This crude assault on Europe strikes at the very heart of Enlightenment values

This crude assault on Europe strikes at the very heart of Enlightenment values

The Ukip/Tory rhetoric on EU immigration strikes at the very values that make us quintessentially European

Will Hutton

The Observer, Sunday 26 October 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/26/crude-assault-on-europe-strikes-at-enlightenment-values

More countries crowd into the world’s smallest continent – Europe – than any other. There are 49 of us (not including Russia) locked into a relatively small geographical space. Most of us at one time or another have been at war with each other. Ancient resentments simmer. Appeals to the proud uniqueness of our blood and ethnicity – from Scotland to Serbia, Catalonia to France, Clacton to Budapest – abound. This is hardly the foundation on which to build amity, trade and prosperity.

How Europe’s countries manage their inter-relationships in a constructive rather than destructive way is the perennial European question. In 2014, nobody expects a repeat of the great pan-European wars of the 20th century. But that does not mean there are not poisonous populist attitudes ready to resurface in all our countries, encouraged by gross inequality, stagnating economies and dismay at the speed of change.

Yet Europe’s peoples are shaped by its Christian past, however secular we have now become, and by the Enlightenment, with its commitment to rationality, rule of law and democracy. Industrialisation and urbanisation in Europe forged a powerful commitment to social solidarity. Common underlying values bind us.

Moreover, geographical proximity has always given Europe its special character, if doing no more than offering a nearby bolthole or new ideas that could simply cross a frontier. Without Protestant Holland, William Tyndale would have had no home to print the Bible in English; the Industrial Revolution was fuelled by exiled scientists and entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The Ukip/Tory story that Britain’s greatness was built on independence from Europe is a fairytale. We are as much part of our continent’s history and evolution, and share its values, as any other European country. Arguably, we are the quintessential Europeans.

Britain was the aggressive leader in European colonialism, the pioneer in creating a rule of law, checked and balanced constitutional settlement, and in industrialisation, and an early adopter of the Bismarckian welfare state. We have, of necessity, been part of Europe’s political system; for centuries, Britain’s pursuit of European balance-of-power politics was central to our statecraft. The potential withdrawal from the arena where today’s Europe’s differences are fought over, brokered and reconciled – Brussels, Strasbourg and the European Union – would bewilder our predecessors.

The EU is a club of 28 nations whose minimal ambition is peaceful reconciliation of conflicting national interests and whose vaulting hope is to unleash the continent’s creativity by making a single economic space whose multinational governance can be consistent with national sovereignty. Its design faults are obvious to everyone – from springing a bill of £1.7bn on the British government last week to the incapacity to manage the single currency so that it supports continent-wide growth – and its critics have a virtual free run, especially in the UK.

But for all that, it is the best we have, and if it did not exist something analogous would have to be invented. Europe, whether in energy, banking, transport, security, telephony, climate change, air traffic control or overfishing, has a breathtaking density of interdependencies and inter-relationships. To imagine each one would be better managed by sovereign states bartering a common position with no appeal to common institutions or recognition of common interests and values is to bay for the moon – a denial of reality.

Even the battered single currency, the alleged cause of everything from secular stagnation to the rise of the populist right, serves a key function. Floating exchange rates are no economic panacea, especially in a small continent with so many competing contiguous interests with the temptation for competitive devaluations ever-present. Secular stagnation has much deeper roots. Without a single currency and the European Central Bank, the banking systems of the smaller European states would have collapsed during the financial crisis, with a domino effect that would have brought down the larger ones. There may yet be profound trouble, but a crucial breathing space has been won. Too little of this is acknowledged in Britain.

Nor are the EU’s other achievements recognised and admired. The revival of the British car industry hinges on membership of the single market. The prosperity and productivity of British agriculture has been driven by the derided common agricultural policy. The City of London is Europe’s banker and lawyer. Our fledgling hi-tech startups sell into the single market. The government’s own review of the pros and cons of EU membership, half complete, can so far find only net benefits.

Yet driven by Ukip, the overriding economic story is the malign impact of EU immigration, robbing native-born British people of jobs and lowering wages. The ennoblement of Andrew Green, whose MigrationWatch has done so much to spread concern about the baleful impact of immigration, shows how mainstream this view has become.

Yes, various economic analyses suggest that every additional 300,000 immigrants lowers the wages of the bottom 5% of workers – about 1.5 million – by around £1.50 a week , with roughly half the immigrants in any year coming from the EU. Openness, apparently, costs us.

What is never discussed is the more-than-compensating advantages. If Britain left the EU, some of the 3.3m jobs directly dependent on the single market would go. It is true that 2.3 million EU citizens live in Britain, but 1.8 million British people live in Europe.

As for falling wages, the real enemy is not immigration but gravely weakened trade unions. If the wage share in national income were the same as 35 years ago, the average worker would be £100 a week better off. The voters of Clacton, Rochester, and Heywood and Middleton would be better directing their anger at the way Britain’s leaders have weakened protections for average workers.

Some immigration controls are imperative: no infrastructure can bear rapid, limitless immigrant population growth. But within those constraints we need as much openness as possible. We can compensate the bottom 5% for their wage losses from the incomes the rest of us make, if we choose.

More important still is keeping Britain British – not in the sense of everyone who lives here being born here, but of retaining our fairmindedness, our tolerance, our openness and our recognition that we are Europeans, too.

This real Britishness is being torched before our eyes. The majority of us don’t like or want what Farage and Tory Eurosceptic bullies peddle; one poll reported support for the EU reaching 56%, the highest for 23 years. Nor do we want noxious pop songs, whites-only taxi firms and the stirring of antisemitism. It is hardly ever said, but the EU, for all its frailties and imperfections, is an important and noble endeavour. It stands for the best of our civilisation and its Enlightenment values, even with its commitment to the free movement of peoples. It now needs friends. Time to stand by it.