On the remain side, we are sometimes guilty of thinking those on the other side of the argument are slightly stupid or have been duped by others but I think we know this is not always true. There is a group called The Leave Alliance (HERE) who campaigned for a leave vote and have given a lot of careful thought to it – producing a 400 page document proposing something called Flexcit (HERE) which has the benefit of being rational at least.
They are keen for us to join the EEA and to participate in a lot of joint programmes with the EU. Some members of the Leave Alliance like Richard North and Peter North (HERE) for example are highly critical of the government’s current approach (August 2017) of pursuing a hard Brexit outside of the single market and the customs union.
However, this does not make them right. The first few pages demonstrate the fundamental flaw in their thinking. Their vision is of Britain as “a merchant and maritime power playing its full role in European and world affairs while living under its own laws”.
They say, “The prosperity of the people depends on being able to exercise the fundamental right and necessity of self-determination, thus taking control of their opportunities and destiny in an inter-governmental global future with the ability to swiftly correct and improve when errors occur”.
For me trade is the central issue and it is clear the authors of this document have never been inside a European company and I would bet, probably not inside very many British ones either. If they had, they would be much less confident about the future than they are.
To trade you need to have things that others want and the UK, if it has demonstrated anything in the last hundred years or so, has shown we do not have anything like the number of world-class businesses that are needed to succeed. And the number that we do have is falling. Witness, not just individual companies within an industry, but almost entire industries themselves here in the UK that are foreign owned. The steel, paper, automobile, energy, cement, white goods and chocolate industries spring to mind. And consider the ones where we once led the world that we have either lost entirely or are hugely diminished, – shipbuilding and motorcycles or others like textiles and chemicals.
In itself this is not a problem. Importing things we need from other countries that have a comparative advantage in whatever it happens to be, is part and parcel of international trade. And workers from the industries that lose out eventually find other work. No, this is only difficult temporarily. Over a period it is manageable. The difficulty for us is two fold. Firstly, we already need to import a lot including about 40% of the food we eat. To pay for it we need to export a lot and herein is the problem. We have not exported a lot for years, even in relatively good times. We have had a balance of payments (the difference between what we buy and what sell abroad) deficit for most of the last century.
In the days of empire we got used to having a captive market. Since this began to decline we have had to trade on our wits and our innovation and skills. This has not gone well, let us be frank. We see this in the lack of British industrial giants and the growing foreign ownership of great swathes of our industrial landscape. And yet we don’t see it, at least those in the Leave Alliance and other pro Brexit organisations don’t. To them the EU is the only barrier to Britain becoming a global powerhouse as exporter. The EU is the problem, the whole problem and nothing but the problem.
