Thursday 19 February 2015

Oh yes, there are alternatives

Nobody knows exactly when that IN/OUT EU referendum will take place and whether it will do so at all. The Labour Party is refusing to commit itself or, to be quite precise, its Leader is refusing to commit himself, assuring all and sundry, including, it appears, members of the Shadow Cabinet, that there is no need for such a referendum but none at all. Should his party win the May election, on the other hand, he may well change his mind.

It is quite likely that the SNP Leader has ambivalent feelings about a referendum of any kind at the moment and it is hard to tell what the Liberal-Democrats think though, it is believed, that most of them favour some kind of a referendum. (They, too, burned their fingers on the AV plebiscite.)

The Conservative Leader has given us assurances that there will be an IN/OUT referendum, probably in 2017 though he is also promising some kind of negotiations in order to introduce radical reform in the European Union. Good luck with that. So far, the only change and reform in the EU has moved in one direction and it is not the one most people in the UK want. We can agree on that, though the same opinion polls that tell us so, also tell us that far fewer people are prepared to vote to leave the organization with which they are seriously dissatisfied, namely the EU.

Let us assume that there will be a referendum, probably in 2017, perhaps a little later, depending on whether the EU decides to have another treaty or not. If we, that is the people who have looked at the present situation, which includes the disaster called the common fisheries policy and have looked at all past attempts to bring in meaningful reforms and the failure of those attempts and have decided that this construct cannot be changed and the UK would be a good deal better off outside it are to win the referendum, we need to produce cogent arguments. As Alex Salmond found out in the recent Independence Referendum, they have to be very cogent, indeed, and reliance on vague promises of great benefits whose source is unknown will be insufficient.

Already we have heard noises from the supporters of the status quo about there being no alternative; about Britain (the country with the fifth largest economy in the world) being too small to survive outside a big block; about the impossibility of making our voice heard on important issues outside the EU; and so on.

This blog has pointed out on a number of occasions (too numerous to link to) that, far from that being the case, it is within the EU, within the common fisheries policy that we cannot make our voices heard. Norway and Iceland, even Greenland or, rather, Denmark on behalf of Greenland, negotiate themselves on matters to do with the North Atlantic fisheries, yet they are all much smaller than Britain; Russia may not be smaller but its economy is, considerably so. The UK, on the other hand, does not negotiate - the EU does and it does so on behalf of the 28 member states.

Many of us have been saying all this for some time through Save Britain's Fish and the Fishermen's Association Limited but have frequently been pushed to the fringes of the political debate. There is, however, a change in the political air.

This week there were two events in London, one an evening panel discussion at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and one a half-day conference, actually in the European Parliament building (formerly the Conservative Central Office), organized by the Conservative MEP David Campbell-Bannerman. Both dealt with the problem of alternatives to EU membership. What can Britain do if she leaves this somewhat sclerotic, economically laggard and politically undemocratic structure?

Not all the alternatives were covered but even the ones that were: taking up our WTO membership rather than letting the EU negotiate on our behalf, re-joining EFTA, trying to join the EEA (European Economic Area), which would have some serious disadvantages, staying in a customs union with the EU or signing a special agreement while acting as an independent WTO member, all have one thing in common that is of interest to readers of this blog: all of them would release the UK fishing industry from the dead grip of Brussels and hand it back to Britain, its Parliament and the industry's members.

The point is that there are many alternatives to the EU and they can be investigated and discussed. The notion that we have nowhere to go and had better stay where we are "for fear of finding something worse" is ridiculous and needs to be destroyed.

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