The best reasons to Leave
The EU is not a free-trade area; it is a customs union. The difference may seem technical, but it goes to the heart of the decision we face
Daniel Hannan
We need to co-operate with our neighbours, say Remainers, as if someone somewhere were objecting to the idea. Were the EU simply a common market, a regional bloc like Nafta or Asean, no one would have a problem with it. What makes the EU different from every other international association is that it legislates for its members. In any conflict between a parliamentary statute and the ruling of a Brussels institution, the latter takes precedence. This legal supremacy, which was not challenged during the renegotiation, is the basis for the political merger of the member states. The EU has acquired, one by one, the attributes and trappings of nationhood: a president and a foreign minister, citizenship and a passport, treaty-making powers, a criminal justice system, a written constitution, a flag and a national anthem. It is these things that Leavers object to, not the commerce and co-operation that we would continue to enjoy, as every neighbouring country does.
The EU is not a free-trade area; it is a customs union. The difference may seem technical, but it goes to the heart of the decision we face. Free-trade areas remove barriers between members and, economists agree, tend to make participants wealthier. Customs unions, by contrast, erect a common tariff wall around their members, who surrender the right to strike individual trade deals. From the start, the EEC prioritised politics over economics and opted for a customs union as the means to a political union.
Britain is one of only two of 28 member states that sell more to the rest of the world than to the EU. We have always been especially badly penalised by the EUs Common External Tariff. Unlike Switzerland, which enjoys free trade with the EU at the same time as striking agreements with China and other growing economies, we must contract out our trade policy to a European commissioner at present, as it happens, a former sociology lecturer from Sweden.
We have (because the EU has) no trade agreements with China, India or most other Commonwealth countries. EUAustralia talks are being held up by a dispute over Italian tomatoes. Even the EU-Canada deal, which everyone thought was agreed, now risks being vetoed by Romania because of an unrelated row about visas for Romanians wishing to enter Canada. Its a costly failure. In 2006, the EU was taking 55 per cent of our exports; last year, it was down to 45 per cent. What will it be in 2030 or 2050?
. We can hardly accuse Eurocrats of being shy about their plans. The Five Presidents Report sets out a plan for the amalgamation of fiscal and economic policies a process that can only take place among the 28 states as a whole, since there is no legal mechanism for eurozone-only integration. The Belgian commissioner Marianne Thyssen has a plan for what she calls social union i.e. harmonisation of welfare systems. Jean-Claude Juncker wants a European army, which the Commission describes as a strategic necessity. These are not the musings of outlandish federalist think tanks: they are formal policy statements by the people who run Brussels.
The EU, in short, is responding to the euro and migration crises in the way it responds to everything: with deeper integration. Because Britain kept its currency and its passport checks, we have other options.
When Britain joined in 1973, the states that now make up the EU accounted for 36 per cent of the world economy. Last year, it was 17 per cent. Obviously, developing economies grow faster than advanced ones, but the EU has also been comprehensively outperformed by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Its not hard to see why: Brussels is more concerned with keeping the euro together as a means to political integration than in the welfare of the poor wretches who have to use it.
Back in the 1970s, western Europe seemed more modern and prosperous than Britain. Does it seem that way now? In an age of Skype and cheap flights, why should we allow accident of geography to trump ties of language and law, custom and kinship? Why tie ourselves to the worlds slowest-growing continent? Ooh, so you want us to be like Switzerland or Norway, do you? say Remainers. No: we can get a better deal than either. We are 65 million people to Switzerlands eight million and Norways five million; on the day we left, wed become the EUs single biggest export market.
Still, its worth noting that Norway and Switzerland come first and second in the Legatum Prosperity Index and that their voters oppose EU membership by, respectively, 79 per cent and 82 per cent. They trade freely with the EU, while being exempt from (in Norways case) most or (in Switzerlands) all its legal acts. They do pay Brussels, but less than we do per capita far less, in Switzerlands case. And, as well as the freedom to sign trade deals with overseas markets (they signed one with the Philippines last month, after just ten months of talks), they are self-governing democracies.
The fact that they all have their own particular deals with Brussels shows how silly it is to expect us precisely to mimic someone elses: wed get our own deal, tailored to our own conditions. And thrive with a trade-based relationship with the EU.
The Spectato
