A Positive Case For Brexit

Here's a tip for Brexiters.  If you really want to annoy remainers, don't insult them.  All that does is confirm the idea that Brexit is simply a howl of rage against nothing in particular by people who just love complaining.  Negative arguments are powerful because they are emotional and full of energy and conviction.  When they are also strong arguments they are unbeatable.  But directed against people who don't buy the original premise, they just sound stupid and they make the person putting them forward appear unhinged.


I for example never bought into any of the negative Brexit arguments.  I don't see how we are losing and sovereignty by voluntarily joining up in a union with other states.  And if there was any question of it, that has been pretty much demonstrated by the fact that we have been able to vote ourselves out. I am very familiar with EU regulations in my field and can compare them with similar ones in other countries.  They aren't the kind of things that you are ever going to love but they are no worse than any other.  If anything, they are probably a bit better.  And I have no interest in vague warnings about immigration.   I want to know numbers and means of enforcement. Anything short of that is potentially damaging waffle.

But having said all that, I didn't automatically plump to remain in the EU.  I was interested in the option of leaving. There is nothing about the EU that automatically guarantees that membership is preferable to going it alone.  I can imagine a project being put together that might be more appealing than staying in. For example, the way Britain is very dependant on financial services isn't much to my taste. That isn't a sector I work in for a start so it doesn't directly benefit me. And I am suspicious that it is a bit too easy to shift it around the world and to be automated.  I am not at all sure I want to rely on it for the long run.  And similarly, I think we really could do with more manufacturing industry. So if the Brexit offering had come with some plans for how exactly a non-EU UK was going to be built I would certainly have taken a look and might well have been willing to sign up for it.

As it was, the Brexit argument was all about stuff that frankly left me cold.  I wasn't interested in hearing about the shortcomings of the EU commission or how unelected and unaccountable they were or anything like that.  I certainly wasn't impressed by the arguments about immigration.  If anything, the EU is a better way of keeping out people we don't want here than having to do it all on our own.  And as to losing the freedom to travel and work in the EU - well that is a real loss that needs some pretty strong compensation to justify.

So although I was open to being persuaded, the unfolding of the campaign has left me a much stronger supporter of the EU than when I started.

Now this is all very well but Brexit won and now the bad news is coming in, we can get to see what they are really like. We already have the downgrading of the UK's credit rating, an historically unprecedented fall in the value of the pound, predictions of widespread relocation of manufacturing jobs to eastern Europe.  We will shortly be hit by price rises. The job losses won't be far behind.

None of this necessarily means that Brexit won't still be a success. But it does mean that once the sacrifices start having to be made people are going to have to have some kind of light at the end of the tunnel to look forward to. The level of support for Brexit was basically only just enough to be adequate for the task to begin with so its supporters are going to have to come up with some pretty strong arguments to keep the show on the road. Simply slagging off the EU won't achieve anything any longer.

So if you have become convinced like me that the Brexit project is ill conceived and should be stopped before it happens if possible and reversed at the earliest opportunity if it can't then hearing yet again about the shortcomings of the EU and its supporters just pushes me further into my existing position.  The thing that might get me out of this frame of mind is a genuinely interesting story about the opportunities that Brexit opens up.

So what might they look like?

The opportunities of doing business with countries that the EU is the obvious one and the only one that has ever been really articulated by the Brexit lobby.  It has failed to convince me so far because I am not aware of any particular barrier to exporting that the EU imposes.  In fact if anything I would say that support from the EU is more obvious than support from the UK government - but both in my opinion do a good job.  But there is no reason why a medium sized economy shouldn't do very well outside it either.  If Brexit Britain is going to have an active policy of promoting exports backed up by a tariff structure that makes sense then I am all ears.

Related to that, but a different area of policy would be taxation.  We can now set any level of income tax, corporation tax and value added tax that takes our fancy.  Let's use those tools to make the country more equal and more productive.  More taxes on the rich and property could be used to fund education and infrastructure to make our island and its people the best trained and the best equipped in the world.  We'd chase away a lot of foreign investment by doing that, but done strategically it could work well.

One special case would be newspaper ownership.  What possible reason could justify foreign ownership of British newspapers?

And to turn one popular Brexit trope on its head, in the modern world you have to compete on quality.  Let's make our regulations the toughest in the world for safety and environmental impact.  That way British would equal quality.  The Swiss do that rather well but we could do it even better.  Let's literally make being British equivalent to being the best.

Not many Brexiters seem to be remotely in this mindset.  The only prominent person I have heard making a positive case for Brexit is Arlene Foster, of all people, from Belfast, of all places.  I wouldn't generally regard that province as being amongst the more forward looking parts of the UK, but whatever else you think about it - Brexit is full of surprises.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-37805720