Five years ago, in Feb 2016, we were still pondering the Referendum Debate. To leave or to stay – surely one of the greatest decisions we could make, and one that felt as though, for once, power was in our hands.
The case for staying was a simple one: to continue with what we knew, without risk of change. To this end, the camp brandished fear as their chief weapon, firing indiscriminately a volley of minutiae and trivia to hit their targets with a wild salvo of disingenuous rumours. Vote leave, and that holiday to the Costa Brava would suddenly cost more; vote out, and you may be out of work. Vote for separation, and the well-established channels for communicating and sharing intelligence across Europe would dry up, and Interpol would cease to function. Even the argument that leaving might return control of our borders and check immigration was twisted by the stay group who insisted that future trade agreements would be contingent upon our taking large numbers of immigrants, or no deal would be struck.
My counter arguments were equally simple: no, no, no. Flight costs for package holidays had fallen for many reasons, and included many destinations outside Europe. Their cost was based on economics, not politics. Employment in Europe had plummeted, and the appalling results on high youth unemployment were evident in many countries, especially Spain and Greece, whilst in contrast, the UK had seen continuing growth and prosperity, with unemployment at enviably low levels. Interpol has a membership of 190 countries and is the second largest political organization after the United Nations in terms of international representation. Britain has continued to be a full member, and does not need membership of Europe to tackle crime. The intelligence services will continue to support each other fully outside Europe, for it is in no country’s interest to block reciprocal information about international threats.
I run my own small business providing consultancy services to the pharmaceutical industry, and I fully appreciate where European membership has been beneficial in harmonising the management of clinical trials and the regulation for licencing medicines. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) was a decentralised agency of the European Union (EU), located in London. It had been operating for over 20 years, and was responsible for the scientific evaluation, supervision and safety monitoring of medicines developed by pharmaceutical companies for use in the EU. I visited their headquarters on many occasions, and was proud that we hosted it in Britain. Leaving the EU triggered the loss of the EMA, which moved to Amsterdam, and the UK now has the local MHRA but this is something I am willing to face. The regulation of medicines is becoming more truly international, with harmonisation ranging across the USA, Japan, Australia and South Africa, and increasingly into China. Britain will remain at the forefront of much of this international effort even outside the EU.
David Cameron would have appeared more honest if he had declared at the beginning his intention of staying in Europe whatever the outcome of his renegotiations. He could have made a firm case by saying that he would work for better terms, but to stay was to our advantage whatever the result. By pretending that they would be swayed by his own efforts was disingenuous and resulted in him arguing for the In campaign with the most minimal of ammunition.
Likewise, Boris Johnson was wrong to boast that we shall succeed because Britain once ran a great Empire. This does not resonate with modern Britain, nor with most people’s knowledge of history. We shall succeed if we leave because we shall have no choice but to make it work. Every company, large or small, will continue to make efforts to export, to both the EU and to the world. The difference will be in the agreements we can make; they will be dictated by our own interests, not the blind, petty, rules of Europe that seem so biased towards the self-interests of countries other than our own.
Immigration must surely be the biggest factor in many minds right now. The figures suggest over a quarter of a million people coming to Britain every year. This is simply not sustainable on any measure, and the limitation of benefits will not touch these numbers. For any great country with central command, be it the USA, Australia, Russia or China, one central government would take control of its borders and do whatever was required to make them secure. For Europe, this has been an abject failure. There is no central political decision-making, no unified policing or military control, no uniform leadership or policy in any form. The whole edifice is floundering under overwhelming numbers. I cannot pretend to offer a solution to this, but I could see that the EU had no solution either, other than reverting to the closure of individual countries’ borders to force the problem elsewhere. This was not a system that deserves my vote. Today, illegal immigration continues across the Channel, but Project Fear was wrong to state we would be forced to accept immigrants as a condition of trade. Put simply, the EU has no wish to ease trade with the UK under any circumstances: but this will gradually ease as mutual benefit begins to assert itself again.
The case for leaving was not based on fear, although I did and still do fear the direction in which the EU is drifting through impotence rather than objective forward planning. The case for leaving was driven by the excitement of freedom from imposed regulation; the unshackling of our economy from a moribund Euro; the reassertion of our own sovereignty against anonymous and undemocratic centralisation; the freedom from the imposition of silly laws and regulations that are only beneficial to some self-interest group somewhere on the continent.
The EU was born as a dream in the aftermath of war; a dream of shared purpose and prosperity, to maintain peace in a world of turmoil. But lacking a common history, language or culture, the incessant drive towards federalism lacks both cohesion and charisma, and the dream is becoming a nightmare from which we are slowly awaking, Covid notwithstanding.
So my call was to vote No to the weak arguments of fear. To say Yes to the opportunity to cut free from the overwhelming and unaccountable bureaucracy of Brussels; Yes to returning power to our elected representatives who gave us this one chance to demonstrate true independence of thought; Yes to the opportunity to develop trade links to the rest of the world without EU restrictions; and above all, Yes to forging a strong independent country that, through honesty and enterprise, may become a beacon to the world.
Has it worked out? The disruption caused by covid worldwide makes any true assessment impossible at this time. Perhaps we will need another five years until covid, like the 'flu, has become no more than an occasional distraction controlled by annual vaccinations. Perhaps then we can judge Brexit more fairly; but perhaps also the EU will continue its political and economic decline, and suddenly the true case for the "Yes" vote will be apparent to even the most ardent opposer.
