As a Remainista, can you tell me why we should remain without citing all the disasters that will befall us if we leave? Give me some positives about the EU.
This is what has been so disheartening about the whole campaign from Remain. There has been barely any focus on making a positive case for EU membership from Cam & Co but thats what happens when you crave the support of the Murdoch press (not that they are the only ones) that keeps its readers on a steady diet of negative stories about the EU for going on 20 years. They've painted themselves into a corner and are now forced to fight fire with fire. I would have expected maybe one of the newer Tory MPs that had a more clean rap sheet with regards to views on the EU to be asked to step out and make the positive case. Tighty has mentioned on here that the Tory party membership is strongly anti-EU but I don't know if that goes deep enough to frighten MPs away from making the positive case lest in jeopardize their career in the party. Labour might as well be a telegraph pole on Downing Street at the moment so no dice there.
The positive case for me is all about cooperation, what has been and what can be achieved as a bloc. The free movement of people has been a great experience for me personally having lived and 'worked' in a couple of different places in Europe and the opportunity to do so in the future is a great source of optimism. Sheffield has a ton of EU nationals working and studying. Meeting people both at home and abroad with shared experiences of seizing the opportunity to experience new things and new places has been an overwhelmingly positive development. EU nationals here and UK nationals abroad just loving what freedom of movement has allowed them to do and I don't want to cut ourselves off from that. Personally it doesn't really make a difference to me because my dad is Scottish so if Leave win and Scotland have another indy referendum I would get dual Scottish/UK citizenship and still be able to enjoy freedom of movement, but for a lot of people that I know that wouldn't be the case and nobody knows what their situation will be in the event of a Leave win.
Legislation that has been secured at the EU level maintaining the highest standards in the world of employment rights ,consumer protection, environmental protection and human rights is a fantastic achievement that has a real effect on peoples lives gets blown wide open. What stays and what goes? The only answer from the Leave campaign that I have seen is 'we'll keep the good bits and chuck the rest'. Who gets to decide what goes where? Whoever is leading exit negotiations? Parliament? the Judiciary? In all of this confusion and uncertainty we can be sure there the big money interests will throw significant lobbying power behind the watering down of these protections and history suggests that they'll come out with pretty decent results.
Those legislative achievements give me reasons to be optimistic about how as a bloc we can tackle the problems that know no borders like tax evasion, increased antibiotic resistance and yes the T word. Sharing information and pooling resources on these common issues that aren't going anywhere no matter what the result is must be more powerful weapons than any one state can muster alone.
If you'll allow me to dip into the negatives for my final point because this is the thing that most concerns me. What does the UK political landscape look like after a Leave win? I'm no fan of Dave & George but if the alternative is Boris and Gove riding to number 10 on the back of the right of the party that bristles with confidence is a scary prospect, especially with parliament fixed until 2020. Whilst there is a left wing case for leaving the EU, it will certainly be the right and the hard right that will be spurred on in the event of a Leave vote and not just in the UK. Europe rejected nationalism and protectionism 70 years ago and imo is a much richer (economically and culturally) place for it. If we choose to leave the EU it is imo a step backwards, closer to the tensions of the past. Talk of world war 3 and wholesale destabilization in Europe is overly strong, but if we think about what the path to those situations might look like, a renaissance for nationalism and isolationism is a necessary step on that path.
I don't believe that our membership of the EU can ever be anything other than wasteful. It wastes our time and our resources. It wastes our money. It is an unnecessary additional level of beaurocracy.
The trouble that I have with this position David is that for it to be true so many people have to be so wildly wrong. Like in any situation where we have incomplete information I find a range-based approach useful. On the evidence available I just can't put 'nothing but wasteful' into that range, can I? I mean its not impossible and I could certainly be convinced that EU membership is a net negative in economic terms though I haven't seen a credible case for that (despite asking many times in this thread
) so it seems unlikely. So I land on the EU being somewhere between slightly bad and very good. I can imagine an interpretation where the EU isn't very good value in its current form and people want to vote to leave, or where people just don't know enough to make a decision and could come down either way, or where the EU is viewed as a positive and we should stay, but the evidence to support a view that the EU is abhorrent and is incapable of being anything but....I just don't get it.
Apologies if this seems like I'm rounding on you for holding a different view but it is out of genuine interest not a flame war. If you're going to the WPT at DTD in October we can reassess over a beer
I could go on about the last point (my vision for the EU if we stay) but I've been writing this post on and off for nearly 3 hours, time to hit the hay.
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