‘The pro-European voice is missing in Britain’, thundered the Financial Times as the year had barely got under way, in an editorial which was both galvanising and disheartening to a pro-European Union membership organisation like ours.
For the last two years we have been shouting from every available rooftop – analogue and digital – about the advantages of in, the perils of out, debunking garden variety Euromyths and tackling the serious, fundamental dishonesty that underpins all Brexit scenarios.
They range widely from the assertion that Britain would be, somehow, ‘better off’ as a smaller entity in a rampantly globalised world, that it could sell more to other markets if it got out of the single market. This is the way to the nebulous magical thinking of those who promise that we could somehow stay in that bit without applying all its rules, which we would not contribute to making, pay a portion of the EU budget, which we would not negotiate, and apply freedom of movement; all the things Switzerland and Norway have to do.
We have been working alongside longstanding grassroots organisations such as the European Movement, and business-oriented campaigns such as Business for New Europe.
But we need to be realistic: our efforts can easily be overlooked in the absence of strong business, political and civil society champions, our voices easily drowned by the relentlessly Ukipised media narrative.
In David Cameron we have a prime minister so constrained by the navel-gazing obsessions of parts of his own party that he went from setting an agenda for reform most of which even Ed Miliband could agree with – and that has now largely been adopted by the new European Commission – to picking rhetorical fights with his own best European allies about the need for treaty changes and the possibility of an early referendum.
Labour politicians, with a few notable exceptions, have also been remarkably silent on Europe. Valiant attempts at fighting Ukip’s xenophobic pronouncements and policies aside, where is the passionate, confident declaration of love for the European project that Britain has done so much to create and shape over the last 60 years, starting from two decades before it even formally joined?
It has even got to the point where we have Jeremy Clarkson pointing out – ‘outing’ himself as a pro-European in a surprising piece in the Sunday Times – that, far from being a ‘red tape’ factory, the single market has hugely simplified and harmonised regulation, allowing us to sell into 27 other countries with a single set of rules.
Defending Britain’s EU membership poses a classic ’collective action problem’. Even in the presence of a mutually beneficial goal, different actors – who have different priorities – are reluctant to take part in a costly collective act if they believe that it will occur anyway without their individual contributions.
The time for such free rides on Europe is over. It needs to be. The European debate has become too toxic, too unbalanced, too ideological and extreme.
Whether there is a Labour or a Tory-led government in charge from May – and therefore whether there is no immediate prospect of an in-out referendum or we face a poll in 2017 or even 2016 as some news reports have hinted – we need to allow a constructive domestic debate on Europe, repair our relationship with our allies, and reassert our influence within it.
Labour supporters are no strangers to collective action and are better placed than others – temperamentally and ideologically – to overcome the collective action conundrum. Each of you needs to be the voice most of you so desperately want to hear, speaking out for what Europe has done for workers’ rights, women’s rights, in the fight against any kind of discrimination; what new horizons it has opened, notably the freedom to work, study and retire anywhere in Europe, the freedom to sell our goods anywhere; and what global battles it is helping us fight – from climate change, to modern-day slavery.
When we have Jeremy Clarkson making the sort of case for Europe the prime minister should be making, it is time to shame that prime minister into speaking out about what is right in our relationship with Europe instead of searching for what is wrong. It’s time to call his bluff and urge him to lead – if he is capable of it – rather than combatively prepare to leave Europe.
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Paola Buonadonna is media director for British Influence, which tweets @BritInfluence. She tweets @Peebi
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Well said, Paola. Just as in Scotland in 2014 (and the UK common market referendum in 1975), if my favourite NGO (whether it’s Oxfam or the Womens’ Institute), or my employer (e.g. Rolls Royce), or my union (e.g. Unison) do not do an audit of whether British membership of the EU is in the interests of their supporters/employees/members, and then tell us, they are not doing their duty by us. They can’t tell us how to vote, they can simply make our votes ‘better informed’. Possibly even religious organisations, football clubs (players’ transfers) and Universities (student fees, transfer of staff etc.) can take action to tell us if British membership of the EU is in the interests of the Brits they serve. Unions and NGOs have frequently made their views clear. If managements at British companies cannot tell their employees if their company benefits from British membership, then perhaps they should go and seek new jobs they are capable of doing. The statement ‘we don’t want to have anything to do with politics’ can be like saying ‘our business is not part of the community we live in’.