There’s something fatuous and dishonest about arguing for or against Brexit simply on the basis of economics.
The EU is a political, not, as its champions claim, an economic construct. Economic tools are used there only as auxiliary means of either bribery or blackmail.
Hence logically any argument about Brexit should proceed from constitutional and sovereignty premises first, second and tenth.
There can be no valid argument in favour of reversing two millennia of constitutional history for whatever economic gain – even assuming the impossibility of EU membership offering any economic benefits to one of the world’s largest economies.
One doesn’t recall too many Englishmen back in 1940 weighing the economic advantages of being incorporated into Germany and thereby saving the ruinous cost of fighting a war.
The benefits of such submission could have been argued plausibly, and Hitler doubtless would have agreed to much tougher terms than those Cameron allegedly asks from the EU today. Nevertheless, those Spitfires were still providing an expression of incipient euroscepticism.
Britain has nothing to learn about politics from the EU’s main drivers Germany and France, what with their, generously speaking, patchy past. Therefore we must leave that wicked political contrivance just because it’s indeed wicked, political and a contrivance.
This argument is too simple for our fatuous and dishonest elites to understand. Its simple and unvarnished truth is such that it precludes any troubled intellectual waters for them to fish in.
That’s why they insist on putting forth economic arguments, correctly trusting that the British public is ignorant enough to accept bogus calculations as real. After all, the elite’s 60 years’ investment into nurturing such ignorance must pay off.
Somehow The Times has positioned itself at the vanguard of this relentless assault on integrity. There’s hardly a hack there who hasn’t delivered himself of ponderous analysis pro and con Brexit, with the con argument rigged to carry the day. However, Oliver Kamm’s excretions on this subject stand out even against this backdrop.
Mr Kamm’s stock in trade is linguistic permissiveness touching on promiscuity: he attacks anyone daring to suggest that some English usage just may be incorrect. Whatever people say is right because they say it seems to be the underlying premise, which Mr Kamm defends with the agility of a dancer in an alcoholic coma.
But today he turns his clumsy attentions to the usual nonsense about the EU being our sole hope for economic survival. Mr Kamm starts with a couple of unassailable truisms: Britain’s manufacturing is in recession, mainly because of its sluggish productivity growth; our trade balance suffers as a result; as do wage increases in real terms.
These points are worth making, but specifically in the Brexit context they mean nothing – unless an argument can be made that, as a result of the continued vandalising of our constitution, our productivity will increase.
Even Mr Kamm laudably refrains from making such obviously meretricious claims. Instead he says that “The EU is our principal trading partner, accounting for 44.6 per cent of our exports…”
It appears that, arithmetically speaking, our exports outside the EU account for 55.4 per cent of the total, which number seems higher than 44.6. Moreover, Mr Kamm chooses not to notice that, while our exports to the EU are declining, those to the rest of the world are growing.
Hence The Guardian (a paper that can hardly be accused of euroscepticism) comments that the first four months of 2015 “showed that much of the growth in exports came from sales to countries beyond… the European Union. That will reassure businesses… for trade in the eurozone continues to suffer from shaky business and consumer confidence.”
Allow me to translate from The Guardian to human: the eurozone is an economic basket case, and we’re much better off doing business with more reliable partners. What does Mr Kamm have to say about this?
Nothing really, other than that “We don’t have just free trade with our European partners; we have access to a single market of 500 million consumers.” He seems to imply that leaving the EU would put paid to this access, which is patently cloud cuckoo land.
Britain managed to have access to world, and European, markets throughout her history – this without having to transfer her sovereignty to the tender care of the most corrupt setup in Europe, this side of Putin’s Russia.
Mr Kamm warns that by leaving the EU we’ll suffer the same tragic fate that has befallen Norway and Switzerland, which have stayed outside the EU but still have to comply with its regulations without having much of a say in its policies.
I’d be tempted to add that somehow those two countries happen to be Europe’s two most successful economies, but obviously facts won’t make a dent in Mr Kamm’s innermost convictions.
Really, his usual clamour for the advisability of the split infinitive and other grammatical solecisms seems almost sound by comparison.