The much-ballyhooed Balance of Competences Review has just published its first set of reports and the lines have already been drawn between the In-at-all-costs camp and the Out-no-matter-whats. The former, jubilant at conclusions drawn by civil servants that EU competences across a number areas are just right, see fit to run around shouting ‘I told you so’ from the rafters. More hardened sceptics wearily remind them of their conviction from the outset that this was always going to be a technocratic sham of an exercise.
The reports are of course crowd-sourced, a collation of evidence. The conclusions, less so. One such conclusion counters the submissions criticising European red tape by maintaining that the process of regulation for SME’s is being ‘reversed at EU level’. It is a rather jaw-dropping justification – devoid of any specific detail – given that reversing anything is anathema to Brussels. And I am hardly surprised the judgement seems to be that problems with EU competences are less to do with the competence and more about teething problems in application and implementation.
At one stakeholder event I attended, the senior civil servant leading my breakaway group had clearly been tasked with trying to steer opinions towards big-picture thinking. As the session drew to a close, he asked if people agreed with his assessment that it seemed the issue was not the EU’s competence but rather the way it was being applied in practice. To my mind these are not mutually exclusive but rather part and parcel of the same thing. Everyone at the table slowly nodded, as though they hadn’t given the fundamentals much thought. It was if they had been bounced into drawing black-and-white conclusions they weren’t quite ready to make. Best then to leave it to Whitehall to ‘make sense’ of the evidence.
The risk is that people fall into the trap of approaching this as a comprehensive assessment of our EU membership. It’s not. What many across the spectrum of opinion on Europe wanted was a cost-benefit analysis of our relationship with Brussels. The idea that the Balance of Competences could ever act as some kind of substitute is fanciful, but that won’t stop those delighted with its ‘findings’ from making it a key cornerstone of the In campaign’s platform.
Arguments have been deployed that a fully conclusive audit of our membership is impossible given that so many of the benefits are unquantifiable. This should speak to the fact that in the debate on Europe, regardless of what side you come down on, those intangibles do matter. Unfortunately, there is no ‘democracy’ or ‘sovereignty’ section in the current review. Euroscepticism’s critics like to dismiss these arguments as boringly old-school, even as the EU itself admits the European project is in a state of flux not least because of the persisting lack of democratic accountability.
Yet the reality remains that these are going to be key factors for voters when they go to the ballot box in any future referendum. The politics will matter. Recognising this is not a carte blanche to dispense with an informed debate on the economic numbers. It should of course be noted that the Single Market report itself concedes these numbers are likely to become fluid, owing to the rapid shifting direction of economic and monetary union. And as Europe Economics notes in its own report for BIS, things like trade diversion may rapidly increase the costs of our membership.
But much like the topic of immigration, to pretend that the debate is being -or should be- conducted solely on the basis of bean-counting costs and benefits is obtuse in the extreme. Telling the public their gut feelings are irrational because one set of numbers doesn’t add up is a tactic that may backfire for the In camp. People who don’t work in policy aren’t immune to the facts, but they also deal in the currency of how things make them feel. Of course, some might say this is why we shouldn’t trust the people to make the decision in the first place – but that wouldn’t be a very democratic argument, now would it?
Allie Renison is Research Director of @forbritain – the campaign to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU
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