Brexit
vote is about the supremacy of Parliament and nothing else: Why I am
voting to leave the EU
AMBROSE
EVANS-PRITCHARD
Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard 12 JUNE 2016 • 6:00PM
With sadness and
tortured by doubts, I will cast my vote as an ordinary citizen for
withdrawal from the European Union.
Let there be no
illusion about the trauma of Brexit. Anybody who claims that Britain
can lightly disengage after 43 years enmeshed in EU affairs is a
charlatan, or a dreamer, or has little contact with the realities of
global finance and geopolitics.
Stripped of
distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to
restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue
living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European
Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the
British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.
For some of us - and
we do not take our cue from the Leave campaign - it has nothing to do
with payments into the EU budget. Whatever the sum, it is
economically trivial, worth unfettered access to a giant market.
We are deciding
whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that
operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a
modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court (ECJ)
that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.
It is whether you
think the nation states of Europe are the only authentic fora of
democracy, be it in this country, or Sweden, or the Netherlands, or
France - where Nicholas Sarkozy has launched his presidential bid
with an invocation of King Clovis and 1,500 years of Frankish unity.
PM: Leave campaign
'telling complete untruths to British people'Play! 02:01
My Europhile Greek
friend Yanis Varoufakis and I both agree on one central point, that
today's EU is a deformed halfway house that nobody ever wanted. His
solution is a great leap forward towards a United States of Europe
with a genuine parliament holding an elected president to account.
Though even he doubts his dream. "There is a virtue in heroic
failure," he said.
I do not think this
is remotely possible, or would be desirable if it were, but it is not
on offer anyway. Six years into the eurozone crisis there is no a
flicker of fiscal union: no eurobonds, no Hamiltonian redemption
fund, no pooling of debt, and no budget transfers. The banking union
belies its name. Germany and the creditor states have dug in their
heels.
Where we concur is
that the EU as constructed is not only corrosive but ultimately
dangerous, and that is the phase we have now reached as governing
authority of crumbles across Europe.
The Project bleeds
the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them
with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws
away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die.
"They are
slowly drained of what makes them democratic, by a gradual process of
internal decay and mounting indifference, until one suddenly notices
that they have become something different, like the republican
constitutions of Athens or Rome or the Italian city-states of the
Renaissance," says Lord Sumption of our Supreme Court.
Brexit
Democracies deny
internally by a slow process of constitutional erosion, like the City
state of Athens
It is a quarter
century since I co-wrote the leader for this newspaper on the
Maastricht summit. We warned that Europe's elites were embarking on a
reckless experiment, piling Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa with a
vandal's disregard for the cohesion of their ancient polities. We
reluctantly supported John Major's strategy of compromise, hoping
that later events would "check the extremists and put the EC on
a sane and realistic path."
This did not happen,
as Europe's Donald Tusk confessed two weeks ago, rebuking the elites
for seeking a “utopia without nation states" and over-reaching
on every front. “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total
integration, we failed to notice that the citizens of Europe do not
share our Euro-enthusiasm,” he said.
If there were more
Tusks at the helm, one might still give the EU Project the benefit of
the doubt. Hard experience - and five years at the coal face in
Brussels - tells me others would seize triumphantly on a British
decision to remain, deeming it submission from fear. They would
pocket the vote. Besides, too much has happened that cannot be
forgiven.
The EU crossed a
fatal line when it smuggled through Lisbon Treaty, by executive
cabal, after the text had already been rejected by French and Dutch
voters in its earlier guise. It is one thing to advance the Project
by stealth and the Monnet method, it is another to call a plebiscite
and then to override the outcome.
Need I remind
readers that our own government gave a "cast iron guarantee"
to hold a referendum, but retreated claiming that Lisbon was tidying
up exercise? It was no such thing. As we warned then, it created a
European supreme court with jurisdiction over all areas of EU policy,
with a legally-binding Charter of Fundamental Rights that opens the
door to anything.
Need I add too that
Britain's opt-out from the Charter under Protocol 30 - described as
"absolutely clear" by Tony Blair on the floor of the
Commons - has since been swept aside by the ECJ.
It is heartening
that our judges have begun to resist Europe's imperial court,
threatening to defy any decision that clashes with the Magna Carta,
the Bill of Rights, or the core texts of our inherited constitution.
But this raises as many questions as it answers.
Nobody has ever been
held to account for the design faults and hubris of the euro, or for
the monetary and fiscal contraction that turned recession into
depression, and led to levels of youth unemployment across a large
arc of Europe that nobody would have thought possible or tolerable in
a modern civilized society. The only people ever blamed are the
victims.
There has been no
truth and reconciliation commission for the greatest economic crime
of modern times. We do not know who exactly was responsible for
anything because power was exercised through a shadowy interplay of
elites in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Paris, and still is.
Everything is deniable. All slips through the crack of oversight.
Nor have those in
charge learned the lessons of EMU failure. The burden of adjustment
still falls on South, without offsetting expansion in the North. It
is a formula for deflation and hysteresis. That way lies yet another
Lost Decade.
Has there ever been
a proper airing of how the elected leaders of Greece and Italy were
forced out of power and replaced by EU technocrats, perhaps not by
coups d'etat in a strict legal sense but certainly by skulduggery? On
what authority did the European Central Bank write secret letters to
the leaders of Spain and Italy in 2011 ordering detailed changes to
labour and social law, and fiscal policy, holding a gun to their head
on bond purchases?
What is so striking
about these episodes is not that EU officials took such drastic
decisions in the white heat of crisis, but that it was allowed to
pass so easily. The EU's missionary press corps turned a blind eye.
The European Parliament closed ranks, the reflex of a nomenklatura.
While you could say
that the euro is nothing to do with us, it obviously goes to the
character of the EU: how it exercises power, and how far it will go
in extremis.
You can certainly
argue from realpolitik that monetary union is so flawed it will lurch
from crisis to crisis until it ruptures, in the next global downturn
or the one after that, and will therefore compel the European elites
to abandon their grand plans, so why not bide our time. But this to
rely on conjecture.
You can equally
argue that the high watermark of EU integration has passed: the
Project is in irreversible decay. We are a long way from the
triumphalism of the millennium, when the EU was replicating the
structures of the US federal government, with an EU intelligence cell
and military staff in Brussels led by nine generals, and plans for a
Euro-army of 100,000 troops, 400 aircraft and 100 ships to project
global power.
You can argue too
that the accession of thirteen new countries since 2004 - mostly from
Eastern Europe - has changed the chemistry of the EU beyond
recognition, making it ever less plausible to think of a centralized,
close-knit, political union. Yet retreat is not the declared position
of the Five Presidents' Report, the chief blueprint for where they
want the EU Project to go. Far from it.
In any case, even if
we do not go forward, we may not go backwards either. By design is
almost impossible by to repeal the 170,000 pages of the Acquis. Jean
Monnet constructed the EU in such way that conquered ground can never
be ceded back, as if were the battleground of Verdun.
We are trapped in a
'bad equilibrium', leaving us in permanent friction with Brussels. It
is like walking forever with a stone in your shoe.
But if we opt to
leave, let us not delude ourselves. Personally, I think the economics
of Brexit are neutral, and possibly a net plus over twenty years if
executed with skill. But it is nothing more than an anthropological
guess, just as the Treasury is guessing with its cherry-picked
variables.
We are compelled to
make our choice at a treacherous moment, when our current account
deficit has reached 7pc of GDP, the worst in peace-time since records
began in 1772 under George III. We require constant inflows of
foreign capital to keep the game going, and are therefore vulnerable
to a sterling crisis if foreigners lose confidence.
Brexit
We have the worst
current account deficit since the reign of George III
I am willing to take
the calculated risk that our floating currency would act as a benign
shock absorber - as devaluation did in 1931, 1992, and 2008 - but it
could be a very rough ride. As Standard & Poor's warned this
week, debts of UK-based entities coming due over the next twelve
months amount to 755pc of external receipts, the highest of 131 rated
sovereign states. Does it matter? We may find out.
The Leave campaign
has offered no convincing plan for our future trading ties or the
viability of the City. It has ruled out a fall-back to the European
Economic Area, the "Norwegian" model that would preserve -
if secured - access to the EU customs union and preserve the
"passporting" rights of the City.
The EEA would be a
temporary haven while we sorted out our global trading ties, the
first step of a gradual extraction. The Leavers have not embraced
this safe exit - or rather, less dangerous exit - because it would
mean abandoning all else that they have pledged so promiscuously,
chiefly the instant control of EU migrant flows.
By this fourberie
they have muddied the water, conflating constitutional issues and
with the politics of immigration. We risk a Parliamentary crisis and
shrieks of betrayal if the Commons - discerning the national will -
imposes the EEA option on a post-Brexit government, as it may have to
do.
We leave Ireland in
the lurch, at risk of an economic shock that it did nothing to
provoke. Those Leavers who chatter cavalierly of resiling from the
(non-EU) European Convention of Human Rights should be aware that the
Good Friday peace accords are anchored in that document, and if they
do not understand why it matters that just 12pc of Ulster Catholics
support Brexit, they are not listening to Sinn Fein.
However unfair it
may seem, the whole Western world deems Brexit to be an act of
strategic vandalism at a time when Pax Americana is cracking and the
liberal democracies are under civilizational threat.
Without rehearsing
well-known risks, we have a Jihadi cauldron across much of the Levant
and North Africa; Vladimir Putin's Russia has ripped up the post-War
rule book and is testing Nato every day in the Baltics; China's
construction of airfields along international shipping routes off the
Philippines is leading to a superpower showdown with the US.
The Leave camp was
caught off guard when Barack Obama swept into London to make it the
US view brutally clear, followed by Japan's Shinzo Abe, and troop of
world leaders. You do not unpick the web of interlocking global ties
lightly.
One hopes that
Brexiteers now understand what they face, and therefore what they
must do to uphold British credibility if they win. We must be an even
better ally. But by the same token, the people of this country have
every right to take this one chance to issue their verdict on four
decades of EU conduct.
Brexit
Remain invokes
Edmund Burke, but he should really be the pin-up philosopher of the
Brexiteers
To those American
friends who ask why we cavil at compromises with Europe when we "pool
sovereignty" - an inaccurate term - with scores of bodies from
NATO to the United Nations, the answer is that the EU is not remotely
comparable in scale, ideology, or intent to anything else on this
planet.
Remainers invoke
Edmund Burke and the doctrine of settled practice, but settled is the
one thing the EU has not been in its irrepressible itch for treaties
and its accretion of power, and Burke is a double-edged sword.
He backed the
American Revolution, not to create something dangerously daring and
new but rather to restore lost liberties and self-government, the
settled practice of an earlier age. Americans of all people should
understand why a nation may wish to assert its independence.
This is my decision.
It may go against my own interest, since I hope to live out part of
my remaining years in France - though countless Britons lived there
contentedly in 19th Century before we ever had such a thing as the
European Union, and no doubt will continue to do so long after it is
gone.
I urge nobody to
follow my example. It ill behoves anyone over 50 to exhort an outcome
too vehemently. Let the youth decide. It is they who must live with
consequences.
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