EURef Talking Points is a new series of articles about words that work in everyday conversation,public debates or in writing when you make the case to remain in Europe.
Having spoken at hundreds of meetings on Europe, my personal view is that to make a winning case for IN you need to make 3 points and rebut 2.
The 3 points are Peace, Prosperity, and [advantages for] People. The 2 to rebut are sovereignty and cost, which are the two Leave arguments that have traction with many people but can both be answered.
In this article, I shall deal with rebutting the cost point.
Leave say that being in Europe costs us £50m a day or £350m per week. It is a figure that they have quoted for a long time and it is rhetorically powerful. It hits people in the chest.
They say that £350m is “enough to build a new hospital every week” while overlooking that the real big cost of a hospital is staffing and running it. These are people who have no thought hard about the realities of public services. They also overlook the fact that they simultaneously pledge all the EU funds spent in the UK will be matched by the UK government (Labour or Tory) if we leave – a tall claim that few voters believe.
The key point is that £50m a day is utterly bogus.
The website fullfact puts the UK’s net contribution at £8.5bn (down from a previous estimate of £12bn). The website infacts puts it at only £6.3bn.
To get a sense of scale, I sometime put it this way:
The UK government spends 42% of GDP. That means for every £10 created in the economy, £4.20 is spent by the UK government. Do you know how much of that is spent by the European Union? [I sometimes ask the audience to have a guess] It’s 10p. Just 10p. Just 1% of GDP. In fact the average English County Council spends 7 or 8 times per head that the EU does. If you worry about Big Government, Brussels is not where you find it.
It’s good to put it in a way that boils the figure down to daily living and recalls the Peace, Prosperity, People points.
Let’s err on the side of caution and for present purposes take fullfact’s £8.5bn. Divide that by 65m people. Divide that by 365 days in a normal year. You get 36p per person per day.
I don’t know about you, but 36p wouldn’t change my life.
But if being in Europe gives one of my neighbours a job, that is my 36p well spent. If being IN brings one more business to this town, that is my 36p well spent. If the EU can shorten a conflict anywhere in the world by one day that is my 36p well spent.
[Some of you know that I have previously used 50p, based on fullfact’s now revised £12bn figure.]
Remember: when talking about Europe keep it plain, direct and explain how it affects people’s lives.
Let’s get our message across.
* Antony Hook was #2 on the South East European list in 2014, is the English Party's representative on the Federal Executive and produces this sites EU Referendum Roundup.
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10 Comments
What about sovereignty? What about uncontrolled immigration?
@Igor S – about the only country I can think of with “full sovereignty” is North Korea.
I’m happy to accept pooled sovereignty to create something (the EU) that is more than the sum of it’s parts.
Freedom of movement is a fantastic privilege and has made my job much simpler and easier. It works both ways.
If I have any criticism of the EU it is that the member states have too much power. I’d like to see the European Parliament as the most powerful body.
JUF 9th Mar ’16 – 8:00pm North Korea does not have full sovereignty, it is subject to international sanctions for several acts of non-compliance.
North Korea sounds about right. They have no Poles or Romanians coming there to take away jobs from the locals and swamp the North Korean NHS and public transport. The North Koreans are so happy they need no free movement, no need to go anywhere. And they have a Leader about as great as Nigel Farage!
What does a cost of “36p per day” even really mean?? It you are working it out based on 65m people, does that charge apply to newborn babies too?!
I’ve always thought the ‘pence per day’ argument is a pretty facile way of doing the numbers. If you go down that route, you could make a case for any amount of public spending being negligible – e.g. doubling the salaries of all MPs would cost each person less than a penny a day, so what’s the problem?!
Could we have some info re Paul Keech and the Lib Dem out campaign ?!
We still have our sovereignty – aren’t we having a referendum on 23 June? In any case we pool, not lose, some of our decision-making in the EU and 3,000 international organisations to promote our interests and project our influence internationally.
We do control our own borders. Leaving the EU will not resolve our perceived immigration problem as 58% of our immigrants as from outside the EU.
The out campaign’s three main counters to the remain campaign appear to be, in no particular order:
1 It’s NATO that has kept the peace in Europe, not the EU.
2 The UK is the world’s fifth biggest economy. They can’t ignore us.
3 We are effectively governed by Brussels.
The first is hard to deny. What I would say is, look at the Baltic States, which are now in NATO, thanks to some extent because they are part of the EU.
The second depends on where that ‘bigness’ came from. It certainly wasn’t from making things; but probably from Financial Services, which could quite easily move elsewhere following a Brexit.
The third is a red herring. Most of our laws are still made here and not over the Channel.
One final point. I just wish the media would get away from tittle tattle like whether the Queen is for Brexit or whether Boris’ office tried to gag its staff and look at the real issues. For goodness sake, treat the British people as intelligent sentient beings for once. Otherwise, we are in four a tedious four months. Both sides need to address these issues if they are going to win over the undecideds.
Good article Antony – I watched Douglas Carswell squirm this week when the £350m figure was dissected by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics
Boris J has a regular article in the Daily Telegraph, followed on Tuesdays by William Hague. Notwithstanding losing a parliamentary by-election when Leon Brittan went to the Commission and laughing at a few jokes, such as Ken Livingstone as the Night Mayor, we should note the role that the former party leader plays in the currently divided tory party. He is loyally supporting David Cameron’s campaign to Remain as a former Foreign Secretary. This week he laments the undemocratic tendency and direction of policy in Turkey and spells out details of objections raised by Cyprus and France. He concludes that Turkey cannot be a member state of the EU and recommends an ‘associate’ status for Turkey, which he admits does not currently exist.
Turkey has been travelling hopefully towards EU membership without any realistic hope of ever arriving, for instance a pre-Erdogan government negotiated a customs union.
A remaining puzzle is that Greece previously had an associate membership, which it lost when it had a military coup.
Boris J.’s previous support for Turkish membership lacked detail and was made in comparison with the former Roman Empire, despite its predilection for repeated military coups and civil wars from which we have been spared in the democratic parts of Europe.