What would happen if the UK voted to leave the EU?
All sorts of claims and counter claims are made about this. But the answer in
the end is that we just don’t know. The future is uncertain and undetermined,
because it hasn’t happened yet. What we do know however, is that political
claims about the future are always influenced by the desire to influence
voters. One party says that there will be something approaching heaven on earth
if they win. The other party says there will instead be disaster and
catastrophe. But neither of these claims has much to do with truth.
Negative campaigning works. If it didn’t work no one
would use it. I used to love negative campaigning. During the Scottish
independence referendum I was overjoyed whenever someone in the Better Together
team described some new disaster that would happen if Scotland voted for
independence. When George Osborne explained that Scotland would definitely not
get to keep the pound after leaving the UK, I thought it was a masterstroke. Surely
now support for independence will dwindle to almost nothing.
Every few weeks some experts would publish a
detailed report designed primarily to scare Scottish voters into voting to stay
in the UK. No doubt these experts believed what they were writing was true. But
they also had a brief to fulfil for which they were amply rewarded. But did
these reports diminish support for independence? Perhaps they did. Some people
who might have voted for independence were too scared to do so. Negative
campaigning works. But it only works in the short term.
Scotland used to be a place where support for
independence was a minority pursuit. Around one quarter of Scots wanted
independence. That figure had stayed more or less fixed for decades. What
turned 25% into 45%? Project Fear did that. Nothing else. So negative
campaigning works. It works so well indeed that it has turned Scotland from
being a place where the overwhelming majority used to support the UK, into a
place where the majority will vote habitually for a party that supports
independence. Long term this isn’t a success. It’s a disaster.
At the moment we may be able to keep Scotland in the
UK because of the economics. But this support is contingent and to an extent
reluctant. If for whatever reason it were economically advantageous for
Scotland to leave the UK, what is the likelihood that we would vote to remain?
Yet Pro UK people still think that ever more negative campaigning is a great
idea. If we have any more great ideas like this, we may as well forget about the
long term future of the UK.
In any political debate you are allowed to counter
your opponent if you think he says something that is untrue, over-optimistic or
unlikely. The Scottish nationalists made claims about the future of an
independent Scotland that have turned out to be false. But has this harmed
them? We all still gleefully point out that Mr Salmond got his sums wrong? We
show that if Scotland had voted for independence, we all would have been much
poorer, that taxes would have risen and public spending would have fallen. We
do this because we think it will harm the SNP? Has it? Is there any sign that
support for the SNP has fallen or will fall in the near future?
It doesn’t matter that the SNP got their sums wrong.
No-one expects people to be able to predict the future. What matters is that
they tell a hopeful story and that the story they tell is one that a majority
of Scots at the moment like. That’s why they are winning.
If Scotland became independent tomorrow, how we’d
end up 20 or 100 years from now would depend on the decisions that were taken.
Becoming independent, no doubt, would involve some tough times and some hard
choices, but this is quite normal when countries become independent. But that
isn’t a reason why you can’t tell an optimistic story about it. The Republic
of Ireland fought a civil war, found their country partitioned and went through
decades of poverty. But they still think it was worth it. Compared to that
independence for Scotland would be easy. So you still think scare stories are
the answer? Project Fear, in fact, is the equivalent of Easter 1916. Shooting people, no doubt scares their friends. What a great idea. How long did Ireland remain a part of the UK after that? Short term Project Fear wins. Long term it loses.
What would have happened if Scotland had voted for
independence in 2014? There would have been some short term market chaos. Then
our lives would then have gone on more or less as normal. There would have been
some negotiations. Everything that had been said in the campaign would have
been forgotten. Both sides would have tried to find a way of fulfilling the
wishes of people in Scotland and the other parts of the UK. Democrats respect
the result of a referendum. What would have been the end result?
My guess is that we would have ended up with
something remarkably similar to what we have now. Central bankers would have
pointed out that it would be economically problematic to break up the
poundzone. Any other option apart from sharing the pound would have been very
bad news for Scotland, but also for the UK. After all Greece leaving the
Eurozone would not only harm Greece, it would also harm Germany in ways that we
perhaps cannot guess. Scotland would therefore have kept the pound.
The UK however, would have pointed out that monetary
union with the fiscal transfers necessary to make it work implies some form of
political union. We would therefore have ended up with a sort of federal
structure. The UK would have been loosened, but not dissolved. Scotland could
claim independence, but there would be many areas of shared government. In the
same way that Greece can be independent, but part of the European Union, so
Scotland would have ended up being independent, but part of a union (the UK)
that would not so much be approaching political union as already being just that. The
result in fact would be very similar to what we have at the moment. So long as Scotland wants to be part of a
currency union with other parts of the UK, we must accept that the goal of
independence is limited. We are always going to be in a political union with
those with whom we wish to share a currency. Once you accept this, then the
debate becomes largely sterile.
If Scotland had voted for independence everyone
would have done their best to avert whatever Project Fear said would happen. The
economy of the UK would be damaged by horrible things happening in Scotland, so
out of self-interest politicians and economists would have done their best to
accommodate the wishes of people in Scotland and reconcile them with the wishes
of everyone else. Forget the fall in the price of oil. It matters not at all.
Currency union would have continued and so would fiscal transfers. The
condition for this is that Scotland would have been ‘independent’ within the
UK. Sorry nationalist friends, but this is what your goal of independence looks
like. So much energy expended in Scotland over precisely nothing.
What then would happen if the UK voted to leave the
EU? Would the disasters predicted by Project Fear II happen? They might. But
the EU more likely would try to come up with an accommodation which suited both
the EU and the UK. The alternative would damage everyone. Imagine if both the
EU and the USA decided to take revenge on the UK. Imagine if they created all
the disasters that Project Fear II so gleefully predicts. If the UK became something
of a failed state, not trading with anyone at all, living in awful poverty,
would this help or harm the world economy? The Pro EU side depends on the idea
that the rest of the world would prefer to damage the UK rather than cooperate
with our wishes. The fall of one
American bank was enough to plunge the world into depression, but wrecking the fifth
largest economy in the world would, no doubt, have no effect whatsoever on the
wealth of people in other countries.
It is perfectly possible for both Scotland to be
independent and for the UK to leave the EU. There are lots of European states
that are both independent and not in the EU. Many of them are successful. Given
that it is possible for Iceland to be independent and not in the EU, the idea
that it would be some sort of catastrophe for the UK to be in that position
becomes faintly silly. There might be some difficulties to be overcome, but we
have a long history of overcoming difficulties.
I don’t want to be negative about Scotland ever
again. Independence is possible. There might be some tough times, but if you
think it would be worth it, by all means support that position. I disagree with
Scottish independence, because I see the UK as my country in the same way an
American sees the USA as his country. That’s it. There’s no need to argue with
a New Yorker about New York independence, because he has a positive story to
tell about the USA. The UK is a great country, with a long history and a people
who have done marvels. If you reject that, then it’s you that’s being negative not me.
Project Fear II is fundamentally insulting to
Britain. It is to suppose that we couldn’t survive outside the EU. This is quite
simply false. We survived for centuries before the EU even came into existence.
We could do so again. There might be challenges, but we’d meet them. Pro EU
people are fundamentally arguing that what Iceland can do successfully we
cannot.
In many EU countries there is no need to argue in
favour of remaining. Greeks are still enthusiastic members of the EU. If they
weren’t they would have left already. The reason for this is that they think
being part of the EU guarantees their place in Europe rather than in Turkey. For Poles and other
Eastern Europeans being in the EU is a sort of guarantee that they won’t revert
to being part of the Warsaw Pact. For Spain and Portugal the EU guarantees that
they won’t return to tyranny. But few Brits have any great feeling for the EU.
Few indeed feel particularly European. There is no common European identity,
for the simple reason that few of us know a word of Slovenian or Hungarian and
our knowledge of the history and culture of such countries is practically speaking non-existent.
It is the failure of Pro EU people to come up with a
positive story about the EU that means they have to resort to ever more
unlikely scare stories. This may well win in the short term, but long term it
loses. The EU may well keep the UK as a reluctant member, but this neither
helps the EU nor does it help Britain. The Eurozone has to move much closer
together or else fall apart. They are on
a different path to us. The UK can only hinder further EU integration, because
our interests differ from theirs. It makes much more sense for non-Schengen,
non-Euro countries to have a relationship to the EU that reflects this reality.
It may be that it is a condition for the
possibility of long term healthy EU survival that the UK votes to leave. Being Pro EU may mean voting for the UK to let them get on with it.
Remember when the Greeks had a referendum last year.
They were threatened with Armageddon if they dared to say No. They were told
that they’d be kicked out of the EU and out of the Euro. Did any of these scare
stories come true? Not one. Only when
they actually voted No did the negotiations even begin. It would be the same
here. If we vote to leave the EU, everyone would try to accommodate our
decision in the way that would be most beneficial for everyone concerned.
No-one is going to cast Britain into the wilderness, for we are all
interconnected and to seriously damage the UK economy is to seriously damage
the world economy.
Project Fear II may win, but it is a double edged
sword. It may damage the case for leaving the EU in the short term, but long
term it damages the case for remain. Discontent about the EU will only
increase. If the UK electorate comes to feel that it has been conned by scare
stories, it’s hardly likely that it will embrace the EU with hearty singing of
the ‘Ode to Joy’.
Being negative about Britain leaving the EU still
feels great for an awful lot of Pro EU people. Many of them likewise still
think that being negative about Scotland leaving the UK is working just
brilliantly. When the SNP wins all the seats the triumph of Project Fear will be clear to all. If you really care about the EU start telling me about how
brilliant the EU is. The fact that you can’t is itself a reason why we should
vote to leave.
