EU referendum: losing our abilities

14/02/2016

Where there is certainly nothing written of any consequence is in any of the competing "leave" groups in this dismal pre-referendum campaign, on whether, if Britain were to leave the EU, we would be capable of running our own country.

Few people beyond those nerds who study such things have any real idea just how far we have now become enmeshed in that vast, amorphous system of government centred in Brussels, Booker tells us. The officials of whole ministries, like the DEFRA, have come to operate almost entirely within the framework of policies and laws decided at EU level.

It is now 20 years since the only occasion when a British minister, Angela Browning, resigned because she could no longer tolerate being told by her officials, whenever she proposed a sensible policy on some issue, "Oh no, minister, we can't do that because it would be against European policy".

Vast numbers of our civil servants have grown up in a world where they have never had to think for themselves what might actually be the best policy for Britain, because such decisions have all been outsourced to a higher supranational level.

If we were suddenly to find ourselves independent, would they know where to begin in working out such policies for themselves? For a start, we would still have to keep huge quantities of EU law on the statute book, following the example of India after its independence in 1947, which only got round to the mammoth task of replacing the British-made law they had inherited in 1955.

We would also have to recruit an army of experts to take our place at those scores of global "top tables", above the EU, where so much policy and regulation is now decided, but where for years we have been represented only by the EU.

How to deal with this is, of course, written up in Flexcit and that is where the detail resides. But you won't find any of the "big leave" campaigns offering anything.

Not only have none of them yet agreed on a properly worked-out plan for how we could plausibly extricate ourselves from the EU; they haven't shown any understanding of how we could learn once again to govern ourselves once we had left.

It would require a titanic effort, immense practical ingenuity and political will, of which at present there is no sign whatever. And, significantly, that is precisely the point made by Wayne Swan, Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

Amongst other things, he takes a tilt at misty-eyed romantics, noting that the Commonwealth can never replace the trading and security bloc that is the EU. Turning the Commonwealth into a free trade area with harmonised regulations and a common trade policy is not on the agenda, Swan says.

He is right about that - two words define the problem: regulatory hysteresis. But, in the absence of any realistic alternatives to EU membership, we are left with the same vacuum that we've been confronting for the last four decades.

Just saying "we want to leave", concludes Booker, is not going to persuade the British people that this would not be that "leap in the dark". This opens the way for the equally dismal "Remain" campaigners to prevail, as they increasingly highlight the lack of any coherent exit plan.

Even if Mr Cameron did come back brandishing a piece of paper with nothing written on it, he could still carry the day, because we have actually lost the ability or will to run our own country - or even describe what it would look like.

In fact, it's worse than that. In the time elapsed since the 1975 referendum, about the only thing the eurosceptic "movement" has been able to do is demonstrate its inability to mount an effective "leave" campaign. So far have they departed from the real world that their brains have atrophied, more so than the civil servants who are expected to come up with a plan for a post-exit Britain. 

Using Nick Cohen as a foil, Pete dissects that failure, which may become more apparent over the next few weeks as events unfold. If certain things materialise, we will be on our way to losing the referendum and our ill-equipped civil servants will be off the hook.