EU Referendum


EU Referendum: the Booker beat


01/05/2016




Arguably the most appropriate response to President Obama, writes Booker, when he told us "no you can't" vote to leave the EU might have been to ask him to look again at his country’s Declaration of Independence in 1776.

After the bit about the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", it goes on to say that, if a people finds itself ruled by a form of government it cannot otherwise change (a perfect description of how we are ruled by the government we have no power to change in Brussels), it is "their right and duty to throw off such a Government".

And if we get the impression that our American friends don't really have much clue as to the nature and workings of the form of government which has increasingly ruled us over the past 43 years, this may be explained by the statement on the US State Department's website that "the European Union was founded in 1948" and that it was only set up "to democratically legislate for matters of joint interest to participating countries".

Then, Booker turn to the main theme of his column, headed: "Brexiteers! We need an exit strategy and we need it now!". Here, he also picks up on the theme he had raised earlier this month, observing that "even more astonishing ignorance of the nature and rules of the EU" is that being displayed by the main players in our referendum battle, not least, alas, by those running the official "leave" campaign.

This begins with their amazing inability to recognise that the only possible legal way for any country to leave the EU is by invoking Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which derives from the insistence back in the Eighties of Altiero Spinelli, the "father of the European Union" that his Union must not be "a prison" from which no country could escape.

Again and again, when two very senior experts on EU law gave evidence to a House of Lords committee on 8 March, they emphasised that Article 50 is the only conceivable mechanism for a country to leave - all it seems falling on deaf ears to those who should know this before anything else.

The transcript of the oral evidence is here, with supplementary written evidence here. There is also written evidence from David Edward here. The crucial words are: "Article 50 is the only route for withdrawal consistent with the UK's legal obligations".

This makes even more terrifying, says Booker, the quite deliberate refusal of the Leave campaigners to come up with a convincing and coherent exit plan which could reassure voters that, by leaving the EU we would not be excluded from the European Economic Area, allowing us to continue trading in the single market just as we do now.

They claim that, if they proposed a specific exit plan, they would only be attacked for it – instead of which they are quite rightly and very dangerously attacked for not having one. Polls show that easily the most important factor influencing voting intentions on June 23 is "the economy", 47 percent (twice as high as concerns over immigration); and it is this above all which plays into the hands of David Cameron's "Project Fear".

The only obvious counter to almost everything the "Remainers" are arguing would be to show that there is one simple. off-the-shelf answer to all their scaremongering: that we should apply to join Norway and other members of the European Free Trade Area, which would not only give us access to the EEA but would also give us much more influence over the shaping of its trade rules than we have now as just one country among 28.

When the history of this referendum comes to be written, nothing will be seen as more responsible for the British people having voted, many very reluctantly, to stay in than the dismal failure of the Brexit campaigners to show that we could quite safely leave by adopting the one practical strategy they refuse to countenance.

We have just seven weeks left to come to our senses on this. Otherwise, as the old rhyme has it, but for the want of that crucial "horseshoe nail", the "kingdom was lost".

Photo: Andrew Wilkinson.