Lies, damn lies and statistics...

Evan Davies said, on Radio Four last night, that he views with suspicion, anyone who is certain that they are right about complex issues.  I agree with that.  I am a Leaver, but I am not certain that I am right.  But I am finding that a considerable number of Remainers are worryingly certain that they are right.

And I should know. Most of my friends and family are Remainers!

An argument that I hear repeatedly is that the Referendum result was not valid because “the people were lied to during the campaign”.  I presume that they mean by the Leave side.  But whenever I ask what these lies were, it comes down to one lie: that we will have £350 million a week available to spend on the NHS.  I am sure there were many other lies, but this seems to be the only one people can think of.  Let’s just look at that for a moment.  In 2014 (an arbitrary choice of year), our gross contribution to the EU was close to £360 million per week (source: fullfact.org).  So the figure on the bus was not invented.  There is, at least, some basis for it.  But it ignores our rebate.  After our rebate, the net contribution was £275 million per week (all figures from fullfact.org).  This would have been an entirely defensible figure to put on the bus.  Many Remainers point out, quite fairly, that the EU spends money in the UK and that this further reduces the sum available.  This is entirely true, and the EU expenditure in the UK amounts to an estimated £86 million per week.  But, and this is important, we don’t control how that money is spent.  The EU controls that expenditure.  So it is arguable that we would gain control over £275 million per week that we don’t currently control, and this could be directed towards the NHS if we so decide.

So the Leave campaign used a figure of £350 million to gain attention when the defensible figure was £275 million. Are we seriously saying that, had the bus said, “Save £275 million per week for the NHS” rather than £350 million, it would have changed anyone’s vote?

But more important than the question of whether lies were told is the question of who told them.  And here we come to a fundamental difference between a referendum and an election.  If a political party in an election makes a claim that it either knows to be false, or could not reasonably know to be true, and if that claim is indeed false and does affect the result of the election, then the election should be declared void.  But if some bloke I meet in the pub tells me that Labour is planning to steal my house, and I am stupid enough to believe him, and this influences my vote, then I can hardly argue that my vote should be reconsidered when I discover that this was not true.

The referendum was not an election.  Both dominant parties abdicated their responsibilities to lead, and split off into different factions.  There were Leavers and Remainers in both parties.  And then we had a vast number of pressure groups all trying to influence our decision.  The CBI had a view;  the IOD had a view;  the NHS had a view; the Chambers of Commerce had a view;  my mum had a view; the bloke in the pub had a view;  and, bizarrely, the British Government had a view even though the governing party did not.  Most of these were for Remain, by the way.  But there were also groups arguing for Leave, including UKIP and two or three campaign groups. Amongst all this noise would have been opinions, mistakes, exaggerations, ignorance, assertions and downright lies.  In this environment, each and every one of us had a clear responsibility to challenge, question and check and then make up our own minds.  The Remain cause cannot argue that because it has found one example of a stupid, or false, statement, or even several, made by groups not standing for election, that the result should be invalidated.  If that argument were sustained, then it would be an argument against all referendums.  Which, come to think about it……

Brexit was the right choice.  Unfortunately, many people made it for the wrong reason, which tends to obscure the fact that the choice was right.

The wrong reason was migration.  It is fairly apparent from the post-event coverage that a great many people voted in opposition to unlimited immigration.  But there are three million EU citizens living and working here as against two million Brits living and working in the EU.  So the net impact is one million.  One million out of sixty-five million is not a problem.

I don’t doubt that it may seem to be a problem locally.  Boston, a few miles from here, has changed its character completely and Thetford, likewise, is now home to a great many migrants from Europe. This may upset local people but it is not a national problem.

What is a national problem, and what on its own justifies the decision to exit the EU, is the Eurozone and, in the immediate future, Greece.  Greece runs a trade deficit with Germany and many other countries.  Under the old system, the Greek Drachma would simply drift downwards to compensate for the fact that more money was flowing out of Greece than flowing in.  This was not good for Greek inflation or Greek self-respect but it did enable the Greek government to print the money it needed to run its social services and it gave the country the capability of addressing the productivity issues that underpinned the trade deficit.

 

Inside the Eurozone, Greece cannot do this.  Locked inside a single currency it will simply run out of money unless the flow in can balance the flow out.  The only benign way for this to happen is for Germany to transfer large sums from its surplus to Greece with no strings attached.  There is absolutely no political possibility of Germany behaving in this way. Such Germans as I have met seem to see themselves as the heroes of the situation, supporting Europe by their work ethic.  This despite the fact that the ones I have met take long holidays and do not seem to me to work particularly hard!  What Germany is actually doing, along with other nations and banks, is lending Greece the funds to balance the outflows.  Now if you had a friend who was unemployed with no prospect of employment, lending her money and charging interest would be about the worst thing you could do for her.  She would probably feel obliged to accept the loans but in the full knowledge that this made her future bleak indeed.  So it is with Greece.  She is accepting loans as the only way of functioning day to day and in the full knowledge that she cannot repay.  The only way Greece can pay is to trash her own economy by means of crippling austerity and economic shrinkage.  So it is only a matter of time before Greece bows to the inevitable, defaults on its loans and leaves the Euro – Grexit.

The immediate impact of this will be a banking and financial crisis in the rest of Europe and beyond.  It won’t solve Greece’s problem, either, but that’s for another discussion.

Perversely, the Euro will increase in value on Grexit since the weakest economy will have been removed.  This will exacerbate recession in the rest of Europe, including Germany, and will put intolerable strain on the next-weakest members – Italy, Spain and Portugal.  They will struggle to remain in the Euro but will bow to the inevitable and fall out in due course.  The Euro will then jump up again, forcing Ireland and many Eastern European countries out.  France will hang on as a matter of pride for far longer than makes sense but eventually France will go too and the Euro will be history.  The trouble is, this process will take years if not decades, during which time Europe will be a basket case economically and therefore socially.

Could I be wrong about this?  Of course!  But I can’t find any economic school of thought that explains how this could not happen but if you know of one, please direct me to their work.  The only way I can see of avoiding this scenario is for the emergence of a single European government that is prepared to redistribute wealth from north to south and I think this possibility is vanishingly small.  It would also raise intractable issues concerning democracy.

This will hurt us whether we are in or out of the EU, so why leave?  We haven’t done so yet, but we need to get on with it if we are to reduce the impact on us.

 

Before we joined the EU (Common Market as then was) we did about thirteen percent of our trade with it and the balance with the rest of the world.  But this is not comparing apples with apples as the Common Market in 1974 was only the original six members.  Adjusting for present-day members, around a quarter of our trade was with the EU and three quarters with the rest of the world.  If this were still the case then our vulnerability to the forthcoming economic depression in Europe would be about half what it is.  In fact, we do just over forty percent of our trade with the EU.  There are two reasons for this growth: it has become much easier to trade within the Single Market and it has become more difficult to trade outside it.  The Single Market has removed the tariff barriers to trade within the EU and many of the non-tariff barriers.  But the biggest non-tariff barrier, which is language, remains in place with every country in the EU except Ireland and Malta. 

As regards the rest of the world, the EU is a protectionist grouping of nations.  It allows free trade internally but not externally.  Various trade barriers are in place that are compromises between the needs and wants of twenty-eight nations.  The trade policies of the EU serve to bear down on our trade with the rest of the world.

When we eventually leave, it will become more difficult to trade with the EU and, over time, will become progressively more easy to trade with the rest of the world.  This won’t be a quick process as we will have to establish new trade relationships but over time it will reduce our vulnerability to depression in the EU.  The trouble is, we should have begun the process at the time of the Maastricht Treaty when the Euro was agreed.  We have left it rather late and will pay a heavy price for this.  Nonetheless, it is better late than never.

In the long term we have made the right choice.  The fact that it may have been for the wrong reasons should not detract from that.

Thoughts on Europe a week out from the Referendum

Re-reading my blog entry of March 29th 2014, I realise that I have been in a big intellectual circle before coming back to the same point.  During the campaign, I have wobbled a lot but I am settling on Brexit and here's why.

There are three main reasons:

1. The Economic Union
2. The Customs Union
3. The Political Union

The Economic Union

The Euro will turn out to have been a historical disaster.  I don't understand why everyone cannot see this.  Imposing an external currency on an economy is exactly the same in economic terms as returning to the Gold Standard.  In the 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression, Great Britain returned to the Gold Standard and the result was nothing short of catastrophic.  Fortunately, the politicians of the time quickly realised this and reversed the decision.  Today's politicians in the eurozone have no such freedom of action.  There is no easy way to leave the Euro.

The southern countries - Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal - have been rendered uncompetitive by the Euro.  They cannot do anything about it and they are suffering terrible youth unemployment and stagnant economies.  Germany, at the other end of the scale, is finding its exports artificially boosted by the fact that its currency, the Euro, is much weaker than a purely German currency should be.  As a result, we are seeing a transfer of wealth from the poorer countries to Germany.

This is not sustainable and the Euro will fail.  Despite the enormous sums of money being thrown at the problem, Grexit is inevitable.  It will be followed by Itexit, Spexit and Pexit before even France throws in the towel and we have Frexit.  During this phase there will be terrible social and economic dislocation in Europe and no growth.

More through luck than judgement, we are outside of the Eurozone but we are inside the customs union and we are going to get dragged down with it if we don't leave.

The Customs Union

A Customs Union is not a Free-Trade Area.  It is an area with a common external tariff wall and free movement of goods within it.  For this to work, the external tariffs have to be set centrally.  This means that 28 countries have to agree on external trade policy.  Most of the 28 countries do most of their trade internally, within the Customs Union.  One country alone does most of its trade with the rest of the world and that is the UK.  Nearly 60% of our trade (and growing) is with the rest of the world.  Yet the tariffs we charge on, say, American imports are not set here.  They are set in Brussels where we have a 1/28th vote.  When America imposes tariffs on EU goods to balance our tariffs, these hit us disproportionately.

The interests of countries that trade mostly internally are quite different to the interests of a country as connected to the rest of the world as we are.  President Obama says that we would go to the back of the queue if we tried to do a trade deal with the US.  Why?  You would have negotiators sitting down together who spoke the same language, had the same enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and who had a shared reverence for Contract.  I reckon the deal could be done in a week.  We won't tax your stuff if you don't tax our stuff and if something meets your standards that is good enough for us and vice-versa.  Job done!  But even if it turns out to be more complicated than that, and it probably will, then we could still do a better deal on our own than as part of a bloc with diverse and competing interests.

The Political Union

This is largely covered in my earlier blog.  The EU is not democratic and cannot be while we all speak different languages.  We are not going to adopt a common language and even if we did, it would be a second language for most people and you need to share a mother-tongue with a political candidate in order to judge not just the policies, but the person.  In short, there is no demos around which EU democracy can be built.  

The paradox is that as the Euro fails the EU will face a choice of breaking up or integrating more.  I think they will choose integration and the impossibility of democracy will then prove crucial.

So I'm voting out.

What will happen?

There will be an initial shock and downturn.  I can't see a way of avoiding that.  It may take several years before the UK resumes a normal growth path.  I wish that were not so, but it is.  However, in the medium term, as Europe fails, we will reap the benefits of the decision we are about to take.  And in the longer term we will prosper in a world that favours small, agile economic units over massive centralised ones.

A week in Chennai

I am now reaching the end of my short time here and I have some impressions to share.  Of course this is rather like spending a week in Idaho and then reaching conclusions about America but bearing that in mind, here I go…

The journey over here was strange.  I travelled Club World which meant that I was pretty comfortable but it was the thought of what was happening on the ground below that unsettled me.

Terminal Five at Heathrow - Only for British Airways

Club World

My footstool and lunch

We flew over Europe but then we passed over the Black Sea only just south of the disputed airspace around the Crimea before passing over Georgia which is still in a state of semi-war with Russia.  Then we passed across northern Syria, Northern Iraq and then over the Caspian Sea just north of Tehran.  I kept thinking that if we had a problem there was nowhere to go.  Then we entered Afghanistan, passing right over Kandahar and Camp Bastion!  I began to imagine that the Taliban had got hold of a shiny new ground-to-air missile and wanted to test it out on that bright speck in the night sky.  We turned south over Karachi where the Pakistani Taliban are battling it out with the government before reaching the relative safety of Indian airspace.  All around me people were watching the movie, drinking or sleeping but I couldn't take my eyes of the moving map.  To see Mosel, Tikrit and Baghdad pass by was an uncomfortable feeling.

I didn't know what to expect of Chennai when I arrived there at four in the morning.  The first thing I noticed was that it was very hot - around 28 degrees (80 Fahrenheit), which was odd in the dark, and very crowded.  Several people claimed to be my driver before I found the real thing - a man with a sign with my name on!  We tore through the packed streets of Chennai, taking about half an hour to reach the Radisson Blu but I was really too tired to notice much.  The hotel itself was gloriously air-conditioned and very comfortable.

Nearly photographed myself nude in the mirror!

Cool, clean and comfortable

Now for my impressions:

I like it enormously.  It is beyond the top end of my expectations.  In fact, I could live here provided I was in a middle-class occupation.  I can quite see why my forbears came here.  They came to trade in the early 1600s and many of them fell in love with both the country and the women.  Many married Indian women (often forgetting to mention this to their wives at home!) and for a hundred years or so Empire was the last thing on their mind.  They just loved the country.

The incredibly solid walls around Fort St George, the British base in the 1600s

The British homes in Fort St George

The now-empty moat around the colony

My first impression is that the women look fabulous in their flowing and brilliantly coloured fabrics.  Those early traders must have thought that they had landed in paradise.  The whole city is a blaze of brilliant colours, buzzing energy and pleasing smells.

Four on a scooter.  I saw many families like this.

The beach - too hot for me!

Pretty certain that Waitrose would not sanction this!

The extraordinarily effective salesman who relieved me of Rs35000 in one shopping foray!

Sights of Chennai - 40 degrees/105 Fahrenheit!

A shopping mall that could be anywhere in the world

My second impression is that the people are incredibly nice.  Everywhere I go they are friendly in the extreme. Everyone tries to talk to you about where you are from and why you are in India and the service in the hotel and in the various shops I have visited is attentive but not intrusive.  They seem to be an extraordinarily polite people.

I also feel very safe.  I forgot to lock my safe one day and left my passport and currency in plain view.  Although cross with myself for the oversight, I needn’t have worried.  And today, whilst visiting some astonishing ancient monuments south of the city, I needed Rs250 (Rupees) for an entrance fee and the man on the gate had no change.  To my amazement, my guide handed my Rs500 note to a postcard seller hanging around us and asked him to go and change it.  We were then nodded through and when we came out half an hour later, the postcard seller produced two 250s and handed them over with a big smile.  I bought some postcards from him with my change but I didn’t have to.  They do bargain gleefully but I would trust all the ones I have met in a way that I would not in many European countries, including my own.

My charming and amusing course participants

Their personal hygiene standards are higher than ours.  This was an eye-opener for me.  They wash incessantly and they have eliminated hand-shaking as a disease vector by pressing their hands together and bowing.  I find this charming and now do it myself.

Secondly, they always wash after defecating, using their left hand for this purpose and they only eat with their right hand to ensure no contamination, though they wash their hands most thoroughly.  Every loo I have seen has a douche on the end of a flexible hose washing.  Again, now I have seen this through their eyes, I can see their point.  You will be pleased to know I have no pictures relevant to this!  Where the West wins out is in public hygiene infrastructure.  Their water is not safe to drink and their sewage system is deficient. 

The greatest single surprise to me is body language.  I always believed that shaking your head for “no” and nodding for “yes” were universal human responses.  Not so.  In Chennai they do shake their head slowly from side to side for “no”, but they rock it rapidly from side to side for “yes”.  Imagine an axis running horizontally through the bridge of the nose and out of the back of the head.  People here rock their heads from side to side around this axis for “yes” so the forehead moves to the left as the chin moves to the right and vice versa.  The rocking is rapid and energetic.  When you first see it, you think that the individual is disagreeing with you vigorously and it takes time to recognise that this is a sign of assent.  The surprising thing for me is that I have begun to copy it.  If someone rocks their head energetically from side to side when they are agreeing with you, you tend to do it too.  At least, I do! However, when I first encountered this when running my courses here in Chennai, I thought that people were rejecting what I was saying and found it very disconcerting.

The language here is Tamil.  India has 29 states and 7 territories.  Each has its own governor and legislature and there is a federal or Union government in New Delhi.  Here in Tamil Nadu the main language is Tamil.  In the northern states it tends to be Hindi but several other states have their own languages.  English is the common language used by people from different states to speak to each other and, of course, it is the language of business everywhere.  However, English in Chennai is very difficult for me to understand and people here find me very difficult to understand.  This was a shock when I began to train and found people frowning and listening intently.  Often, I would ask a person for their opinion and get a non sequitur for an answer, such as “yes”, or an answer to a quite different question – and that is if I understood them at all.  Their English is as fluent as mine but it is bordering on becoming a different dialect and may evolve into a different language given time.  It is easily the most difficult to understand version of English that I have so far encountered.

Business life seems to be similar to our own.  The offices of Standard Chartered, where I have been working, are very impressive indeed.  They are more like a campus then offices, with several buildings spread around a tropical park and an outdoor staff restaurant.  Inside, the offices are cool and pleasant places to work with the same technology we expect at home.  The mostly graduate staff are earning around £2,000 p.a. but I suspect the purchasing power of this is much greater than the actual amount suggests.  This is presumably the reason Standard Chartered have put their global shared services centre here.  I began work in England as a graduate on less than that and I suspect the price level here is at least as low as it was back then in England.  Certainly the style of dress, use of mobile phone and wearing of jewellery and designer glasses suggest that they are not poor on these salaries.

My course participants

The entrance

My classroom

A road within the bank.  Asia is on the right.

The logo picked out in grasses

The Melting Pot - the bank's staff cafeteria

The bank's private park around which the offices stand

It might look familiar but the first mouthful nearly blew my head off!

Looking up from the Melting Pot

Impressive sign indicating the various buildings on the private campus

The Asia building

Staff enjoying lunch

Me and my lovely participants

Map of the office

Staff relaxing and communing out of doors

My participants again

The heat is not as bad as I feared.  Daytime highs are around 40 degrees (105 Fahrenheit) and night time lows around 27 degrees (80 Fahrenheit) but the heat is like a warm blanket and feels very pleasant.  Of course, I tend to move from air-conditioned hotel via air-conditioned limo to air-conditioned offices, so I am not exposed to it except when I want to be.  During my trip to the temples at Mahabalipuram I did begin to feel it a little after a few hours.

My trusty steed. I went everywhere in a hotel vehicle

Temples carved from solid granite.  The technique is to make small holes with a chisel, plug them with wood and then soak the wood so that the expansion splits the rock.  This was all done nearly two thousand years ago

This is a natural structure.  Plenty of theories about how it happened, but nobody knows

Another granite temple with my delightful guide in front

These Indian gods are SO sexy. Much more glamorous than ours!

Reputed to be one of the largest bas-reliefs in the world.  The channel in the middle is the Ganges coming down from heaven.  All the characters tell stories.  Just below the elephant tusk is the legend of the cat who pretended to meditate (you can see its paws over its head) and so the mice thought it was safe to play.  But the cleverest mouse noticed that the cat's tummy was fat whereas a true mystic always fasts!  This whole thing is thirty or forty feet high.

More of the bas-relief

This is the story of the villagers who upset the rain god.  He decided to drown them in a deluge but Lord Krishna came to the rescue, raising the mountain over his head like an umbrella.  Again, each of the characters in the village has a story.

My excellent guide

Sandstone monuments that had remained buried for centuries until the British (hooray!) detected them and excavated them

This is one incarnation of God and is female on the left of its body (god's perspective) and male on the right.  My guide assured me that this indicates that Hindus regard men and women equally.  This may be true or it may be a modern gloss on an ancient story - I can't tell.

The beach at Mahabalipuram

The subject of Empire has come up once.  A Hindu friend asked me what my view of the Empire was.  I told him, truthfully, that I was conflicted about it.  On the one hand, it is a remarkable achievement for a small island with around three million inhabitants at the time and very few natural resources to spread its influence to the four corners of the earth and it is impossible not to feel a frisson of pride when thinking about that, but on the other hand bad things were done by it and I feel uncomfortable when I think about some of those.

He replied, to my surprise, that he was conflicted too.  He said it was sixty seven years since “we” left (he didn’t have to think about that – Indians apparently know exactly how long ago we left) and that Indians were still running on the infrastructure we left behind.  By the way, I say “we” because he said “you”.  We both knew that I had never been there.  The roads, railways, power generation and hospitals and schools were largely as we had left them and for some reason, India had been unable to maintain the level of capital formation after we left.  He found this frustrating but he said that there was no doubt that India owed a lot to the British.  So we agreed to call it quits and left the subject.  For what it is worth, I suspect that India might take off now that it has a right-of-centre government committed to reducing the deficit and freeing up business.

My only gripe is food!  I can’t find anything that does not blow my head off.  They would curry their cornflakes, given the chance.  I am desperate to eat something that does not actually hurt.  I am not one of those travellers who avoids salads, fruit, ice in drinks etc. etc.  Diseases are far too clever to be thwarted by that sort of thing and I take the view that to hell with it, I shall eat what I am given and rely on Imodium and a night on the loo if necessary.  Sure enough, my third night was spent on the loo and I was a bit washed out the next day, but this would have happened however careful I had been.  The fact is that bacteria vary around the world and a digestive system will initially kick back against unfamiliar bacteria.  I can well imagine an Indian getting traveller’s tummy in London.  After that night my guts adjusted and I have been fine since.

Getting home was a bit of a nightmare.  The flight was delayed from 3:30 AM to 3:30 PM.  I was aware of this through checking online so I had a more leisurely start on Monday morning than I had originally planned but it meant that I did not get home until 1 AM on Tuesday whereas I had planned to be home in the later afternoon on Monday.  But I soon recovered and have very positive feelings about the trip as a whole.

Why we should leave Europe now

I have written this entry primarily for my American friends and maybe my Australian ones, too.  It sets out to explain that the seemingly reactionary view that we should leave the European Union now is actually progressive.  It takes the form of  three arguments - political, economic and the peace argument.

The Political Argument

You need to understand that the European Union is not a free trade area or an association.  It is a union.  It has an executive – the European Commission – and it has a legislature – the European Parliament.  It has a Court – the European Court of Justice – and it has a Civil Service.

These institutions are supranational and rank above their equivalents in individual countries.  The decisions of the ECJ are binding on the British Supreme Court and EU “Directives” are binding on the British Parliament.

The problem for Britain is that we don’t fit in this structure.  For a thousand years we have offered an alternative vision of society to that holding sway in Europe.  We have been democratic while they have been autocratic; we have been individualistic while they have been corporatist; we have prized liberty above equality whereas they have tended to the reverse; we have been protestant while they have been largely Catholic; their legal systems have tended to be inquisitorial and based on directives from the centre whereas ours has been based on precedent and adversarial debate; we have followed the Rule of Law in which an independent judiciary has been able to protect the citizen against arbitrary authority whereas they have had absolute authorities.

Recently, in historic terms, Europe has become democratic too, but there remains a fundamental gulf between our view of Democracy and theirs.  In Europe, The State tends to be supreme and the purpose of Democracy is to determine who will wield that supreme power.  In Britain we tend to regard the State as a necessary but not particularly desirable entity that is to be subservient to The People unless absolutely necessary.  Daniel Hannan gives a good illustration of this in his book on Freedom.  He was attending a debate in the European Parliament on a Directive to regulate Herbal Medicine.  He put down a question: why do we need a Directive on Herbal Medicine?  His colleagues looked at him as though he were mad: “because there isn’t one”, they said.  In Britain our response would be, “Great!  We don’t need one, then”.  But not in Europe.

Even the word “Directive” is anathema to me and to many Britons.  You don’t “Direct” an English man or woman to do something.  That’s been tried and it doesn’t work.  You win them over by argument and persuasion.  The British people give their consent to laws; they don’t accept direction.

So how did we let things get this far?  The answer is that we, the British, did not understand these differences when we voted to join the Common Market in 1974.  We thought we were joining a free trade area.  I thought we were joining a free trade area.  We knew about the commitment by the European Founding Fathers to “Ever Closer Union” and we didn’t believe it. But since then, a series of treaties have surreptitiously moved power from the People’s Representatives to the European Centre.

Around the turn of the Millennium the Europeans made a choice that was a step too far for us.  They implemented a currency union – the Euro.  Thankfully, we saw the danger and said no to this.  And this decision almost certainly saved us from the chaos that the Euro Zone has experienced since.  But what the decision did do was highlight to me and people much more powerful than me the democratic deficit in Europe.  The Euro has no democratic oversight.  It is a currency without a master.  It is managed by an unelected group of bankers in Frankfurt who make their decisions without having to answer to the Peoples of the countries whose economies are affected.

But it is worse than just the Central Bank.  Europe cannot be democratic for this reason: People don’t vote for subtitles! Citizens will not vote for politicians whose language they do not speak.  You have to look into the eyes of your politicians and you have to weigh their every word and nuance to make a judgement.  You can never make a judgement based on an interpreter’s summary of what they have just said.

And learning other languages, whilst better than nothing, is no solution.  Only a mother-tongue speaker can make an informed judgement as to the suitability of a politician for office.

So democracy is not possible in Europe.  Each country may elect its own representatives, who may negotiate with their peers from other countries, as happens in the European Parliament, but a true democracy in which the leaders of Europe are elected by the People of Europe will never be possible while we all speak different languages.  And we will always speak different languages.

These arguments, and others, have not been overlooked in Europe either.  An increasing number of European citizens are coming to realise that this is just a bad idea.  It is not going to work.  We will come out eventually when the whole thing falls apart.  So let’s shorten the process by coming out now.

The Economic Argument

The argument is often put that jobs and investment depend on our membership of the EU.  Well I grew up in a Britain that was not part of the EU and what I remember about that Britain is that prices were significantly lower than in mainland Europe, that our standard of living was higher than all but Germany and that we had full employment and considerable prosperity.

Being in Europe has restricted our freedom of action considerably.  We are not able to do trade deals with the USA, China, Australia or any other country.  We have to accept whatever trade deals the European Centre does on our behalf.  Some call this “Clout” but it is not that.  It is subjecting ourselves to a slow-moving, bureaucratic process that aims to compromise our interests with those of the other Member States.  The European Union was set up to solve a problem that no longer exists.  The World Trade Organisation is progressively bringing down the tariffs and barriers that restrict world trade and the internet now means that it is as easy for me to deal with a customer in Australia as one in France – easier because of the language.  The European Founders feared that the US and the Soviet Union would dominate world trade and that we needed to club together to counterbalance that dominance.  So what about Singapore?  Hong Kong? Switzerland and Norway?  Do these countries look as though they are suffering from lack of clout due to being small?  On the contrary, their freedom to be fast-moving and nimble gives them an advantage. 

A specific example is useful here.  Genetically Modified Organisms.  British science is world class in many areas but we cannot produce and sell GMOs despite their manifest advantages because we cannot reach agreement with the other twenty eight member states on what we can and cannot do.  So while America and Asia race ahead in this crucial area, we are forced to sit and watch.

Would Europe raise trade barriers against us if we left?  Well, let’s not forget that they are the smaller part of our export market.  We sell more to non-European countries than to Member States.  So we would not be left with no markets.  But we also buy more from mainland Europe than we sell to it.  In the case of Germany, we are the largest market in the world for German products.  Will they stop selling to us in a fit of pique?  Hardly?  Will they slap barriers on our goods?  Well only if they want retaliation.

There would, of course, be some dislocation and there might even be some temporary disinvestment.  But our job would be to show that we can be the best place to invest based on the quality of our workers and infrastructure, not on membership of a dying club.  If people can make money here, they will invest here.  It is as simple as that.

The Peace Argument

Of all the arguments, this has always seemed the strangest to me.  The argument goes that Europe has had seventy years of peace as a result of the EU.  Really?  Would we all start fighting if the club were disbanded tomorrow?  Looking at the ill-will generated in countries such as Greece and Cyprus by the European Central authorities, it is arguable that conflict is more likely within the EU.

The reason we have had peace is simple.  Britain, France and, above all, the USA have had nuclear weapons that could annihilate the Soviet Union if it chose to attack.  So it didn’t choose to attack.  And obviously the non-nuclear powers in Europe are hardly going to attack the nuclear ones.  I cannot see that the EU has had any influence at all on peace in Europe.  We have just moved beyond the stage at which we try to kill each other the whole time.

So does this mean I support UKIP?

No.  There is much in UKIP that I support tactically but I do not support the party.  For one thing, they are against Gay Marriage.  They claim to be in favour of Liberty and then they say that.  I don’t expect a political party to tell me who I can marry and I don’t plan to tell other people who they can marry.  This is not an issue for politics at all.

They are also opposed to European immigration.  Perversely, this is one of the few things about the EU that I actually like!  Free movement of capital, goods and people is what I voted for in ‘74. UKIP says that it would replace open-door immigration with a system of work permits.  The trouble is with this that you cannot tell what people will achieve based on their qualifications and skills.  It might help with a shortage of doctors but what about entrepreneurs?  Some of the best have arrived in just the clothes they wear and have built wonderful companies that have benefited the country hugely.   Would we have Easy Jet if we had insisted on Stelios’ family having a certain tally of points?

I love the dynamism that immigration creates – the smiling Czech who serves my coffee with such energy, the Indian business magnate, the French Chef – and many non-stereotypical examples, too!

UKIP will kill this stone dead if we are not careful.

So what’s the Answer?

We need to work through the main political parties to persuade them to use their remaining powers to get us out.  There are enough people of goodwill on all sides that we can do this.  We just need to focus on it and let our politicians know.

Headline: "First Amendment doesn’t apply here: N.C. lawmakers push bill for state religion"

See here for the article.

The funny thing about this from my outside standpoint is that such a move would have the opposite effect to that intended.

Here, Christianity is the state religion.  In fact, espiscopalianism, which we call “Church of England” is the state religion.  By law, every school has to teach “scripture” for an hour a week, every school day has to incorporate a religious assembly and five senior Bishops sit ex officio in our legislature.  The result:  2% of the population goes to church on a Sunday and we have something like 40% which doesn’t believe in God at all and most of the balance is agnostic.  An old joke is, “are you religious?  No, I’m Church of England”

Religion grows when it is persecuted.  When it is enforced, it withers.  Throw ‘em to the Lions is a great recruiting sergeant.  Compulsory prayers will drive people away.

The speech Nixon never gave

I heard this morning the speech that Richard Nixon had had prepared in the event that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the moon.

I am grateful that he never had to give it.  Firstly, of course, for the obvious reason but secondly because the words:

"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."

would inevitably have become more famous than the moving original from Rupert Brooke:

IF I should die, think only this of me:
    That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. 

(from "The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke who died in World War l)