With the Brexit debate currently focusing on the question of trade, Brexiters are able to wrongly claim that the UK would enjoy better trade agreements outside the EU, sooner or later. This exercise in hand waving complacency is not available when it comes to our security.
This is not just about the European Arrest Warrant, responsible for the extradition of 7000 criminals out of the UK and 1000 brought to justice here including failed London bomber Hussein Osman.
There are over 100 measures in total, many of which the UK has chosen to withdraw from while remaining in the important ones. The European Investigation Order, for example makes it much easier to investigate crimes where some investigation is needed in another jurisdiction.
Perhaps the most significant is intelligence sharing, which led to arrests last week in the UK, in connection with the Paris and Brussels bombings. Terrorists clearly don’t respect borders and for us to operate in national silos would make us much weaker. Brexit would delight Da’esh.
These are all agreed measures for co-operation which we have opted into because they are in our interests to do so. Unlike the case with trade, where Single Market rules are the exclusive rules for doing business, there is nothing to stop us agreeing additional measures bilaterally with any other country in the world, inside or outside the EU. And we do. Any Brexiter who claimed we could replicate the EU measures better outside the EU would be trumped by the observation that there is nothing stopping us doing it already.
Now most Brexiters seem to be motivated by a desire to ditch any co-operation that comes with an EU label, but some will say at this point that surely the EU will let us remain within those measures we want to be in (which on the 2014 decision of the UK government is all of them that we are currently in) and they may be right in principle although Brexit will make it more difficult in practice, and they have their fellow Brexiters to fight.
But, like the Single Market rules, the co-operation measures on crime, policing, terror and intelligence are not cast in stone. They are an ongoing project of improvement – responding to new threats, fixing mistakes (if not always as quickly as we might like), closing loopholes etc.
We should not expect a renegotiation with the UK each time the rump EU amends one of its crime fighting measures. No, like the single market, if we stay in, while leaving the EU, we are in a democracy by fax where we will have chosen to have no influence.
We already have border controls, and we can keep out terrorist suspects that we – or our European friends – have identified. But Britain, along with France, Germany, Belgium the Netherlands and Sweden have far too many home-grown terrorists who will most likely, as with all terrorists, kill the people around them, but will make connections all over the world. We won’t defeat them by giving up our connections.
* Joe Otten was the candidate for Sheffield Heeley in June 2017 and Doncaster North in December 2019 and is a councillor in Sheffield.
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27 Comments
I’m in favour of leaving the EU and ripping up the European arrest warrant. I think the European arrest warrant is an illiberal disgrace and one of the main reasons I want out of the EU. I hate to think of Turkey, a country where it is illegal to admit the Armenian genocide or insult the president getting into the EU and having the power to automatically demand our arrest.
Rightsaidfredfan:
I hope this is a joke for which I have missed the point
RightsaidFredfan
Those comments are so ludicrous they must be a joke. No wonder the campaign is annoying many people.
Someone seems to be an Aco lite.
I believe that Turkey recently asked Germany to file charges against a comedian for insulting their president. Not too keen on turkey in the EU… Not to keen on being in a political union with a country where you could be sent to jail for saying bad things about Kim Jong Un’s hair cut either mind you. Or would merkle only send it to the courts if you insulted the leader of a friendly nation?
I can’t put in to words how bored I am with both sides in the debate trying to out-scare each other and claim the mantle of objective truth. Yesterday on Radio 4 they were asking a chap from “Fact Check” whether George Osborne was telling the truth about the £4,000 (or whatver it was) he claimed every household would be worse off by in the event of leaving the EU. It was the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard, since there is no objective judgment to make on any kind of economic prediction, only speculative estimates. You might as well ask someone to “Fact Check” Mystic Meg’s forecast for this summer’s weather.
To date I have only heard one strong fact-based argument for staying in the EU, and that came from Jeremy Corbyn funnily enough. He said we should stay in to protect workers’ rights. Given the total destruction of the left and centre-left, and remembering how the social chapter was the one thing that saved us from the worst excesses of the Tories last time, this is the only thing at present that is causing me to tend towards Remain.
@Rightsaidfredfa
For clarity, I would guess that this is what you are talking about?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-green-lights-legal-case-against-erdogan-critical-comic-a-1087445.html
Look, hardly anyone objects to European co-operation on Crime, Policing, Terror and Intelligence.
But why do we need to be a member of an organisation which, with disastrous effect as the EU PTB clearly don’t understand the economics of it, is trying to enforce a single currency on all its members? Why do we have to have 25% unemployment in Greece and Spain so that German and UK police can talk to each other?
Petermartin2001 – it isn’t even hardly anyone in this thread. For many Brexiters the point is to abandon this co-operation.
But I am interested in your suggestion that there are Eurozone outers who have changed their minds about joining the Euro after agreeing to it at Maastricht or on accession. Who are they? How can you tell? They would make great allies for Britain if cultivated.
@Joe Otten
“For many Brexiters the point is to abandon this co-operation.”
Really? Who has been saying this then?
If we weren’t in the EU already almost nobody would want to join it. Tells me all I need to know.
Then there is the issue of what the EU would look like with turkey in it, definitely not something I want us to be a part of. You can say that turkey can’t join without our agreement but it can join without the British people’s agreement, nobody got a vote on Poland joining, our government just OK’d it and didn’t put any restrictions on the numbers who could come and those who objected were often called racist to silence them. I see no reason they could’nt just do the same again. The Irish people however did get a vote and said no to Poland joining, they were told that was the wrong answer and that they needed to vote again. These are plain facts, and I see no reason it couldn’t all happen again with turkey. Are we going to automatically extradite anyone turkey ask for to the human rights abusing hellholes that are Turkish jails then too?
“For many Brexiters the point is to abandon this co-operation.”
Sorry Joe, now you are just making stuff up on the hoof. Can you show any link or any evidence to any Brexit argument, that says joint co-operation with Europe on crime, terrorism and intelligence should be abandoned.? Why on earth would anyone even say such a ludicrous thing?
If we vote Leave, the UK, post Brexit will enthusiastically, still play it’s part [plus funding], for a whole range of mutually beneficial European projects and interests from shared intelligence, to scientific projects like CERN,… but,… we frankly, we just don’t need that extra layer of unaccountable Overlords, to maintain good relations with fellow Europeans. Please, let’s get real and have less of this ,… drawbridge raising,… back to the 50’s,…crazy talk.
Seriously,.. I know some people are getting a bit fraught with it all, but let’s not wander off into absurdity?
Does anyone seriously believe the UK would stop working closely with the EU – or they with us – against crime and terrorists if we voted to leave the EU? This is exactly the type of rubbish that is driving people into the leave camp. More and more I’m hearing people support the leave campaign because they don’t believe what they see as silly statements from the stay in side. The out campaign is making a case of hope for the future and people – rightly or wrongly – are beginning to believe them. If the remain campaign doesn’t raise it’s game from just fear of the unknown they could well blow this.
J Dunn, you can see the evidence in this thread of people wanting to pull out of co-operation measures in the field of crime, policing, terror and intelligence.
Am I suggesting that Brexiters generally want to pull out of all of it? No. But on average they seem to want rather less of it than we have at the moment. It’s up to the leave campaign to spell out what they want us to be in and what to be out of. Falling back on Europol has been mentioned, which would be sacrificing a lot.
Brexit means foregoing our right to participate in these measures and then either begging leave to remain in them anyway, or saying good riddance and going weak on crime and terror. It depends which Brexiter you listen to.
Joe,… you have a very low threshold of evidence if you think one person saying let’s rip up the European Arrest Warrant is evidence of anything frankly.
And as for the EAW,… has it not proved to be a deeply flawed piece of legislation on several occasions. You want real evidence ?
1. Ask Andrew Symeou from Enfield, extradited under the EAW, and thrown in a Greek jail for 10 months for something he clearly didn’t do.
2. Ask the parents of Ashya King, who were hounded across Europe under the EAW, because they had the audacity to take their sick child out of the NHS who didn’t have the resources to help him.
The EAW is a disturbingly blunt tool for use in a civil society, but to draw a conclusion that criticism of EAW is akin to cutting off all co-operative and mutually beneficial ties with Europe, is a tad absurd.
@ Joe Otten,
As you may have guessed, I’d be quite happy to be a part of an EU which either knew how to run a common currency or allowed everyone to have freely floating currencies of their own.
But there is only the UK which is in this category. The UK is the only “eurozone outer” in the sense I think you mean. Everyone else is either compelled to follow the rules of the so-called “Stability and Growth Pact” which probably should be renamed the “Instability and Contraction Pact”. Even Denmark pegs its currency to the euro so isn’t at all free of the euro.
The problem with the common currency is that there is no mechanism to recycle the huge surpluses generated by Holland, Germany and others. If Germany insists on running a surplus in euros then someone else has to run a deficit in euros, and which forces them into debt. But then the Germans complain about those debts!
The EU is a noble ideal but the introduction of the euro has made it a crazy system in practice.
What struck me is when the financial crisis happened the UK printed money and offered help to its Irish neighbor, Norway also offered to help Iceland. The USA wouldn’t just stand by and let one of its states go to ruin either.
In the euro zone when the going got tough Greece and Spain were essentially hung out to dry with policies that would give them 25% unemployment and 50% youth forced on them. This is ruinous to an entire generation of Southern Europeans.
So much for a union, when the going got tough it was every country for themselves in this euro zone. I say vote out and take the European arrest warrant with you.
J Dunn, thank you for disproving your own point.
petermartin, clearly I misunderstood you. I thought you said that there were EU members being forced into the Euro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_eurozone
It appears from this that Sweden, though it has in theory an obligation to join, has basically decided not to. Nobody seems to mind that much. Meanwhile the baltic states have all joined, most recently Lithuania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuania_and_the_euro
where there seems to have been some debate whether to accede in 2015 as they did, or whether to put it off. A decision for Lithuania.
The picture seems to be of each country deciding for itself what it wants to do. Who can argue with that?
Joe Otten,
You ask:
” The picture seems to be of each country deciding for itself what it wants to do. {in regard to the adoption of the euro} Who can argue with that?”
I’d say anyone who understands just a little bit of Keynesian economics!
It’s not the euro itself, per se, which matters. It is the so-called Stability and Growth Pact and, in particular, the Medium Term Budgetary Objectives which are designed to align currencies towards the adoption of the euro and which do cause all the damage. They suit the big net exporters of the EU. But they don’t suit everyone as not everyone can be a big net exporter.
But the MTO’s don’t just apply to the eurozone. They apply to everyone in the EU – apart from the UK. At least for now! Who knows what pressure will be applied to change that after the July referendum?
The only EU member state being exempted to comply with this MTO procedure is the UK, as it per a protocol to the EU treaty is exempted from complying with the SGP. In other words, while all other member states are obliged nationally to select at MTO respecting their calculated Minimum MTO, the calculated Minimum MTO for the UK is only presented for advice, with no obligation for it to set a compliant national MTO in structural terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_and_Growth_Pact
“J Dunn, thank you for disproving your own point.”
How so ?
Why don’t you address RightSaidFred’s point?
Are you against Turkey joining the EU? Are you in favour of their having a second class membership that would prevent them from issuing EAW?
If not then his points seem justified.
@ Peter Martin “But there is only the UK which is in this category.”
Sorry, Peter, but Denmark uses the Kroner.
Sweden, Croatia and Czech Republic have different crowns. Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria don’t use the Euro either. The supplimentary question is the extent to which they are allowed to fluctuate with respect to the Euro.
I don’t see the pound Sterling changing enormously with respect to the Euro either, whereas it did change greatly with respect to the Deutschmark. £1 = DM11 about 1960 to £1 = DM3 approx when the Euro came in The story with the guilder and Swiss franc was similar.
Perhaps the existence and stability of the Euro is an essential prop to stabilise the pound.
@ David – “Sorry, Peter, but Denmark uses the Kroner.”
I rather think you misread what he wrote.
@ David Raw,
“Denmark uses the Kroner”
Yes of course. Except it is called the Krone. But you’ve either not read what I was saying or you’ve not understood it.
@ petermartin 2001 Thanks for your modest and diffident reply.
Sorry to have used the plural kroner… it must have upset you….. Of course the Krone is only loosely pegged to the Euro so we’ll have to split the difference (about 2.5% give or take) on that one. ‘Shadow’ would be a more accurate term.
It may be of some comfort to you that I share your Keynsian preferences.
@David Raw,
We shouldn’t always agree with everything in Wiki, but in this case it says, quite rightly:
“…. the Danish krone is pegged closely to the euro”. The more important point is that Denmark runs a surplus in its foreign account of 6.5% (just slightly smaller that the German surplus) so would have no problem at all adopting the euro.
The UK has a deficit of about 5% and so, together with the USA which also runs a large deficit, does the EU an enormous favour. Germany and Denmark need someone to run a deficit! But these kind of deficits simply would not be possible for the UK under euro or even SGP rules. (see my reference in my 2.25pm comment about “The only EU member state being exempted to comply with this MTO procedure”)
Simply, if the UK or the USA are in deficit to the ROW through a trade imbalance, then someone in the UK or USA has to fund that deficit by borrowing. That inevitably means Government running larger deficits than are allowable under SGP rules. Euro or no euro it doesn’t make that much difference. It’s the rules, or MTOs, that are the problem.