Why I have voted for the UK to Remain in the EU

1. I believe in the promotion of the humanitarian democratic values, the mitigation of unbridled nationalism, and minimising the risk of war, by cooperation among the nations of Europe – a Europe which incidentally includes the UK, and which I consider my homeland. The European Union with all its faults is the only organisation we have which is struggling against endless backbiting to achieve exactly that.
2. Working in the City of London for many years I personally witnessed its extraordinary growth as a huge money earner for the UK (a trade surplus of £72 billion last year compared to a much larger current account deficit of £96 billion for the whole country). Cameron has now negotiated safeguards that will let the City to continue to grow as the financial centre of the European Union despite the UK not being in the Eurozone. This deal would not apply if the UK were not in the EU at all.
3. Membership of the European Union has also benefited UK exports and foreign investment into the UK. The value of this benefit has been significantly bigger than the UK’s net contribution to the costs of running the EU which is a fraction of one per cent of GDP.
4. The UK’s economy has been performing well. Membership works.
5. Other EU members can also perform well: Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden all have faster growth rates than the UK. German, Netherlands and Greek performance is similar to the UK’s at present, while France and Italy lag behind due to their reluctance to adopt economic reform promoted by the EU.
6. The EU’s contribution included setting up structures for democratic institutions which are now under attack by right wing parties in certain countries, and they may be seriously damaged, but at least they were set up. Legal and economic structures provided a framework for substantial foreign investment, accounting for Poland’s rapid economic growth while the rest of the world suffered from financial crises.
7. Only when united will Europe be a global player that can compete politically and strategically with the other global powers, the USA, India and the increasingly assertive China and Russia. Britain needs to lead and needs to persuade other European countries, particularly Germany, to do their share of building our military strength against the growing threats we now face.
8. Large economies are more efficient than small economies. A key aim of the EU founders was to build a stronger and more efficient economy for the benefit of all countries in the region including the UK. This involves different countries or regions specialising in different things, like the UK in finance, a high value business.
9. In order to have a single large market, we need common standards for numerous products and so the countries of the EU use the Commission to agree and set standards for everything from kettles to cars.
10. One civil service rather than twenty eight doing all those things is efficient. The EU says it has 33,000 employees. The British government has 5.9 million employees with perhaps 450,00 classified as civil servants. Some sources claim Poland has 440,000, others 700,000 civil servants, depending on how they are classified. Germany has 1.6 million. Complaining about the staffing levels of the EU, which has a population of 500 million, is ridiculous.
11. Decisions are made by the EU governments working together, not by the unaccountable totalitarian “Monster Brussels” invented by the populist press and continually complained about by anti-Europeans and self-serving politicians.
12. A classic example of how things work is steel: the USA has set 266% tariffs to protect itself against Chinese exports at below cost, which threatened to bankrupt US steel producers. The EU wanted to do the same. But the British government successfully blocked this, an example of the how the British Government can and does influence EU decisions. As an aside, I would suggest that in this case Britain got it wrong and now, as a result, China can continue to threaten European steel producers including the Tata plant in Wales.
13. The British Parliament passes the UK budget, which includes tax rates, and the Leave Campaign’s slogan “take back control of our taxes” is a lie. The major problems Brits complain about – inheritance tax, income tax, outrageous stamp duty, the attack on buy-to-let investors, a major airport problem in London, poor transport infrastructure, a dysfunctional NHS, immigration from the Third World, the list goes on – are all self-inflicted.
14. The London Stock Exchange, the City and the leaders of great British companies from Carphone Warehouse and Easyjet to BT and Sainsburys don’t seem to think Monster Brussels is that bad for them either as they are overwhelmingly in favour of Remaining and reforming where needed. Trade Unions and believers in employee rights too.
15. The EU is of great assistance to UK academic research, innovation and international co-operation by way of research grants and for example the Erasmus student exchange programme.
16. Yes, Europeans benefit from visa-free travel to Britain but so do Brits benefit from visa-free travel to the rest of the EU. Millions of Brits live in other EU countries, we have free movement of capital, freedom to buy homes, businesses and farms elsewhere in Europe, and from next year we will have no mobile phone roaming charges thanks to the EU.
17. I am very sorry that the recent arrival of more Poles in the UK has triggered populist resentment led by Farage. Several estimates show that Poles have been a net benefit to the UK – they are young and fit, they have come to work not to sponge, and many of them even work in the NHS, schools and universities, and other public services. It would be an unfortunate historical irony if the nation which kept to its March 1939 Treaty to fight for Britain if it was attacked, which gave Britain the enigma secret and prototype machine at the beginning of the Second World War, ran Agent Knopf, the most important agent the Allies ever had in the German Military High Command, provided examples of V1 and V2 rockets, fought for Britain in North Africa, Italy, and Northern France, on the High Seas, in Bomber Command and the Battle of Britain, should also be the country which triggered Britain’s departure from the EU.
18. The hidden key platform of the Brexiteer campaign is to restrict the flow of young Polish and other EU workers into the UK. If this flow is successfully restricted, a foreign investor thinking of setting up a factory in the UK partly staffed with, for example, good value Polish workers, will at the margin, as the supply dries up, consider setting up the factory in Poland instead.
19. Nobody has explained how this hidden plan of restricting the inflow would be carried out. Would visas be imposed on incoming EU citizens? Are we banking on the other EU countries admiring us so much that we will continue enjoying visa free travel and rights to work and live in their countries? Dominic Raab, the UK justice minister, conceded on 24th April that Brits may then need visas to visit Europe. The Spanish Prime Minister has said that if Britain introduces a points system for admitting EU citizens, the EU should reciprocate.
20. Finally stung into clarifying the Brexit plans, their leader Michael Gove said on 19th April that the UK would be part of the “free-trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey”. In fact the countries in this zone most often quoted by Brexiteers as models, namely Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, all have freedom of movement and all pay contributions to the EU, even though Switzerland’s banks do not even have financial services “passports” to do business in the EU. Gove seemed to accept that the City would lose its financial “passport” to do business in the EU, and when he claimed that the City is wrong to worry about, this hardly anyone believed him.
21. We may feel smug about the fact that Syrian refugees are landing in Greece and Italy not here. However, the Syrian war was not caused by the EU. Last year’s wave was caused by Russian bombing and refugees would have been landing in Greece and Italy even if there were no EU. Angela Merkel made a mistake and was too generous in her response. But her motives were decent. The EU is showing solidarity with Greece and desperately trying to find a solution by negotiating with an unsavoury regime in Turkey. This is a messy and difficult task, but the intention is fine and honourable.
22. Anti-European politicians may feel it is their prerogative to make endless derogatory remarks about the EU, the euro, other European leaders, and so forth, while expecting patient politeness back from Angela Merkel and others. Merkel keeps saying she would like the UK to remain to help reform the EU. There is no rule which says this patience will last forever. Will it persist after the UK slaps other European countries in the face by deciding to Leave? Continental Europeans do generally have a friendly attitude to Brits. But none of them understand why so many Brits hate them back, and many of them are losing patience.
23. Anti-Europeans may expect that, after we Leave, European leaders will, out of kindness or just because Britain is such an important country, let us pick and choose between those bits of cooperation we like and those that we don’t, that the City will continue freely to grow its business in the rest of the EU, that we will continue to export to Europe tariff-free, that we won’t have to contribute anything at all to the costs of running the tariff-free zone, that we will have everything our way, and that when we start making changes to their disadvantage they won’t reciprocate. Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. Exports to the EU represent a very large part of the UK economy, 12.6% of GDP, putting the UK in a relatively vulnerable position and giving the EU a lot of negotiating power. Exports to the UK represent only 3.1% of EU GDP, giving the UK much smaller negotiating power. All EU countries except Germany and the Netherlands have trade deficits (not surpluses) with the UK. Not a good position for the UK to start a game of brinkmanship.
24. The UK would either (a) have to simply accept EU standards without participating at all in the process of setting them, which would really damage UK sovereignty, and pay for the privilege, like Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, in which case, since the special rebate Margaret Thatcher negotiated would no longer apply, the UK’s net contribution may even have to go up, or (b) have to establish its own departments to set up its own unique standards, which would be very expensive and cumbersome and lead to the logistical nightmare of how to export to the EU, whose different standards the new British departments would have been set up to reject.
25. The EU has already negotiated and is continuing to negotiate very good trading terms with the rest of the world to the benefit of the UK. The US has already indicated that it prefers to negotiate with regional trading blocs than with individual countries. The trade of Germany alone with the US is twice the UK’s. So the “downside” in damaged trade with the EU after Leaving is considerably bigger than any “upside” in trade with the rest of the world.
26. A decision to leave will either (a) provoke similar debates in other EU members, potentially damaging the rest of the EU, which I think would be most unfortunate even if anti-Europeans cheer, or (b) unite the rest of the EU against the UK.
27. Option (a) seems to me unlikely. For ages anti-Europeans have been telling us that the euro will collapse. Now, 18 years later, it hasn’t. A euro was worth 66p in 1999 and has been worth between 78p and 82p most of this year. The eurozone’s economic growth in the first quarter of this year was higher at 0.6% than the UK’s at 0.4%. Anti-Europeans have been telling us for even longer that the EU is collapsing. It hasn’t. Although, according to the Economist, Russian diplomats are also gloating over the EU’s refugee, Brexit and other problems, the EU is likely to endure.
28. That leaves option (b), which would also be most unfortunate. Or a combination of (a) and (b): a EU that is both weakened and antagonised.
29. Britain should behave like a great country. Richard Horton of The Lancet put the overriding argument rather well: “Our membership of the European Union will help to shape a positive and creative vision for Europe. The debate about the Union’s nature and purpose demands our participation and voice, not withdrawal and silence. At a time when the continent is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis since World War 2, does the UK really wish to walk away from its European partners?”

And finally, the Leave Campaign’s allegation that the EU costs the UK £350 million a week is a double lie. First the true gross figure is £250 million. Even this lower figure ignores money that the EU sends back to the UK. The actual net cost is about £135 million, a fraction of one per cent of GDP, and the cost to the UK of establishing its own organisations to replace services currently provided by the EU could be significantly greater, even before calculating the cost of potential economic damage created by Brexit. Offering the NHS £350 million is fraudulent. There will be less money left for the NHS, not more. Brexiteers terrify people with threats of millions of migrants arriving from Africa and the Middle East to rape and pillage our innocent citizens, and ask them to vote for Brexit for protection. The EU has no such intention, UK citizens are already protected by existing arrangements and this is a smokescreen for the Brexiteers’ real intention, which is to prevent EU citizens, above all Poles, from coming to the UK.

At the end of the day, the British voters are entitled to Leave if they wish. However, in my opinion, this, and the debate it could provoke in other EU countries, will be a victory for Putin and a significant step back towards the 1930s for everyone else. Instead of uniting us, the Jihadists will have divided us.

Jan Ledóchowski