EU Referendum. Yay.

Yeap, here I am, declaring my voting intentions once again.  Sure, I could keep them to myself, but since I’m voting for something I believe and I’d like others to contemplate voting a similar way, I figured I’d lay it down, as if you don’t have an earfull of it already.  Oh well….

So, unremarkably, given my political leanings, I’m a Remain vote on the EU Referendum.

As I see it, there are plenty of half-way decent reasons to remain.  The cost we contribute to the EU is significant, but still less than a fraction of overall government spending, ridiculously dwarfed by defense, education, healthcare etc..  Claims that leaving the EU would free up billions of pounds to build more hospitals are simply ludicrous; the membership fee of approximately £15 billion per year is a drop in the ocean compared to the £222 billion paid on welfare (mostly pensions), £140 billion on healthcare or £98 billion on education.  Don’t get me wrong – £15 billion a year is a lot, but the resounding choruses of ‘are you kidding me don’t go’ coming in from practically every economist in the world, regardless of political leanings regarding the economic benefit for Britain of being part of a single-trade zone, to my ears vastly out-weighs the shuffling speculation of ‘but what if…?’ coming from the Leave campaign.

The current vein of anti-expert, anti-complexity that seems to dominate politics, where nuanced arguments by informed people are dismissed with a cry of ‘yes but is that what the people want?’ by opponents of an idea – on all sides – pisses me off.  It’s the economic equivalent of going to the doctor and being told that you have cancer, only to reject it with a cry of ‘no, because that’s not what I want to have’, and I find it hard to support any campaign – and this goes for the Remain campaign too – that is scared of embracing complexity in its arguments.

Then there’s the sovereignty argument.  Firstly, I think the notion that more integrated governance = the death of liberty and the destruction of cultural identity is ridiculous.  There are some issues which we need to act on as a species, rather than as little nations yapping at each other.  Climate change is the biggest and most obvious, and requires a global response, not a parochial one.  The EU’s record on climate change isn’t great, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the attitude of current Tory Party, which is all in favour of fracking and tax breaks for the oil companies, while making it harder to build and invest in renewables.  Having another authority going ‘um, but yes, the fate of the species?’ is not a problem for me, and I don’t see it as a challenge to national identity.

Other ideas also supersede parochial governance, of which I think the Human Rights Act is a bigg’un.  Given that the EU version of this was heavily drafted by British lawyers, the fact that we want to reclaim our sovereignty by no longer being bound by a predominantly British document that protects freedom of expression, faith and thought, is frankly ridiculous.

And you know what else?  The EU doesn’t set our tax rate.  It doesn’t force us to clean up our act and stop being a haven for money laundrying.  And even if it tried, Britain can leave whenever it damn well wants, holds a veto on new memberships and has voted ‘yes’ on 95% of the over 2,500 EU-level laws and amendments that have been passed in the last few decades.  Or to put it another way… Britain can make the EU work, and still be British.

Hell, don’t get me wrong – the EU is a great fat lumbering beastie of a thing, complicated and messy.  But so is Whitehall; so is life.  I’m all in favour of EU reform; I’m not sure that sitting outside complaining about it without any voting power whatsoever is the way to pull that one off.

For all these reasons, I’m heading for the Remain camp.  But there’s one other thing which strongly shoves me towards Remain, and it’s this – that once you get through the wishy washy not-quite economics of the Leave camp, the vast majority of its arguments come down to immigration.

Specifically, certain types of immigrant.  I’ve received a fair bit of ‘Leave’ literature through my door, and sure, while it harps on about the costs of things, almost invariably it then starts talking about migrants, especially the danger of Turkey joining the EU, and how migrants are taking good British jobs and undermining our security.

And by taking our jobs, what they mean is that Eastern Europeans are coming to Britain.  And by undermining our security, what they mean is that Muslims are coming up from the Middle East – hell, we’ve agreed to take in nearly 2,000 refugees from a war-torn nation, or roughly twice the number of people who could fit into my school assembly hall on a Tuesday morning.  And we’re scared.  And we’re running around trying to blame other people – no, in fact, to blame Other People, ‘Other’ with a capital ‘O’, people who by being different from us, are less than us.  Less than proper people at all.  There wasn’t a problem with freedom of movement in the EU back when it was only lovely French people and charming Spanish waiters coming over to the country.  But when Poland joined, suddenly there was a cry of ‘oh God, the incoming swarms!’ and people complaining that Poles were taking all the British jobs – almost as if British bosses weren’t hiring immigrants on the basis that they had to pay them less and could get away with affording them fewer worker’s rights.  We aren’t just worried about migration in this debate – oh no.  We’re worried about the wrong kind of migrant.  About people from poorer countries coming over here and working hard in jobs we don’t really want to do while paying UK taxes and not, I hate to say it, not actually exploiting the benefits system except for a tiny minority – far smaller than the domestic figures – who are held up as examples of how evil all foreigners are forever.

Is the immigration system brilliant in the UK?  Possibly not; but given how much of our educational and healthcare system is dependent on immigrants, and given, more importantly, that people are people, whole and true, the demonisation of whole ethnicities of people as being The Problem – much more of a problem than the fact we’re living through hard economic times with a government selling off every state asset to rich private companies – is frankly vile.  We are demonising people, and spreading fear and hate, and fundamentally at the bottom of every single bit of Leave literature I’ve read, that’s what it boils down to.  Other people.  People who are Other.  Fear them.

Or… simply… don’t.