Having lived and worked in 4 EU countries I expected that my voting decision on Brexit would be a very easy “Remain”. But it wasn’t! I ended up voting leave despite my emotions telling me to do otherwise and even now, over 3 years on, I would do the same.
Let me explain.
Many years ago I stumbled into a realisation that political tribalism was probably a stupid position to adopt. Until that realisation, as someone from a working class background, I had always voted Labour and assumed I always would.
The realisation came when it dawned on me that if there were a single political position that actually worked we would have discovered it by now and be using it! Like the wheel that has remained unchanged for millennia, we would have resolved the problem of how to organise ourselves and be doing it. That we haven’t resolved how we should organise ourselves indicates that this is a dynamic problem requiring an ever adjusting solution. In that context it’s hard to find a broad role for option-constraining political dogma. Like driving a car – left, right and straight on are all viable options depending on the prevailing circumstances.
Since that realization my voting record has covered all three major parties only dependent on whether I felt we needed a bit more social justice (turn left) a bit more wealth (turn right) or a bit more political humility (straight on – Lib Dem) at the time.
So when the Brexit vote came up I adopted what has become my normal approach to voting and tried to assemble some objective data on which to base my decision between the two choices (albeit with the expectation that whatever data I looked at it would confirm my Remain expectation).
I decided to make my Brexit choice based on historic performance data rather than to try and guess the future which I had concluded decades ago was a fool’s errand. The accuracy of predictions about the future for any new situation are largely meaningless (Economic predictions on any new situation seem to be no better than coin tosses, predictions on any new infrastructure delivery times are useless –HS2, NHS IT etc),
So for the Brexit vote I decided that my most heavily weighted data parameter would be per capita GDP figures and set a time window of 1980 (easier access to numbers) to 2015 (subsequently updated to 2016). I measured per capital GDP in 1980 for each of the countries in the EU at the time, again for 2016 and compared those numbers to comparable non-eu countries (Canada, Iceland, Australia, USA, New Zealand, Norway Switzerland and Singapore).
I used these Wikipedia figures and I leave you to collect and check the data.
From that data & other trends I concluded that:
- The economic per capita GDP argument for the EU wasn’t that strong.
- The clubbing together (economies of scale and negotiating power) argument was weak.
- Shrinking agility & growing membership was not an optimistic indicator of the EU’s future.
GDP argument
From that (admittedly simplistic analysis) I came away with the following analysis:
- The EU has done significantly (20%-30%) worse in relative per capita GDP terms than comparable non-EU countries over the period.
- That Southern EU countries seem to have fared slightly worse than the EU as an average and it appears that wealth might even be moving from the poorer south to the wealthier north!
- The only economies that have done very well are the low tax (tax haven) countries of Ireland and Luxemburg
- With Australia, Canada, Singapore, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland having higher relative per capita GDP than Germany it’s clearly possible to prosper outside the EU
Better together argument
What about the clubbing together (economies of scale and negotiating power) argument?
Whilst a large market offers an attractive opportunity, the disparate national interests often present a significant and growing barrier to actually taking advantage of it. As an example most European countries probably don’t care about protecting a single Belgium village beer, but it nearly sabotaged the Canada trade deal.
And when you look at the external tariffs that the EU applies to non-EU countries it seems to me that EU citizens are paying higher than global market prices for many foods and goods to protect EU producers. That protection seems to be also resulting in those protected producers falling behind in terms of productivity when compared to the wider global market.
The other economic figure that influenced my thinking was how despite significantly growing in size the EU economy has shrunk as a percentage of the world economy (from 24% for the members in 1980 to 16% today despite the number of countries increasing substantially). So whilst the EU remains the largest trading block its role in the world economy continues to shrink.
Now some of this shrinkage (along with the US) is a reflection of the growth in the world economy as countries develop but that also amplifies the importance of working with the rest of the world that EU rigidity makes harder.
The longer outlook for the EU?
Whilst largely neutral I have a concern that growing EU Federalism, EU dogmatism and a lack of flexibility may collide with growing nationalism within EU countries and (in my view) a growing need for agility in trade, economic and political matters. The faster downward trend in the % of the world’s GDP that the EU represents (even compared to similar developed economies), seems to reinforce the growing gap between the rate of change and the EU’s ability to accommodate it. I don’t think this bodes well for the future.
I think some things take as long as needed and cannot be accelerated. I describe these sorts of situations as being subject to the ”laws of the farm” where plants grow at a rate determined by their nature and our ability to change that rate is severely constrained.
So whilst I agree with the long term goals of the EU I think they have allowed dogma and ideology to override the fact that the EU is a collection of individual countries, cultures and histories that make integrating them into a single entity subject to the “Law of the farm”