part of this. There is also the concern that the worst neo-liberal aspects of this trade deal could be much worse for the UK if it were to negotiate its own bilateral deal along similar lines, and such a deal would take significant time to be completed too, owing to the US not prioritising it.
The numbers regarding the EU/UK exports and imports are correct, but even if the UK were to establish bilateral deals with every EU state, consider how much time this could take and how damaging this could be to UK exports. The EU is the UK's highest recipient of exports (45%), so it would be a negative outcome for all sides if the UK were to leave the EU.
2. The Membership Fee.
Depending on who you listen to, we pay somewhere in the order of 17-23 Million per day to be a member of the EU (After rebates funding agriculture, regional investment, investment in EU backed projects and the like). That makes us a net contributor, along with Germany, which, as I understand it, makes us the only 2 of 26 EU contributors that give more than we take.
I know that we get a lot of stuff funded by the EU...but surely if we're giving out more than we get back, we could just redistribute our membership fee to all the avenues that are currently funded and still have money left over for politicians to fund Duck Houses and the like? I appreciate that there will be additional layers of bureaucratic bullamphetamine parrot that bleed away some of this money by setting up think tanks and other stuff to determine where the money will go...but not to the tune of 17-23 million surely??
There are other countries which are net contributors too, notably France.
The only truly reliable figure about the UK's contribution to the EU budget (it's not really a membership fee) is £8.5 billion net per year. That is actually a very small amount of money. For example, the budget for the NHS in this country alone for 2015/16 is £116 billion (the King's Fund is the source for this). The EU budget is smaller than that of government departments, and the idea that there's plenty of it to be spent on other areas isn't correct.
Also, there's a very good paper written by an excellent LSE professor on EU contributions here:
http://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Who-pays-for-the-EU-and-how-much-does-it-cost-the-UK-Disentangling-fact-from-fiction-in-the-EU-Budget-Professor-Iain-Begg.pdf.
It's very short and he explains it better than I can.
The EU ensures that the money it invests in this country is spent appropriately. Without that oversight, the government of the day could spent the money however it wishes. Would it really direct this into the areas which will lose out? Higher education and farming (two sectors which would lose the most) have been poorly funded by successive governments for years. There is no evidence that this is going to change.
A prominent leave campaigner, Conservative MP, chair of the Health Select Committee, and former GP Sarah Woollaston quit the leave campaign because Vote Leave were using the wrong figures and making false claims about how they could spend money from our contribution to the EU budget on the NHS.
Also, Brexit is in no position to say how it would spend money because it's not running the government, Cameron and Osborne are.
In essence, the amount of money put into the EU budget is small, in relative terms, and could not be used to plug all the gaps that leaving the EU would cause in the way that Brexit is suggesting.
3. Professional workers from the EU working in Britain.
If we leave...where do all the nurses come from? And doctors, and any other skilled job which we have had to outsource for a very long time? I'm not trying to be flippant here, but we have something to be very proud of in the NHS, and if we suddenly cut off the source of a lot of those professionals that help make it work, where will it be in the future?
Quite.
There is a benefit to this country from economic migrants from within and outside the EU. The NHS has been one of the sectors which had to recruit from within and outside the EU because there are not enough people in this country who wish to work in the NHS.
4. UK influence within the EU.
I read a statistic that "Since majority voting was introduced in the late 1980s, the UK has voted against an EU legislative proposal seventy times - and lost all seventy votes.". This would suggest that the UK has no real influence within the EU.
Furthermore, because the EU gets just 1 seat in the World Trade Organisation, the UK effectively gets just a small percentage of that representation. Which seems to me fairly counterintuitive for the 5th largest economy in the world...
Where has that statistic come from just out of interest?
The key point about EU decision-making is that discussing votes in the Council of Ministers is a flawed proposition because they rarely take them. As I alluded to in a reply to Tangi above, their approach, in the vast majority of cases, is to reach a consensus without even taking a vote, even though they have the option to do so.
If you were to look at the sheer number of pieces of legislation, amendments, and all other matters which require 'a vote' on the different configurations of the Council of Ministers (there are different configurations for each policy area, e.g. one for finance, one for the environment, and so on, a bit like House of Commons Select Committees if you want a comparison to the UK system, but with much more power than House of Commons committees), even if the UK has lost seventy votes, it will have been on the 'winning side' of votes in thousands of cases.
The UK still has its own seat within the EU bloc on the WTO, so it's a bit of a red herring to go down that route, especially when you consider that one reason why the EU member states sit as one group is because the EU bloc has considerably more weight than a single EU member state. You only need look up the whole US versus EU tariff issues which have been taken to the WTO on a number of issues over the years.
5. The EU's view on its own rules.
Article 125 of the EU treaty expressly prohibits the bailing out financially of member states. Indeed, if my research is correct, it was one of the key points required by Germany before they agreed to the Euro.
And yet bailouts have occurred. If the EU is so willing on breaking their own rules...well, are any of the rules they have written sacrosanct, or are they able to tear them up whenever the mood allows?
Here is the clause 2 from article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty:
The Council, on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, may, as required, specify definitions for the application of the prohibitions referred to in Articles 123 and 124 and in this Article.This gives some freedom of manoeuvre when applying article 125, and it was this that was utilised to allow for bailouts. A very interesting blog post discussing this and the ECJ's court ruling on the matter can be found
here.
That said, I doubt that we would just tear up all of the good that the EU has given us the second we leave...or at least, I would hope not!
My response to this is opinion based. My view is that Boris Johnson, who has joined the leave camp solely to further his own interests by effectively setting himself up to challenge David Cameron for the leadership, would remove such regulations and protections without a second thought. He is much more of a neo-liberal than the current Conservative government is, and he would not be interested in any state led protections for people at all.
I think my biggest problem with this referendum is that I am being asked to vote at all.
Yes, I agree, and you are not alone with this view. The referendum should not be happening at all, because the majority of people know too little about the EU to make an informed decision and either have insufficient time or insufficient will to learn enough about it to come to an informed position.
I fear that this referendum will be decided on, frankly, fairly trivial points - or at worst, totally misguided points:
It could well be, and that's a very worrying prospect.
I don't want straight bananas.
Yup. One of the most important decisions that this generation will have to make may be influenced by the curvature of a banana...and that is fundamentally wrong. A decision of this import, of this magnitude, should be made by learned people that have studied all aspects (away from the grasping of lobbyists).
A fun fact for you. The EU directive on bananas never said that they should be straight or sold in bunches of three (which shows you the last time Boris Johnson went shopping for bananas
). Even better, it was repealed a number of years ago, so doesn't even exist any more. The EU has been cutting back on unnecessary directives for some time now. It's just that the leave campaign don't like to tell anyone that.