The EU is awful! Compared to what?
Jeremy Paxman’s recent BBC documentary, “Paxman in Brussels”, serves as an embodiment of the contorted frame of Britain’s EU debate. Allegedly impartial, the documentary was followed up by an even more forthrightly Eurosceptic article that Paxman was forced to pull prior to its publication over its barely concealed one-sidedness. Considering some of the points Paxman raises in his documentary will allow us to get to the heart of much that is wrong with the general framing of Britain’s EU debate.
The central issue for Paxman is of sovereignty: “Everything, the economy, immigration, curvy cucumbers, oven gloves, everything comes back to sovereignty”. Accordingly, Paxman starts with the question, “By being part of the EU, have we lost the right to rule ourselves?” An hour later, he concludes: “there is no question that British sovereignty has been lost”. Any lingering notion that this BBC documentary may actually have attempted to be impartial set aside, we can move onto some of the points Paxman raises to arrive at this conclusion.
Paxman begins his documentary by discussing the familiar theme of Brussels’ “pettifogging regulations”. As is typical, it is never even considered whether EU regulations compare favourably to anybody else’s, including the EU’s own member states. This raises the question: What standard is the EU being compared to? The answer seems to be of some imagined utopia, since typically no attempt is made to compare the EU’s performance to that of any other real-world actor.
Something that is often ignored in the area of EU regulations is the Union’s role in harmonising law across Europe, so that where there are regulations on seemingly petty issues like cucumbers or bananas, this is often preferable to having twenty-eight separate pettifogging laws across Europe as would otherwise be the case. In other words, the EU’s regulations by definition often mean an effective cut in overall legislation.
Paxman then turns to the common theme of British exceptionalism, describing the execution of Charles I and its effects on the development of notions of sovereignty. Even among the niche intra-left Leave (“Lexit”) debate, notions of British exceptionalism are commonplace. Of course, it would be contrary to the whole point to put exceptionalist arguments into any perspective, so that they in a sense encapsulate our theme.
Given that all of Britain’s formative historical influences could geographically come from nowhere else but Europe, Britain could be described as the continent’s most European country just as easily as it could be described as exceptional. Even as it subjugated swathes of the globe during the outward-facing period of empire, Britain merely followed wider continental trends. All these kinds of considerations undermine the Brexit argument’s aim, which systematically relies on a lack of perspective to suggest we’re simply different to the continent, and therefore should be politically separated from it.
Paxman then amusingly goes on to describe the EU as “pretty madly complicated” because “the buildings are confusing, there are loads of them! A parliament, a council, a Commission, and a law court”. This of course sounds pretty much like what you would expect to find in any state, that is, a legislature, often bicameral, an executive and a judiciary. This kind of facile point literally only works if you ignore all potential comparisons that you could care to come up with, even among the EU’s own member states, which are the closest examples to hand. Again, what is the EU being compared to?
This sloppiness is so pervasive precisely because it is so seldom questioned. Remain’s silence has in this way done real wonders for the Brexit campaign by allowing the entire debate to be framed in their image.
Next, Paxman bizarrely bemoans that the EU spent 21 million euros on a visitor centre at the European parliament. Talk about pettifogging! Is this a lot to spend on such a venue? Who knows, who cares. That isn’t the point of this senseless EU bashing within a vacuum devoid of any perspective. Cameron recently backed spending a similar amount on a Thatcher museum. Half the amount, 10 million-odd euros, were spent on the UK’s Parliamentary Education Centre, inaugurated last year. To make some kind of reasonable comparison, we would need to go into more details. But, again, why bother? After all, it’s much easier to simply read a big figure and associate it with Brussels waste without a second thought.
It will be necessary to stop our blow-by-blow account here, since what has been described thus far only gets us under five minutes into Paxman’s hour-long documentary(!) This veritable barrage of out-of-perspective points is wholly representative of a dominant swathe of wider Brexit tactics.
Whether it’s bemoaning the size of the EU’s bureaucracy, the scale of its budget, or its lack of popularity, the same question should be asked at every stage yet never is: “compared to what?” What are we comparing the EU to after all? Whatever the answer is, it seems clear that it is not being compared to any of its member states, the most obvious references to hand, and especially not to Britain. If it were, the EU would rank more favourably on pretty much all counts. It has a much smaller bureaucracy, spends far less, its institutions are typically much more popular relative to national ones, and so on. Given this reality, it is crucial for Leavers to launch their attacks in a vacuum of their own making. Since Remainers don’t seem to be doing much about this, it is left to the public to question these arguments themselves. Don’t fall for Leave’s out-of-context arguments! Ask yourself, “compared to what?”
Our country, the United Kingdom, is itself of course a democratic union of several nations. From a pure freedom and democracy perspective, this union has strengths (like the House of Commons), and many weaknesses (a dodgy voting system, a monarchy, an anachronistic second chamber composed of “Lords”, and a whole bunch of confusing buildings producing reams of pettifogging regulations). If we seriously applied the same standards of criticism as are typically hurled at the EU to the United Kingdom, we would probably conclude that we may as well scrap whole thing and start anew!
What this whole mess of criticisms in a vacuum obfuscates is that, just as Paxman argues, everything does indeed constantly turn back on the fundamental issue of sovereignty and who makes decisions on our behalf. The real question is simple, it is of whether you believe Britain can do more to steer its own future (that is, exercise real world, practical sovereignty) within the EU, or outside it. We all know Britain would regain the technical right to declare whichever fancy as law on the outside, but this is of course quite different from the idea of actually getting anything done. This was something people understood during the debate of the early 1970s, when continental institutions were far less important, yet it is overlooked by today’s Remain campaign.
All of thirty seconds prior to Paxman’s bold conclusion that “there is no question about” British sovereignty having been lost through EU membership, we got a clear example of floundering Remain tactics via his gift of an interview with a prevaricating Nick Clegg. Paxman: “Asked a straight question: has national sovereignty been restricted, yes or no, what do you say?” Clegg: “I think it’s been extended”. After a pause, a puzzled Paxman replies, “so the answer is yes or no?” “It’s been extended”, Clegg tediously repeats, “so, it hasn’t been restricted, it has been extended”. “So the answer is no”, Paxman helpfully suggests, “you say there’s been no curtailment…”. Clegg interjects: “You’ve got to be open about this…”(!) A wholly unnecessarily crooked answer to a straight question, this exchange offers a glimpse into how the debate on Britain’s continued EU membership has gotten to its current state.
After this clumsy exchange, Clegg goes on to provide a condescending analogy to help Paxman understand why his take on sovereignty is so childish. By the time Clegg finally musters a decent response comparing England’s union with Scotland to the EU, and the idea of sovereignty being boosted by sticking together, it’s hard not to find yourself sympathising with Paxman’s sceptical approach. This feeling was not at all intrinsic to the arguments they put across. Clegg could of course have just answered: “no”. That might have helped.
Alas, the voices for Remain being what they are, as the above exhibit hammers home, the debate on sovereignty has so far been lost. Nobody is fiercely arguing, as they should and in the 1970s did, that sovereignty is categorically strengthened by EU membership because we can get more done in the world rather than exercising a mere technical right within our small islands.
Not only is the sovereignty debate ceded to Leave, but the entire context in which it is framed is handed over, too. Whether Remain is ceding the very notion of the Britain geographically existing within Europe by going along with in an exclusionary othering of Europe in public debates, or failing to demand any perspective from Leave’s criticisms of the EU, the entire frame of the debate has been surrendered. We are left with a cold deal, peddled by a predictable roll call of establishment figures, who have presided over economic catastrophe and stagnation. And then Remain scratches its head and wonders why the polls are looking so frightening.
Not only would a little more perspective from Remain make so many of Leave’s arguments evaporate, thereby recovering lost ground, but it could even serve to directly attack many of Remain’s typical points and so actually gain ground from Leave. For instance, it is an incredible irony that among the 53 Commonwealth states, India is consistently touted by Leave campaigners as an appealing example of a trade alternative to the continent. This attractiveness of course stems precisely from the fact that India represents a single market encompassing hundreds of millions of people, more diverse than the EU by almost any measure (whether it be in terms of ethnicity, language, religion and so on). Of all the attractive trade partners in the world, would an isolated Britain jump forth in any Indians’ mind? How about the EU?
Perhaps the next favourite Leave example, Switzerland, only compounds the irony by bringing it closer to home. Switzerland serves precisely as an example of how a prosperous political federation of diverse peoples with varying languages and histories can in fact become reality, even in the heart of Europe. Unquestioned like so much of Leave’s mythology, such arguments and examples have become effective weapons employed against Remain.
Paxman’s documentary is useful in highlighting the blatant weaknesses behind so many of Leave’s standard arguments once some perspective is introduced, while at the same time underlining the feeble battle that Remain has put up. This combination has proven so damaging that it may well terminate Britain’s EU membership come June 23rd. Even if the Remain camp does little to reclaim the ground it has lost, much less gain new ground, we can all go a long way in redressing this imbalance by simply asking ourselves, “compared to what?” when we hear the standard criticisms of the EU. Remain desperately needs a touch of that invaluable attitude which has so daftly been ceded to Leave along with so much else, that essential attitude of scepticism.
