Weekly Economics Podcast with Caroline Lucas MP and John Hilary
This week we held our first debate on the Weekly Economics Podcast, in the week the country goes to the polls to decide whether or not to leave the EU.
Rather than shouting at one another through megaphones from rival flotillas, we decided to invite two mostly likeminded people - but with different views on the EU referendum - to have a respectful and dignified chat.
The response has been enormously positive. One listener wrote in to say:
It’s by far the clearest, most measured debate on the issue I and the friends I’ve been sharing it with have heard.
My girlfriend even went so far as to say “it was lovely” which surely must be a first during all the weeks and months we’ve had of discussions and arguing?
Not everyone has the time to listen to the whole thing, and I wanted to make it accessible to people living with hearing difficulties or deafness too. So here, along with the podcast itself, is a full transcript of the debate.
Kirsty Styles (presenter): Hello, my name is Kirsty Styles, and welcome to the Weekly Economics Podcast where this week we’re hosting our very first debate – and it’s not an easy one. It’s over the EU referendum just as people go to the polls on Thursday.
I’m joined by John Hilary, Executive Director of War on Want, and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas MP, to thrash it out. We’re here in Portcullis House, right next to parliament.
Caroline, you’re going to be presenting the pro-European case, and John, you’re going to be putting forward a more Eurosceptic view.
We’re going to have opening statements of a minute from both of you and we’ve flipped a coin so John, if you’ll start.
John Hilary (Executive Director of War on Want): Thanks very much. Right at the beginning of this, my organisation, War on Want, took a decision not to be campaigning either in or out but to use the opportunity to put out some education and experience we’ve had - in my own particular case, campaigning against the EU’s trade and other policies for the last 20 years. And I think that’s really what’s important here because 99.9% of the electorate who are going to be voting in this referendum have never had any direct experience of what the EU institutions really do or mean.
Of course, Caroline has much better experience than most people on this, but from our point of view I thought it was really important to say to people that there is something more to this than just the fuzzy ‘let’s be voting to be European’. This is not about a referendum to be European; it’s a referendum to be subject to the institutions of the EU, and that I think is what we should be focusing on.
Caroline Lucas MP (Green Party): I think what’s at stake in this referendum is who gains power from whichever outcome we have. So if there’s a Brexit, who gains power from that? And what worries me is I think it’s going to be the right of the Tory party and UKIP, and if that leads to the economy taking a hit and a recession, that means it’s my constituents in Brighton who are going to be having to struggle even harder to make ends meet.
And I have to say too that I can’t see any of the major challenges that we face today being easier to tackle if we’re doing it on our own rather than doing it alongside our EU colleagues; whether that’s climate change, the refugee crisis, or indeed trying to control the excesses of the international financial system. I think on all of those issues they’re going to be much easier to tackle by working together.
I’m not going to sit here and say the EU is perfect. Of course it isn’t. It does need to be reformed, it needs to be more democratic, so does Westminster. We need to work at both of those things. But to be able to change it, you need to be in it.
TRADE
KS: Thank you both for those opening statements. First of all, we’re going to focus on the economics of EU membership in this debate. As usual on this podcast we have a slightly broader view of what economics is made up of. Let’s focus on trade. How will leaving the EU, or remaining, affect our trade with other countries?
CL: You’ll have heard probably until you’re sick and tired of it the main campaign telling us how much of our trade depends on our relationship with the EU, our access to the single market… But actually what concerns me as somebody who really cares about small and medium sized enterprises for example is how we make it easier for them to deal with some of the bigger companies. And I think the fact that the EU provides some basic rules and key protections, which means for example that if you’re a small or medium sized enterprise based in Brighton then you’re not having to deal with 27 different sets of import policies, you can just deal with one… I think that helps to even up the power between the smaller companies and the big companies.
So I think that in terms of being able to improve the quality of trade and ensuring that smaller businesses can get their access too, we’re better off inside the EU.
JH: One of the interesting things that both Caroline and I have worked on for a long time is the EU’s relations in trade with other countries outside Europe, and that’s really an indication of how the EU has played an incredibly negative role on behalf of transnational capital.
The horrific savagery with which it’s imposed economic partnership agreements on the countries of Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific and indeed the raw materials initiative, which has opened up those countries to Europe, is an example of where when you want to break down the economics of the EU, you’ve got to think of the political economy. Who’s gaining from this? And every single time it’s big business. And that’s the trajectory of the EU at the moment.
The problem for us of course is it’s also the trajectory which our current government in this country also wants to take us on - and that’s where any talk of what happens in the future has got to look at the new trading relationships that we would have to negotiate post-Brexit.
We have a constant problem that this is not really our debate. We’re not being offered the sort of alternative we would like to see in this debate, which is of trade justice. Instead, we’re being shown these two predatory approaches and really I think the question comes down to power, as you said Caroline. Where is it that we can best fight the power of these transnational corporations?
CL: I completely agree with you that in a sense the two options on the table are both pretty distasteful, but the decision we have to make is are we going to have a better chance of being able to contain the power of transnational corporations by being part of the EU, or do we really think we’re going to be able to do it better as a single country on our own. And I just can’t see how that latter scenario adds up.
If you’re going to try to control transnational corporations then you need to have some power yourself, you need to have some weight, and that’s what the EU can give us.
When you’ve seen for example the role of the European Parliament, which on this issue has generally been as a constraining influence on some of the ambitions of the right-wing governments that currently sit around the table at the European Council, I think you also see that there’s a way in which we can try to ground the power of these transnational corporations by bringing it back home, and I think that the European Parliament has been central to that. The EU actually has gone much further to deal with things like the Panama papers, they’re just about to set up a whole new inquiry into tax avoidance… You need to be doing it at that level. As a single country on your own, I just don’t think you’re going to be able to tackle that power.
TTIP
KS: Speaking of trade, you’re both against TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Do you think remaining in the EU or indeed leaving would make us more or less likely to sign up to TTIP or any similar trade deals?
JH: This is one of War on Want’s big campaigns at the moment and we’ve been following it very carefully. On a very easy level, it’s clear that if we come out of the EU then the UK is free of TTIP. What it doesn’t answer is what we’d get instead - if we weren’t going to be getting TTIP, would we get something worse? And I think what’s interesting for us is it begins to open up the whole prospect of what we’d be fighting for here and on what terrain.
Clearly, again, you’d have a current government, whether or not under David Cameron or Boris Johnson or any of the other Tories, who would be pressing for the most neoliberal, regressive form of trade policy with no reference to social or environmental standards. However, that’s exactly what the EU is doing. Going back to your last point Caroline, the problem for us is that not only is the Council doing it (the heads of the 28 member states) and the Commission (the unelected ones who have the right of initiative to drive this through), but they’re being supported by the European Parliament, who seem to have absolutely no qualms about signing away all of our rights.
The difficulty for us who are campaigning so hard with all of our sister organisations across Europe, is we’re coming up again and again against this democratic barrier. We have no levers to be able to challenge that power imbalance.
We’re under no illusion that it would be better coming out for the current lot [of politicians], but at least we are on a field where we believe we can even up the forces to challenge for a better trade policy.
The nice news is that when President Obama came over he said to everybody in this country, 'ooh, if you vote for Brexit you’re going to be at the back of the queue for TTIP’, and we all thought, mm, sounds good, don’t mind if we do!
CL: [Laughs] Well on TTIP I want to say that I’ve spent many years of my life campaigning against it and similar trade agreements too.
I think the question before us is where is our best hope of being able to defeat TTIP, and actually I disagree with John on this.
If you look at what’s happening across the EU, you’ve got 250,000 people marching in the streets of Berlin, 3 million people across the EU signing a petition against TTIP, you’ve had sufficient mobilisation in France to mean the French government is looking like it’s going to do a very good job of blocking TTIP… So actually on one level you could say, it’s because we’ve got this potential to be working with allies right across the EU that we’ve got our best chance of stopping it.
But also as John said, let’s beware of what we might be replacing it with. The worst thing about TTIP is the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, which allows private corporations to sue democratically elected governments in private courts if they believe that a government is putting up a so-called barrier to trade - something that we might think is an environmental standard or health and safety is a barrier to trade as far as the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism is concerned.
Now that process is already in plenty of bilateral trade agreements, and you can be sure that a government under Gove or Boris or Cameron would be putting them into successive trade agreements that the UK signs up to here.
So anybody who thinks that by withdrawing from the EU we’re going to end up with a lovely, cuddly, friendly trade policy in the UK is really in a fantasy land.
JH: But let’s be clear - nobody thinks that. The key thing is whether we have the terrain to struggle for it [better trade policy].
I think what’s also important here is that this isn’t just a vote for the next 2-3 years - this is a long-term vote, probably the only one we’re going to have in our lifetimes as to whether we’re in or out of the EU. Therefore it’s not just about what Gove or Johnson or any of the current Tories would do. It’s about a long-term dispensation where we would say, do we take back the power to struggle for that ourselves?
While I completely agree there’s nothing to suggest we’re going to be heading into nirvana any time soon, what it would be doing is it would be giving us back the power, potentially, to argue for that - even in a country like ours which has traditionally been the most regressive, whether it’s been Tory or Labour administrations.
CL: I just think we would have more influence staying in the EU - we could be making more of an alliance between civil society movements across the EU, and that is already being done incredible effectively. Again, I think that’s much easier to do alongside our EU colleagues.
JOBS
KS: So let’s move onto jobs. How do you think staying in the EU, or leaving, would affect the number and types of jobs in the UK. Caroline?
CL: You’ll have heard plenty from the campaigns so far in terms of making the point that we’ve got more jobs as a result of our membership of the EU, and the figures are disputed, but I think it’s clear that there are more jobs. And also, crucially, in terms of the quality of those jobs and making sure that there’s a level playing field, the fact that workers’ rights are agreed across the EU means that there is some resistance to the race to the bottom. Because what you find, obviously, is that private companies will try to play off one country against another to try to find the cheapest place for them to set up to do business. So that’s why it’s so important to have workers’ rights right across the EU, to make sure that there is that minimum standard, below which those corporations cannot bargain downwards.
JH: Yes, there is the issue of both quantity and quality. We’ve heard a lot of figures banded about - one of the calculations which came out of the European Parliament’s policy division just a few weeks ago was that if the UK stays in and we have TTIP, there’ll be about 150,000 jobs lost in the UK as a direct result.
Now, we always take these statistics with a pinch of salt, but we play them back to the people in the European Commission - who are trying to sell us TTIP as a great jobs and growth idea - that actually there’s going to be a massive cost. And that again comes back to the position which I think we both share, Caroline, that the issue here is about the distribution of power and wealth within Europe, and that gets to the heart of what the jobs issue is. Clearly, for capital, they love the idea of this constant ability to undercut the rights of workers, and the European Court of Justice, as you know, has delivered a series of cases which now make it more difficult to get collective bargaining in the EU. It’s all under the logic of the movement of capital at the expense of labour.
For us, there’s a profound difficulty here because the gains made in the post-Maastricht years have now been eroded and the talk of social Europe, which was so important in the early 90s, has completely dissolved. In its place we have global Europe.
CL: I disagree that it has completely dissolved. Certainly we need to fight for social Europe but we’ve got colleagues across the EU who are joining us in that fight. We’ve got the Greens and the socialists and even some of the liberals in the European Parliament, all of whom have that same agenda.
I guess, John, you wouldn’t be arguing that if we came out of the EU we would actually have better workers’ rights. I take your point that we’re not just measuring things on the next 3-4 years, but if you think about the damage that could be done even in a short time by a government headed up by let’s say Boris Johnson, who’s made it very clear he wants to get rid of all of the social chapter, we would see a huge amount of destruction that can be done in a very short time.
Again, if there’s going to be trade - and we haven’t talked about what the trade arrangement would be post-Brexit - but if there was still going to be trade involving the single market, if you didn’t have that floor of minimum standards, I think you absolutely could be seeing a spiralling downwards of conditions.
JH: It’s important to say that at the moment, the floor there is in the EU is below what we have in the UK, and that is a result not of the EU giving us anything, but as a result of the struggle and the fight that’s taken place in this country. In terms of maternity leave, maternity pay, paid holiday, we have far better, far higher standards than in the rest of the EU.
We have fought for that, and we should have confidence that we as a people can stand up to the power of our governments. The upsurge in energy and dynamism that took place after May last year, when the current administration were elected, tells me that there’s a real appetite for that fight in this country.
CL: I don’t doubt the appetite, but I do want to challenge you on the issue of whether or not all of our rights have been as a result of UK work alone. Lots have been, but there are key court cases and key moments - the EU, for example, made it not just equal pay for equal work, but equal pay for work of equal value, and then pursued that in the courts to make sure it actually happened.
So I think the EU has given us something extra. And yes, and accept that at some level the floor is lower than our own domestic policy, but what it has done has been to rise up the standards in other countries - for example in Eastern Europe, whose floor at that point would have been absolutely rock bottom.
What we need to be doing is ratcheting up standards for people outside the UK as well as inside. This is actually part of a bigger philosophical debate about our membership of the EU. We talk all the time about what benefits us - I think there’s also space to talk about what benefits the rest of the EU, and I think the UK has an important role in helping other countries improve their standards too.
IMMIGRATION
KS: How would leaving the EU or remaining in it impact on the economics of immigration?
JH: It’s important to look at the ways in which just focusing on the economics of it isn’t the full argument. If you look for example at what the right wing have said, as a result of bringing in lots of lower-paid immigrant workers from eastern Europe, we’ve been able to have the 'miracle’ (as they put it) of growth without wage inflation, and without wage inflation you’ve been able to keep interest rates down, and therefore you have this virtuous cycle. Which of course for people who are in the poorest parts of Britain has been seen as a real challenge.
I do agree with you Caroline, again, that it’s not just about people in this country. I spent a lot of time in discussion with people in Poland last year about this, where they’ve had a mirror reverse of this. By exporting a lot of their labour, the relative balance of power within Poland has shifted away from capital towards labour, and as a result of that local pressure they’ve been able to force wages up and better terms and conditions.
So I think we wouldn’t want to be swayed by any of these economic arguments on their own, because I think that’s what gets us into the sort of very nasty, objectionable language which you see in the current mainstream debate. What we should be saying is there is a much greater problem which is nothing to do with immigration - the hollowing out manufacturing and society in this country, and I think that is experienced by a lot of people who don’t have the luxury of privileged jobs or secure lifestyles, as being something where they don’t understand what’s happening.
There needs to be huge investment and serious attention to the reality of that problem if we’re not to see this mass exodus of people voting for UKIP and much nastier parties. And that of course I think is where we all unite in saying the debate and the tenor of it is absolutely the opposite of what we would like to see. This idea of opening up markets and closing down borders - we want to reverse that.
CL: I very much agree with much of what John has just said. In terms of the economics of immigration and the way in which no doubt the private corporations would love to see wages being driven down, I think what we need to be doing is making sure there is a minimum wage that is properly enforced and increased, and also, longer-term, think about a vision whereby we have a minimum wage not just in the UK but across the EU. Obviously it wouldn’t be at a common level to begin with, but that’s something in terms of the future of the EU that we could be looking forward to.
In terms of freedom of movement more broadly - if we have access to the common market then free movement is part and parcel of that deal, and you’ll hear a lot of people saying that in a very reluctant way, but I think we need to turn that on its head and actually celebrate the freedom of movement. It’s the most extraordinary gift that we can live and learn and love and work and study in 27 other countries. When other EU nationals exercise their right to come to our country, they make a huge contribution to our society, our community, our culture and economically too. So often, as John has alluded to, in this really nasty debate it’s made to sound as if every single social problem in the UK is as a result of immigration, when clearly it’s successive governments who failed to invest enough in schools and housing. When it comes to the NHS you’re more likely to find EU nationals treating you than standing in front of you in the queue.
At the same time as recognising that immigration brings this net economic benefit as well as a social and cultural benefit, we should be ringfencing the finance that comes in from that and investing it very specifically in those places that are experiencing change most rapidly, so that you get a win-win - you’re investing in housing, education, leisure centres, community centres, so that everybody can see the benefit from this.
ENVIRONMENT
KS: One topic we haven’t heard as much about in this campaign is the environment. How would leaving the EU or remaining in it impact on our environmental policy?
CL: First of all, thank you for at least putting it on the agenda because it’s been conspicuous by its absence in the main debate, and that’s very odd in a sense because if you ever needed an issue through which to see the importance of the EU, it would be the environment.
It’s very clear that environmental problems are cross-boundary by their very nature; you don’t have environmental problems queuing up politely at passport control waiting for their papers to be checked. Therefore we need to have the kind of facility whereby we can tackle problems like air pollution, marine pollution and so forth across borders. Certainly if I look at my own constituency in Brighton, the air pollution that people suffer from there - some of that is being blown across the Channel from France, so one country can’t possibly tackle those issues on their own.
If I think about climate change in particular - again, an issue that individual countries will struggle to address on their own - although the Paris climate talks were not as ambitious as either John or I would have wanted, not at all, nonetheless they were more successful than we at some times feared, and that is as a result of the role the EU played. First of all in terms of ratcheting up the level of ambition within the EU, and then using that to leverage up ambition amongst other EU states. And the UK, to be fair, played a pretty positive role in that whole effort. So I think when you’re dealing with environmental that are by their very nature cross-boundary, you’re going to need an institution that looks pretty much like the EU in order to do it.
JH: I completely agree we need to work with other countries, but the EU is not just any old collection of countries sitting around a table, as indeed they did in Paris. The EU is a specific neoliberal capitalist programme which is driving more and more towards the interests of capital.
At the moment it is trying to downgrade even the commitments made just a couple of months ago in Paris. One of the examples of that is the fuel quality directive which was introduced in order to try to deal with exactly the same problems of pollution that you’ve alluded to Caroline. Immediately had a chance to downgrade, to water down, those provisions, particularly relating to the tar sands in Canada, which originally had been excluded - we were saying this is the worst type, the dirtiest type of oil; we can’t have this coming in. As a result of the business lobby pressuring the European Commission, that’s already been downgraded.
We’ve seen more and more of this watering down of provision from the European central institutions. That’s the real concern for us - whatever gains there would’ve been in the past, when the idea of a more progressive, social and environmental friendly Europe was there - that’s now been knocked out by the new competitive Europe. Not just any old competitive Europe but one which is hard-wired into the DNA of the EU through the treaty of Lisbon.
This is the problem - the EU isn’t just a group of countries sitting round a table with a nice agenda. The EU is a neoliberal capitalist programme run by the bosses for the bosses, where everybody else is on the outside desperately trying to knock their way in. That’s where the environment as well as labour rights and social rights are now clearly being put second to the interests of capital.
CL: But empirically it is the case that our strongest nature protection - for example, the habitats directive, the birds directive - is coming as a result of the EU. Our own politicians here, people like George Osborne, are the people who are talking about those jewels in the crown of nature protection as being ridiculous costs and burdens, and threatening to get rid of them as soon as they can.
I wouldn’t disagree with you that there is a battle going on at the heart of the EU, but I think you’re downplaying the sense that there is a fightback going on. The European trade unions, environmental organisations and many of the MEPs are part of that fightback.
You mention the Lisbon treaty, which of course is the treaty that enshrined competitiveness, and before that you mentioned the whole Gothamberg process, which was about social Europe. Yes, there’s a fight going on there, but one of the reasons it’s so tightly fought is because if you look at who is sitting around the table at the Council of Ministers, it is a majority of right-wing, neoliberal governments. Not surprisingly, if you’ve put right-wing, neoliberal bigotry into the EU, that’s what you get out of the EU. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Throwing away those institutions because we don’t like the current incumbents is just reckless.
I remember a time - just for a few years - but there was a time when a large number of the environment ministers were actually from the Green party from many different countries. And during those halcyon days there were some incredibly strong policies coming out of the EU as a direct result of getting those voices in. I think we let our own government off the hook if we keep blaming this 'Brussels process’. The reason there are so many right-wing policies coming out of the EU is because there are so many right-wing governments sitting around the table. So when this referendum is over, let’s go and fight to make sure we get some better governments at the table in the first place.
JH: We’ll definitely be fighting on the 24th of June whatever happens, I can assure you of that! [laughs]
It’s not just the representation of the countries around the table - it’s the institutions themselves. If you think of the horrific treatment of the Greek people, obviously Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Portugal and all the others who’ve been forced into this horrific austerity, that was done by organisations like the European Central Bank - unelected, unaccountable - and the Euro finance ministers, the Eurogroup… These are not bodies - including the European Commission - who are amenable to change from the outside through elections. If we had a complete reversal, we would still be left with these institutions right at the centre of the European programme which are not amenable to change from the outside and have all the power to be able to introduce new directives and carry them through.
AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES
KS: So next we’re onto the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policy. What would happen to those if we left the EU?
JH: We’ll probably have a lot of agreement on these. Both Caroline and I will probably see both of these policies as being deeply flawed.
What’s interesting about the common agricultural policy, is that as well as all of the trouble it’s caused countries outside Europe, it’s also representative of how the money we give to Europe is siphoned back in a particular class way.
The money we give into Europe - which is a huge amount - goes towards the common agricultural policy, and when it comes back to Britain it goes to the biggest land owners. There was a fascinating thing when Tony Blair was in power, where you ended up with a proposal to cap the amount of subsidy being given back to farmers - to big farmers in this country - and Blair was the one who prevented that going through because he said it would be adversely disadvantageous to the Royal family!
If we came out of the European Union, that would obviously be one serious amount of money we would no longer be giving over. So what we could do here is have a very strong campaign to try and see that it would be small-scale farmers, organic conversion, which would get the subsidies, rather than us giving it to the Duke of Westminster and other massive landowners who, let’s be frank, don’t need the extra cash.
CL: But John, can you really imagine a government under Boris or Gove giving that money to small farmers? No. I’ll tell you what would happen - we would stop being part of the common agricultural policy, and that would mean there would be no support or subsidy going to our farmers, including our smaller farmers, and a free market in agriculture would see the end of farming in this country. Any sense of environmental stewardship or support for animal welfare or support for local farming would be absolutely destroyed.
I’m not going to sit here and defend the common agricultural policy - I’ve said before, the problem with it is no so much that it’s common but the actual policies. They are changing, slowly, not fast enough, but it is true that now there is less support for overall production, which was a major problem because that production often got dumped in poorer countries and completely undermined their livelihoods. That is changing. The money now is going to support different elements of environmental stewardship. The amount of money that is allocated to environmental stewardship is up to our own government to decide, so it’s interesting that in England, for example, they decided to put far less money into it than they did in Scotland and Wales - so a lot of this is down to domestic choices too.
I’d just underline the point that however much we are going to keep up the campaign to ensure that more of the common agricultural policy is about supporting smaller farmers, environmentally friendly farming and so forth, if we withdrew then I think we would see an absolute free market in agriculture, a complete downgrading of any concern about local environmental impacts, animal welfare… It would be a pretty grim picture. And add to that the role that the EU has played in terms of things like standing up for a ban on some of the most damaging pesticides - neonicotinoids, which damage our bee populations - or the stand that they’ve taken against GMOs… They’ve been taking that position against successive British governments, which have wanted those kinds of damaging environmental policies and it has been the EU that has stood up against them.
KS: Can I get you to address fisheries, quickly?
JH: The fisheries side of it is particularly important outside the EU waters. Most of the European waters have been fished dry, so they’ve had to send the trawlers outside and the west coast of Africa has been absolutely ravaged as a result of the common fisheries policy. The impact of it has suddenly been exported to other countries. You’ve seen situations where small-scale farmers in Senegal and other countries have been wiped out as a result of this deep water fishing going on by European trawlers offshore.
We have a particular problem with it in the waters of occupied Western Sahara, where the EU has done a dirty deal with Morocco, which is currently the military occupying force in Western Sahara, to take the fish of a country where they’ve got absolutely no right to be in charge of.
How can you have this type of predatory capitalism, which the EU represents, with no care for the impact that it causes outside European borders?
CL: I would simply say that if you’ve got predatory capitalist governments sitting around the table in Brussels then you get predatory capitalist outcomes. I wish it were not the case. I rest my case that we need to get out there and change the governments. But to throw away the institutions would be reckless.
CLOSING STATEMENTS
KS: We’ve almost come to the end. Just time for your closing statements of a minute from each of you. John, can you go first?
JH: In this debate, we’re offered two alternatives which are deeply unsatisfactory, unattractive and unappealing. For us, it’s a question of looking at where you’re going to get best traction and what terrain is best to fight against the neoliberal programmes which have been put in place by either the EU or the British government of whatever stripe.
This is about a fight against a series of institutions and treaties which admit of no alternative. Whatever happens, on the 24th of June we will come back renewed with extra strength and energy for the battle ahead. We will continue to fight that battle with our sister organisations across Europe and indeed across the rest of the world - but the key thing for us is who are we most likely to be able to beat? Someone we can see in front of us, or a faceless, shadowy bureaucracy which nobody knows about?
CL: John talks about a faceless, shadowy bureaucracy; in actual fact, elements of the European institutions are more democratic even than our own parliament. This government was elected on 24% of the vote; we’ve got an unelected House of Lords. Democracy needs to be tackled both in Westminster and in Brussels - I don’t think this is simply a problem of Brussels.
I wanted to raise an issue that’s not been raised so far. The origins of the EU came out of two horrendous World Wars, when people came together to say that war in the future should be made not only unthinkable but also impossible. And I think that the EU has played an incredibly important role in helping to keep the peace over the past 70 years.
The EU as we have it today isn’t an abstract project born of some kind of idle philosophising in continental think tanks. It was built on the blood and bones of Europeans killed in the disastrous first half of the 20th century. I don’t pretend that the EU has been the only force for peace, but I do think it’s been an important player in achieving that. In an uncertain world, we would be very reckless to throw that away.